Stop Calling President Trump a Centrist
The president’s most consistently held beliefs about the role of government in American life involve punishing minority groups, not protecting the social safety net.
After President Trump struck a deal with Democratic leaders last week to raise the debt ceiling, avoid a government shutdown, and secure federal aid for victims of Hurricane Harvey, national media outlets marveled at the prospect of a new transactional Trump, no longer beholden to any party or ideology, only the semblance of getting stuff done.
Some of the reaction by the media echoed earlier Trump pivot stories, which seem to pop up every few weeks the president goes without a self-inflicted controversy. And there are journalists whose coverage of Trump since November seems to internalize criticisms of media elites from conservatives, who insist journalists do not understand Trump or his voters. If journalists underestimated Trump’s chances at winning the nomination and winning the election, surely they could underestimate his chances at winning reelection, so they look for ways to normalize him as much as possible.
But a lot of the marveling over Trump’s deal with the Democrats comes from flawed theories about why he won in the first place. One of those theories is that Trump won over GOP voters because he wasn’t a small-government conservative, and vowed to protect popular social welfare programs like Medicare.
While it’s true that Trump’s agenda pointed toward a more activist role for government than Republican platforms typically endorse, saving the social safety net wasn’t one of the main reasons Trump’s did.
Because Trump had never held elected office prior to his 2016 campaign for president, he could attach himself to various policy positions and remain relatively insulated from accusations of flip-flopping or lying to constituents. And, given that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had become a polarizing figure within her own party following a brutal primary battle against Bernie Sanders, it made sense for Trump to triangulate on certain issues, including social welfare programs, that might appeal to frustrated Sanders supporters. As Trump reportedly told House Speaker Paul Ryan back in May according to Politifact, “There’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep it and give you more.’”
It’s possible that Trump’s bucking of Republican orthodoxy on entitlement reform was a small comfort to those Obama-to-Trump voters, and the unusually high number of undecided voters that ultimately swung to Trump in the final days of the race. But saving the welfare state simply wasn’t the raison d’etre of the Trump campaign, and there’s no evidence it was the most salient issue to his voters. Nor does there appear to be evidence that Trump voters would abandon him if he suddenly began advocating cuts to social welfare programs as part of a balanced budget (more than half say they will never stop supporting him according to one poll). Even after he endorsed a Republican healthcare bill that would have made drastic cuts to Medicaid and some Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, Trump continues to enjoy high favorable ratings among Republican voters.
What really mattered to Trump voters, and where Trump’s true appetite for big, bloated government lies, is the punitive power of the state over the lives of minorities and anyone who defends their rights.
While President Trump has ceded his legislative agenda to the most conservative members of the GOP majority in Congress, he remains the same ‘law and order’ candidate from 2016. To date, his most significant policy accomplishments involve curtailing years-long bipartisan efforts toward police and criminal justice reform. Under the helm of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President Trump has reversed Obama-era steps toward ending federal for-profit prison use, curtailing the use of military-grade equipment by local law enforcement, and investigating police departments accused of civil rights violations. Back in July, he so much as endorsed police brutality in a speech to law enforcement officers in Long Island, New York, to the “approving laughter” of the audience.
Since he took office, Trump has also wielded his executive authority to ban Muslim immigrants from traveling to the U.S., end protections for young undocumented immigrants working in the U.S., and set up a voter fraud commission under the flagrant falsehood that millions of people voted illegally in last year’s election.
Most appalling of all, Trump brought white nationalist sympathizers to serve in his White House as his top political advisers. In a post-Charlottesville interview, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon came as close as ever to admitting that exploiting racial tensions between the two parties will ultimately help Trump “crush the Democrats.”
But Trump’s fervor for the punitive state is consistent across a much longer span of time than between his early candidacy and his current presidency. Long before 2016, Trump was the public face of the birther movement, and recently granted a presidential pardon to a former sheriff who had spent several years investigating former President Obama’s birth certificate. And long before that, Trump spent over two decades calling for the execution of a group of exonerated teenagers accused of rape in New York’s Central Park in 1989.
The only consistent position Trump has held on the role of government in civic life over the past 30 years is that its vast law enforcement powers should be used to target and punish minorities with impunity. And it’s a shame that much of the national media remains in denial about who, and what, he is. It says a lot about the state of political punditry when the president can go from a morally derelict leader in a time of crisis (Charlottesville) to a cunning moderate in a matter of weeks.
Late on Wednesday, Democratic leaders in Congress announced that they were closing in on a deal with President Trump to pass DACA legislation in exchange for border security funding — but not the wall. Trump eventually posted a tweet on Thursday morning declaring no deal had been made, but in the intervening hours, prominent Trump supporters flipped out over the possibility of him giving “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s most loyal supporters know that racism, nativism, and xenophobia are at the core of his movement, and that breaking a major promise on immigration could be the one thing that dismantles his base. Not cutting Medicare.
