Donald Trump has always been an enigma for many conservatives as we still wrestling with his legacy. His accomplishments from his first administration were significant, and, in most eras, he would be viewed as a significant President. His economic plan lifted Americans incomes including those at the bottom, his Middle East policy managed to ally Sunni Arabs with Israel, and his recognition of China as a global adversary would have meant a shift in foreign policy if he won re-election. Then there was the Trump who refused to concede the election until January 6th, when the Capitol riot occurred. Trump’s propensity for controversial statements and tweets antagonized many Americans and he certainly didn’t always behave “presidentially.” As we approach the election day, he is locked in a tense fight with Kamala Harris, a political hack of no accomplishments.
In my book, The Rise of National Populism and Democratic Socialism, What Our Response Should Be, I compared Trump to Herbert Hoover, another businessman who became President. In 1929, Herbert Hoover became President. Before becoming President, Herbert Hoover’s reputation was that of a self-made millionaire and brilliant manager and served as Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge Administrations and to many voters he was the Great Engineer who would bring his business expertise to government. While much of Hoover’s reputation was that of a conservative, the reality was that Hoover was a progressive Republican when he ran in 1928. My father once reminded me that much of the New Deal began under Herbert Hoover and his run for President in 1928 emphasized his business expertise and his managerial skills, which included his efforts in heading the American Relief Administration, which relieved the hunger of more than 200 million people In Europe from 1918 through 1922.
Hoover was a disciple of the Efficiency Movement, which sought to eliminate waste throughout the economy and society. This movement played an essential role in the Progressive era in the United States. The theory began that society and government would be better if experts fixed national problems once they were identified. Hoover felt comfortable with the Progressive movement. I bring Hoover up since Trump’s original campaign was like the Hoover appeal– a businessman who will run government by bringing in the best experts. Trump doesn’t talk about “reducing the size and role of government” but talks of managing the present government better.
In her biography, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive, author Joan Hoff Wilson described Hoover’s economic thinking:
“The version of Hoover presented in the media’s narrative of Hoover as champion of laissez faire bears little resemblance to the details of Hoover’s life, the ideas he held, and the policies he adopted as president. Where the classical economists like Adam Smith had argued for uncontrolled competition between independent economic units guided only by the invisible hand of supply and demand, he talked about voluntary national economic planning arising from cooperation between business interests and the government . . .. Instead of negative government action in times of depression, he advocated the expansion of public works, avoidance of wage cuts, increased rather than decreased production—measures that would expand rather than contract purchasing power.”
St. Lawrence University economist Steve Horwitz added, “Hoover was also a long-time critic of international free trade, and favored increased inheritance taxes, public dams, and, significantly, government regulation of the stock market. This was not the program of a devotee of laissez faire, and he was determined to use the Commerce Department to implement it.” Trump, like Hoover, opposes international free trade and in the past talked of surtaxes on the rich. The similarity between the progressive Hoover and the progressive Trump were eerie to many of us in 2015 and through the 2016 primary.
I theorized that Trump’s model of Republicanism would be like Hoover’s and Richard Nixon’s. Nixon was a statist as president, including creating new bureaucracies like the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency as well as wage and price controls. Nixon’s goal was to make government work for the Middle Class and his supporters – his silent majority. However, Trump broke more toward Reagan on domestic policy, except for his trade policies, which closely resembled the GOP of the 1920’s. Trump’s goal was to make government work for the middle class, those who were left behind over the past two decades. Trump’s policies benefitted minorities and those at the bottom as those at the bottom and minorities saw their income go up until the pandemic. The pandemic sent much of the middle class, lower class, and minorities income lower and for wiping out the gains many made during Trump’s first three years as president.
Richard Nixon’s own economic policies, along with the paralysis of the Watergate scandal, led to the recession of 1973-75 and to the stagflation of the 1970’s, which included slow or no growth along with high inflation at the end of the decade under Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t until the Reagan years that the back of inflation was broken. After, we saw more than two decades of economic growth resulting in a rise of income for the middle class that continued during the Clinton administration, but it was the supply side economics of Reagan that shook America out of lethargy. Reagan faced a different challenge, raging inflation and high marginal tax rates that was sucking many in the middle class into higher tax brackets. Today, the marginal tax rates are considerably lower to go with recent Trump reductions of corporate taxes. Even the highest Biden corporate tax rates will still be lower than what they were before Trump lowered the rate. (Biden’s corporate tax rates would place the United States near the highest in the developed world. And Harris wealth tax on multimillionaires will add an extra taxation that will tax unrealized gains and hurt future investment. Harris plan will take Biden plan and make it worse.)
