For good and ill, the post-debate mutiny within the Democratic Party and the assassination attempt over the weekend on former President Trump have largely taken the spotlight off of the ongoing Republican National Convention. Indeed, I have followed it only through press accounts.
The POLITICO gang reports, “A new kind of Republican Party is forming at the RNC.”
A new kind of Republican Party is revealing itself at its national convention.
All the markers of a MAGA jamboree are on display, from hulking Donald Trump iconography inside the convention hall to rhinestone Trump cowboy hats and red Trump-Vance placards.
But look closer and the party is changing — increasingly embracing economic populism at home and isolationism abroad, shifting its decadeslong position on abortion and not only leery of, but hostile to, certain business interests.
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It’s the result of a confluence of economic, demographic and cultural changes — including a newly ascendant labor movement, which the GOP finds itself increasingly attracted to, at least nominally. Together, those forces have only accelerated the GOP’s flirtation with a renovation of the party.
“I think what we’re witnessing now is a full on frontal assault on conservatism,” said Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence from 2019 to 2021, who is so estranged from this new version of the party that he was advised to skip the convention. “And you can look at the platform walking away from issues like life and traditional marriage, embracing tariffs across the board, but I feel like yesterday and last night went a step further when you have speakers that are basically saying NATO was at fault for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and referring to job creators as ‘corporate pigs’ and denouncing national right to work.”
He said, “That’s an enormous departure from where our party has been and I don’t think it’s a prescription for success.”
Perhaps most shocking to some more traditionalist Republicans was the fiery speech from International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien — the first Teamster to speak at an RNC in its 121-year history. In his remarks, he trespassed on traditional economic conservatism, decrying the “corporate elite,” outlining the harm of Right to Work laws, which make it harder to organize and have been passed mostly in GOP-run states, and called the Chamber of Commerce “unions for big business.”
David Urban, the former 2016 Trump campaign adviser, told POLITICO he looked at his CNN co-host David Axelrod, the former Barack Obama adviser, and asked him while off air: “Am I at the right convention?”
O’Brien’s remarks left some watching — in the hall and from afar — nearly physically uncomfortable, even as they slowly began to embrace a new brand of Republican base voter.
“I was starting to squirm a little bit on some of that stuff, but I also know how you blend that, and that’s what makes up my support,” said Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, who is running for governor and is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. “And that doesn’t mean you take the most outrageous stuff that he might have said, but you don’t dismiss some of the rest of it, and you find a new coalition.”
Or, as Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio put it: “I think President Trump has made our party what it always should have been, which is a populist party rooted in conservative principles.”
For years, the GOP has been undergoing a sea change as a working class party — all revolving around the organizing principle of America First. At times during his presidency, Trump reverted to more traditionalist GOP ideology on issues including tax cuts, which he cut in 2017. But it was his selection of Vance that could ultimately cement the party’s trajectory toward a different point on the horizon.
“Vance was the most distinctive choice he could make, in part to send a signal: I think coverage has rightly captured what we are certainly hearing which is that the business community and Wall Street and so forth, are, are deeply dismayed and concerned — as they should be,” said Oren Cass, a former economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and a close associate of Vance’s who spoke with him last week.
In the coming years, Cass, the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, a group aimed at developing a new center-right consensus on policy, predicted “a multi-ethnic, working-class conservatism as the foundation of an actual Republican Party that could achieve a durable governing majority.”
My co-blogger Steven Taylor frequently points to the weakness of our parties. This is yet another example of that. The party has abandoned almost every principle that defined it from Ronald Reagan (if not Richard Nixon) through Mitt Romney. The presidential nominee, for all intent and purposes, is the party. His delegates write the party platform (but nobody has any power to force any given member of the party, including the President, to adhere to it in governing). He appoints the party chairman and other key officials. Trump is the party and the party is Trump.
Unlike the POLITICO gang, I don’t see this so much as an ideological shift as much as one of instinct. Trump knows his appeal is to the white working class and he’s going to tell them what he thinks they want to hear.
