If you live in Red America, as I do, you’re familiar with two conceptually incompatible arguments for Donald Trump. We’ll call them the MAGA argument and the Republican argument.
The MAGA argument can be summed up in three words: Burn it down. Trump’s core supporters are convinced that the American establishment is irretrievably corrupt, that America is in its last days and that only the most dramatic action can save the Republic. They think the Trump of Stop the Steal and Jan. 6 is the real Trump, and they can’t wait to see him unleashed.
The Republican argument is different. These are the voters who still think they belong to a party of limited government and individual liberty. They look back at the first two years of Trump’s term — when he nominated conventional Republican members to his cabinet, selected conventional conservative judges to the federal bench and passed a conventional Republican tax cut — and think that will happen again.
These Republicans look at Jan. 6 as an aberration. They’ll tell me that concerns about democracy are overblown and that what they really want is cheaper groceries at home and less chaos overseas.
“I’m voting for Trump’s policies,” they tell me, “not his tweets.”
In other words, one set of voters is voting for Trump with great joy and enthusiasm because they absolutely, positively take him seriously. Another set of voters is voting for him in part because they don’t take him seriously at all.
Both sets of voters can’t be right.
So let’s take the Republican policy challenge. Are his policies actually better than his tweets?
No, they are not. For Republicans to believe that Trump will govern responsibly, they have to believe that his campaign is a lie. Because if you actually listen to Trump, he’s not promising peace and prosperity. He’s promising conflict, chaos and economic policies that make no sense if inflation is a prime concern.
Are you thinking of voting for Trump because prices are too high? His proposed policies would almost certainly make inflation worse. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 leading economists found that 68 percent believed inflation would be higher under Trump than Kamala Harris. Only 12 percent thought Harris’s policies would exacerbate inflation more.
Trump’s extraordinary dedication to tariffs (earlier this week he said, “To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff’”) is a chief reason for economists’ concerns. The cost of tariffs — taxes imposed on foreign goods imported to the United States — tends to be passed on to the consumer. Indeed, that’s part of the entire point of the exercise, to make foreign-made goods more expensive for consumers so that they’ll buy domestic products.
It’s not just tariffs that could drive prices higher. Even setting aside the practical impossibility and moral horror of Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations, it could also have an inflationary effect by disrupting the American labor supply.
In fact, as Jack Herrera documented in a comprehensive Texas Monthly report, concerns about labor disruption are one reason even hawkish red states like Texas haven’t truly cracked down on the hiring of illegal immigrants.
“Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber,” Herrera wrote, “Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings.”
Are you thinking of voting for Trump because the budget deficit is out of control? The same Wall Street Journal survey found that 65 percent of economists believed Trump would drive up the deficit more than Harris. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan organization that analyzes American fiscal policy, claims that Trump’s policies would increase the deficit by a staggering $7.5 trillion over the next decade. That’s more than double the projected $3.5 trillion increase from Harris.
What about international chaos? It’s fair to note that neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor the Hamas attack on Israel occurred on Trump’s watch (though it’s hardly the case that our nation’s enemies were afraid of Trump — both Russia and Iran attacked American forces during Trump’s term). But the wars are both underway. What will Trump do now?
The answer is extraordinarily vague. Regarding Ukraine, Trump has promised that he’ll essentially make the parties end the conflict. He doesn’t say how — just that when he’s president Ukraine and Russia “will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that ends the violence and paves a path forward to prosperity.”
His running mate, JD Vance, has put forward a more concrete proposal that looks a lot like Russian victory. He would allow Russia to keep the territory it’s taken from Ukraine and require Ukraine to pledge neutrality and refuse to join NATO or other “allied institutions.”
“I do not think,” Vance has said, “that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine.” That’s not a recipe for peace, but for catastrophic defeat and a human rights crisis.
Trump keeps undermining NATO. He’s pledged not to defend countries that are “delinquent” under his definition. Yet NATO’s deterrence is rooted in the very notion that an attack on one NATO state is an attack on all. Trump would make a great power war more likely, not less. He’ll create targets of opportunity for America’s enemies.
Trump’s policy in Israel and Gaza is almost entirely undefined. In an interview with an Israeli newspaper, he told Israelis: “You have to finish up your war. To finish it up. You gotta get it done. And, I am sure you will do that. And we gotta get to peace, we can’t have this going on.” Yet there is nothing quick or easy about rooting terrorists out of Gaza or Lebanon, or dealing with the Iranian threat. “Finish it up” is a demand, not a plan.
It’s clear that Trump is less focused on enemies abroad than he is on his enemies at home. In an interview on Fox News, he talked about the threat posed by the “enemy from within” and raised the possibility of potentially deploying active duty military against his domestic opponents. He targeted the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff by name, calling him one of “these lunatics that we have inside.”
“We have some very bad people,” he said, “We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
He’s also threatened to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to facilitate mass deportations. The law — part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a discredited series of laws enacted during the John Adams administration — was intended to give presidents broad powers over “enemy” aliens during a time of armed conflict. It was infamously invoked to intern Japanese Americans in World War II and to impose sharp restrictions on the freedom of German and Austro-Hungarian immigrants in World War I.