While many Trump supporters tried to compare their guy to Reagan [i]throughout the 2016 election, there are significant differences. Unlike Trump and Hoover, Reagan was an accomplished politician who had been on the political scene for decades and had already run for president once. Before that, he was a well- known actor and even as an actor, he had a keen interest in politics. Before Reagan became president, he had been fighting for conservative ideals for three decades and understood the political process as well as the ideas behind them. Kiron Skinner, Annelise Skinner and the late Martin Anderson’s own research confirmed his substantive knowledge of the issues by reviewing and publishing many of his diaries and other private writings.
In 1967, Reagan was invited to be part of a debate with Robert F Kennedy on American foreign policy and destroyed him and eleven years later, many felt he won a debate with Bill Buckley on whether the U.S. should withdraw from the Panama Canal Zone. These two debates showed he had the ability to go toe to toe with some of the best debaters of his era.
There is one similarity between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump is that both were consistently underrated. Trump in 2016 as a debater succeeded with his attitude, not on what he knew. The four words, “Make America Great Again,” exhibits Trump’s mindset. He wanted to reverse the decline he saw just Reagan wanted to reverse the decline he saw in 1980. In the 1980’s the Soviet Empire appeared on the rise, and we were dealing with double digit inflations with many wondering if the American dream was slipping away. Another similarity with Reagan and Trump is that both reached blue-collar workers. In 1980, these voters were called Reagan Democrats. Now they are called Trump Republicans.
How often have we heard what a great dealmaker Trump is? How many people will remember that Reagan was a master of negotiations? When Trump during the election made the case that Reagan worked with Tip O’ Neill, he did not remember Reagan did not deal with Tip O’ Neill, he dealt against O’Neill by working with moderate Democrats to get much of his budget and tax policies passed. Reagan had a Democratic majority in the House plus heavy opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate. Many moderate Republicans were against his economic plans, and he did not deal with O’Neill. Instead, he dealt with many of the moderate and conservative Democrats and went around O’Neill as well as much of the Senate Republican leadership who were not sold on his “supply side” economics.
Reagan’s deal making with the Russians was exemplary, but Reagan’s success is that he dealt from strength. The nuclear freeze was in full force during his first administration as the left were trying to undermine his military buildup by keeping America from putting Pershing missiles into Europe to counter the Soviet SS-20. Reagan’s first goal was to rebuild the military before dealing with the Russians and to wait for the right moment to call for arms reductions on both sides. That moment did not come until Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Soviet empire in 1985. During his second term., Reagan successfully negotiated the removal of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in both Europe and Russia in 1987 because the year before, he walked out of the Reykjavik conference on nuclear arms reduction. Reagan’s policy set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Reagan walked into the White House with a worldview and a plan to go with that worldview. Unlike Reagan, Trump did not have a history of consistent ideology when he entered the White House, and he supported Economic nationalism and consistent supporters of protectionism. This was shown in his cabinet appointments, as he selected conservatives such as Rick Perry and Scott Pruitt but others just as Steve Mnuchin were outsiders. Trump appointments come from all factions of the Republican Party and in the case of Mnuchin, a political novice with no public record as a political activist other than his donations, mostly to Democrats. Trump’s ideology was originally based on Trump’s personal brand, divorced from a consistent worldview. While Reagan began his career as a Democrat, his move to the right aligned with his movement toward traditional Republican values. Trump did show that he belonged to the right as his court appointments, tax and regulation policies showed. His foreign policy was the more modest approach that George W. Bush ran on in 2000 before 9/11. His view of “America First” was not isolationism as much as ensuring that American interests came first and that included an energy plan that allowed America through fracking to challenge OPEC as the leading producers of oil natural gas and oil and having our allies pay their fair share of their own defense. (When Trump took office, many NATO countries were not fulfilling their bare minimum 2 percent of defense spending including Germany, the leading economic power in Europe.) NATO began increasing their defense budget during the Trump administration and continued during the Biden years as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Throughout the 2016 election, Trump’s two signature issues were immigration and trade. He exploited the yawning gap between the views of the elites in both parties and the public on these issues. He feasted on the public discontent over a government that can’t be bothered to enforce its own laws on immigration no matter how many times it says it will. With the Biden Administration’s first steps in reversing border security of Trump years, this only reinforced the political class willingness to obliterate our borders and open the tap of illegal immigrants coming into the country. While Kamala Harris may pretend that she is tough on the border, the reality she was the border czar, and the border went undefended from unfettered illegal immigrations.
