Whatever else came to be associated with the GOP, these beliefs were at its core. It is the party’s heritage. That was the idea, anyway. Like any group, the Republican Party has evolved. Sometimes it has been more “populist,” reacting to the whims of the people and supporting a broader sphere of government action in society, and other times more “libertarian,” veering closer to a strict interpretation of its founding principles of limited government.
When Donald Trump came onto the GOP scene, party leaders were concerned about whether he supported, or even understood, the conservative movement. With good reason. Over the last three decades, Trump has changed his political party registration five times. He has been a member of the Independence Party, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, a registered independent, and then decided he was a Republican again. I doubt during any of these switches that he did much “studying up” on the philosophical identity of each group.
GOP members had a right to be circumspect. In 2004, Trump confessed to CNN, “In many cases, I probably identify more as a Democrat.” In 2007, he praised Hillary Clinton and said, “Hillary’s always surrounded herself with very good people,” adding, “I think Hillary would do a good job [as president].” Incredibly, as a Republican presidential candidate in 2015, Trump again repeated that he identified “as a Democrat” on key issues like the economy. In the years up to that point, he donated to the biggest Democrats at all levels of government—Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Anthony Weiner, John Kerry, and Harry Reid. He gave money to Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe, and Eliot Spitzer. It was only after he started to get serious about running for president as a “Republican” that he gave money primarily to Republican candidates.
Trump is not the only president in the modern era to have switched sides. Ronald Reagan famously changed from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, but the change was driven by principle, and the change stuck. He didn’t sway back and forth, again and again. It would be tough for anyone to claim Donald Trump flipped parties on “principle” like Reagan.
Some have sought to dig into Trump’s ideological evolution, figuring out what changed or who inspired him to become a Republican. I’ll spare them the needless waste of effort. Donald Trump became a conservative when it became politically convenient for him. I have no doubt he would have become the raucous rising star of the Democratic Party, too, if that looked like a shorter path to the Oval Office. Either way, he did with his belief system what he did with any Trump product. He outsourced it for low-cost manufacturing to someone else, then slapped his name on it. A handful of hired minions gave him the bare-bones requirements of a “conservative” platform. And he covered it with gaudy gold plating to make it his own.
This realization—of a wolf in elephant’s clothing—dawned on Republican commentators one by one during the 2016 primaries. The most prominent defenders of the conservative faith warned the rest of the GOP that Trump was an apostate. David McIntosh, the head of the conservative Club for Growth, said the candidate was not a “free-market conservative.” Rush Limbaugh blasted Trump’s support for bloated entitlement programs, engaging in a rhetorical back-and-forth with himself on the air, “Can somebody point to me the conservative on the ballot? What do you mean, Rush? Are you admitting Trump is not a conservative? Damn right I am!” The late columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, “Trump has no affinity whatsoever for the central thrust of modern conservatism—a return to less and smaller government.”
I had my own misgivings like any of them. I watched as Trump spent more time mocking other candidates than he did on substance. The debates became little more than schoolyard brawls when he jumped in. When he did talk about what he stood for, it was often anathema to GOP principles, from his views on socialized medicine to a large federal role in education. I was especially concerned and surprised by Trump’s views on the economy, which were far more “interventionist” than the policies the Republican Party had been promoting in recent years.
Donald Trump was not coming off as a conservative, because he wasn’t. That’s why Republicans tried to erect ideological “roadblocks” to his nomination by pointing out the candidate’s sharp deviations from the GOP platform. Those roadblocks did little to stop a man who wasn’t driving on the same road. He won primary after primary. Speaker Ryan went forward with his backup option, releasing a platform designed to lock the nominee into accepting Republican orthodoxy. Trump largely ignored that, too, and plowed on toward Election Day victory. The Republicans’ “inoculation plan” failed. Indeed, it never stood a chance.
The Wolf in Elephant’s Clothing
With the full powers of the Executive Office of the President, Donald Trump has turned the GOP into a mess of contradictions. He confounds party leaders daily with errant statements and conflicting positions. But his actions on the topics nearest and dearest to the GOP—the size of government, national defense, and economic policy—are what is most noteworthy. On balance, the president’s handling of those issues has been a net negative for the party and the country.
Big, Beautiful Government
For all President Trump’s talk these days about Democrats trying to make America socialist, the reality is that he is the king of big government. The federal bureaucracy is just as large, centralized, careless with spending, and intrusive under Donald Trump as it was when Barack Obama was in office. In many cases, it’s bigger. This is an uncomfortable truth for Trump supporters. Rather than hew to traditional conservative beliefs about a limited federal role, Trump has allowed government to balloon. He’s especially vexed when we inform him the government will never be large enough or powerful enough to execute his spontaneous propositions.
The US federal budget deficit was actually declining under the Obama administration, from $1.4 trillion in 2009 when Obama took office to $587 billion in 2016, just before he left. Credit for the remarkable downward trend goes to congressional Republicans, who forced a standoff with the White House in 2011. They demanded a budget deal that would bring the deficit under control. The result was the Budget Control Act, a law that slashed federal spending, put strict annual limits on future expenditures, and placed a cap on the government’s “credit card.” It was considered the conservative “Tea Party” movement’s crowning achievement.
Donald Trump was not interested in penny-pinching. He may try to project the image of a man working to save taxpayer dollars, and it’s true that he can be talked out of stupid ideas if they cost too much. But that’s not because he’s trying to save money so it can go back to the American people. He still wants to spend the money, just on things in which he’s personally interested, such as bombs or border security. Trump recoils at people who are “cheap.” Today he is sparing no expense on the management of the executive branch, spending so freely it makes the money-burning days of the Trump Organization look like the five-dollar tables at a Vegas casino. As a result, the budget deficit has increased every single year since Donald Trump took office, returning to dangerous levels. The president is on track to spend a trillion dollars above what the government takes in annually.