President Trump’s last-minute fights against leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill may not add to his total of first-term legislative victories but could set him up to remain the GOP’s populist leader in a possible bid for a second term.
That is what one Republican strategist described as the “method” to Trump’s “madness” as the president pushes for an increase in individual economic relief payments from $600 to $2,000, says he will send a rescissions package to excise pork from a massive government funding bill he only reluctantly signed after a veto threat, and continues to hold up defense authorization legislation over Big Tech and military base names.
Trump appears unlikely to prevail on any of these initiatives, though he has put together a strange bedfellows coalition that ranges from Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley to socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on the $2,000 payments. But despite his refusal to concede this year’s presidential race, with the Electoral College results slated to be certified the day after the pivotal Georgia Senate runoffs, he could already be turning his gaze toward 2024 — or whatever comes next for the reality TV star turned president.
“I think the president has the right political instincts on this. He wants to keep fighting for average Americans and realizes $600 is insufficient,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant. “He’s never cared about the deficit. His position is giving Dems what they want and splitting the GOP, but that doesn’t matter much to him.” A second consultant added, “As I’ve said before, Trump owes the free-market intelligentsia nothing.”
In some ways, it takes Trump back to the formula that helped him win in 2016: an economic populism that differentiated him from both Democrats and his fellow Republicans. In addition to railing against China and what he described as bad trade deals, candidate Trump said he wouldn’t touch entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, despite their status as long-term drivers of U.S. debt. In exchanges with Republican primary opponents like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Trump said he would repeal Obamacare but replace it with something generous so that no one was “dying in the streets.”
As a result, Trump won over even some Sanders voters in his successful race against Hillary Clinton. “He also outlined a wide-ranging, if inchoate, critique of the bipartisan policy consensus that had dominated American politics since the end of the cold war: a failed combination of ‘neoliberal’ economics at home and military adventurism abroad,” writes American Affairs editor Julius Krein, a formerly pro-Trump intellectual who broke with the president after Charlottesville. “Moreover, Trump’s critique was based on national interests rather than the (often treacly) left-liberal moralism of progressive Democrats, thus scrambling ideological categories and establishing himself as a candidate with a unique appeal among key constituencies.”
Krein and his allies argue that Trump abandoned much of what set him apart from other Republicans after taking office, focusing instead on the agenda of tax cuts, judges, and Obamacare repeal he shared with GOP congressional leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan.
In 2020, Trump emphasized his opposition to socialism and other conservative issues. He remained competitive in the Rust Belt relative to other post-Ronald Reagan GOP presidential nominees, claiming he only fell short in these states due to widespread voter fraud, but President-elect Joe Biden narrowly moved them back into the Democratic column.
But many Republicans will want to move past Trump’s populist brand of politics after he exits the White House. The president himself has publicly focused on his election challenges, intervening in the COVID-19 spending package only very late in the process. His inability to sway GOP lawmakers on these issues could signal he is losing his grip on the party rather than demonstrating his 2024 staying power, some Republican insiders say.
“He may think supporting a $2,000 check now will help his unannounced 2024 presidential chances, but if he loses the Georgia Senate seats by continuing to trash Republican officials down there, the only thing he’ll be thinking about in 2024 is how he managed to lose Republican control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate in four short years,” said a veteran GOP operative in Washington, D.C. “Republicans won’t be comparing him to Lincoln or Reagan. They’ll be comparing him to Obama and Nixon.”