And, not even just in the sense that he’s a politician and that’s what politicians do. As noted in this morning’s episode of The Daily podcast (“Trump 2.0: He’s Never Sounded Like This Before“), his rhetoric and tone have shifted dramatically since he first came down that escalator in 2015. While he has always said nasty things about his opponents, in his first campaign he did so with a lot more jocularity and very much talked about building a “movement.” Since his 2020 loss, he’s very much focused on the “them” that have been persecuting him—and, by extension, his followers.
He has been very much focused on getting back at those who impeached him, “stole the election” from him, impeached him again, brought various criminal suits against him, and are otherwise making his life difficult. He has talked a lot about breaking down the barriers that constrained him in the last term, including the so-called Deep State.
As Vox’s Andrew Prokop notes (“J.D. Vance’s radical plan to build a government of Trump loyalists“) his choice for VP is very enthusiastic about this.
“If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
That was no idle talk. To an extent unusual for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He’s been deeply influenced by thinkers on the movement known as the New Right, who want to seize and transform societal institutions they believe are dominated by the left.
A big part of that would involve a restored President Trump purging any resistance to him, or checks on his power, from the executive branch.
Trump has long had figures in orbit urging him to act to remake the executive branch, such as Steve Bannon, who called for “deconstruction of the administrative state” at the start of his brief White House tenure. In the chaos of Trump’s first term, such plans didn’t get very far at first. Trump grew increasingly frustrated by what he viewed as resistance to his agenda among permanent federal employees and his inability to get “loyal” people in place.
Meanwhile, younger conservatives on the outside of the administration — like Vance — were wondering why President Trump was struggling to enact his agenda and grappling with the leftward movement of the nation on social justice issues. Many of them gravitated toward explanations offered by writers on the New Right.
The New Right put forth an institutional theory for why conservatives couldn’t get what they wanted. Per this theory, the left had ultimate power due to their control of important institutions, from the media and academia to tech companies and the federal bureaucracy. The task ahead for the right was to fight for and seize control of these institutions.
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As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally got around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issued an executive order known as Schedule F.
This order laid the groundwork for reclassifying as many as 50,000 career civil servant jobs as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it could be implemented, however, and Biden quickly revoked it.
There’s been much fear about Trump restoring this policy in his second term, replacing a great many nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt plans.
Such a move could be implemented in any number of ways, from the more limited and less disruptive to more sweeping and very disruptive. Considering Trump has only intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I’ve thought that how this plays out would depend on who staffs his administration, since he could be pulled in various directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political blowback could counsel restraint.
Vance would not do that. He would be a key voice in Trump’s administration urging him to go very big indeed.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said that the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
This is, of course, how authoritarians think about power. When they win elections—even if, as in Trump’s case, they don’t—they ought to be able to govern as they wish with no obstacles. The Constitution, the other branches of government, and the laws of the land are mere inconveniences.
To be sure, to the extent one believes in the Unitary Executive theory, civil servants ought to execute the policy preferences of the elected President rather than substitute their own judgment. The problem with that is that, while they ultimately report to the President and his appointees, the agencies are creatures of Congress who are mostly carrying out functions delegated to the legislative branch under Article I of the Constitution. Bureaucrats are supposed to act within the bounds of their legislatively-granted authority and apply their expertise in making day-to-day judgments as to how to execute policy.
Because they’re part of the Executive branch, they also receive policy guidance from presidential appointees (cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, etc.). But they’re constrained by, among other things, the Administrative Procedures Act.
Trump found himself thwarted time and again in his first term when he tried to do issue orders willy-nilly without regard to procedure. He clearly wants to make sure this isn’t the case next go-around.
To be sure, doing any of this would require the acquiescence of Congress. The civil service as we know it was established by the Pendleton Act of 1883 (incidentally, a reaction to a presidential assassination by a disgruntled would-be government employee) and a century and a half of follow-on legislation. But there’s a very good chance that a re-elected Trump would, at least initially, enjoy majorities in both Houses of Congress. And, should the Democratic minority in the Senate attempt to filibuster, one suspects that device will go away.
