One of the paradoxes of Donald Trump’s campaign is that his best issue by far is the economy, yet nobody knows what he would do about it. Trump has flooded the zone with populist promises, each more absurd than the last. He would impose a 10 percent tariff. No, 20 percent. He would eliminate taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security and limit interest rates on credit cards to 10 percent (another implausible but round number, given that the average credit card charges a rate more than twice as high). He would restore the state and local tax deduction that his own tax cuts repealed. After once dismissing cryptocurrency as a scam, he has proceeded to embrace it, perhaps after belatedly realizing scams are kind of his thing.
Trump’s Republican allies tend to wave off this string of nonsensical offerings as irrelevant to his agenda. He won’t do all these crazy things because he can’t: Either Congress won’t pass them, or they would have effects so devastating he’d be forced to course-correct immediately, or — like his suggestion he might “pay off the $35 trillion [federal debt] in crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35 trillion crypto.’ We have no debt” — they are metaphysically impossible.
Every presidential campaign begins with ambitious plans that shrink upon contact with governing realities, but the extent of Trump’s incoherence is without precedent. Nobody, including within the campaign itself, believes Trump even wants to implement anything resembling his stated agenda. As Bloomberg News reported, “Even his own advisers are unsure about which ones he intends to enact if elected.” J.D. Vance has added to the confusion by alternating between offering that Trump’s intention is to roll back Obamacare’s protections for preexisting conditions and then insisting delusionally that Trump during his first term worked with Democrats (?) to save Obamacare(??).
And so the range of governing outcomes in the event Trump wins is unusually broad. It’s possible that, as in his first term, he muddles through, advancing the familiar Republican mix of regressive tax cuts, deregulation, and little else. It’s also possible that Trump will find his way toward some new populist synthesis that he has manifested in rhetoric and style.
But there is a third possibility, one that received far less attention than either of these: What if Trump goes all in on something like the traditional conservative anti-government agenda? What if it is finally Trump who fulfills what Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Paul Ryan dreamed?
There is no reason to believe Trump currently harbors any intention to play this historical role. But it is certainly possible that this is where he could arrive four months from now.
The Republican Party’s most distinctive feature, the one that sets it apart from conservative parties in other industrialized democracies, is its refusal to accept the legitimacy of the welfare state. The dominant tradition of the American right is a belief that the distribution of income produced by markets is morally sacrosanct, an ideology Richard Hofstadter characterized as “Social Darwinism.” American conservatives greeted every new social benefit, from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare, as a socialist or communist plot that would inevitably cascade into economic collapse and political tyranny. While conservatives have staged retreats or pauses in their war against the state, they have never consciously accepted the extension of government that began under Franklin Roosevelt as beneficial or unavoidably permanent. They most vociferously reject the tax and transfer mechanism, by which the rich pay higher tax rates to fund benefits for the non-rich.
Viewed from the left, conservatives seem to have controlled the terms of public debate since Reagan’s time. But from the right, the Reagan and post-Reagan eras have failed to roll back the New Deal’s most objectionable elements. Their........