* For my dear family and friends who are Trump supporters, I wish not to be provocative and strive only to be honest in my assessment of Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not the personification of “conservative”. If you read further, you’ll see why. Please keep in mind that hagiography (worshipfulness) is not an endearing quality. I won’t engage in it. That kind of adulation should be reserved for Him who raises up and brings down nations (see 2 Samuel 22:48), and belongs not to the hot political personage of the moment.
The choice of J.D. Vance is more proof that the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan has been laid to rest . . . for the time being. Like a vampire rising from his crypt, though, the GOP corpse is resurrecting as the Trump Party, while standing for nothing more than Trump’s brusque utterings on all matters foreign and domestic. Replace the “R” with a “T” after the name of the party’s officeholders.
What does the “T” actually represent? A strong hint can be found in the party’s platform. Warning, don’t be so dismissive of the party’s platform as an empty gesture and meaningless after the convention. Platforms are aspirational, reflective of the collective heart and mind of a party and provide the direction for where its representatives would like to nudge the country once in office.
Where does Trump want to lead the party and country in his platform? He no doubt wants to sidestep the prickly issue of abortion. The party’s longstanding and firm stance in support of unborn life has been replaced by a “Vote of the People” (see #1 below). A “Vote of the People” sanctifies the taking of unborn life according to the Trump Party. The only abortion act to be condemned is “Late Term Abortion”, the poll-tested safe position. The Trump Party’s positions are as poll-tested as the verbiage to tar opponents coming out of the Democrat political complex.
By its nature, the issue of the taking of unborn life can’t be reduced to states’ rights. A “Vote of the People” can’t sanctify a practice that is unsanctifiable. Instead, to advance Trump’s political interests, the 2020 commitment – “. . . we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” – must be expunged and replaced by the 2024 “Vote of the People” and a curt seven lines.
The Trump Party has adopted the 1854 rationale of Sen. Stephen Douglas (D, Ill.) in his Kansas-Nebraska Act regarding slavery in the territories, just adapted for abortion. Douglas called it “popular sovereignty”, like Trump’s “Vote of the People”: let the people in the territories choose to enslave others, or, in our moment, take the life of children who haven’t exited the womb. That makes it alright, eh?
Trump has a history of being a bit dodgy on abortion. He was for it before he was against it, following in the illustrious rhetorical tradition of John Kerry. Now he’s shuffled slightly in reverse to “Vote of the People”. Anything that’ll get him back in the White House, even if it is over the bodies of the unborn.
There’s much in the platform to be lauded: rebuilding our military and its domestic industrial base, immigration controls, the defense of common sense in the culture wars, preserving the 2018 tax cuts, choice in education, ending the eco-madness, etc. These fall in the Venn diagram overlap between the old Republican Party and the new Trump Party. It’s in the expanding outstretched areas beyond the common zone that the Republican Party turns into the Trump Party, so much so that the word “Republican” is unrecognizable in the party name and as the descriptor of its members’ affiliation. “Republican” needs to be trash-canned for Trumpican. Those who gathered in Milwaukee are Trumpicans, not Republicans. All Trump Party officeholders, formerly Republican, should be designated like Sen. J.D. Vance – T, Ohio. Ditch the “R”.
No better example of the metamorphosis can be found than in the Trump Party’s newfound pledge to commit fiscal lechery (see #4 below), and this from a man who has filed six Chapter 11 bankruptcies starting in the early 1990s. It’s no secret that the dole, the welfare state, entitlements are driving us to the status of 1980s Argentina with an inflation rate of 3,000% (see #3 below), or Weimar Germany between 1922 and 1923 when inflation made one US dollar worth 4,210,500,000,000 marks. The three elephants in the federal budget of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid currently account for almost half of all federal spending (see #5 below), and are on a glide path to eat up more. Then, you must pile the mounting and mandatory debt interest payments onto that fiscal Mt. Everest. Interest payments don’t add one new frigate to the navy or new bridge to the interstate highway system.
What’s the Trump Party’s answer? Mimicking Trump before his adoring crowds, the platform reads, “President Trump has made absolutely clear that he will not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security.” The bombast is followed by a promise of more benefits and a pie-in-the-sky hope that we can grow ourselves out of the incontinence (see #4 below).
