As bombastic, braggartly, and Brueghelian as Donald Trump is, he has performed one valuable service: He’s shown how little influence the GOP’s self-appointed ideological gatekeepers actually have. ADVERTISING As bombastic, braggartly, and Brueghelian as Donald Trump is, he has performed
As bombastic, braggartly, and Brueghelian as Donald Trump is, he has performed one valuable service: He’s shown how little influence the GOP’s self-appointed ideological gatekeepers actually have.
For years, a coterie of conservative groups and thinkers have worked the levers of their own Oz machines, their amplified presence grumping, growling, and fuming as they pressured Republican candidates to adopt their favored nostrums.
Now comes Toto Trump, a fluffy-haired political terrier who, ignoring the fearsome Oz facades, has pulled back the curtain on the would-be guardians of GOP ideology, revealing them as far less potent than they pretend to be.
Nowhere has the distress been louder than at National Review, conservatism’s flagship journal, which is incensed with Trump over … well, just about everything.
“Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones,” wrote the editors in a cri de coeur that anchored its mid-January “Against Trump” issue, which featured 22 conservatives teeing off on the Republican front-runner.
Actually, Trump’s success suggests that consensus is neither broad nor deep. Moreover, National Review efforts to torpedo Trump have bounced off his thick hull.
They must be just as morose at the Club for Growth, the party’s primary sentinel on supply-side economics. Now, Trump has proposed large income-tax cuts, with big top-rate reductions, a scheme that would balloon deficits and necessitate more budget cuts. Which is to say, he has embraced the voodoo basics.
So why the Club’s ire? Well, he still backs progressive taxation, and favors making businesses that repatriate offshore profits pay a tax of — gasp — 10 percent. He once supported a wealth tax and single-payer health care. And he still says the United States should “take care of everybody” with coverage. So upset are the Growthsters that they have been targeting Trump with attack ads. “He’s really just playing us for chumps,” concludes one. Yes indeed; call the club a bunch of trumped, stumped chumps.
Sabers have also been rattling over at the GOP foreign policy establishment, and particularly among the neoconservatives. After all, Trump has basically repudiated the interventionist foreign policy they favor. He’s even gone so far as to charge that George W. Bush &Co. lied to push the country into war with Iraq. His election would spell “the death knell of America as a great power,” warns historian Max Boot. In early March, dozens of GOP foreign policy and national-security types outlined their opposition to Trump in a public letter.
To no avail. Marco Rubio was, by and large, the neocon favorite. But on March 15, Trump ended Rubio’s candidacy by trouncing him in his home state of Florida.
We can’t, of course, overlook the free-marketers who populate the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute — and who thought they had the GOP locked onto a free-trade trajectory. But though Trump occasionally pays lip service to unfettered trade, his actual stance falls into the managed-trade category. He has, for example, called for (and then stepped back a bit from) a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, as well as for higher taxes or tariffs on goods from US-based firms that relocate manufacturing to other countries.
That’s hardly a complete list of his ideological apostasies. But despite the sound and fury of the gatekeepers, Trump’s heterodox views haven’t hurt him at all. Which suggests that, going forward, the GOP may be able to bust loose of long-time conservative correctness and sally freely forth to explore some new ideas.
© 2016 The New York Times Company