Nixon ran in 1968 on behalf of the silent majority who were overtaxed, whose sons were fighting in Vietnam and who witnessed crime going up. Nixon ran a law-and-order campaign and when he governed, he expanded the welfare state in his first term while giving us the Environmental Protection Agency. His goal was to rein in the bureaucratic state and create a conservative big government that worked for the middle class. He did not reduce government spending or the power of the administrative state.
Like Nixon, Trump ran on a law-and-order platform, including standing up for a new generation of forgotten Americans, many of whom fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. And as 2020 showed, the left’s attempt to defund the police and cut budgets across the country only increased crime, much of it in urban centers.
Trump in his own way succeeded in doing what others claim conservatives needed to do. He significantly increased GOP vote totals among minorities. Only George W, Bush and Ronald Reagan outperformed Trump’s vote totals among Hispanics in 2020 and Trump’s Black votes percentages were higher than both men and only Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford exceeded Trump percentages with blacks since 1972. While exit polls had Trump at 12 percent among Blacks, one post-election poll had Trump support among Blacks at 18%. At least 1,500,000 more Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump in 2020 than 2016.
Trump’s failure was his inability to get to over 50% plus and after two election cycles, his coalition was stuck at 47%. One factor that hurt Trump was the collapsed of Third Parties with Libertarians going from 3.5% to 1 %. He increased his numbers among minorities and that in previous elections would have been enough to secure victory, but he lost ground among college educated whites, in particular college educated men. The question that remains is how much of that was due to their disdain for his personality and how much was due to his policies. We will find out in 2024 but on issues like immigrations and fighting for the middle class, Harris campaign has borrowed openly from their opponent. Trump view on immigration is now mainstream and his opponent has conceded it by essentially pretending the immigration policy over the previous four years didn’t exist.
Trump’s influence on the party is significant for he built a new coalition of attracting many poorer and blue-collar whites to the Republican flag and his game plan for developing support among minorities is showing fruit. Trump did what we at Americas PAC have suggested, build a coalition around rural and blue-collar whites while adding significant numbers of minorities. His biggest failure was suburban America in 2020. In 2016, Trump had a four percent lead in the suburbs but in 2020, he lost the suburban vote by two percent, a six-point swing. The coalition is within reach of a Republican victory, but it entails finding a politician who can woo the suburban vote while keeping Trump Republicans loyal to the G.O.P. and make further inroads among minorities. These issues remain in 2024 and the constant lawfare campaign waged by the Biden/Harris administration and many local Democrats prosecutors in many blue locations just as Atlanta and New York. Is Trump the right messenger, that is what 2024 will show.
The battle to see Trump punished will continue on a state level and New York City and Biden’s Justice Department will certainly carry on their own jihad against Trump and his family after the 2024 election and if Harris wins, this continues and will most likely expand against other Republicans and conservative. There is a precedence for this as Franklin Roosevelt pursued members of the Hoover administration—and. in particular Andrew Mellon– legally and modern-day Democratic Party is even more nasty, and Joe Biden is not losing sleep over his DOJ or some state attorney general pursuing the Trump family until they find something to jail him or members of his family or bankrupt them nor will Harris. For many Democrats, Trump was an affront to them, and it is their attention to wipe out any aspect of Trumpism.
Trumpism is part of the conservative movement, and the GOP and conservatives need to understand that for their own future success and for the sake of the country, a synergy between Trump populism and Reagan conservatism is not only within reach but also a necessity.
