by Joe Walsh
Florida senator Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s Republican competitors in 2016, picked up on that point and exposed Trump’s ignorance. “Here’s what you didn’t hear in that answer, and this is important guys, this is an important thing. What is your plan?” he asked Trump directly. “I understand the lines around the state, whatever that means. This is not a game where you draw maps. . . . What is your plan, Mr. Trump? What is your plan on healthcare? You don’t have a plan.” Trump’s response consisted mostly of insults: “I watched [Rubio] melt down two weeks ago with Chris Christie” and “I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago. . . . I watched him meltdown on the stage like that, I’ve never seen it in anybody. . . . I thought he came out of the swimming pool.” The only meat in his reply to Rubio was “You get rid of the lines, it brings in competition. So, instead of having one insurance company taking care of New York, or Texas, you’ll have many. They’ll compete, and it’ll be a beautiful thing.”
“Alright. So, that’s the only part of the plan? Just the lines?” Rubio asked.
“The nice part of the plan—you’ll have many different plans. You’ll have competition, you’ll have so many different plans,” Trump answered.
The exchange was enough for the moderator to press Trump for more: “If you could talk a little bit more about your plan. . . . Can you be a little specific . . .”
“There is going to be competition among all of the states, and the insurance companies. They’re going to have many, many different plans,” Trump replied.
“Is there anything else you would like to add to that . . .”
“No, there’s nothing to add. What is to add?”17
Well, there is a ton to add, because conservative policy scholars have labored over creating an alternative to Obamacare for years. Trump was incapable of saying even “Look, there’s more to this, but I think the lines are the biggest part of it and they’re what I think is important to focus on tonight.” The best he could do was ask, “What is to add?”—because obviously he was genuinely unaware that there was anything more to consider.
Is it any surprise that barely a month after being inaugurated, when the GOP led off its legislative agenda with health care reform, Trump said, “Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”18 Is it any surprise that Republicans wound up proposing options that most of the public despised? And is it any surprise that more than a year after they failed, Trump still vowed, “The Republican Party will become ‘The Party of Healthcare!’ ”19—and Rubio said, after meeting with the president about the subject, “He didn’t offer a plan”?20 It’s poetic, I tell ya.
So here’s the bottom line about Donald Trump and his politics: he has no core philosophy; the north star he follows is whatever delivers him power or allows him to keep it; his platform is built around indulging his supporters’ cultural grievances instead of solving their problems; any overlap he has with conservative beliefs is incidental; and those last two things make him an unreliable champion of conservativism and the people he supposedly represents. This will be especially important for the years 2021 through 2024—because if he doesn’t have to worry about satisfying his voter base anymore, he’s liable to act unleashed. How can we trust him to govern like a conservative—which includes honoring the rule of law—if he’ll never have to face the electorate again? The answer: we can’t.
One of the core components of being conservative is being consistent. Donald Trump is as erratic and undependable a leader as this nation has ever had.
Both conservatives and the United States in general deserve better. We need to start putting our faith in ideas instead of people again. Blind partisanship means we end up voting for any man with an R next to his name, no matter how degraded or moronic he is. And this partisanship is one consequence of the Trump cult. The Republican Party is the United States’ conservative party, yet it has sold its soul to a man who is demonstrably not conservative. The Republican Party has historically comprised many factions—people such as Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, Rand Paul, and Trump-like “populists” such as Rick Santorum all under the same roof—which ultimately benefits the exchange of ideas. It’s an iron-sharpens-iron sort of thing. But not only has the GOP determined that Trump is the best of what this competition has produced; it has concluded that his is the only acceptable opinion. Dissent from within the party by people like me is quashed by party leaders, as if I’m no different from a Democrat. (Spoiler alert: I’m very different.) The healthy thing for people on my side of the aisle to do is to advocate strongly for conservative causes. The unhealthy thing to do is to vouch single-mindedly for a man who has selectively adopted a handful of them at the expense of trampling on the rule of law we claim to hold dear. That seems awfully shortsighted—a short-term gambit by a group of people who usually judge the world by long-term stakes.
As this book has argued, those long-term stakes are just, oh, the well-being of maintaining our democracy and resisting the ever-increasing threat of something resembling dictatorship. If you believe that appointing Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, putting through a tax cut, providing some relief from regulation of the private sector, and just generally keeping the libs at bay is worth empowering China and Russia at our expense, running an almost completely cowardly foreign policy, shafting our farmers, wasting the best opportunity to move on from Obamacare, and exploding the debt, you’re a glass-half-full type of Trump supporter. If you believe that all those wins outweigh the losses—and also the most damaging parts of this presidency, which were detailed in the previous chapters of this book—then I’d argue that we’re looking at a deal with the Devil. “What he brings is the manner, the lying, the name-calling, all of this, which I think will do more lasting damage to the country—you can’t unring these bells—than Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did,” the archconservative columnist George Will said.21 As Trump has shown, presidents can change the tax policy and regulations and foreign policy stance of previous administrations. But enabling rule by cult, the justification of government with disinformation, and the serial abuse of executive power—the hallmarks of authoritarianism that the United States has gone to war against throughout its history—can be really tough to undo. You can’t whip people into a frenzy and then bring in someone who will calm everything down in a snap.
