Perhaps the most underappreciated fact about President Trump is that he is a Republican.
People know he is a Republican, of course, but this is often treated as incidental to his political persona. He is a Republican, sure, but he’s not a Republican in the way that Speaker Mike Johnson or John Thune, the Senate majority leader, are Republicans. As nearly every commentator under the sun has observed for the past decade, Trump is unique — and to his critics, transgressive — in ways that defy traditional categorization.
And yet, the most salient detail about Trump as an actual officeholder is that he is a Republican politician committed to the success of the Republican Party and its ideological vision. In this way, he is little more than a vehicle for the policy agenda of the most conservative Republicans, willing to sign whatever they might bring to his desk.
We saw this in his first term, with his signature legislative accomplishment, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Was this his promised transformation of the American economy, the populist blow for those Americans left behind by the nation’s failed political and economic leadership?
No, it was a massive upper-income tax cut designed to pay huge benefits to the wealthiest Americans, including the president, his family and their friends. In Trump’s first go at government, in fact, his entire administration was geared toward the rich and connected. His Environmental Protection Agency worked in the interest of industry; his Department of Labor worked in the interest of bosses; his Health and Human Services worked hard to undermine Medicaid and other federal health programs; and his Department of the Interior was more interested in using land for resource extraction than protecting it for current and future generations of Americans.
In short, Trump governed like a Republican. And it is not a stretch to say that much of his first term was, on the domestic front, more or less indistinguishable from a hypothetical third term for the previous Republican president, George W. Bush. Trump even ended his term, as Bush did, with a rolling set of crises and disasters, each exacerbated by his mismanagement.
Trump has so far governed as a mostly orthodox Republican — not as some heterodox populist — in his second term as well. He spearheaded an assault on the federal administrative state, fulfilling a dream that dates back to conservative opposition to the New Deal, and has put his presidency behind large and unsustainable tax breaks for the rich as well as vicious cuts to the social insurance state.
If signed into law, the Senate version of Trump’s policy bill would slash $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and $186 billion from anti-poverty food assistance to help pay for trillions in tax breaks, including more than $564 billion in business tax cuts. By one estimate, these changes would result in at least 17 million people losing their health insurance over the next decade, as well as millions losing SNAP benefits, with some states possibly even ending their programs. All this so that the top 1 percent of households can receive an estimated average of a few tens of thousands of dollars each year.
But as irresponsible as this bill is, there is a dog-bites-man element to its existence. If we understand that Trump is, in most respects, an ordinary Republican president, then it is not news to learn that a Republican president wants to cut social services for the poor to sustain a large tax cut for the rich.
It is, perhaps, the longest-standing priority of the modern Republican Party to starve the welfare state, lower taxes as much as possible and spend what little federal revenues remain on internal and external security. With his “big beautiful bill,” Trump is doing, in a real sense, what any Republican president would do. That he cloaks this in the rhetoric of populism should not blind us to what’s actually happening
This reality extends, at least somewhat, to foreign policy.
What, so far, has been the signature foreign policy action of the Trump administration? A strike on Iran’s nuclear program. With one decision, Trump fulfilled the dreams of a generation of Republican hawks who have been clamoring for war with — and regime change in — Iran since President Bush proclaimed that it was a member of the “axis of evil” in 2002. You could, if you were so inclined, draw a straight line from that speech to John McCain’s “bomb Iran” quips in 2007 to Trump’s appointment of Mike Pompeo, a noted Iran antagonist, as secretary of state in 2018 to his airstrike last month.
Across both the first Trump administration and this one, what you see are the longstanding goals of the Republican Party being fulfilled by a Republican president. What’s striking isn’t that this is happening, but that Trump, in his 10 years on the American political scene, has successfully obscured his rigidly partisan agenda with claims of populism and ideological heterodoxy. His occasional gestures toward support for existing social programs or greater taxes on the rich — and his willingness to say anything to amass power — are enough to persuade many voters (and some professional political observers) that Trump will somehow moderate the Republican Party or turn it away from its traditional agenda. If anything, it’s been the opposite: Trump’s willingness to do everything favored by his partisan fellow travelers has only accelerated the Republican Party’s dash toward ideological and policy extremism.
The obvious rejoinder here is to point to the extraordinary nature of the president’s assault on constitutional governance. Unlike his predecessors, he pays no lip service to the idea that we are a nation of laws. As I have said before, he sees both the presidency and the nation at large as his personal plaything and cannot separate himself from the office. Still, there are elements of this administration’s contempt for democracy that have clear antecedents in previous Republican presidencies. Trump’s attacks on civil rights and voting rights are of a piece with Reagan-era efforts to weaken both (shaped in the White House by a young John Roberts). And his effort to build an unaccountable domestic security apparatus, under the guise of immigration enforcement, is clearly an attempt to bring the techniques of the war on terror home to use against Americans.
To look at the Trump administration and see something distinct from the past 44 years of Republican governance is to inhabit a fantasy in which past Republican presidents weren’t similarly contemptuous of legal and constitutional limits on their authority. Indeed, if Trump embodies the theory of the “unitary executive,” it’s because conservative jurists like John Roberts and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have — along with their Republican-appointed colleagues — effectively rewritten the Constitution to allow for the exercise of virtually unaccountable power by Republican presidents.
Yes, you can attribute some of the worst of this administration to the specific authoritarian vision of Trump and his allies. But a good deal of what we have seen — and what we will see — is simply what happens when you elect a Republican to the White House.
When George W. Bush left office in 2009, the United States was mired in two wars and the global economy was in free fall. When Donald Trump left office after his first term, the United States was mired in a deadly pandemic and its economy was recovering from a free fall. (And this is to say nothing of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a desperate bid to stay in office.)
That’s two Republican presidencies over 20 years that ended in disaster. There is no reason to think that Trump’s second term will be the exception that breaks the rule.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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