President’s GOP not all that different
Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, but it’s still discernibly the Republican Party.
The Republican National Convention was obviously very Trumpy. At least one member of the family had a slot every night, and it featured theatrical touches worthy of reality TV.
There also are notable differences of substance. Trump’s party has reversed itself on trade and jettisoned concern over deficit spending. The party is much less hawkish than George W. Bush’s GOP and much more skeptical of immigration than Ronald Reagan’s. It doesn’t have the focus of the 2004 Republican Convention on terrorism or the 2012 Republican Convention on out-of-control entitlement spending.
And yet there is a clear throughline between today’s Republican Party and the GOP of the past several decades. Someone transported from the floor of a Republican convention in the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s to the Mellon Auditorium would unquestionably have known where he or she was. Take Don Trump Jr.’s speech, which by lineage and inclination should be most representative of the Trump GOP. Sure enough, on trade and immigration, Trump Jr. hit distinctively Trumpian notes. But much of what he said echoed high-profile speakers at past Republican conventions. Trump Jr. argued that “Biden’s radical leftwing policies would stop our economic recovery cold,” in part by raising taxes.
This contrast with Democrats is a GOP commonplace. The keynoter at the 1984 convention during the high tide of Reaganism, Katherine Davalos Ortega, then treasurer of the United States, hit Democratic nominee Walter Mondale for his record “based on the idea of high taxes, big spending and more government regulations.”
Trump Jr. called former Vice President Biden “weak on China.”
Republicans have been hitting Democrats as weak for decades. In his acceptance speech as vice president in 1984, George H.W. Bush referred to the “Carter-Mondale era of vacillation, of weakness, of lecturing to our friends and letting them down.”
Trump Jr. declared that “in the past, both parties believed in the goodness of America. We agreed on where we wanted to go. We just disagreed about how to get there. This time, the other party is attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded.”
In her famous 1984 foreign policy speech, Jeane Kirkpatrick said that
Democrats once “were not afraid to be resolute, nor ashamed to speak of America as a great nation.”
Trump Jr. underlined the importance of safety and security and hailed the police as heroes. Back in 1984, Bush said, “President Reagan and I think it’s time that we worried less about the criminals and more about the victims of crime.”
Republicans have long promoted national pride and national strength, or as Trump Jr. put it, “this land of promise and opportunity — of heroes … and greatness.” In 2012, Chris Christie ended his keynote speech by declaring, “together, we stand up for American greatness.”
This perspective sheds some light on the future of a post-Trump GOP. In the main, it’s not likely to be radically different from the current Trump GOP. As Michael Barone argued recently in The Wall Street Journal, America’s political parties are great institutions that change gradually, while preserving an identifiable DNA.
If this week’s convention has again demonstrated Trump’s personal grip on the party, it also showed that the Republican Party as it has existed for decades isn’t going away.