by Rick Wilson
FISCAL CONSERVATISM GOES BELLY UP
Trump’s budgets and spending plans are, as you might imagine, reflective of a man who has lived on credit his entire life, never balanced the books, and never cared if his debts were paid. The party that screamed its lungs out that Barack Obama was bankrupting America during his eight-year term is suddenly just fine on record debts, deficit spending, easy money flooding Wall Street from the Fed, and every other form of economic heresy of the erstwhile Republican philosophy of fiscal probity. Trump’s proposals of a trillion here and a trillion there in new federal spending are reflective not only of his own lifetime addiction to greater-fool-theory credit but also of an utter lack of even a passing regard for fiscal sanity.
Trump’s first budgets were wonders of rosy scenarios, mathematical legerdemain that opens up entirely new fields of number theory, phantom budget cuts, and mythical savings from that old favorite “Ending fraud, waste, and abuse.” His first budget was received even by many of Trump’s fans in Congress with the same delight as one might experience on finding a turd in a punchbowl.
Even the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, a Trump supporter and sometime advisor, was displeased. “It is a big spending budget,” he said. “And that’s not what, you know, conservatives want to see. Whether Republicans are hypocritical—I mean, I think right now you could say they are because they certainly criticized Obama for running up big deficits, which he did. But now we’re seeing that happen under a Republican administration. . . . This is a very unusual Republican budget.”6
And about that whole “smaller government” promise? Not so much. The Trump budget projects a 55% rise in federal spending between 2017 and 2028. For those of you playing our game at home, 55% is rather a goddamn lot.
Trump gave the GOP what it obviously had always wanted. Instead of the fiscal discipline we pledged and campaigned on for generations and that is objectively necessary for the nation’s long-term fiscal health, we adopted the economics of Donald Trump’s life. Borrow. Spend. Crash. Go bankrupt. Find greater-fool lenders for the next round of borrowing, spending, crashing, and bankruptcy.
Our reputation for fiscal conservatism always had a whiff of bullshit about it, even in eras when we had control of the House, Senate, and White House. We talked a big game on entitlement reform, lowering the burdens on middle-class taxpayers, and ending the kind of government lard voters roundly pretend to hate until it gets spent in their districts or states. In the age of Trump, we largely stopped pretending. I’ve made a hundred ads for candidates and written as many speeches in which they promise on the lives of their children that they’re going to be the one who finally gets to Washington and cuts the wasteful spending at the Department of Wasteful Spending. They’re going to be the one who finally gets control of government spending, cuts regulations, and bitchslaps that deficit so hard it never shows its face in This Town again.
Yeah. At least Trump let my party stop pretending. Eat, spend, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die broke.
Oh, there are still a few tattered, dodgy fig leaves covering our fiscal junk. With the passage of the tax bill, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell created a new super-extra-special Budget Committee to finally, really, pinkie-swear-for-real finally get America’s fiscal house in order. Wink emoji. Love ya. Mean it.
Budget expert and economist Stan Collender nailed it when he said, “This new select committee on the budget isn’t just utter nonsense, it’s an insult to our intelligence. We’re being told not to look at the big deficit hikes that were just enacted but to pay attention instead to yet another attempt to prevent it from happening again.”7
INFRASTRUCTURE
Ah, infrastructure. The policy unicorn that everyone loves in theory, that Congress and lobbyists dine out on for their constituents and clients, and that always flops on execution. In the Trump era, Republicans threw aside their objections to massive, top-down federal stimulus programs. And let’s face it, that’s all “infrastructure” plans are, really. Everyone loves cutting the ribbons and having a bridge named after them, but most of these programs fall far short of their promised economic benefits. Or at least that’s what conservatives used to believe.
Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan was a back-of-the-envelope political creation of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, trade warrior Peter Navarro, and Steve Bannon. Their interests were a combination of oligarchic self-interest, economic nationalism, and raw populism, and the plan reflected just that. The Kellyanned version of it went like this: “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”8
A few conservative economists, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marc Scribner, expressed their skepticism over the plan. Scribner wrote, “Contrary to the dominant political narrative from members of both parties, which is parroted uncritically by most of the press, there is little evidence that these public works projects promote long-run economic growth.”9
Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan included $200 billion in federal spending and a whole lot of “public-private partnership” magical thinking and never got much further than being mocked each time it was brought up as the theme of the week.
MORE BOOM-BOOM FOR SUPREME GENERALISSIMO TRUMP
Here’s an irony: I spent part of my early career trying to save the defense budget when I worked in Dick Cheney’s Pentagon at the end of the cold war. We were going to have a “peace dividend” if it killed us. In terms of our defense budgets, it almost did.
