This week’s Republican National Convention comes amid a shift away from some of the fiscal conservative priorities of elections past in favor of more populist economic priorities.
The top candidates on the Republican ticket, former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), both fit into an economic mold that is different from that of previous Republican contenders in several ways. The Republican Party platform has also undergone a transformation.
“I think it’s a pretty dramatic shift,” Marc Short, the chairman of Advancing American Freedom, a group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, told the Washington Examiner amid the convention, which began Monday and will run through Thursday.
It’s a marked difference not just from the pre-Trump era but also from just four years ago in 2020.
Trump appears poised to enact an even more aggressive tariff agenda this time around than during the first Trump administration, which Short described as one that supported free market principles.
While free trade advocacy reigned supreme in the party for decades, imposing tariffs, traditionally not on Republican wish lists, has become a priority. There has also been growing skepticism around corporations, Wall Street, and big business. The party’s top brass is now focused on building up manufacturing and making Republicans the champions of blue-collar America.
Short said during Trump’s first term, tariff use was “usually to compel a change from an adversary like China, but now you’re basically looking to say we’re gonna have a broad-based approach across the board to include allies and adversaries alike.”
“So I think that’s a dramatic shift from not eight years ago, but from truly four years ago,” he said.
Others aren’t as worried. Steve Moore, an informal Trump adviser and Heritage Foundation economist who has long championed supply-side economics, told the Washington Examiner he is more focused on showing how Trump was a better steward of the economy than President Joe Biden has been.
Trump has raised the idea of 10% across-the-board tariffs, which would be a massive departure from decades of trade policy. The former president also floated the idea of reducing the income tax and replacing it with tariffs during a recent visit to Washington, D.C.
The former president’s pick of Vance as his running mate further accentuates the shift in the party in terms of economic policy.
While Republicans are typically averse to organized labor, Vance last year visited a picket line of striking autoworkers.
Vance also praised Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, Lina Khan, who has faced opposition from conservatives in the party. Khan is a critic of big companies and a proponent of “hipster antitrust” — a school of thought that abandons the consumer welfare standard that guided U.S. antitrust policy for decades in favor of a much more adversarial approach to business that also considers other factors, such as corporate concentration and income inequality. Khan’s enforcement efforts have drawn harsh criticism from many Republicans.
“I think if you look at J.D. Vance’s public phrase for Lina Khan, it’s a very different economic approach than, I think, what was the first administration,” Short said.
Bryan Riley, director of the National Taxpayers Union’s Free Trade Initiative, panned the notion of more tariffs in the context of the new GOP platform in a Tuesday report published amid the convention.
“Instead of imposing big tax increases on American families and businesses based on the economically misguided belief that trade deficits make us poorer, policymakers should embrace pro-taxpayer reforms designed to spur economic growth and pursue a trade policy that strengthens our ability to work with U.S. allies to counter China,” Riley said.
While some fiscal conservatives might not be enthusiastic about these changes, a growing segment of the Republican Party has been pushing for a deeper embrace of blue-collar workers and middle-class families. For them, the shift is a welcome one.
The new GOP platform, approved earlier this month, is greatly pared down from the previous iteration.
The 16-page long 2024 platform includes several more populist policy proposals — a notable realignment to Trump’s vision for the United States. The new platform also features some very notable omissions from the 2016 version.
Although conservatives lobbied for years for sweeping reforms to lower the debt, the term “debt” is not mentioned a single time in the new platform. The term “deficit” is mentioned only once in the context of the country’s trade deficit, not the federal budget deficit.
The omission is a big departure from the 2016 document, which mentions the phrase “debt” a dozen times and first describes the national debt as “a burden on our economy and families” up high in the first section. It also castigates the Obama administration for running up the federal debt.
In terms of the platform, Moore said he would have preferred more on debt and deficits, but the budget proposals Trump has put out in the past have featured spending cuts and would stimulate growth.
Former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady told the Washington Examiner he thinks the emphasis on “growth” in the platform addresses some of the omissions about debts and deficits.
“Economic growth, job growth, paycheck growth — all of which produce revenues for the federal government and for the country to get back on track financially, you’ve got to have two things,” Brady said. “You’ve got to have growth, and you have to have guardrails around spending.”
Brady, who played a lead role in writing the Trump tax cuts and is now an adviser for the Alliance for Competitive Taxation, a business coalition working to keep the 2017 tax cuts in place, said he thinks Republicans are still trying to figure out “how best to tackle” the problem of putting guardrails on spending in the long term, with the goal of bringing the U.S. budget back into balance. He also said that, specifically, Republicans on Capitol Hill are still “very concerned” about debt and deficits.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
He characterized some of the trade proposals more in the context of ideas rather than “firm policies yet.”
“I get the impression the [former] president is seeking input on how all that impacts his economic legacy and so I think it’s early, I view it as early to see that as just a concrete part of the platform,” Brady said.
