By general consensus, if the policies of President Trump’s first administration were a compromise between his impulses and the doctrines of the pre-Trump Republican Party, then Trump 2.0 is Trumpism in full. The old order is dissolved, the Bush and Reagan Republicans are exiled or subjugated, and Trump alone sets the agenda for the G.O.P.
There are clearly areas where this is true. Trump’s foreign policy can be described in various ways — as a form of Jacksonian-inflected realism, as a deal-making blitz, as an immoral attempt to promote a more authoritarian world order — but in each description you can see the outline of something coherent and clearly specific to Trump himself.
Likewise the Trumpian culture war, which began with internal bureaucratic battles and now seeks to humble Harvard University, may be reckless or punitive or dubiously legal, but it’s easy enough to tell a coherent story in which crushing the strongholds of cultural liberalism is a uniquely Trumpist goal.
But the budget battles that delivered the passage of a House tax bill last week feel like a notable exception to this rule. Here the old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas still dominant. Here Trumpism as a transformative force is relatively weak, in part because Trump himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants. And here it’s hard to make the way the Republican majority intends to tax and spend cohere with other elements of the administration’s agenda, on trade and immigration above all.
In its broad strokes, the House tax bill could have been passed under any Republican president of my adult lifetime. Prioritizing low top tax rates and corporate tax cuts? That’s the old song of supply-side economics. Combining those tax cuts with cuts to Medicaid and discretionary programs? That’s Paul Ryan’s Republican Party. Finding that your spending cuts don’t pay for your tax cuts? That’s the familiar deficit-financed conservatism of the Reagan and Bush presidencies.
Of course, there are aspects of the tax bill that are specific to Trump and his coalition. The Ryan-era G.O.P. was open to trimming Medicare and Social Security; the Trump-era party won’t go there. The top tax rate in the House bill is higher than the top rate under George W. Bush — reflecting a concession to fiscal reality and the desire to spare Medicaid from deeper cuts. And there are various provisions, from the tax cuts on tips and overtime to the increase in the child tax credit to the proposed tax increases on big foundations and universities, that seem to fit with the blue-collar coalition that votes Republican in 2024.
In my recent interview with Vice President JD Vance, he mentioned the no-tax-on-tips provisions to counter my description of the bill as conventional G.O.P. policymaking. But those kinds of provisions are still very much a minor theme. The major themes are familiar — and they are not a new populist agenda, not a Trumpist transformation.
Now, one could counter that since Trump supports the “big, beautiful” bill, it’s Trumpist by definition. Maybe he just is an old-guard Republican on taxes and transfers.
But I don’t think that’s quite right. Trump has lots of economic instincts that differ from the old consensus. That’s why he pushed the party leftward on Medicare and Social Security. It’s why he recently warned congressional Republicans not to mess with Medicaid. It’s why he was willing to briefly entertain the possibility of raising taxes on the richest Americans. But only on trade does he have the mixture of conviction and leverage to force congressional Republicans to accept a transformed agenda. A different Republican populist — a President Vance, a President Josh Hawley — might push harder to reshape the budget debate. But Trump is both weaker and less interested in the details, and so the default remains roughly as it was before.
That default, in turn, does not cohere with the other elements of Trumpism. It doesn’t cohere politically with his populist appeals because it offers relatively little to the president’s downscale base. And it also doesn’t cohere as economic policy because it doesn’t match with the priorities implied by the president’s big trade and immigration moves.
Both of those big moves reject the logic of 1990s and early 2000s globalization, the assumption that the freest possible movement of goods and people would necessarily benefit the United States. But if you reject that logic, that should reshape how you think about taxes and transfers as well, and you should be less inclined to assume that the lowest tax rate alone will deliver the economic outcomes that you seek.
On trade, for instance, the Trumpian idea that there is a particular interest in building up the American manufacturing base, whether for the sake of increasing blue-collar employment or the sake of national security, strongly implies that the government should be trying to act comprehensively to boost American industry and innovation in at least partial imitation of the Chinese model.
The Trump administration has ideas in this area, and its deregulation strategy — the main thing cited by the vice president when I challenged him on this front — is clearly intended to be the MAGA version of the center-left zeal for increasing “abundance.” But the core Republican fiscal priority is still low taxes, not strategic investment. The Department of Government Efficiency was more focused on cutting head count than on increasing state capacity. And the G.O.P.-controlled Congress has disassembled elements of the Biden administration’s industrial policy without substituting a right-of-center version. (My suspicion is that in the next year we’ll get some talk about a Trump infrastructure or industrial policy bill but that, as in the first term, it will founder because House Republicans aren’t interested and Democrats don’t see any upside in bipartisanship.)
On immigration, similarly, the Trump theory is that America can prosper with much lower rates of low-skilled immigration, thanks to some combination of tech breakthroughs (maybe the robots are finally coming) and higher wages that coax male work force dropouts back to factory jobs.
But in the longer run, if you have a much lower immigration rate, you need a higher domestic birthrate. And while there is a lot of natalist talk on the right, there’s nothing being considered by the G.O.P.-controlled Congress that’s remotely commensurate with what we know it takes, in dollars, to boost birthrates in developed countries.
Of course, it’s possible that the Trump administration and America will be fortunate, that deregulation alone will clear a path for technological breakthroughs that happen independently of government support, that cultural ferment will yield a more rapid renewal of family formation than any program of baby bonuses or child tax credits.
But in the realm of fiscal policy, amid debt and inflation risks, there will never be a Republican agenda oriented fully toward populist goals without a Republican president willing to break a conservative taboo that Trump has mostly left in place, by finding some way to be right-wing and also tax the rich.
Breviary
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How A.I. creates “dark leisure.”
When college English majors can’t understand Dickens.
Why Alasdair MacIntyre disowned his would-be followers.
Why Hannibal is still remembered.
How Obergefell failed.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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