During the Republican National Convention last summer, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Deputy Majority Whip Tom Cole spoke confidently about their ability to work with Donald Trump as President. Despite all Trump's rhetoric, they insisted that at the end of the day, they would drive the legislative agenda, and he would sign whatever they put in front of him.
And so he has. If you strip away all the turmoil and rhetoric, Donald Trump has been everything Republican leaders could have hoped for. He has delivered not only Neil Gorsuch, but a consistent slate of conservative judges. He is implementing a deregulation agenda for the ages on behalf of GOP business constituencies. And then there are the tax cuts. Anyone who scoffs at Trump's performance in his first year in office is scoring by a different set of metrics than Republican leaders in Congress.
Democrats, on the other hand, see the world differently, and are drooling at the prospect of a wave election in 2018, and sending Trump home in 2020. For many Democrats – and no small subset of moderate Republicans – the turmoil and rhetoric matter. However, counting on Donald Trump's negatives to drive independent voters and a share of Republicans to her corner did not turn out to be quite enough for Hillary Clinton, and it may not be enough in 2018 – to say nothing of 2020. When Nancy Pelosi railed against Republican tax cuts the other day, and derided the $1,000 tax cut bonuses that corporate America is throwing around to their workers, she betrayed the Achilles Heal of Democratic Party strategy looking forward.
Pelosi's comment was not unreasonable from a certain vantage point. If five million U.S. workers receive $1,000 bonuses – the announced number is in the range of two to three million so far – that represents $5 billion into the pockets of working men and women. In contrast, in the wake of the tax cuts, Bank of America economists project that $450 billion of repatriated corporate profits – roughly half of the trillion dollars, after tax, that companies are expected to bring home – will be used to buy back stock.
From the standpoint of the politics of envy – which has now morphed into the politics of rage – Pelosi has a reasonable case to make. While the President referred to the tax cut bonuses as a “a big, beautiful waterfall,” allocating a half a trillion dollars to investors vs. five billion to workers would seem to confirm that the benefits of the tax cuts are tilted somewhat to the wealthy, just as GOP donors intended. On the other hand, for families earning $35,000 or 50,000 a year, $1,000 is real money, to say nothing of the doubling of the standard deduction. More to the point, Democratic Party leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, who begrudge that reality only highlight how long it has been since they lived paycheck to paycheck.
Railing away about how the Republican tax cuts will go away in 2027, or the trillion dollars of new deficits, will be hollow argument for Democrats in 2018. A trillion dollars over ten years is a hundred billion a year, which remains barely significant in a four trillion dollar budget. To paraphrase Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen from many years ago, a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, no one really pays attention anymore. Sure, there will be a reckoning some day. If interest rates ever return to historical norms prior to the 2008 collapse, the annual interest cost of the federal debt will rise from $200 million a year towards one trillion. But no one (except for me, of course) seems worried that it will happen in their lifetime.
But there is more to it than that. Much has been made by Trump and his advocates of the fact that unemployment rates have hit historically low levels across the economy in recent months. And it's true. The recovery from the 2008 collapse has been a long slog, but unemployment rates across demographic groups – notably Women, Blacks and Hispanics – have finally declined to pre-collapse levels. Democrats can argue that Trump's policies had little to do with finally reaching that milestone; and by and large that is true, the downward trend was part of a long, cyclical recovery and ten years of massive monetary stimulus. But the fact remains that business and investor anticipation of tax cuts and regulatory relief that Donald Trump promised did have an impact – business confidence is up, along with the stock market – and now that they have been passed into law, the tax cuts are going to add significant new fiscal stimulus to an economy that was already picking up steam. By the time election day rolls around in 2018, and certainly by 2020, it is likely that the U.S. economy will be in high gear.
As much as the turmoil and rhetoric that flows from TrumpWorld on a daily basis has become all-consuming, it is steadily becoming normalized as background noise. If that continues to be the case, a booming economy may well loom as a major obstacle to Democrat chances to realize the wave of their dreams, and a strong counter-narrative that will make the election about more than Donald Trump is an dangerous sociopath who is undermining American democracy.
Of course, Donald Trump is a sociopath who is undermining American democracy. That is not a partisan assertion, rather, it is the stance that Ted Cruz articulately put forth during the Republican primaries, and it provided the backdrop against which Paul Ryan and Tom Cole felt the need to assure other Republicans that having Trump lead their party could be managed.
Republicans, of course, have come to terms with their sociopathic leader, in large measure because Donald Trump has delivered on the Republican agenda far more effectively than Democrats want to acknowledge. The other factor that Democrats are loath to acknowledge is that even as the turmoil and rhetoric have damaged the Republican brand, Democrats have suffered as well. George Bernard Shaw summed it up well: the problem with wrestling with a pig is that you get dirty, while the pig likes it.
