Republican leaders have been all but begging Donald Trump to “talk policy” rather than focus on grievances in his campaign. As I explained in Part One of this column, however, those leaders cannot possibly mean that they want Trump to talk about policy solutions. Instead, they simply want him to fearmonger about immigration and the economy rather than to continue his usual ramblings about sharks and Hannibal Lecter.
Somehow, credulous journalists are buying the nonsense that, say, “not talking about crowd sizes” is per se a policy discussion. But it is more than possible to run a policy-free political campaign even when referring to substantive matters. The Republican Party knows that that is true, because they have been doing it for decades.
Under the Republicans’ advice to Trump, he would still never explain what he would or could do as a matter of substance. He would simply downplay the silly-sounding things and play up other things that sound serious—but he would still do so in an unserious way. In the end, “talking policy” would be beneficial for Trump only if that meant focusing on certain topics that Republicans think will enrage the public and then stoking that outrage, not offering solutions.
So the cynical game is simple. No one is asking Trump to initiate a results-based policy discussion. In essence, the call for him to “talk policy” boils down to this: “We’re only going to win with fearmongering, and you love doing that. But we want you to terrify people by talking about immigrants and the economy, not with meandering stories about sharks or stale lies about stolen elections. But whatever you do, do not talk about actual solutions, because you have none. We have none.”
Trump and the ‘Trust me!’ School of Policy Solutions
I spent most of Part One discussing how Trump has deviated from Republicans’ usual political strategy in one important way. Whereas Republican politicians generally can offer minimally plausible cause-and-effect stories to try to sell their policy ideas (I used their obsession with supply-side tax cuts as the prime example), Trump skips the middle steps and says, at most, that he will do X and then a wonderful Y will happen. How? No explanation needed!
Or, as I put it at the end of Part One: “Trump says ‘Trust me!’ more often than even the most shameless scam artist, and when he promises to make a good thing happen, he expects people to take it on faith that he will do something right—or not merely right, but ‘perfectly.’”
In last Tuesday’s non-debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, we saw Trump use this move a couple of times. In fact, his fantasy-world approach became even worse when he was asked about the situation in the Middle East, especially in Gaza. There, Trump simply said that the current bad situation there never would have happened if he had still been President. Again, he did not bother to explain how he knows that to be true. It is simply: Me in power, only good things happen.
Notice, however, that even if Trump were right about that, he does not own a time machine. Even supposing that what happened is all someone else’s fault, Trump did not say what he would do in 2025 to make it stop. He chose not to talk about it at all as a policy matter.
When it came to other questions, Trump at least did not rely on time travel, but he did similarly skip over the actual policy details. In fact, on at least one issue, he said that we would not even have to wait until 2025 before we reached nirvana. He asserted that he would resolve the war in Ukraine before his next inauguration. How? He simply will make that happen. How? Again: Me in power, only good things happen.
This is why the now-infamous moment last Tuesday, where Trump admitted that he had no “plan” to improve health care in the U.S. but instead had “concepts of a plan,” was so amusing and revealing. He again argued that he would create something better and cheaper, which would be great if he had such a plan. But because he is obviously unwilling to support single-payer national health care—which would, based on the evidence, provide much better outcomes at much lower total cost—he has no plan.
It is rare to see Trump cornered to the point where he admits out loud that he has no clue what he is talking about. Even when he is not so publicly exposed as an ignoramus, however, he simply is not in the business of providing policy solutions backed up by logic and evidence.
On the Rare Occasions that Trump Does Talk Policy, Republicans Want Him to Shut Up
So Trump is almost a complete nullity when it comes to having substantive discussions about policy. Would Republicans be happier, then, if Trump began truly to talk about policy in a substantive sense? The evidence is not promising.
They certainly should not want him to talk substantively about the war in Ukraine, to take one obvious and tragic example. During last week’s non-debate, Trump said that he wanted only “to get this war finished and just get it done,” while steadfastly refusing to say whether he thinks Ukraine should win and Russia should lose. Even though he still refused to offer cause-and-effect reasoning as to what he would do and how it would work, what he did say amounted to an inadvertently clear policy statement—stand the U.S. down, undermine NATO, and let Russia occupy Ukraine. That approach, however, is not a political winner. If I were a Republican, then, I would be relieved that Trump generally does not engage in policy talk when it comes to war.
And Republicans should not want Trump to talk about his other actual policy ideas, either, even when it comes to Trump’s supposed political advantage on the issue of immigration. Two weeks ago, Trump made news when he slipped up and allowed himself to muse at a rally about just how he plans to deport millions of people from America. There, rather than simply waving his hand and saying that he could make it happen and it would make American great again, he stated out loud that the process would be “bloody.”
