Have we witnessed the death of Trumpism?
“War is like crack for presidents,” said the conservative firebrand and once ardent Trump supporter Ann Coulter on Townhall.com. “It confers instant gravitas, catapulting them to respectability, bypassing all station stops.” And so it has proved with Donald Trump and his “immoral” bombing of Syria. It’s a move which “violates every promise he ran on”, but which is catnip to the Republican establishment. In my head, I carry this nightmare vision of Trump and Jared Kushner, “watching TV together and high-fiving: ‘DID YOU SEE THE NEWS! THEY LOVE YOU!’” But we voted Trump because on the campaign trail he vowed not to meddle in Middle Eastern wars, as it makes things worse. He was right then; he’s wrong now. “We want the ‘president of America’ back – not ‘the president of the world’.”
What bitter buyer’s remorse Trump’s populist true believers must now feel, said Kevin D. Williamson in National Review. Mexico isn’t going to pay for the wall, which probably won’t be built. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is still the law of the land. The reset with Russia has turned into what Trump calls a “horrible relationship”; while China – which candidate Trump said had been “raping” the US for decades – is now our friend. Rather than booting out “coastal elitists” and draining the swamp, he has stuffed his White House with Goldman Sachs alumni and “corporate Democrats” such as Kushner. Our president is reverting to his New York City Democratic roots. Sorry to break this to you, Trump voters: “Ya got took.”
No, what he’s really reverting to, said Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, is traditional Republican priorities. Each time he comes into contact “with a concrete agenda, every heterodox promise he made has given way to conventional GOP positions”. He reversed his vow to get rid of the Export-import Bank as soon as Boeing’s CEO explained to him that it helps US exporters compete with foreign companies. (“Instinctively, you would say it’s a ridiculous thing,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal. “[But] it turns out… lots of small companies are really helped.”) He has become a “conventional party man whose ideas reflect the agenda of the lobbyists and wealthy individuals who have his ear”. The only distinctive bit of Trumpism he has kept is the “ethnonationalist” rhetoric about immigration and national identity. Trump is just a racist version of George W. Bush.
But he is well aware of the need to reassure his supporters that he’ll keep his promises, said Abby Phillip in The Washington Post. That’s why last week he took the rare step of leaving his new comfort zone – the Oval Office – to deliver a speech to the workers of Snap-on, a tool manufacturer based in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure more products are stamped with those wonderful words ‘Made in the USA’,” he told them. Shortly after, he signed an executive order that bars foreign contractors from bidding on federal contracts, requires any steel used in federal projects to be melted and poured in the US, and seeks to limit foreign workers coming to the US. What he didn’t say was that he has already reneged on his central protectionist policy: axing the North American Free Trade Agreement. His administration has sent Congress a letter proposing only modest changes to it.
The pity of it, said Jeet Heer in the New Republic, is that aside from its despicable racism, Trumpism had a lot going for it. US foreign policy does need a reset; free trade deals do need to be overhauled to “more justly weigh the impact on vulnerable Americans”; immigration, for the same reason, does need to be curbed. Trumpism also rejected the need for austerity: “I’m not going to cut social security like every other Republican,” Trump had pledged; “I’m not going to cut Medicare and Medicaid.” Alas, since he entirely lacks the focus and knowledge needed to enact such a daring agenda, Trumpism “was doomed to fail”. And its death “all but ensures that American politics will return to the very status quo that gave us Trump in the first place”.