TRUMP- WHY THEY LIKE HIM: JAY COST
http://m.weeklystandard.com/articles/why-they-him_1001596.html?page=1
“Of course, Trump is not what he claims to be. He is hardly a paragon of conservative virtue, having supported Democratic politicians and liberal causes until quite recently. And it is all well and good to be frustrated; it is quite another to do something about it. Trump would never get anything done, even if he could win a general election (which he can’t). His in-your-face style might work great on a reality TV show, but the Framers designed our system to thwart such bullies.”
Donald Trump is not going to be the next nominee of the Republican party. The flamboyant businessman has made billions in real estate, but politics is another matter. He manifestly lacks the temperament to be president, and his conversion to the Republican party is of recent vintage. As the field narrows, and voters look closely at the other candidates, Trump will fade.
All else being equal, it is surprising this message should resonate. For a party that does not control the White House, the GOP is in incredibly strong shape. Tallying up the state legislative, gubernatorial, and congressional seats, Republicans are as strong as they have been since the 1920s. History suggests that the GOP should win the White House, too: The Democrats are going for a historically rare third consecutive term; the incumbent president’s approval is weak; and their presumptive nominee has acute ethical problems.
Yet the Republican party’s approval rating is abysmal, hovering in the mid-30s. A party only hits such a low when its own supporters are disenchanted with it. The polling weakness squares with what one gleans listening to talk radio and reading right-wing websites. There is widespread distrust of the GOP among the most energetic and engaged conservatives.
And why should they trust this party? To win majorities in 2010 and 2014, congressional Republicans grossly overstated what they could accomplish so long as Barack Obama is president. Before the 2010 midterm, Mike Pence, at the time chairman of the House Republican Caucus, told Sean Hannity:
What I’ve said is there will be no compromise on ending this era of runaway spending, deficits, and debt. No compromise on repealing Obamacare lock, stock, and barrel. No compromise on defending the broad mainstream values of the American people in the way we spend the people’s money at home and abroad. On issues that go straight to principle and straight to the concern the American people have on spending and taxes and values, there’ll be no compromise.
But, of course, there has been “compromise” on Obamacare. There had to be! Ours is not a parliamentary system, but a separation-of-powers regime in which the president retains substantial authority to block legislative action. Suggesting otherwise to voters, as Pence (and other senior Republicans) did, courts disenchantment.
Ditto the Senate. When, during the 2012 campaign, it looked like Republicans would take the upper chamber, Mitch McConnell suggested that Obamacare could be repealed through the budget reconciliation process, which requires just 51 votes. “The chief justice said it’s a tax. Taxes are clearly what we call reconcilable. That’s the kind of measure that can be pursued with 51 votes in the Senate,” he said. “If I’m the leader of the majority next year, I commit to the American people that the repeal of Obamacare will be job one.” Yet last year McConnell argued that it would take a filibuster-proof Senate majority to undo Obamacare.
Since 2010, the actions of congressional Republicans have mostly fallen shy of campaign promises. From a short-term perspective, this may have been necessary. It is hard to mobilize your voters by saying, “Vote for me to stop the president from doing worse.” It is better to say, “Vote for me to roll back the president’s actions.” But over time this rhetorical overreach has facilitated a climate of distrust. Republican voters increasingly believe that their leaders, even if they had complete control of government, would not do half of what they promise on the campaign trail.
The Republican party took control of Congress in 1994, but perhaps it is better to say that the opposite is true. Congress by that point was wholly immersed in what political scientist Theodore Lowi called “interest-group liberalism”: the systematic expansion of government at the behest of the interest groups that dominate the political process. For good-government conservatives, this system is doubly offensive because it expands government in a partial and unfair way.
While the Republican insurgents of the 104th Congress did a lot of good, they failed to demolish this regime. In many respects, they strengthened it. As Matt Continetti argues in The K Street Gang, Republican leaders wanted to build an insuperable majority by courting Beltway lobbyists that could lavish them with campaign cash. The 2006 midterm may have dashed that hope, but the congressional GOP is still deeply committed to interest-group liberalism. Look at the proliferation of earmarks, the cost of which increased 300 percent between 1995 and 2006; it was congressional Democrats that first put limits on them. Look at last year’s farm bill, which was a bloated payout to agribusinesses. Look at the new highway bill, which authorizes substantially more spending than the Highway Trust Fund can finance. Look at the Senate GOP’s support of the Export-Import Bank, despite the fact it is just corporate welfare.
Some of these issues are fairly deep in the policy weeds, so the average voter might not know the specifics. But there is no doubt that grassroots conservatives get the gist. Republicans have been promising since 1994 to reform government, soup to nuts. Twenty-one years later, Washington remains stubbornly unreformed. It does not take a Brookings white paper to figure out what has happened: Republicans in Congress did not follow through, even when they had complete control of government. And with a Democratic president, congressional Republicans still do far less than they could.
Then there is the hot-button issue of immigration, on which Trump has played up the wide divergence between the party’s base and leadership. The leadership, spurred by a panoply of interest groups, wants comprehensive reform that typically includes amnesty for illegal immigrants and an increase in legal immigration. Grassroots conservatives, meanwhile, are deeply concerned about the effect of massive immigration on wages, not to mention its downstream effects on the culture. Unlike the arcana of the farm bill, these are matters average Republicans grasp on an intuitive level, and they do not trust the leadership to serve their interests.
In economic terms, this is called a principal-agent problem. GOP voters (the principals) have empowered elected officials (the agents) to reduce and reform government, but the latter have not done so. Is it any wonder that a guy like the Donald can thrive in this situation? He is the perfect vehicle to express the deep frustration conservatives feel. Bombastic, brash, and indiscreet, he comes across as a straight-shooter who tells it like it is. After a generation of being misled by their leaders, many conservatives find this a breath of fresh air.
Of course, Trump is not what he claims to be. He is hardly a paragon of conservative virtue, having supported Democratic politicians and liberal causes until quite recently. And it is all well and good to be frustrated; it is quite another to do something about it. Trump would never get anything done, even if he could win a general election (which he can’t). His in-your-face style might work great on a reality TV show, but the Framers designed our system to thwart such bullies.
This is why principal-agent problems can be so dangerous. They create leadership vacuums that any two-bit demagogue may fill, to the detriment of everybody involved. In the case of Trump, his rise to the top of the heap has been an unfortunate time suck. The party is currently too distracted by the Donald to think about the big issues or determine which candidates are of presidential mettle. Worse, Trump is prone to saying outrageous things that needlessly alienate independent voters from conservatism.
It is fair to blame Trump’s supporters for this, at least in part, for they really should know better. There are a host of serious candidates who actually could upend the status quo in Washington, but they are lost amid Trump’s clown show. Still, there is a bigger point we must not miss: Donald Trump is not the Republican party’s real problem; he is a symptom of the problem. There is a generation-long climate of distrust between conservative voters and Republican politicians. Trump is simply taking advantage of this weakness.
Ultimately, the primary blame for Trump rests with the party’s leadership. If average conservatives really believed that the party would ever follow through on its campaign rhetoric, Trump would be an asterisk in the polls.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
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