Be honest, speak to the young and future generations about the huge burden that they will be expected to carry. Currently, we’re creating $1 trillion of new debt every 100 days (see #5 below). To say that the three elephants aren’t a big part of that picture is to play the part of the flim-flam artist in the old shell game. When we try to fund anything else, like defense, it only increases the pressure on the total federal budget, regardless of the gimmicky mirage of FICA taxes going in and bennies going out. Demography can’t sustain it. The Trump Party promises to stop the alleged raiding of the account, but ironically they need to raid it in order to shower rewards on favored industries, fund additional benefits, and resuscitate a languishing military after years of neglect.
One shouldn’t expect fiscal probity from a man who’s played fast and loose with the bankruptcy laws. Trump will be freed from the normal debt worries that are faced by normal people since he’ll have the federal power to issue new debt and gin up the printing presses. Debt is something for somebody else to worry about. Right? By that time, Trump and his aged cohort will have passed to their reward. Not so for your kids. We ought to be ashamed.
On the domestic front, the Trump Party promises tariffs and all manner of trade tomfoolery including the showering of largesse on favored companies and penalties for consumers (tariff-induced price increases), people who might be reluctant to subsidize the featherbedding of our labor unions, the same gang who ran Detroit and its automakers into the ground. Read Chapters three and five of the platform to know what the Trumpicans have in store (see #6 below). The effect of treating natural allies as trade enemies at a time of a resurgent Red China is anybody’s guess. It probably won’t end well.
But forward thinking hasn’t been the hallmark of Trumpicans, including Trump’s anointed 39-year-old #2, J.D. Vance. Look at the Trump Party’s definition of “National Interest” (see #7 below):
“Republicans will promote a Foreign Policy centered on the most essential American Interests, starting with protecting the American Homeland, our People, our Borders, our Great American Flag, and our Rights under God.”
Sounds great, right? This isn’t a product of independent deep thinkers coming together. It’s a cut-and-paste job from Trump’s stump speeches. The threat of Red China, the interests of our friends in the Indo-Pacific and Israel are mentioned, but Ukraine and the threat of Putin’s Russia didn’t survive the Trump censors.
Trump’s outlook presents a bugaboo that is compounded in Vance. It is a lack of appreciation for the international liberal political order after World War II. Don’t fly off the handle about the word “liberal”. The liberal order means the classically liberal cooperative arrangement of rule-of-law democracies, alliances, also called collective defense, and free trade. The “America First” jargon of the Trump clan often means America alone. The attacks on free trade translates into a love affair with tariffs, which is not a lubricant for international collaboration. Are the criticisms of NATO limited to making member nations increase their contributions or do they represent a pivot away from the alliance, another manifestation of America alone?
We’ll learn the hard way by putting him and his people in the White House for a second term. His people in a second term may not be the Reaganite types that populated the first. This second edition may be populated with protectionists and isolationists/noninterventionists, appointees falling under the dubious conjury of “national conservative”.
Listening to Vance, one worries about a whole lot of things. The former Never Trumper of 2016 has shape-shifted into a Trump firebrand with the same propensity for bombast before an open mic or on X as his Trump “shifu” (Chinese martial arts master). In 2019, Vance made clear the battle lines in the party between Reagan Republicanism and Trumpism. Speaking of Trump and the party split, he said,
“Even though he [Trump] was the president of the United States, there were already people who were aggressively pushing back against his influence, who were already planning a return to basically reimplementing the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions in 2019. I think that’s over now. And the fact that it’s over is a huge, huge win for you guys [i.e. national conservatives], but mostly, it’s a huge, huge win for the American people.” (see #8 below)
By 2024, the Reaganite Republican Party of 2019, which Vance characterizes as the “Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions” – the free trade/small government/robust-military-and-diplomatic-engagement stance of Reagan – is eclipsed by people vaguely referred to as “populists”. The word demands parsing.