There is no place for a “never-Trumper” movement within the conservative coalition directed at his supporters but an acceptance that they are integral part of the coalition without which the GOP and conservative’s movement can survive. The never Trumper movement should have ended in 2016 after the primary for obvious reasons, –the Democrats were far worse and still are. Biden and a future Harris Administration has already proven along with much of the leadership class that they intend to institute a socialist regime that threatens the very fabric of our society. Trump may have his weaknesses, but he is preferable to Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party. As I detailed in my book, The Rise of National Populism and Democratic Socialism, the Democratic Party is now the socialist party of America. But the fundamental question remains:, what about the GOP and the conservative movement?. Where do we go from here?
In 2014, before the “Trump coalition” was formed, Americas PAC which I lead campaigned in Illinois. Republicans made a strong showing when they took the governor’s seat, and two congressional seats and Senator Dick Durbin was held to 53% of the vote against weak competition. Throughout the campaign, we ran ads that argued that rising government spending and debt reduced voters’ economic opportunities, and these ads succeeded in persuading voters to vote for Republicans. Voters, our customers, knew that the Obama economic plan produced eight years of stagnation and that they no longer benefitted from Democratic policies. In 2016, the rise of Donald Trump showed that many Republicans didn’t even trust their own party to follow through on producing opportunities to succeed. So, they nominated an outsider.
For years, Democrats have been good at framing their ideas as a way to solve their customer’s problems but the customers, namely voters, are no longer automatically buying the Democratic plan and for the most part, their campaign in 2020 was about “Hate Donald Trump” and not talk much about their socialist game plan. But now they are governing, they showed their true agenda. While Harris is hiding her own radical nature, the reality is that there will be no change in Biden’s policy.
As I mentioned in my previous book, the GOP has yet to decide on what kind of party they will be and what they will emphasize. Trump was solid on taxes and regulations; his foreign policy was a return to the more modest approach that George W. Bush campaigned on in 2000. But Trump increased government debt and government spending. Trump’s spending plans looked modest compared to what Democrats have pushed in the Biden years and what Harris is now proposing. What he promised to do was to “Make America Great Again.” As Americas Majority Foundation associate JD Johannes noted, “Too often politicians and their consultants view voters as blocs or market segments. For Democrats, this makes sense since they view voters as part of demographic groups, but Republicans and conservatives succeed when they view voters not as blocs with specific issues but address major macro concerns.”
The pandemic produced a fissure within the country and many in the middle class saw their incomes decline. Michael Lind observed, “Some on the populist right and anti-capitalist left interpret the prolonged state lockdowns as conspiracy by big business against small business. It is easy to see how people could reach this conclusion. Many small firms had been destroyed during the pandemic by government-mandated bans and social distancing rules while bigger firms had an easier time. According to Inequality.org, between Mid-March 2020 and February 2021, the wealth of U.S. billionaires grew by 1.3 trillion. But the wealth gains for the rich have gains for the rich have come mostly from their disproportionate representation in stock market, not from the ability to steal customers from small companies that have gone under.” Regardless of the cause, the cost of the pandemic had unequal consequences for a good portion of the Republican coalition.
Voters noticed that while they got money from the stimulus to tie them over from a government induced plan to stop the economy cold, the ability to start up their lives proved difficult and for many as they entered 2021, the Federal government and many state governments did not want to give up their control while many governors, mostly in red states, decided to open the economy. (The latter opening was opposed by much of the political class located in Washington DC and the scientific class.) The pandemic proved the futility of the leadership class and if it was not for those Republican governors just as Brian Kemp, Ron DeSantis, and Kim Reynolds, the United States would have suffered a severe recession going into 2021. Instead, their efforts led to a reduction of a peak unemployment at 14.4 percent to 6.7 percent and Biden/Harris administration inherited an economy that grew 20 percent over the last six months of 2020 and 1.5 million jobs returning to workforce from the lockdown instituted in the spring of 2020. If states like New York, Michigan, Illinois and California have followed Florida, Texas, Georgia, South Dakota, the unemployment would have been even lower, and the expansive government spending in 2021 could have been avoided. We would be better off economically without the inflation that accompanied Biden/Harris game plan.