Being conservative is all about being judicious. We conservatives need to reintroduce that temperament into US politics. It’ll make all of us more stable—and saner.
We also need some consistency in a conservative agenda. As I wrote at the beginning of this book, I absolutely believe that Donald Trump touched a nerve with some of his policy proposals, not just his attitude. (Even if the attitude was most of his shtick.) The federal government ought to do a better job—any job at all, really, since it hasn’t tried much—of helping set up our working class for success. That means, for once, thinking about how the policies of today will affect the generations of tomorrow. To quote Will again: “We used to borrow money for the future—we fought wars for the future, built roads, harbors, airports for the future—now we’re borrowing from the future to finance our own consumption of government goods and services, and everyone’s agreed on this. It seems to me the political class is more united by self-class interest than it is divided by ideology in this regard.”22
As Trump discussed during the 2016 campaign, the nation could use some better roads and harbors and airports, since so many of them are in a state of disrepair and we’ve neglected them for too long. But as Trump didn’t discuss, we also need to shore up the accounts for federal retirement benefits (which I’ll discuss later). The actuaries have said for years that Social Security and Medicare are headed for insolvency. Reaching that point would be a disaster. And not to fix them would be to ignore, selfishly, the well-being of our youngest generations and future generations as we move forward in the twenty-first century.
If we want to have a policy de
bate about how technology will affect the public’s future, we need to make sure we’re doing it within the constraints of the Constitution. I swear, of all the disruption that tech has caused and will continue to cause Americans, Twitter and Facebook enforcing their community standards is waaaay down the list of priorities; in fact, I’m not even sure it’s on the list. Sure, Twitter and Facebook have a left-of-center bias. But they’re private companies. They can have whatever rules and resulting biases that they want. Everybody has a right to call them out for it and boycott their services—but there is no role for government here. Government should stay out. The true threats technology presents are in things such as cyberwarfare, AI, and automation. Research by the Brookings Institution23 found that more than 70 percent of the tasks in industrial production, food service, and transportation are susceptible to being automated—that’s blue-collar work such as molding and casting, operating chemical plants and the machines inside the plants, truck driving, and construction. It’s not just China that may put these people out of business; it’s tech. So how do we want to react to it to make sure that our economy can accommodate people who will need to work in new industries? These are the kinds of topics that need to be at the core of conservative discussions.
And when we look abroad, we need to remember that the world is better off when the United States is helping lead it. We can’t cede moral authority in the twenty-first century to the likes of China, a Communist state of systematic censorship and oppression, and Russia, so long as the thuggish Putin or a strongman like him remains in charge. There’s a lot of gray area between saying “The United States is not the world’s policeman” and saying that the United States ought to be everything to all people. Going entirely the first way is how the United States hastily abandoned its Kurdish partners in northern Syria to slaughter by Turkey and risked setting ISIS fighters back on the loose. I appreciate President Trump’s desire to keep the men and women of our military at home. I think that’s a thoughtful instinct and forces us to reckon with the toll of armed conflict. We should incorporate it into our foreign policy—while remembering that the cost of not taking every last measure to ensure that ISIS remains locked up before getting out of the area is reintroducing a threat to innocent Americans on our own soil. I’ll say it again: part of being conservative is trusting in experience. By Trump’s own admission, he’d rather trust his assumptions and not be questioned.
The United States needs a strong, coherent center-right party to help guide it through this rapidly changing world. We don’t have that right now. We have a weak center-right party because of its members who are too afraid to speak truth to authority and too willing to exchange foundational principles for short-term power. All we have to do to break away from this lapse in judgment is reprioritize the integrity of our minds above the gut of one man.
Chapter 9
Fixing the Debt
As you may have figured out by now, I think it’s far more serious that Donald Trump has damaged the institutions and instruments of our democracy—the Constitution and the law, the free press and fact-based debate, the presidency itself and the national character—than that he has botched some government policies that the country prioritizes in more “normal” political times. But that doesn’t make such outcomes irrelevant. As an economic conservative, I’m steamed that Washington has allowed the national debt to grow out of control and that the Trump administration is turning our economy into an example of “bad ideas from the nineteenth century” that you’d find in a college textbook. As a border hawk, I feel completely let down about the president’s unfulfilled pledge to get a handle on illegal immigration and build a wall. This goes without mentioning a couple of issues that could present crises for the nation: our lack of planning for how to deal with climate change and the near-term explosion in the number of retirees, which contributes to the debt threat. These unresolved problems are what make the Trump era a double whammy. Not only has the political world had to prioritize protecting our democracy, but doing so has come at the expense of working on the challenges we were already letting get out of hand.