The “populism” for Vance is a cry for big government which is evident in his hostility to changes in Social Security and Medicare and in his support for trade protectionism. In 2020, running for the Senate, Vance said, “I don’t support cuts to Social Security or Medicare and think privatizing Social Security is a bad idea.” “Privatizing” is political code for opposition to the reforms that make them sustainable. It’s one of Chuck Schumer’s favorite rhetorical contraptions.
And in many ways, Vance is right there with Schumer and the rest of the collectivist establishment in the donkey party. They don’t like free enterprise, because it might be too free of their control, and apparently neither does Vance. He adores Lina Khan, Biden’s radical chairwoman of Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He gushingly approves of her when he said, “I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”
If you’re a socialist of the kind commonly found in today’s Democrat Party, then the FTC is the place to be to assault your arch enemy, the free enterprise system. Khan traffics in the “Bigness is Badness” jargon of the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party rather than the more practical and sensible “consumer welfare” principle of anti-trust law and regulation. The former is indefinable and leaves much running room for anti-business skullduggery, perfect for the budding socialists manning the parapets of today’s Democratic Party. Vance is anxious to join her there, while she has driven the two remaining Republicans out of the commission (see #11 below). Does Vance match Lenin’s definition of the “useful idiot”?
Vance’s “national conservative” compadres yearn for the 1950s, a time when our trade competitors were digging out from under the rubble of World War II. Then came the 1970s oil shocks, new regulations and new muscular federal regulatory agencies, and the revival of our trade rivals. Much American industry couldn’t survive their unions that were made powerful during the lax times of the 1950s and 60s. Much traditional American manufacturing fled the Rust Belt for the right-to-work Sun Belt and the South Belt. Michigan’s loss was Tennessee’s and South Carolina’s gain.
Foreign manufacturers jumped into the American right-to-work free trade zone of states making the words “foreign made” irrelevant. The car list is quite impressive. Much of Toyota’s entire lineup, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW have made their way into states not blue, not controlled by the AFL-CIO, where freer labor meets freer trade, and that means a smaller government. That’s the prescription for economic growth, not Vance’s big government manipulation of economic actors, whether they be consumers or producers, with bombast like, “We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade, we’ll stamp every product made in the U.S.A.”
Do you actually think these protectionists will stop with “supply chains”? Another Vance-style “populist”, Sen. Josh Hawley (T, Missouri), now favors private sector labor cartels, commonly called “unions”, and opposes right-to-work laws. What is right-to-work? Right-to-work is the counter to the longstanding practice of using state powers to goad workers into labor unions under the legal colloquialism “collective bargaining”. The “collective” part of the phrase is the greasing of the skids, through force of law, to direct workers into the arms of union bosses, people who today have a propensity to be more socialist than a socialist. Yes, right into the arms of people like Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO.
We should examine Liz Shuler, the kind of person who Vance and Hawley would like to link arms (see Wikipedia for her brief bio). She is an example of the new, postmodern kind of boss, unlike the fabled bosses of decades past who toiled in blue collar jobs. Not her. Active in Oregon’s Democratic Party, and after her degree in journalism, and after union organizing activism in Oregon and California, she does what aspiring union bosses of today do: fight worker freedom in the workplace. She led the AFL-CIO effort to defeat Proposition 226 in California. It would have restricted the unions’ habit of easy access to a worker’s paycheck under state law to garner dues payments, and additionally it would have required a worker’s permission before his or her dues moneys can be used for political purposes. These are the type of people who Vance and Hawley want to join in political comradery.
In so many ways, the Trump/Vance/Hawley “populism” is a white flag to the Left. They pander by surrendering to the militant unionism that made a hash of industries who fell under its powerful political sway. Is it just pure greed for a company to escape to a right-to-work state or overseas to avoid future bankruptcy? A survival instinct most emphatically exists in the economic realm, as it does among unionists whose very existence is dependent on government-granted privileges, without which, they’d shrink to voluntary associations. Trump/Vance/Hawley are okay with government-sponsored union power over the lives of workers and their employers.
