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This piece takes Trumpism to be a total rejection of “traditional” GOP orthodoxy and does not reckon at all with how the Party laid the groundwork for Trump./1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/worries-about-trump-and-a-bloodbath-at-the-polls-this-fall-stokes-republican-feuding-this-week/2020/07/22/820e038e-cc2a-11ea-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html
The idea that Trump “came out of nowhere” and “violated the party’s supposed orthodoxies” ignores the long-term trends that led to the embrace of Trump by GOP voters and most of the establishment./2
Other than trade, he ran, as I showed in this piece from Fev 2016, on a standard conservative platform: anti-abortion, pro-gun, tax cuts for the rich, anti-minimum wage increases, eliminate the debt, repeal Obamacare, intense xenophobia, being “tough.” /3 https://baselinescenario.com/2016/02/03/donald-trump-is-running-as-a-conservative-republican/
And this line about the “traditional fiscal concerns of the Republican Party” made me livid. In blowing up the deficit Trump is acting like a “traditional” GOP president (see Reagan, GW Bush). Remember when VP Dick Cheney said “deficits don’t matter”? /4
Everyone knows that “traditional” deficit hawkery only rears to head when a Democrat is president. Why perpetuate such obvious bs, especially when the Party nearly unanimously supported the 2017 tax scam that amounted to a massive giveaway to the rich and corporations? /5
How long does it take before a belief widely ignored by the Party whe it is in power stops being labeled an “orthodoxy” or a “tradition”? Is four decades enough time? /6
At some point, we stopped talking about the GOP’s “traditional” support for “free soil.” So it can be done./7
After two generations isn't it time that we described GOP "traditional orthodoxy" accurately (including, first and foremost, tax cuts for the rich) and stopped pretending that it has anything to do with concern about the deficit? /8
