Washington Examiner, August 2024
In 2004, real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump told CNN that he “in many cases” considered himself more of a Democrat than a Republican. Fast forward 20 years later, and the former president is once again navigating a political middle ground that is as much about defeating Vice President Kamala Harris as it is leaving a permanent mark on his adopted home, the Republican Party. Over the past several months, Trump has made a rhetorical shift, dropping the label “conservative” in favor of describing his politics as “commonsense.” In March, he explicitly said he is “not conservative.” Trump has taken that label to describe the GOP as a whole, telling a crowd in Arizona a week ago, “You say what you want — it’s nice to say conservative, but really, we’re the party of common sense.”
But Trump’s words are coinciding with a pivot to the middle on policy that is challenging virtually every tenet of modern conservatism. He’s vowed not to “touch” Social Security, moving the party further from calls to raise the retirement age, while on Thursday, he prompted Obamacare-era hand-wringing with his proposal to mandate that private insurance companies cover the cost of in vitro fertilization procedures. That final proposal, which follows his rejection of a federal abortion ban, has rankled the religious Right. At the same time, he’s ignored deficit hawks with proposals including “no tax on tips” that, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would increase deficits by more than $4 trillion over the next decade.
