Bloated Trump budget deal confirms death of tea party

Ah, memories. Remember how presidential candidate Donald Trump grandly promised to eliminate the federal debt in eight years? That’s a memory he apparently hopes we forget.

You could hear that in the absence of “debt” or “deficit” in the high praise he enthusiastically tweeted (“I am totally with you!”) for the two-year budget deal that White House and congressional budget negotiators reached a few weeks ago.

The national debt has grown on Trump’s watch to a record, more than $22 trillion in February for the first time.

The deal worked out by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will raise spending by $320 billion and blows right through the spending caps put in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act. That law, once seen as the crowning Republican achievement of Democratic President Barack Obama’s years, set strict caps and enforced them with automatic spending cuts.

This major push for fiscal prudence was imposed on the Obama administration by the rise of the tax-fighting tea party movement, which popped up early in Obama’s first term and helped Republicans win back the House in 2010.

Where are they now? The grassroots movement that was united more by social media networks than formal organizational structure seems hard to find these days, except in fundraising emails and the resumes of conservative House Freedom Caucus members.

Just as the late Ross Perot’s 1992 independent run for president can be heard echoing in tea party rhetoric, the movement’s spirit and supporters appear to have been absorbed into Trump’s movement.

But not entirely. Trump, as he has shown us before, isn’t much of a deficit hawk. Quite the contrary, his promises cover all that he figures his base is looking for — a Mexican wall, a “better and cheaper” replacement for Obamacare, etc. — and virtually no details about how to pay for it all.

Of course, somewhere along the line, the debt must be paid, or at least that’s what the conventional Washington wisdom has told us. But Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged a new reality, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s memoir, by declaring, “You know, Paul, (President Ronald) Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Reagan had won reelection despite a rising deficit on his watch.

If there is any consistency we see in the long-running debt and deficit debate, it has been how much more important it has been to Republicans than to Democrats, especially when Democrats are running the White House.

Bottom line: As a political matter, the national debt means less as an actual hazard than as a symbol for what it represents to our evaluation of political candidates: How much do we trust this person to have our interests in mind?

Tea party folks I interviewed in their movement’s heyday sounded more motivated by social and cultural values than by numbers.

Trump picked up on that discontent and rallied the discontented to build a base. That’s a big reason today’s progressive Democrats talk about the national debt less than the more pragmatic Obama did. They understand how much you spend in the political world can be less important than what you spend it on. And they learned a lot of that from Republicans.