President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner may be ascendant, but don’t count out the conservatives in the administration yet.
As the jockeying between the “West Wing Democrats” associated with Kushner and the populist nationalists highlighted by White House strategist Stephen Bannon grabs headlines, movement conservatives and other more conventional Republicans may be poised to benefit.
If personnel is policy, they represent a much bigger slice of Trump appointees than either the Kushner or Bannon camp. These mainstream Republicans also have more experience in politics and government than Trump’s relatives and most of the people working to make “Trumpism” a governing philosophy.
“The idea that this is somehow going to become a Democrat administration is laughable,” said a source close to the Trump camp.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley had a breakout week and now rivals Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as a foreign-policy voice of the Trump administration. A onetime supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., for president, Haley has articulated the president’s recent sharp turn against Russian leaders and Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Budget director Mick Mulvaney has become a point man for negotiating with his former House Freedom Caucus colleagues on repealing and replacing Obamacare, which has regained its spot as a top administration priority.
Mulvaney was praised by fiscal conservatives after the “skinny budget” contained deep cuts to non-defense discretionary spending. Trump did not talk much about budgetary discipline on the campaign trail and his first budget proposal was not expected to cut so aggressively. Whether Mulvaney can convince the president to embrace entitlement reform may be the next test of his influence inside the administration.
Vice President Pence remains the top movement conservative in Trump’s orbit and has taken on a leading role in reviving the stalled Obamacare talks among congressional Republicans.
Some recent appointees aren’t far off from what Trump said during the campaign. Just this week, Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, was brought in to advise the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At the same time Julie Kirchner, a former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, was also hired as an adviser to the acting commissioner for Customs and Border Protection.
The organizations both appointees came from are not only tough on border security but favor lower levels of immigration overall, including fewer legal immigrants. Both hires were immediately denounced by immigration advocates, with Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., tying them to Bannon, speechwriter and domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Neither Sessions nor Miller are believed to have fallen out of favor.
Gutierrez went so far as to describe the hires and other Trump administration immigration hawks as “advocates for eliminating legal immigration.”
Even as Trump has appeared to tone down and in some cases outright reverse the more nationalist positions he took during the campaign, hires like Kirchner and Feere point to his administration taking a more restrictionist line on immigration than previous administrations of both parties.
Kevin Hassett, Trump’s choice to chair the Council of Economic Advisers, was savaged by immigration hawks. He was also described by Bannon’s former publication Breitbart News as “a win for the corporatist, business-first faction” as opposed to the “populist, America-first faction that helped Trump win the election in November.” He is certainly not Trump-like on trade or immigration.
But if the goal, as Bannon himself put it at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” you could probably do worse than a free-market economist from the American Enterprise Institute.
Matthew Yglesias of the liberal web magazine Vox argued Thursday that Trump had finally “pivoted,” but to the right rather than the center.
“Down the line, Trump’s current policies now point toward orthodox conservatism,” he wrote, pointing to a wave of deregulatory initiatives among other things.
All this comes as many who hoped Trump would govern as a different kind of Republican have expressed public misgivings about the current direction of his administration.
“We want the ‘president of America’ back,” wrote the columnist Ann Coulter, author of the book In Trump We Trust, “not ‘the president of the world.'”
“Left to his own devices, uncontaminated by Washington group-think, Trump gets it right,” she maintained, an argument reminiscent of the 1980s pleas to “Let Reagan be Reagan.”
At the time, many of the conservatives brought into the Reagan administration didn’t have the same level of government experience as the centrists associated with then Vice President George H.W. Bush.
In the Trump administration, many of the movement conservatives do have experience and it is his family members and the populists who are the novices.
