Six months ago, Mike Lee was screaming. Standing on the floor of Quicken Loans Arena, the Republican senator from Utah begged the chairman of the Republican National Committee to call the roll on a procedural vote preceding the nomination of Donald Trump. He failed.
“President Trump’s peculiar brand of populist, nationalist politics is not what I had in mind,” Lee admitted to a crowd at the Heritage Foundation Thursday. “But neither must his election be the existential threat to conservatism, republicanism, and constitutionalism that many of his critics feared.”
Three weeks into the Trump administration, Lee now exudes a public optimism. Once one of the president’s biggest critics, the senator now sees an opportunity to reorient Trump’s populism toward a new type of conservatism, one specifically for “the forgotten man.”
More than just rebranding, Lee is making a pragmatic gamble. If Republicans embrace “a healthy dose of the president’s intuitive populism and nationalism,” he reasons, then perhaps Trump will take seriously the ideas of the conservatives he thrashed at the ballot box. The risks are obvious. Worst case possibility, Lee provides conservative veneer to Trump’s big government priorities. Best case scenario, Lee manages to get conservative policy into law.
Central to Lee’s principled populism is a new division of labor. He foresees the populists, with their fingers to the pulse of the people, identifying problems and conservatives subsequently knocking them down. It’d solve what he describes as “the chief political weakness of conservatism,” namely an inability to perceive problems facing regular Americans.
Though untested in Congress, Trump’s populism is more voracious than perhaps the senator recognizes. The conversion of Stephen Moore provides the authoritative example. Once a free market advocate, Moore fell away into economic apostasy after joining the Trump campaign.
In a closed-door meeting with Republicans, he explained the cost of that discipleship last December. “I don’t want to spend all that money on infrastructure,” Moore said, referring to Trump’s promised trillion-dollar package. “I think it’s mostly a waste of money. But if the voters want it, they should get it.”
Put another way, the people should always get what they want. Principle be damned.
But the Utah senator is prepared to risk a little populism in order to help “put the federal government back on the side of forgotten Americans.” Afraid that Trump’s cures could prove worse than many of the diseases the businessman diagnosed on the campaign trail, Lee offered several prescriptions Thursday.
Most noticeably to avoid tariffs, Lee floated a new tax two-step. First, he wants to axe the corporate tax rate altogether. That move, he contends, would “move billions of dollars from the IRS into worker’s paychecks” and attract foreign business with the prospect of “zero tax on profits.” Second, Lee advocates boosting tax rates on capital dividends to keep investments state side.
While those policies are innovative and politically pragmatic, Lee’s principled populism could still prove a tough sell to conservatives. Already Andrew McCarthy at National Review has dismissed the idea as misguided, describing it as “a call for sober Bacchanalia.” But wooing working people isn’t anything new. After Mitt Romney lost the presidential election in 2012, my Washington Examiner colleague (and boss) Tim Carney advanced the idea of “free-market populism.”
Ultimately, the only buyer that matters is Trump. Chances are good that the president is not interested in being reoriented at all and would rather let his populism run its course unchecked. If that happens, Lee could be left disappointed again.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
