For the last several weeks, as Vice President Kamala Harris has surged in the presidential race while Donald Trump’s campaign has stalled (at best), a purportedly reasonable bit of advice for Trump has become the conventional wisdom among Republican politicians: Don’t focus on the crazy culture wars and grievance stuff; focus on the policies. Then, we’ll win.
Yes, believe it or not, Republican politicians claim to believe that they can win on policy. But that is obviously wrong. Not only is it wrong, however, it reflects either delusion or a deep level of cynicism that needs to be exposed. Upon examination, it turns out that “talking policy” could be good for Trump and the Republicans only under the most degraded notion of what it means to discuss real policy questions.
The Republicans who are calling on Trump to change his “tone” are not at all telling him to abandon grievance-based exploitation of people’s fears. Even though it is possible to gin up anger while talking about, say, windmills (which, Trump tells his supporters, cause cancer), Trump can do the same thing while focusing on immigration (“open borders,” criminals from Venezuela, and all the rest) or ranting about grocery store prices. The former is not working, so Republicans are hoping to convince him to focus entirely on the latter.
As I will explain at length below, serious policy debate would be a losing strategy for Republicans, so Trump is only supposed to inflame passions on issues that Republicans think provide the best opportunities for intensifying voters’ rage. That is what counts as “discussing policy” in the Republican universe. The only arrow in Trump’s quiver is inflammatory bombast, so Republicans are merely asking him to make people angry about different things.
When it comes to policy in the true sense of that word, however, the Trump camp wants nothing to do with it. Indeed, as Treasury Secretary Pete Buttigieg put it in an interview last month:
I think it’s incredible that actually the biggest scandal of the year is a policy scandal … is Project 2025. Most people say elections aren’t really about policy anymore, but if you think about it, the biggest scandal—the one that actually has the Republicans the most afraid, the one that has the President doing damage control—it’s not a criminal coverup (although they had one of those, too); it’s not a sex tape; it’s the simple fact that they wrote down their own policies. That is the thing that they might not recover from.
Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 prove Buttigieg’s point. Over the summer, Trump wrote on social media that “I know nothing about Project 2025.” Even though he supposedly knew nothing about it, however, he quickly added that “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” So he could not even fully disavow the project, saying only that some unspecified parts of it are not to his liking.
But let us stipulate for the sake of argument that Trump has no commitment to Project 2025, which he now rejects because it has become politically toxic. What, then, would “running on policy” mean? The twin realities are that Trump has almost no policy ideas at all, while Republicans’ policy stances are—and have long been—deeply unpopular.
It is understandable that Republicans do not want Trump to (continue to be) obviously unhinged; but the last thing they should want is for people to focus on what Republicans would actually do if put back in power.
The Lesser of Political Evils: Trump Talking About Sharks, or Trump Talking about “Migrant Crime”
To be clear, if for some reason I wanted Trump to return to power so that he could finish the job of destroying the rule of law, I would join with his other enablers and beg him to stop talking about his long list of oddball obsessions. From the 2020 election supposedly being stolen to Joe Biden being the victim of a “coup” to the vagaries of flush toilets and water pressure in showers—to say nothing of openly racist and misogynistic attacks on Vice President Harris—this is all very bad politics.
Trump and his running mate JD Vance have become obsessed with insisting that they are not “weird,” but that label has stuck to them because the word fits. It is not some random insult. The Democrats could have used any of a number of other, more standard, political epithets—dangerous, out of touch, and so on—but VP candidate Tim Walz created the putdown of the year by putting his finger on the common theme uniting Trump’s uncommon preoccupations. The Trumpian response—“No, you’re weird!”—is both juvenile and oblivious to the substance of the underlying criticism. Democrats are not calling them weird as in “You’re a bunch of poopyheads.” They are calling Trump and Vance weird because they are very, very weird.
In any event, late August and early September saw an endless parade of Republicans on news shows and in op-eds all but pleading with Trump to “talk about policy” and to stop being weird. Peeling away even the first layer of political spin, however, reveals that their desire is, as I described above, simply to change the subject to the two issues that Republicans believe are Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities: immigration and the economy.
On one level, that makes a modicum of sense as a matter of raw political manipulation, as I will discuss in Part Two of this column. But here is my central point: It is possible—and desirable, from the Republicans’ standpoint—to have a conversation that centers on those two controversial policy areas without ever talking about policy.