We live in a political world in which the Republican party is still defining itself whereas the Democrats are the Socialist Party. In the case of the Democrats, we have to understand modern day Socialism is not what we may believe in textbook socialism in which government controls the means of production but instead it is closer to a fascist model that the mechanism of “capitalist society” is left in place, but that government controls what private sector does. Example will be government forcing companies to make electric vehicles and consumers buy them as gas combustible cars are phased out as part of a net zero strategy. Net zero is the ultimate corporativist model being followed by the political left and the Democrat Party as private utilities companies will be paid through subsidies and guaranteed return on investment to switch to wind and solar. Without these subsidies, wind and solar is not practicable and compared to nuclear, hydroelectric and oil, coal and natural gas, inefficient. The result is that the middle class and poor will be denied choices in vehicles, less vehicles to buy and they will be more expensive. Energy to heat their home will be even higher without dependability.
Modern day socialism practiced by the left today resembles more fascism than what we classified as socialism, but the result is the same, the government controls what is produce and allows selected favored industries to fasciculate the delivery of these goods. Capitalism exists in name only. One excellent example when Biden/Harris forced technology companies just as Facebook and Twitter to censor political opinions that ran counter to Administration views in the name of stopping misinformation. They become the vehicle of censorship by denying important scientific information that was far more accurate than the science promoted by Biden/Harris administration.
As for the Republicans, they are becoming the party of the working man and woman, and they have the opportunity to put a coalition that includes significant minorities, blue collar, rural American and small business owners in suburban and urban centers to win elections in the future. The key element is to understand what needs to be done. Henry Olsen made a few observations, “The Republican Party’s nomination of Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as its presidential ticket has caused many to declare that the party of Ronald Reagan is gone. Permit me to state an unpopular opinion: It isn’t…That view is unpopular because many of those who say they espouse Reagan’s values don’t really understand what those values were. And that’s the point: Reagan’s enduring influence isn’t what many of his self-appointed devotees thought it was, and that influence is far more powerful in today’s GOP than those adherents realize… Reagan himself did not share any of these supposedly Reaganite ideals. Reagan criticized government social planning and wanted a dramatically smaller government, but he was not free-market fundamentalist. He expressly supported social programs that prevented poverty and was unafraid to support new programs when he was convinced they were necessary. He was willing to raise taxes when needed, and he even imposed tariffs and other restrictions on international trade when he thought it was in America’s interests…In short, Reagan favored a robust private sector economy tempered by necessary regulations and social programs to ensure the bounty of growth was shared by all.” My view is that Olsen makes a good case of the populist nature of Reagan conservatism, and it begins that his reducing marginal tax rates was due to the fact that many in the middle class were hit with a marginal tax rate that reserved for the rich a generation earlier. The marginal tax rates were at 70 percent and by the end of the decade it was down to 28 percent and never exceeding 39 percent. Many in the Middle class the biggest federal tax burden is social security and Medicare not federal income tax. They are hit with many states sales tax and states like New York and California income tax so conservative economic needs to move in a different way beginning how to reform social security tax to preserve the system while reducing the overall burden on the Middle class which I do in my book “America at the Abyss Will America survive?” Reagan to move the free market forward in a welfare state, he occasionally took a step back to move agenda two steps forward. He didn’t oppose the welfare state but wanted to reform it to ensure that those impacted would move up the economic ladder and not be trapped in a permanent cycle of government dependency.
Reagan did raise some taxes in his term but the overall tax burden on the Middle Class was reduced just as Trump tax plan did a similar thing. Reagan did impose tariffs but only for short period of time and receive reciprocal treatment for America, it was not a permanent situation as his goal was to increase overall trade internationally. He did reduce regulations that interfered with growth just as Trump did. Trump negotiations on the new NAFTA followed Reagan strategy with changes that benefitted American worker while allowing trade to expand.
On Foreign policy, Olsen wrote, “He favored robust national defense and a resolute defense of freedom, but he rarely committed American military might. He criticized the Vietnam War in the 1960s from the right because there was no strategy for victory. One cannot say with certainty what Reagan would have done about Iraq or Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. One can say that he would not have favored the endless deployment and squandering of military might in engagements that were intentionally meant to produce stalemate.”
