Let’s Take the Republican Policy Challenge

If you live in Red America, as I do, you’re familiar with two conceptually incompatible arguments for Donald Trump. We’ll call them the MAGA argument and the Republican argument.

The MAGA argument can be summed up in three words: Burn it down. Trump’s core supporters are convinced that the American establishment is irretrievably corrupt, that America is in its last days and that only the most dramatic action can save the Republic. They think the Trump of Stop the Steal and Jan. 6 is the real Trump, and they can’t wait to see him unleashed.

The Republican argument is different. These are the voters who still think they belong to a party of limited government and individual liberty. They look back at the first two years of Trump’s term — when he nominated conventional Republican members to his cabinet, selected conventional conservative judges to the federal bench and passed a conventional Republican tax cut — and think that will happen again.

These Republicans look at Jan. 6 as an aberration. They’ll tell me that concerns about democracy are overblown and that what they really want is cheaper groceries at home and less chaos overseas.

“I’m voting for Trump’s policies,” they tell me, “not his tweets.”

In other words, one set of voters is voting for Trump with great joy and enthusiasm because they absolutely, positively take him seriously. Another set of voters is voting for him in part because they don’t take him seriously at all.

Both sets of voters can’t be right.

So let’s take the Republican policy challenge. Are his policies actually better than his tweets?