Donald Trump Sounds Like a Democrat From the 1980s
One of the most entertaining recent social media love fests involved President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.).
Warren wrote that she and the president agree about scrapping the debt ceiling—a congressional limit on federal borrowing. Its goal is to force the government to live within its means. Congress often relaxes the limit, but “Katy, bar the door” if extreme progressives such as Warren get their way.
Trump was “very pleased” to announce his agreement with her that such limits would lead to “economic catastrophe.” He thinks it’s wrong to put such power in “the hands of political people,” as if the root spending isn’t done by politicians. Anyhow, it was the latest example of the Horseshoe Theory, whereby the two political extremes don’t occupy distant points along a line, but are as close together as the two ends of a horseshow. There’s indeed an odd similarity between right-populism and left-progressivism.
Justin Amash, the former Republican congressman from Michigan, is one of the few politicians who lives up to his own billing (“a principled, consistent constitutional conservative dedicated to individual liberty, economic freedom and the Rule of Law”). He threw shade on the Trump/Warren kumbaya session: “Donald Trump is, at his core, a big-government politician with misguided views on economics and the federal budget. He’s a more socially conservative Elizabeth Warren, which is to say he’s a 1980s Democrat.” Bingo.
Having grown up as a Democrat in Pennsylvania in the 1970s—the only Republicans I knew were of the Rockefeller variety and wore bowties—I was greatly influenced by the rise of Reagan and eagerly switched parties after the 1980 election. I remember the era’s politics clearly, as I was studying political science at George Washington University. (I couldn’t get back to my dorm room after the Reagan assassination attempt, as the president was convalescing at GWU hospital and the streets were closed.)
So when I hear my Republican friends compare Trump to the Reagan era, I half-heartedly agree. Yes, we’re seeing the revival of that decade’s debates—except Trump is an almost exactly replica of the Democratic politicians of the time, but with a socially conservative twist. It’s as if Missouri Democrat Dick Gephardt, the congressman and later a Democratic presidential candidate, had a love child (politically speaking, of course) with Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo.
I’m relieved that I’m not the only one to have noticed. In a February column in The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson quoted from the 1980 Democratic platform: “We w
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