For advocate of an America’s First foreign policy might begin reviewing the former Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger six rules for engagement. The principles were:
1. Forces should not be committed unless the action is vital to national interest.
2. Forces should be committed wholeheartedly with the intention of winning – or they should not be committed at all (No half-hearted commitment).
3. Forces should be committed with clearly defined political and military objectives.
4. The use of force should be the last resort (after all diplomatic initiatives have been exhausted).
5. The relationship between objectives and the force committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.
6. Before committing forces abroad (in foreign countries) there should be some reasonable assurance of public support.
Casper Weinberger set these principles in the aftermath of the Vietnam war in which America was divided and there was serious question on how the war was conducted, so he set in principle ideas that political leader needs to consider. In 1984, two events occurred, one in which 240 Marines were killed as result of a suicide bomber in Beirut and the second, the invasion of Grenada in which United States removed a Marxist government that overthrew another leftist government and supported by Cuban forces.
The Beirut attack was part of an ill-defined peace keeping mission in Lebanon and eventually Reagan, left Lebanon as oppose to getting sucked into an endless morose and in Grenada, United States went into with overpowering force, and easily removed the Cuban forces in an island in our backyard, the Caribbean.
The first Gulf War was influenced by this principle as United States and their alliance went into Kuwait with overwhelming force, defeated the Iraqi army easily before ending the war. And Bush administration went to the American people and Congress to gain approval to use force if diplomacy failed in persuading Hussein to leave Kuwait. After the failure of diplomacy, the first Gulf War commenced.
The second Gulf War and the war on terror began with these principles but after the initial victory, the United States expanded upon the objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan to reinstitute democratic government in both countries. From there, United States engaged in long term engagement that ended in failure in Afghanistan and is not truly succeeding in Iraq.
The question is how to use these principles in the future to protect American national interest and not lapse into an isolationist position. During the Reagan years, the number one objective was to defend the West from the Soviet Empire and everything else was tied to that. Arming the Afghan rebels against the Russian was part of that strategy and within Congress there was bipartisan support and did not involve the use of U.S. troops. Grenada could be justified since the threat was close to home and overwhelming force and clear military objectives were present. The first Gulf War was another war that had defined objectives, expel Hussein from Kuwait, it was in a vital area that impacted both the United States, and her allies and overwhelming force was used. Many criticized President George H W Bush for not marching to Baghdad and the Bush administration felt that their mandate was limited and that they were not interested in occupying Iraq. We can argue the case but then Weinberger thesis was that there was limit to what the American public would support and what they would not. For many in the Bush years, they feared being involved in another insurgency.
Reagan, like Trump did in his first administration, did not waste American resources and kept his eye on the ball, the dissolution of the Soviet Empire just as the future administration must concentrate on the Chinese.
The point is that the synergy of Reagan policies and Trump populism is the way forward. The most successful aspect of Trump first term was his tax plan, his energy plan and his push against regulations. On statewide basis, governors like Kim Reynolds, Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp and other GOP are showing the way on moving forward as they have promoted, school choice for parents, insist parents have a role in education, tax reduction and reform and keeping spending under control and that is why since the pandemic, GOP governors have outperformed their Democratic counterpart when it came to lower unemployment and job growth and kept spending in control. The results have been migration from blue high tax states like California and New York to Florida, Texas and other red states.
Trump voters are integral part of the coalition, but we need to expand to beyond the MAGA group, to minorities who see their community becoming unsafe, their economic opportunity reduced, and many are upset over illegal immigration the cost and increase crime in their community. Reagan showed the way to move forward. Trump is a right of center politician, but he is the ideologue and unlike Reagan, doesn’t have a world view but has a mixture of several world views that sometimes are contradictory but his success in his first term will be a repeat of following Reagan strategy of embracing the Middle Class. Reagan was not loved by the Republican establishment and let not forget that his main opponent that year was George H W Bush who viewed Reagan supply side as voodoo economics. Bush was wrong and the Reagan plan led to nearly quarter of century of economic growth that positively impacted all aspect of the population.
The Donelson Files 