In the years that followed I helped corporate defense contractor clients fight for DOD contracts to build a variety of things that either spy on the bad guys or leave a smoking crater where the bad guys were just before we decided their bunker, desert tent, drug lab, or condo needed to go boom. While it’s not all for North Korean–style missile parades, Trump’s defense spending plans aren’t tethered to a revised international defense strategy, but rather to a mere bigger-is-better preference. Donald Trump’s record-breaking defense spending plan hit the $716 billion mark in 2018, leaving even Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s relentlessly upbeat budget chief, shaking his head. In the anodyne language of the Washington Post, it was “a major increase that signals a shift away from concerns about [the] rising deficit” and was “a setback for deficit hawks.”10
By “setback” they meant “Sweet Jesus, that’s a lot of money. At least it’s for Mattis.”
FAMILY LEAVE
Another of Trump’s proposals that dragged conservatives down a path of policy apostasy came in the form of Ivanka Trump’s family leave proposals. Giving parents paid leave so they can care for newborn kids is a puppies-and-kittens plan. Who wouldn’t love that? In 1993 Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family medical needs or childbirth.11 The catch, of course, is the whole “unpaid” part.
Long a tentpole argument of the Democrats, paid family leave is the standard everywhere else in the world. Republicans had forever rolled their eyes over this, with an ironic sigh, and said, “Yes, we get it. Norway is awesome. How ya gonna pay for it?” The idea had its Republican adherents, including my friend Marco Rubio. You can see why it’s broadly popular.
At least until the topic of, you know, paying for the damn thing comes front and center. Republicans struggled for ages on how to provide paid leave without breaking the bank.
Looking for a way to get suburban mommies to think the GOP isn’t a party of rotund, ass-slapping old white dudes? Well, hello, ladies. Meet the Ivanka Trump Family Leave Plan.12
Sounds great, right? The Devil in the details was the price tag. The plan championed by Ivanka Trump used—wait for it—Social Security to pay for it. Already reeling from an unsustainable financial model and staggering under costs driven by a st
eep growth curve on its disability benefits, Social Security wasn’t a logical pool of money for this proposal, which almost any rational political figure could have suggested to Team Trump on day one.
The Democrats’ proposal for paid family leave has long been centered on a new federal payroll tax, which in a moment of stark political irony makes their position more conservative than the Trump plan. Yes, they want a gazillion-dollar new nanny state entitlement. But at least they weren’t engaged in magical thinking on how to get there.
ENTITLEMENT REFORM AND THE GOP ARE NEVER NEVER NEVER GETTING BACK TOGETHER
When it comes to reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, Trump knows his audience; he’s not touching the three entitlement programs that drive the vast bulk of federal spending. Those folks rely on federal largesse, despite their avowed desire to get gubmint on a fiscal diet. Despite the acknowledged coming insolvency of all of them, Trump said from the start that he’d leave them as is.
Paul Ryan, an otherwise passionate champion of entitlement reform, first said that without entitlement reform he couldn’t bring the budget in balance and pay for Trump’s defense spending spree. Later, Ryan appeared to give Trump a pass, because frankly, that’s become Ryan’s only option. Instead of accepting Trump’s Shermanesque statement on entitlement reform, Ryan did a back flip worthy of a Bulgarian gymnast by claiming entitlement reform would affect “people near retirement age.”
Ryan has been consistently right about the need to fix these programs, but he keeps missing the emotional problem with cutting even a dime from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They are wired deeply into the American culture of soft socialism, and the GOP never truly had the appetite to fix them, despite the Tea Party’s endless bloviating on the subject.
Despite Ryan’s desires, Trump read the hypocrisy of the GOP base like the experienced con man he is. He knows his support skews older, poorer, and whiter. Particularly in the red-state target markets where Esoteric Trumpism was greeted with whoops that would shake the mold off a trailer’s walls, those social programs—and increasingly the disability program of Social Security—aren’t considered big government. They are an economic mainstay.
A much-mocked trope from the peak of the Tea Party era occurred at a town hall meeting held by Representative Robert Inglis of South Carolina. A man stood up and angrily demanded of Inglis, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Now take that moment and inject it with a massive bolus of meth, Oxycontin, resentment, and simmering white working class anger, and Donald Trump was never, ever going to go there.
Decades of fell warnings of the entitlement program doom that was coming to us are now in the memory hole. Paul Ryan can’t even broach his favorite topic of entitlement reform in 2018, given midterm elections are coming and most of America views the GOP with the same warmth and regard as they do genital warts. Whoever replaces Ryan as Speaker won’t do it in 2020, because Donald Trump will be running for reelection. The fiscal time bombs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are still ticking.
Trump will likely be dead of a KFC-induced heart attack before we face up to them.
“COAL” IS TRUMP FOR “SOLYNDRA”
Donald Trump’s economic nostalgia is a powerful force, both for him and for his followers. Nothing, though, seems to ring his Proustian bell for the industrial era like coal.
