It’s surreal watching North Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham leap to President Donald Trump’s defense on cable TV, denouncing “this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president.” He might have been thinking of an attempt by some guy named Senator Lindsey Graham, who said of Trump in February 2016: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.” Senator Marco Rubio, who called Trump “dangerous” and a “con man” during the campaign, has also boarded the Trump train. So did Senator Ted Cruz, who pointedly refused to endorse Trump at the Republican convention after the real estate mogul mocked his wife’s looks, implicated his father in the JFK assassination and labeled him “Lying Ted.” The Never Trump movement, to the extent it ever was a movement at all, consists of a few conservative intellectuals, not Republican politicians or front-line activists.
The Republican Party is now undeniably Trump’s party.
This was one of the crucial developments of 2017, because a few Republican politicians who decided to resist Trump substantively could have become a real check on his power. A few Capitol Hill Republicans have pushed back on Trump rhetorically, notably retiring senators Jeff Flake, who denounced the president as a disgrace to his office, and Bob Corker, who bemoaned the lack of “adult day care” in the White House, but they have not used their considerable leverage to try to change his behavior. With Democrats voting in lockstep against many Trump nominees and most of the Trump agenda, any Republican senator could have demanded, say, that he release his tax returns in exchange for their vote on his tax bill, or that the bill include legal protection for Russian collusion Special Counsel Robert Mueller against presidential interference, or for that matter that Trump defray the taxpayer-incurred costs of his constant jaunts to his private clubs. But Republicans have made it pretty clear that they don’t plan to stand up to Trump. None has pushed for more aggressive investigations of his activities, and some have actively shielded him from investigations, while calling for investigations of his rivals. And while White House aides have often leaked their dismay about Trump’s defense of neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, or his attacks on the FBI and the intelligence community, or his uninterest in briefings that have more than one page or don’t flatter his ego enough, none of those aides has actually resigned in protest.
In recent months, Republicans have bucked Trump a few times. GOP senators blocked a few Trump judicial nominees -- including a 36-year-old former ghost hunter who had blogged favorably about the Ku Klux Klan and failed to disclose his marriage to a White House aide, as well as a lawyer whose confirmation hearing went viral after it became clear he had never tried a case, taken a deposition or learned much about the law. A couple of Republican senators who like the Export-Import Bank also scuttled Trump’s nominee to lead it, because he was until quite recently an outspoken proponent of abolishing it. For the most part, though, congressional Republicans have given Trump a pass, even as his approval ratings have steadily wilted into the low thirties. As countless features about Trump voters have confirmed, he’s still popular with the angry white seniors who tend to dominate Republican primaries. It’s not a coincidence that Flake and Corker chose to retire rather than try to win a primary as an anti-Trump Republican (though Corker, for his part, insists he would have won).
One lesson of 2017 is that Congress simply isn’t going to serve as a serious check on Trump’s power, unless Democrats take control of Congress in 2018.
1.The Triumph of the Right
Trump is not (and never was) a typical Republican conservative. He used to be a pro-choice Democratic donor. He beat 17 typical Republican conservatives in the 2016 primary, running as an anti-establishment populist deal maker. But one reason Republican conservatives have turned a blind eye to his missteps is that on almost every domestic policy issue, he has pursued an ideologically conservative agenda and nominated conservative ideologues to execute it. Republicans might be more concerned with a president who publicly threatened to challenge the license of media outlets he hates and privately fumes that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS if that president wasn’t also nominating right-wing judges and cutting corporate taxes.
Trump has struggled to get things done -- comparing his promises versus his achievements for his first 100 days was good for a laugh -- but those are two very big things he did get done. In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, which was perhaps the most effective shattering of Washington norms -- first by helping elect Trump, by giving skeptical conservatives a pressing reason to vote for him, and later by enabling Trump to fill the vacancy with Justice Gorsuch, who will keep pulling American jurisprudence to the right long after Trump has left office. So will the dozen appellate judges Trump installed in his first year, a squadron of Federalist Society conservatives who might turn out to be his most enduring legacy.
The tax bill, a deficit-exploding mix of modest temporary tax cuts for the middle class, more generous temporary tax cuts for the rich, and massive permanent tax cuts for businesses and inherited wealth, was also a major victory for the Republican establishment and its corporate donors. It was originally floated as “tax reform,” an effort to make the code more efficient by eliminating tax breaks and loopholes while reducing rates, but the final version lowered rates while preserving almost all breaks and loopholes, which will make it much harder to do reform in the future. Its immediate economic impact will probably be minimal (despite the hyperventilating stock market), since the economy is already near full employment and the Federal Reserve will probably hit the monetary brakes to offset any fiscal stimulus. But the legislation could usher in a new era of trillion-dollar deficits, along with a new Republican push to cut entitlements like Medicare, Social Security and food stamps. And as Trump reportedly told some of his well-heeled guests at Mar-a-Lago, it will make rich Americans richer, exactly what he said he wouldn’t do on the campaign trail.
In fact, the Trump White House agenda bears only faint resemblance to the Trump campaign agenda. Trump never promised to make it easier for internet service providers to sell customer data or harder for ripped-off consumers to sue banks. But ever since he entered the Oval Office, Trump has sided with business owners on just about every issue other than trade, pushing to gut Obama-era rules requiring oil companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, restaurants to let their workers keep tips, financial advisers to represent the interests of their clients, and manufacturers to keep records of on-the-job injuries. In fairness, Trump and his liberal critics alike tend to exaggerate the immediate impact of his assault on regulations; dismantling rules usually requires years of bureaucratic maneuvering and litigation. Still, Trump has made it clear whose side he’s on -- the side of companies that don’t want to disclose the toxic chemicals they use, coal-fired power plants that don’t want stricter pollution limits, for-profit schools that don’t want to be penalized if their students don’t get jobs, and bosses who don’t want to pay their workers time-and-a-half for overtime. He still talks about fighting for the little guy, but then he’s not quite followed through. That bipartisan infrastructure bill he keeps promising has yet to see the light of day.
In Washington, personnel is policy, and Trump stocked his administration from the start with partisan conservative Republicans. He set the tone when he chose the self-proclaimed “right-wing nut job” Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina congressman who helped launch the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, to lead his war on regulations as head of the Office of Management of Budget. Mulvaney was also the architect of Trump’s plan for unprecedented domestic spending cuts, which have stalled in Congress, and Trump even picked him to start defanging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was tormenting the financial industry before Mulvaney took the reins in November. Similarly, Trump’s picks to lead the Education Department, Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency were strident critics of the missions of those agencies. And after railing against Goldman Sachs on the stump, Trump chose Goldman Sachs alumni to be his Treasury secretary, top economic aide and deputy national security adviser, and a Goldman Sachs attorney to be his top Wall Street regulator.
Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was also a Goldman Sachs alum, but even though the left hated his incendiary views on race and immigration, he was the leading voice inside the White House for populist critiques of the Republican Party’s trickle-down agenda. But Bannon lost the battle for Trump’s brain and got fired. Trickle-down is ascendant.
And Trump’s policies are mostly the GOP’s policies.
Whether not he really is a conservative True Believer, or a quasi-moderate who has simply calculated that his best hope of re-election is to cling to the solid 36%-40% base which helped elect him, is ultimately irrelevant. He and the GOP have been forced into a shotgun marriage, and unless something truly egregious in his conduct can be uncovered, this union is likely to last into the 2020 election season.