Again, do the Trump supporters who want him to “talk policy” want him to be saying that? No, they want him to change the subject to immigration or the economy, but they do not want him to say anything about how he would improve matters. They only want him to rant.
After Trump’s spectacular flame-out in the non-debate, Republican U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer wrote: “He treated it like a mini-rally in a lot of respects. You’ve got to be talking to those swing voters in swing states. He could do that with better details.”
I have no doubt that the senator thinks that he is on safe ground when calling on Trump to provide “better details,” but again, what exactly could those details include that would be politically good for Republicans? Now that Trump has admitted that the actual policy he wants to pursue will involve violence, this is bad news for him and his party, and providing more details could only make things worse. So even when Trump does accidentally talk about the intervening steps in a policy discussion, the Republicans should want him to keep the details to himself.
But What About Republicans’ Policies? Sorry, But Those Are Also Unpopular
Is the big lesson here that Republicans would be happiest if Trump were to stop saying everything that he has been saying and instead go back to his adopted party’s well-worn policy playbook? One former Republican congressperson, Carlos Curbelo, seemed not to be kidding last week when he said this about Trump’s sagging support: “It’s not his policy. If you look at some of his policies, people support his policies. His economic policies, I mean the polls are all there. It’s on style that Donald Trump loses.”
But that is simply hallucinatory. It is true that “the polls” show that voters are unhappy about the economy, which leads them to say that they dislike the incumbent party and prefer the opposition. But Trump’s only economic policy is protectionism, which people either reject (because they know that it will cost them more money) or do not understand (which Trump is counting on when he tells them that tariffs are not taxes). If anything, Trump’s policies will make consumer prices go up (as the Harris campaign has pointed out). It is detached from reality to say that Trump could talk about his economic policies—his actual ideas about what to do and how it would affect people’s lives—and win voters’ hearts.
Should Curbelo have said instead that people support “Republican policies” rather than “his [Trump’s] policies”? Republicans seem confident that Trump would do better politically if he could make sure that the topic of the moment is always either “the economy” or “the immigration crisis,” because they know that those are topics that tap into voter dissatisfaction. That is rank cynicism. But the last thing they should want is to have a discussion about what they would do to solve any of the problems facing the country.
Republicans, after all, know that voters are unhappy that consumer prices are higher than they were when Biden took office. But have they ever said what they would do to reduce prices back to those earlier levels? Of course not (largely because it cannot be done without creating another Great Depression). And even if the discussion about immigration were “substantive” and not about imaginary migrants eating house pets in Ohio, Republicans similarly have nothing to propose to the American people to solve any real-world problems, with the added dollop of irony that they have affirmatively rejected the only policy solution on immigration that has been negotiated in the last few decades. (I happen to think that the bipartisan immigration bill that President Biden ended up supporting—and that Trump then told his allies in Congress to kill—was overall a bad idea, but that is beside the point.)
Republicans are in a bind, because the American people oppose them on the issues. Honestly and clearly discussing Republicans’ policy ideas would be political poison. It would not make Republicans more popular.
In 2015, after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision recognized same-sex marriage as a civil right, there was talk among pundits that Republicans could make lemonade out of lemons by using that decision as an opportunity to move beyond an issue on which they had been very much on the wrong side of history. Better, the argument went, to move the discussion to other issues. At the time, I wrote a Dorf on Law column titled: “Republicans Can Now Return to Their Other Unpopular Positions.” A year later, I followed up with another column: “Do Republican Leaders Actually Believe That Their Policies Are Popular?” (Anticipating that I would be writing this week’s column, I republished the latter column about two weeks ago.)
The point of those columns was that the polls have shown for years what they continue to show, which is that it is difficult to find a policy area on which the public favors Republicans’ actual policy views (as opposed to being manipulated by their incendiary rhetoric). Guns? Abortion? Tax cuts for billionaires? The minimum wage? Environmental issues? Voting rights? You name it, the polls show majorities and supermajorities of American citizens rejecting the Republican Party’s (including the pre-Trump Republican Party’s) retrograde views.
Republicans are thus in a no-win situation of their own making. They support Trump, who is prone to making outrageous statements about, say, Harris “becoming Black” or that the January 6 insurrectionists are patriots who should be pardoned. And to be very clear, anyone could understand why Republican party leaders would want that to stop.
But the alternative only works if Republicans can pull off a misdirection play. They need to talk about “policy areas” without talking about actual policies. They need to tap into people’s inchoate anger without revealing that Republicans’ policies—where they exist at all—would not solve those problems and often would even make them worse.
In short, we should not believe Republicans who say that Trump can win on policy. What they mean is that they think they can hoodwink the press and the public if they simply repeat the word “policy” again and again, even as they cower in fear of ever having to engage in an honest policy discussion.