The border should be Trump’s strongest issue. Border crossing surged unacceptably during President Biden’s first three years in office, but Trump is responsible for torpedoing a bipartisan border bill that would have both given the president new legal authority to close the border and reformed a broken asylum system that is driving much of the crisis.
So if Trump wins, he is left with trying to pass a bill that he already opposed, devising a new bill with uncertain prospects in Congress or relying on his own executive power, which is vulnerable to challenges in federal court. As a Times analysis observed, Trump’s border plans “are light on details but strong on fury.” Harris, by contrast, has a much simpler and more direct approach: She’ll sign the bill.
The problem of potential Trump chaos is magnified by his probable personnel policies. Republicans look back at Trump’s first term and appreciate his early cabinet and judicial appointments. MAGA views those people as mistakes. They wouldn’t let Trump be Trump.
So instead of Mike Pompeo at the C.I.A., you’re likely to have Kash Patel, a man my newsroom colleague Elizabeth Williamson accurately described as “valued more for subservience than expertise, and eager to pursue a vengeful president’s whims.” Politico is reporting that the Trump team is preparing blacklists of banned staffers — only the most loyal members of MAGA will find a home in the next Trump administration.
And if you, like me, largely liked Trump’s judicial picks, don’t expect a sequel. Trump is frustrated that his judicial appointees blocked his effort to steal the 2020 election, and now his loyalists are pushing what The Journal described as a “combative slate of new judges.”
Expect fewer nominees like the intellectually independent Amy Coney Barrett and more like Judge Aileen Cannon, the South Florida federal judge who dismissed Trump’s criminal documents case on specious grounds.
If you take Trump’s words seriously (and we should take every presidential candidate’s words seriously), his proposed policies mean more inflation, worse debt, greater international instability, incompetent or corrupt appointees, disruptive mass deportations and the deployment of military force against domestic opponents. That is not a formula for peace, prosperity or stability. It’s a formula for precisely the economic and international chaos that Republicans say they want to avoid.
This is where Jan. 6 enters the picture. Even if Republicans want to move on — even if they believe the liberal response was overblown — Trump’s actions demonstrate that Trump’s malice isn’t confined to mean tweets. He wants to break free of the men and women who restrained him in 2020, from his former attorney general, Bill Barr, to his former vice president, Mike Pence, and to the Supreme Court justices who rejected his frivolous legal arguments to overturn the election.
Trump’s conduct reminds us that the best moments of his first term are an artifact of establishment Republican influence, influence he now rejects.
I don’t mean to say that a potential Trump presidency won’t have some policies that traditional conservatives would approve of. It’s quite likely that he will reverse the Biden administration’s policies on Title IX and trans rights in schools and sports, for example, but it’s doubtful Biden’s policies will ever be fully implemented anyway.
On Monday, my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote an interesting, extended analysis of the American political realignment, noting the logic of Harris’s outreach to disaffected Republicans. There’s no doubt that Harris has been quite liberal, but look again at the issues I just discussed — which candidate is taking the more conservative approach to debt? To confronting Russian aggression? To free trade?
For traditional Republicans to feel at home in Trump’s G.O.P., they have to make a leap of faith. They have to assume that Trump is lying to his base. They have to assume that he’s running on a fake platform. But knowing what we know now, their faith is misplaced. Trump’s tweets are his policies, and there is no one left in the Republican Party to stand in his way.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about Florida’s abortion referendum — the second most important election this November. If 60 percent of Florida voters vote for Amendment 4, a proposed addition to the Florida Constitution that would enshrine abortion rights in Florida law, the pro-life movement will be in crisis:
If the pro-life movement can’t win more than 40 percent of the vote in a red state when its popular governor (he won re-election by more than 19 points) is all in defending the heartbeat law, then where can it win? And if Donald Trump carries the state while the heartbeat law goes down to defeat, won’t that simply reaffirm the Trump Republican pivot away from defending the unborn?
The stakes are high. If state law stands, Florida can establish a blueprint for pro-life legal activism. After seven straight losses in abortion ballot measures (including losses in red Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio and Montana), opponents of abortion will finally enjoy a clear win. They’ll have hope that they can defend well-drafted laws in the court of public opinion.
But if Amendment 4 prevails, it will raise a question: Where can the pro-life movement prevail? After its legal victory in the Supreme Court with Dobbs, does it now face a long, slow defeat if pro-life laws fall one by one even in red America? Will it be reduced to a rump movement, ignored by both national parties and relegated to a desperate defense of the few remaining abortion restrictions in the deepest-red states?
On Monday, we published my audio essay about natalism. I share JD Vance’s goal — to encourage Americans to have more children — but not Vance’s tactics:
When a natalism movement is centered on education and inspiration and not fear and anger, you can absolutely have a country and a culture where big, thriving families exist right alongside households and communities where there are adults who don’t have kids and it’s all fine.
The concern is not with, in my mind, somebody who has thoughtfully decided that having kids is not right for them. Do what you think is right, OK?
My concern is with the people who want to have kids, they really do, and they just think, “Can I do this financially? Can I do this as a person?” And those are the people I want to come alongside with and encourage.
I think a healthy natalist movement is about: How can we take those Americans who want to have children or want to have more children and encourage them in that endeavor?
The post Let’s Take the Republican Policy Challenge appeared first on New York Times.