After a year of unrelenting political warfare, neither party is faring particularly well with the electorate. Based on Gallup tracking data, the share of the electorate that identifies with the two major political parties has continued to decline. Since Election Day 2016, the share of the electorate identifying as Republican has declined by 2%, while the share identifying as Democrat has declined 4%. Meanwhile, the share identifying as independent has jumped 10%. As of last month, only 27% of Americans identify as Democrats and 25% as Republicans, while 46% now identify as independents.
When the upcoming elections roll around, as much as Democrats are enamored of their message of Trump narcissism and Republican greed, that may not be enough to win over independent voters and anti-Trump Republicans. Democrats need to understand that they exist in a bubble – as Nancy Pelosi's comments confirmed – and if they are to build a winning coalition, they need a message that goes beyond pointing out how bad the other side is. Failing that, they may wake up after election day to find that in the midst of an economy that is steaming along, independents had become weary of the yelling and screaming, and just decided to vote their pocketbooks.
Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."
Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out his political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.
And so he has. If you strip away all the turmoil and rhetoric, Donald Trump has been everything Republican leaders could have hoped for. He has delivered not only Neil Gorsuch, but a consistent slate of conservative judges. He is implementing a deregulation agenda for the ages on behalf of GOP business constituencies. And then there are the tax cuts. Anyone who scoffs at Trump's performance in his first year in office is scoring by a different set of metrics than Republican leaders in Congress.
Pelosi's comment was not unreasonable from a certain vantage point. If five million U.S. workers receive $1,000 bonuses – the announced number is in the range of two to three million so far – that represents $5 billion into the pockets of working men and women. In contrast, in the wake of the tax cuts, Bank of America economists project that $450 billion of repatriated corporate profits – roughly half of the trillion dollars, after tax, that companies are expected to bring home – will be used to buy back stock.
From the standpoint of the politics of envy – which has now morphed into the politics of rage – Pelosi has a reasonable case to make. While the President referred to the tax cut bonuses as a “a big, beautiful waterfall,” allocating a half a trillion dollars to investors vs. five billion to workers would seem to confirm that the benefits of the tax cuts are tilted somewhat to the wealthy, just as GOP donors intended. On the other hand, for families earning $35,000 or 50,000 a year, $1,000 is real money, to say nothing of the doubling of the standard deduction. More to the point, Democratic Party leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, who begrudge that reality only highlight how long it has been since they lived paycheck to paycheck.
Railing away about how the Republican tax cuts will go away in 2027, or the trillion dollars of new deficits, will be hollow argument for Democrats in 2018. A trillion dollars over ten years is a hundred billion a year, which remains barely significant in a four trillion dollar budget. To paraphrase Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen from many years ago, a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, no one really pays attention anymore. Sure, there will be a reckoning some day. If interest rates ever return to historical norms prior to the 2008 collapse, the annual interest cost of the federal debt will rise from $200 million a year towards one trillion. But no one (except for me, of course) seems worried that it will happen in their lifetime.
As much as the turmoil and rhetoric that flows from TrumpWorld on a daily basis has become all-consuming, it is steadily becoming normalized as background noise. If that continues to be the case, a booming economy may well loom as a major obstacle to Democrat chances to realize the wave of their dreams, and a strong counter-narrative that will make the election about more than Donald Trump is an dangerous sociopath who is undermining American democracy.
Of course, Donald Trump is a sociopath who is undermining American democracy. That is not a partisan assertion, rather, it is the stance that Ted Cruz articulately put forth during the Republican primaries, and it provided the backdrop against which Paul Ryan and Tom Cole felt the need to assure other Republicans that having Trump lead their party could be managed.
Republicans, of course, have come to terms with their sociopathic leader, in large measure because Donald Trump has delivered on the Republican agenda far more effectively than Democrats want to acknowledge. The other factor that Democrats are loath to acknowledge is that even as the turmoil and rhetoric have damaged the Republican brand, Democrats have suffered as well. George Bernard Shaw summed it up well: the problem with wrestling with a pig is that you get dirty, while the pig likes it.
After a year of unrelenting political warfare, neither party is faring particularly well with the electorate. Based on Gallup tracking data, the share of the electorate that identifies with the two major political parties has continued to decline. Since Election Day 2016, the share of the electorate identifying as Republican has declined by 2%, while the share identifying as Democrat has declined 4%. Meanwhile, the share identifying as independent has jumped 10%. As of last month, only 27% of Americans identify as Democrats and 25% as Republicans, while 46% now identify as independents.
When the upcoming elections roll around, as much as Democrats are enamored of their message of Trump narcissism and Republican greed, that may not be enough to win over independent voters and anti-Trump Republicans. Democrats need to understand that they exist in a bubble – as Nancy Pelosi's comments confirmed – and if they are to build a winning coalition, they need a message that goes beyond pointing out how bad the other side is. Failing that, they may wake up after election day to find that in the midst of an economy that is steaming along, independents had become weary of the yelling and screaming, and just decided to vote their pocketbooks.
Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."
Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out his political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.
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