NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE F ew political conflicts have been as hotly anticipated as the potential clash between former president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On Friday morning, Axios reporters Mike Allen and Josh Kraushaar previewed what that increasingly likely contest will look like — or, at least, how Trump and his team plan to prosecute the fight against their most potent rival.
Per Allen and Kraushaar, there will be unflattering nicknames, bad-faith accusations, and a lot of psychological projection. Trump’s backers hope to neutralize his vulnerabilities on Covid — his support for quasi-lockdown measures, deference to the public-health bureaucracy, and early obsequiousness toward China — by accusing DeSantis of everything of which the former president is himself guilty.
That dovetails with the New York Times’ reporting, which, citing a “Trump ally,” revealed in late January that the Trump camp is stockpiling “news B-roll of DeSantis presiding over vaccinations of elderly people.” In effect, the former president and his allies are going to accuse DeSantis of pursuing the strategy Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, recommended, but with too much gusto.
This will only work if Republican voters have short memories. And clearly, the Trump campaign thinks they might. There is no other way to explain its apparent belief that the biggest gun in its arsenal is tethering DeSantis to former House speaker Paul Ryan. Allen and Kraushaar report that Team Trump hopes to cast Florida’s governor as a Ryan “lackey,” or worse, someone who “used to be a Reagan Republican,” in the words of one unnamed Trump ally who believes that charge exposes DeSantis as an opportunist.
Depending on the mood of the party’s base next year, this could be an effective strategy. One problem with it, however, is that many of the party’s voters — the majority of whom are 50 or older — were also probably “Reagan Republicans” at one point in the past. Forcing Republican voters to interrogate and disown their nostalgia for Reagan could be a harder slog than Trump’s camp and his loudest backers on social media think.
Moreover, the Republican Party’s elected officials have recently given every indication that fiscal prudentialism, which is supposedly so out of fashion among Republicans, is their comfort zone, the place to which they retreat when the ineluctable logic of negative partisanship compels the Right to oppose Democratic profligacy.
The fight over Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the speakership in December was only the latest example of this tendency. What did the band of anti-McCarthy mutineers demand in exchange for their acquiescence? Key committee slots, some amendments to House rules, term limits, and reforms to the immigration system, sure. But also an end to the extravagant spending that has typified governance in Washington for decades, the Trump years being no exception.
Renegade Republican representative Scott Perry’s demands included “a balanced budget” and the implementation of “the Fair Tax Act,” which, while unworkable and politically toxic (as Ramesh has ably detailed), at least pays tribute to the virtue of deficit reduction while clinging to the vice of America’s ballooning non-discretionary spending obligations.
Joe Biden himself clearly understands that it’s to his benefit to seem fiscally responsible, even if he isn’t in reality. He likes to pretend that his budget proposals, the “Build Back Better” monstrosity, and even the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” are designed to reimpose fiscal discipline on the country. The pretense is laughable, of course, but it represents a recognition on the White House’s part that there are advantages to appearing frugal, even (or perhaps only) when that appearance is deceiving.
Axios asserts that Trump’s team hopes to put DeSantis on his heels by reminding voters of his “past support for changes to Social Security and Medicare, including votes as a U.S. congressman to raise the eligibility age for Medicare.” The assumption that voters will punish any politician who acknowledges the doomed fiscal trajectory America’s entitlement programs are on has become inviolable conventional wisdom. There’s plenty of evidence to back it up. But the nationalist Right’s response to this problem is to give up on solving it. Indeed, it’s the populist wing of the Republican Party — those steely “fighters” who never fail to remind us how dead-set they are on challenging progressive orthodoxy in ways the go-along, get-along old guard of the GOP simply won’t — that has become invested in ratifying the Left’s fiscal vision for the country.
The GOP’s populist-nationalist wing looks upon past fiscally conservative movements within the party scornfully. From the Reagan Revolution to the Contract with America to the Tea Party, they regard these movements and their grandiose objective — engineering a paradigmatic shift in how Americans view the role of the state — with sneering contempt.
The New Right’s most vocal elements see tyrannical “idolatry” in a market society that privileges the maximization of personal liberty. They see the “fetishizing of autonomy” in the pursuit of “individual affluence,” from which charity, entrepreneurialism, and economic growth spring. They look upon the previous generations that sacrificed so much to cast previously unquestioned Keynesian pieties onto history’s ash heap and they scoff. They would replace the blessings they’ve inherited from those generations with complacency.
Paul Ryan-ism gets a bad rap because it is unpopular, and populists want nothing more than to be popular. But Ryan devoted his career to a noble idea — one that had supplanted the soft statism of the pre-Reagan GOP and swept aside the cosseting protectionism that kept Western Europe in shackles — and he sacrificed a lot in its pursuit. The populist Right has no such noble economic idea; it just wishes to seize power so it can put big government to its own ends.
It is a testament to the populists’ political skill that they have convinced so many that their economic program represents a rare, welcome willingness to fight. But it doesn’t; it represents a capitulation to the Left.
Trump has taken a lot of heat from progressives when he picks culture-war fights. But those same progressives have also given him nods of begrudging approval for, at the very least, being unwilling to touch America’s unfunded liabilities. Secretly, that must give him no small satisfaction. After all, as drain-the-swamp types so often remind voters, the rarefied atmosphere in those Georgetown cocktail parties can be intoxicating.