As a personal hypothetical example, I could have a long discussion about why my students are not learning what I want them to learn (not that that ever happens with my students in particular, of course!) without ever even coming close to talking about causes or solutions. I could just say over and over again that I care about “learning” and that students are not doing that. I could even give inspiring speeches about how great it will be when they do start to learn again. I could spend a lot of time trying to convince people that I am thinking about that very important issue, but unless I start to talk about a plausible path from here to a better future of actual student engagement, I am not having a meaningful policy discussion. I am repeatedly mentioning the problem, but I am not talking about how to solve the problem. And that is the Republicans’ problem in a nutshell.
Trump Barely Even Tries to Explain How He Will Solve All of Our Problems
Last Tuesday, Trump faced off against Harris in an event that was billed as a debate. On Dorf on Law last Wednesday, I explained why that was not a debate at all, and I again adopted the term non-debate to describe the event (as I did here on Verdict after the Biden-Trump non-debate over the summer). In that column, I went through only a few of the many lies and delusions that Trump let loose in Philadelphia, and at the end, I wrote: “In an upcoming Verdict column, I will turn to what might generously be called Trump’s policy views but are more a matter of listening to him grunting words like ‘economy’ and ‘war.’” My initial purpose here, therefore, is to distinguish between making bad policy arguments and making no policy arguments at all.
In 2016—that is, political eons ago—I pointed out that Trump mostly does not bother to explain how he will make the wonderful things happen that he says he will make happen. To return to my example above, this would be like me saying: “My students aren’t learning, but I’m going to learn them up real good. There’ll be so much learning, you’ll be tired of all the learning.” How? Not saying.
Whereas Republicans prior to Trump had always been willing to ignore inconvenient logic and facts that undermine their cause-and-effect assertions about how their policies would work, at least they bothered to offer a story that could be true. They argued, for example, that test-based education would improve learning, so they passed the No Child Left Behind law during the second Bush presidency. That law turned out to be a disaster, but it had a plausible logic to it.
Pre-Trump Republicans were, in other words, trying to convince people to vote for them by making statements that could be evaluated based on normal standards of human understanding and discourse. Those policy arguments were, however, often terrible (as I will discuss in further detail below), which might be why Trump took a different tack.
The most obvious and persistent example of the Republicans’ effort to tell a defensible cause-and-effect policy story—or at least one within the realm of possibility—is their generations-long fixation on supply-side tax cuts. Their argument has always been that reducing tax rates will bring forth more economic activity, because people supposedly will have an incentive to work additional hours, and businesses that otherwise would not have been created would arguably be brought into a now-profitable-after-tax economic environment. After that first step, Republicans then argued that those increases in real productive economic activity would be so large that total tax revenue would rise, even though each dollar of income would be taxed at lower rates.
To be clear, Republicans ignored all of the evidence that this simply does not happen. Indeed, even the first step—the assertion that tax cuts increase economic activity through trickle-down effects—has never held up to scrutiny, which means that the second step is not even mathematically possible. There cannot be offsetting revenue due to increases in economic activity when there is no increase in economic activity.
Again, however, some minimal amount of credit is due here, because Republicans did have a story about how their policy would work. That is, they put forth an explanation of the mechanisms that would need to work as planned before we would see the good effects that the Republicans promised—a sequence of events that did not come to pass, but at least Republicans started with something more than “We alone can fix it.”
Trump is too distracted or bored for such things.
Listening to Trump over the years, it has been notable that he at most will say the specific thing that he will do before skipping over the intervening steps and jumping straight to the candy-canes-and-rainbows future outcome. For example, he signed the regressive and reactionary Republican tax bill in 2017 and predicted that it would more than double economic growth. How would it make the economy grow faster than it has ever grown? Because it is a tax cut, and Trump signed the bill. (In fact, growth slowed down somewhat in the years after that bill became law.)
More often, Trump will simply say that he will make some good thing happen without even hinting as to what he would do to set it all in motion. 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 Part Two of this column, I will explain how Trump uses his “I will press a magic button and great things will happen” illogic in his current campaign. But is there a substantive, non-Trumpian policy-based discussion that Republicans could use instead as a winning strategy?
Not at all. Their policy stances—on the environment, on reproductive rights, on gun violence, and on down the line—are very unpopular. They do not want Trump to talk about solutions. They only want him to talk—vaguely and threateningly—about topics that are more likely to scare people into voting for Republicans. It is a deeply cynical strategy.