Is Trump a Conservative?

Plenty of Never Trump Republicans are quick to assure us that Trump is no conservative.  So it is fair to ask, is Donald Trump a conservative?  I suppose that depends on how you define conservative, and I, as a liberal, am not in the best position to do so.  Certainly he is not a conservative if you define conservative to mean cautious, prudent, looking before you leap, or taking an attitude of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  If it is broke, proceed with extreme caution.”  Nor is he conservative if you define that term as traditionalist, promoting moral restraint, favoring the rule of law, or relying on institutions rather than individuals for security.  And certainly he is no conservative if by that you mean conscious of the dangers of appeals to people’s worst instincts.

If you define conservatism as upholding the status quo of power, the answer is rather more complex.  Famously, he has boasted that he wants to “drain the swamp” in Washington, but what does that mean?  To a liberal, it means getting rid of the big money influence, and addressing the issue of regulatory capture, i.e., regulation operating to the benefit of the industries they are supposed to be regulating.  But that does not appear to be how Republicans understand the phrase.  To Trump supporters, it means getting Washington insiders all upset and disrupting the city’s ability to function at all.  And to the Republican donor class, draining the swamp means ending economic regulation altogether.  After all, they reason, if regulators just end up being captured by the industries they regulate then the only sure way to end the problem of regulatory capture is to end  economic regulation altogether.

And that is where things become awkward.  Because if you define conservatism as the priorities of the Republican donor class – wanting to massively cut taxes with a focus on the top and on corporate taxes, and to gut regulations – then Trump is very conservative indeed.  Most famously, he has required all regulatory agencies to eliminate two major regulations for every one enacted, and requiring the two repealed regulations to have a greater cost than the one enacted.  The result has been to bring new regulations to a virtual halt, with only fifteen (15) major regulations issued, all in areas exempt from the order, as opposed to 93 in a comparable time by Obama and 114 by the Junior Bush.  Many Obama era regulations passed in the last six months of his administration have been repealed as well.*  The Trump Administration has been skeptical of Obama-era workplace protections, rolling back restrictions on exposure to beryllium and silica and requirement for employers to keep records of workplace injuries.  It has thrown open public lands to coal mining.  

 It is true that he differs from the Republican donor class in on immigration, and plenty of the rank-and-file see this as a major break with traditional conservatism and a major victory over the donor class, which wants to bring in cheap labor.  But the Republican Party has a longstanding nativist tradition.  The anti-immigration faction of the party has been dominant ever since it beat back Bush, Junior’s proposed immigration reform.  The donor class might prefer more immigration, but ultimately the issue is not so important to them that they are prepared to split the party over it.  So long as fighting immigration does not mean imposing burdensome regulations on employers, they are willing to accept an anti-immigration party in exchange for tax cuts and regulatory rollback. 

It is also true that he differs from the Republican donor class on free trade.  This is a more complex issue.  On the one hand, conservatives (as generally understood), the Republican Party, and industrial capitalists (closely aligned since the 1870’s) have a traditional of protectionism to promote U.S. industry dating back to before the existence of the Republican Party and ending only after WWII, when protectionism was seen as contributing to the war by deepening the Depression.  But times have changed since then.  Since then industrial capitalists have become much more internationalist, building plants the world over and creating complex, highly integrated supply chains spanning national borders.  The Republican donor class may be willing to yield ground on the free flow of people across national borders.  They are unlikely to be so accommodating on the free flow of goods or capital.  But then again, thus far Trump has not undertaken any serious protectionist actions, at least in part because cabinet members from the Republican donor class have managed to talk him down by convincing him of the damage that disrupting supply chains would cause.

It is also true that Trump has not yet delivered any kind of tax cut, and that he does not favor mass cuts in entitlement spending, other than Obamacare.  But the Republican establishment is capitulating with unseemly haste on the matter of spending, rapidly discovering that their real opposition is not so much to government spending as to a Democrat doing it, and that so long as they get their tax cuts, deficits and spending aren’t really important.  Besides, tax cuts will either unleash such growth as to make cuts in spending unnecessary or else precipitate a future fiscal crisis and force future spending cuts (hopefully with a Democrat in office), so who cares. 

But what Trump has been able to deliver on appears to be what the Republican donor class really cares most about – massive regulatory rollback.  Even Steve Bannon, the least establishment of Trump’s appointees, has boasted about the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”  In short, if you define conservatism as economic royalism, then Trump is as conservative as you can get.**

The real difference is that Trump is the first Republican to make a populist case for economic royalism.  During the 2012 election, with Mitt Romney as the candidate, Republicans argued that business owners – “job creators” – were the only truly productive members of society, and that anyone willing to let someone else sign their paycheck were simply losers and failures who never worked a day in their lives and contributed nothing to the economy.  Unsurprisingly, that was not a winning argument.   Trump’s argument, famously, has been to blame the loss of good-paying blue collar jobs on foreigners – both immigrants stealing jobs from the native-born, and from plants that flee overseas to take advantage of cheap foreign labor.  The danger in this argument, from an economic royalist perspective, is that it might draw attention to who is hiring all those illegal immigrants and sending all those plants overseas.  But here Trump has the answer.  He doesn’t focus so much on immigrants lowering wages as on immigrants committing crimes.  And as for those plants fleeing overseas, it isn’t the employers’ fault.  It is the evil government, strangling our noble and honorable job creators with unconscionable taxes and regulations.  Repeal the taxes and regulations, and job creators will bring back all those good-paying jobs of old, just as they have always wanted if only the evil regulators had not interfered.  And to all appearances Trump has been successful at selling economic royalism as a populist philosophy.

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*Complex rules forbid simple legislative repeal of regulations more than six months old.
**And it should be noted that the economic royalist assumption that rolling back regulations "drains the swamp" by removing opportunities for regulatory capture ignores the potential for corruption and conflict of interest in the process of deregulation -- call it deregulatory capture.