For the Trump/Vance/Hawley gang, it’s a cold and hard calculation for the union vote while laying waste to American competitiveness. Union-love hasn’t worked going back to the 1930s. Consumers behave like business. They both thrive under conditions of free choice. Businesses discovered the welcome mat in southern states and European and Asian competitors recovered from the rubble of WWII, and buyers prospered with more options than those offered by the protectionists and hardcore unionists. Workers might need to relearn the lesson that without buyers for their production, their jobs evaporate. That’s why Trump/Vance/Hawley want to goad consumers, like they do workers, into buying what they wouldn’t in a level playing field. But now with the rise of the Trumpican Party, all of us will be forced to live our lives under a flimsy “industrial policy” of tariffs, subsidies, and coerced unionization. It’s an invitation to go back to the 1970s.
The bait for the unionized worker is a combination of tariffs and the bennies of the dole. The dole is bribing people with other people’s money, ditto with tariffs. Trump/Vance/Hawley is incomprehensible on tariffs. American consumers pay the tariff like any other business tax. Prices jump either directly from the tariff or from an oligopoly of “Made in America” favorites. Ironically, Trump is skeptical of EV mandates – as am I – but he wants to empower unions with a powerful government, the same government that imposed the EV mandate to begin with. Since they’re too busy sending Reagan to the ash heap of history, don’t expect the Trumpicans to recognize this 1986 Reagan masterpiece: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
This Trumpican Party is busy sending up the white flag on the welfare state, but they won’t stop there. It’s quadrafecta of white flags that includes Ukraine, coerced unionization, and free trade. Would Reagan be a member of this party, a party of bankrupting welfare programs, America alone, neo-socialist assaults on free enterprise, labor monopolies, and a deaf ear to the cries of aborted babies? I kinda doubt it. After all, as he said of his departure from the Democratic Party in the 1960s, “I didn’t leave my party [the Democratic Party]; my party left me.” Well, has my party left me?
RogerG
Sources:
1. The GOP 2024 party platform can be read at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform. For abortion, turn to Chapter 9, section 4 of the 2024 platform.
2. Compare the brevity of the 2024 abortion plank with 2020 which can be found in “Republican Party Platform: ‘The Unborn Child Has a Fundamental Right to Life’” at https://www.lifenews.com/2020/09/03/republican-party-platform-the-unborn-child-has-a-fundamental-right-to-life/
3. “Inflation rates in Argentina”, WorldData.info, at https://www.worlddata.info/america/argentina/inflation-rates.php#:~:text=The%20hyperinflation%20of%20the%201980s%20peaked%20in%201989,economic%20turbulence%20began%20again%20in%20the%20new%20millennium.
4. Read the Social Security/Medicare planks in the 2024 GOP platform in Section 6, “Protect Seniors” at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform.
5. “U.S. National Debt Soars Adding a Staggering $1 Trillion Every 100 Days” at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-national-debt-soars-adding-a-staggering-1-trillion-every-100-days/ss-BB1pOq5u#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20National%20Debt%20is%20skyrocketing%2C%20ballooning%20from,track%20to%20increase%20by%20%242.8%20trillion%20this%20year.
6. Chapters three and five of the GOP platform at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform.
7. Chapter 10 of the GOP platform at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
8. Thanks to Philip Klein for his research into J.D. Vance in “J. D. Vance Pick Represents Another Nail in Coffin of Reagan Republicanism”, National Review, 7/15/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/j-d-vance-pick-represents-another-nail-in-coffin-of-reagan-republicanism/
9. “J.D. Vance Ditches Past Support For Social Security Cuts”, Travis Waldron, HuffPost, 7/13/2022, at https://www.yahoo.com/news/j-d-vance-ditches-past-161011851.html?guccounter=1
10. “Why the rise of JD Vance in Trump World divides US business”, Lauren Fedor, Financial Times, 7/12/2024, at https://www.ft.com/content/ff258541-dfe3-4dd9-99bf-2a1d26b6a21c
11. “Lina Khan’s Stalled Revolution”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 3/20/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/lina-khans-stalled-revolution/
12. “The Grand Strategy Behind J.D. Vance’s Latest Push To Kill Ukraine Aid”, Ian Ward, Politico, 4/18/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/18/jd-vance-ukraine-aid-00153201#:~:text=In%20place%20of%20the%20rules-based%20international%20order%2C%20Vance,more%20insulated%20from%20global%20economic%20and%20military%20entanglements.