I want to discuss a few of these of particular interest to conservatives—the federal government’s deficit spending and debt, the United States’ new and costly approach to international trade, and the wall—from a particular perspective. These matters are complicated enough already without taking into consideration how qualified our public officials are to act effectively upon them. But Trump has raised the degree of difficulty by one big-ass order of magnitude. I think you can connect his character defects, which are examined in the bulk of this book, directly to his abject failure to restore fiscal sanity in DC, maximize the benefit of exchanging goods and services worldwide, and rein in illegal immigration as a competent (and preferably compassionate) adult would do.
Let’s begin with the debt—and revisit this beauty from an interview Trump did with the Washington Post during the 2016 campaign:
Trump: We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.
Bob Woodward: How long would that take?
Trump: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers. . . .
Woodward: What’s fairly quickly?
Trump: Well, I would say over a period of eight years. And I’ll tell you why.
Woodward: Would you ever be open to tax increases as part of that, to solve the problem?
Trump: I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.
Woodward: That would be $2 trillion a year.
Trump: No, but I’m renegotiating all of our deals, Bob. The big trade deals that we’re doing so badly on. With China, $505 billion this year in trade. We’re losing with everybody. And a lot of those deals—a lot of people say, how could the politicians be so stupid? It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s that they’re controlled by lobbyists and special interests who want those deals to be made.1
Okay. There are really two parts to his pledge.
The first part is that he would eliminate all of the federal debt in eight years. Though that’s simply unrealistic for any president to accomplish, it could be chalked up to typical overpromising by a presidential candidate. He walked the statement back some in a subsequent interview, saying that the government could pay off some undefined percentage of the debt over a decade—not all of it—“depend[ing] on how aggressive you want to be.”2 But how firmly he pledged to do something about the United States’ red ink isn’t the issue here.
The issue is the second part: that the country could pay off untold trillions of dollars of debt by making NAFTA more effective and doing the same with the United States’ other trade pacts. Notice how he said that it would be a direct and preferable alternative to raising taxes. “I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad. . . . The big trade deals that we’re doing so badly on. With China, $505 billion this year in trade. We’re losing with everybody.”3 As the saying goes, that’s not how any of this works. Yes, it didn’t seem 100 percent certain that Trump was saying that the money we’re “losing” in trade with China and other countries could somehow be used to pay down the debt. But read what he said across the table from South Korean president Moon Jae-in in 2017, a handful of months after he was inaugurated: “The United States has trade deficits with many, many countries, and we cannot allow that to continue. And we’ll start with South Korea right now. But we cannot allow that to continue. This is really a statement that I make about all trade. For many, many years, the United States has suffered through a massive trade deficit. That’s why we have $20 trillion in debt.”4
That, ladies and gentlemen, is Donald Trump saying the United States is in debt because it imports more than it exports. That is so moronic—so mind-numbingly dumb—that it’s insulting: insulting to conservatives who care about fiscal responsibility; insulting to Wharton graduates who actually know what the hell they’re talking about; insulting to the public, which counts on the president to make
choices on its behalf that are informed by sound data and reasoning. One of the most basic prerequisites of doing that is understanding rudimentary economics. Trump doesn’t.
Thankfully, the folks at the bipartisan nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget are more patient than I am. They explain:
Years of budget deficits have accumulated into the national debt, currently $19.8 trillion.* Yet the budget deficit is determined by the tax and spending decisions made by Congress and signed into law by the President, regardless of how much American consumers and businesses buy from other countries.
In a thought experiment, let’s pretend that every good and service purchased in the United States this year was produced here. There would be no trade deficit. But most federal spending would be unchanged—the size of government agencies and the military, the amount of Social Security and Medicare benefits, the amount of veterans’ and retirement benefits, etc. Federal revenues, which are driven mainly by the structure of income and payroll taxes and the total amount of income in the economy, would also be similar. If spending and revenue don’t significantly change, neither will budget deficits.
To be sure, the trade and budget deficits are somewhat related to each other. But the cause-and-effect is largely the opposite of what President Trump suggests. It isn’t that higher trade deficits lead to higher budget deficits, but rather [that] higher budget deficits tend to indirectly lead to higher trade deficits. Currently, about $6 trillion, or a little less than one-third of the gross debt, is currently held by foreign countries and investors. Higher budget deficits can result in more foreign-held debt which in turn can impact the trade deficit (another one-quarter of the gross debt is money the government owes itself and does not have even an indirect relationship with trade deficits.) (My emphasis.)5
As George Conway noted, one of the knowledge areas in which Trump graded himself as the smartest of anyone in the world is “trade.”