Ah, coal. The shittiest, most miserable, most polluting, most dangerous energy source in our portfolio. The industry had been dying a deserved slow death at the hands of natural gas and solar until Donald Trump decided to try to revive it with a suite of executive orders and the leadership of Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Barack Obama’s early plans to encourage a green-energy sector in the U.S. included loan guarantees for companies like the solar-energy vaporware firm Solyndra. When Solyndra was granted a $535 million loan guarantee in March 2009, Republicans lost their minds in anger. The phrase “picking winners and losers” was one of the GOP’s central talking points in opposition to Obama’s stimulus and its emphasis on green energy.
Representative Paul Ryan didn’t like it much then, and made it clear on Fox News Sunday after Solyndra met its inevitable demise. “There are billions more of this exact kind of spending that came out of the stimulus that will produce these results we fear. This is industrial policy and crony capitalism at its worst. It’s exhibit A for how this kind of economic policy doesn’t work. We shouldn’t be picking winners or losers in Washington. We should be setting the conditions for economic growth so that the private sector can create jobs. Washington is not good at picking winners and losers, so we shouldn’t try.”13
Trump consigliere and walking time machine Steve Bannon once said of his plans, “I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”14
Coal? Ironworks? Why not America’s long-lost buggy whip industry? Isn’t it time we revived our vital town crier market sector as well?
Trump’s own tactics attempting to shame companies who threatened to outsource jobs played out both on the campaign trail and in the early days of his presidency, and reflect Trump’s authoritarian streak as the National Bully.
These were American companies competing in a global marketplace. Trump’s threats to punish them with the power of his tweets, his bully pulpit, and his government sent a shock through the corporate world.
Trump’s early experiments with trying to browbeat private companies into submission were like chapters out of the Junior Authoritarians Activity Guide. Ford, Carrier, GM, and Boeing were early examples of Trump’s attempting to use his Twitter pulpit. He scared firms into announcements they would be bringing jobs back from overseas, or canceling foreign manufacturing deals in order to placate Mad King Don’s online rages: “General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U.S. car dealers—tax free across border. Make in U.S.A. or pay big border tax!”15
LESS GOVERNMENT . . . BUT IS THAT WEED I SMELL?
The nation made up its mind on marijuana a long, long time ago. We’re okay with it. Personally, I haven’t smoked it since 1985, but you do you. In what represents almost a perfect test case of conservative hypocrisy in the age of Trump, suddenly the great and terrible powers of the federal government have been activated in Drug War Version 9.0.
For all the blathering by conservatives about respecting the states, adhering to the 10th Amendment, and fighting for individual choices and freedom, the Trump Party looked at the ballot initiatives and laws passed in the states to reform the draconian sentencing and possession guidelines for marijuana and said, “Whoa there! The Devil’s Weed must be stopped!” in the righteous tones of a southern tent preacher.
Massive majorities in both major political parties favor legalizing medical marijuana and the decriminalization of possession. Majorities favor legalization of marijuana for personal use. In states that have decriminalized and legalized, regulated, tax-paying markets have emerged, providing jobs and revenue to the states and stopped the prison pipeline where (primarily) young black men have languished for possession of as little as one ounce of marijuana.
In the event you’ve been living under a rock, the war on drugs has failed spectacularly. All wars on drugs fail spectacularly. Republicans used to believe this. Libertarian Republicans used to hold this as a central article of faith.
No longer.
Trump’s payback to antidrug hard-liner Sheldon Adelson played directly into the skill set of Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator turned attorney general, turned scourge of the 420 crowd. Sessions saw the states exercising their power to manage their own affairs, set their own sentences, and decide what recreational
chemicals their citizens could consume after a long day and turned the DOJ into a wrecking ball.
Reversing an Obama-era policy of minimal federal regulation of state marijuana laws, Reefer Madness Sessions went to work destroying a multibillion-dollar sector of the emerging economy.
When Obama’s administration used Operation Choke Point to cut off access to banking, credit card processing, and other financial services to thousands of legal, licensed firearms dealers, many Republicans (myself most certainly included) went apoplectic at the vast federal overreach. Sessions has turned exactly those same tools on the marijuana industry, with only muttering from the GOP in return.
Individual choices? The 10th Amendment? Getting Washington out of the business of the states?
Not in the age of Trump.
LIVE BY THE EO, DIE BY THE EO
The problem with unlimited government is that it keeps getting bigger, metastasizing into more and more forms that its creators never envisioned. Departments and their missions creep over wider and wider swaths of American life, expanding into territory their creators never intended.
Many Republicans looking for ways to justify their embrace of Trump fall back on one particular node of reasoning that I find completely insufficient: claiming that Trump is using executive orders and regulations to “get things done.”
They keep insisting that Trump’s governance by executive order and by policy changes is a true accomplishment for conservatism. They’re wrong, of course, both in substance and in the procedural nature of how a conservative can and should govern.
