Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters
A single word, economy, can probably explain much of Donald Trump’s popular-vote victory last year.
The irony of Trump 1.0 was that he was such an inexperienced president he could only do so much damage. His political operation was not organized enough to assault the bureaucracy or launch an enormously damaging trade war. The economic agenda of his first term was not terribly expansive or even imaginative. He wanted a corporate tax cut, and he got it. He wanted a few tariffs and got them. He tried and failed to obliterate Obamacare, and this failure probably saved the Republicans from a much deeper rout in the 2018 midterms.
Now, for Trump, the chickens have come home to roost. His long-held polling advantage on the economy is no more. Never has a president so acutely engineered a stock-market crash and possible recession. If the 2008 economic collapse can be blamed on financial deregulation and predatory housing policy, at least two presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can share the blame, as the crisis built over a decade. In one month, Trump has eroded America’s near-term economic outlook and made many business leaders question the reliability of investment here. For the first time in more than half a century, some are even wondering how reliable the dollar will be, in the long term, as a reserve currency.
A great question, still unanswered, is how Democrats will respond. At some point, they will need a muscular economic vision of their own. Letting Trump hang himself will only go so far. It may be enough to flip the House, but winning the Senate and building a durable majority with a strong president is another matter entirely.
One irony of all this is that American leftists have long been derided as the sort of operators who would do this to the business climate if they ever got into power. Corporate titans loathed Bernie Sanders and feared, far more than Trump, a self-described democratic socialist storming into the White House. Leftists running for executive office have contended with this caricature forever: They’re too unhinged to be trusted with City Hall or a governor’s mansion or the presidency. There would be stock-market chaos, mass layoffs, or some kind of Soviet-style seizure of the means of production.
Instead, we’ve learned something else: An unhinged Republican can destabilize the business class much more. And unlike a left-wing Democrat or socialist, Trump is not focusing on building out any kind of industrial policy that could make some of his tariffs logical one day. He is not expanding union power, subsidizing American manufacturing, and bolstering the safety net of his working-class base. Rather, he’s allowed Elon Musk to enact a slash-and-burn libertarian fantasy on the federal government that truly is benefiting no one: not the poor, the working-class, or middle-class people who rely on federal services, nor the ultrarich, who, for all their nihilism, need a functioning country in which to make more money. His deep cuts to biomedical research will also have no beneficiaries: It is destruction for destruction’s sake, and it will only empower our geopolitical rivals.
The only upside of this second Trump regime is that no future president is probably going to repeat it. Even half-sane politicians don’t want to trade wars with every country on earth and an absurdly volatile stock market. The DOGE cuts have been wildly unpopular, and future Republicans will at least approach federal downsizing with more care. They’re going to have to work quite hard to win back the confidence of the many moderates and independents who decided, last year, MAGA could be trusted on the economy.
Democrats don’t yet have their own firm economic vision for the future. If this is a problem, there is at least an open presidential primary looming that will allow the contenders to clarify what it is they’d like to do. At a minimum, they can promise sanity, which grows more appealing by the day. They can vow, on day one, to rebuild the federal government and undo the damage Trump has wrought. They can run as anti-chaos candidates, and this time, none of the rhetoric will have to point to hypotheticals. We know the power of MAGA and its utter failure at governing. For J.D. Vance, Trump’s likely successor, campaign life is not going to be breezy. Unless an economic miracle is unleashed in the next year or two, he will have vanishingly little to campaign on. This is the Trump economy, and he’ll have to own it.
What could a Democratic vision look like? One problem with Bidenomics — and Biden did have genuine achievements as president — is that it amounted to a great deal of money spent on initiatives that will take years to bear fruit, assuming Trump doesn’t find a way to completely undercut them. The green industrial policy, the subsidizing of semiconductor-chip manufacturing, and infrastructure spending were all necessary, along with the antitrust policy that Trump, for all the mayhem he’s unleashed, has quietly been maintaining at the Federal Trade Commission.
But the Biden administration left behind few tangible programs. If Democrats, in 2023 and 2024, fell behind on the culture war — the MAGA right’s position on immigration proved more popular, and Democrats were successfully portrayed as out-of-touch college-educated elites — they could also not easily campaign on memorable economic plans. The child tax credit, which was popular and seemed poised to make a dent in the poverty rate, was allowed to lapse. Nothing equivalent was standing in place by the time Biden attempted reelection. Kamala Harris herself had trouble articulating the Biden agenda.
Democrats, in the past, have found success campaigning on health care, though beyond permitting Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs, there were few easily recalled health-care achievements during the Biden years. Obamacare has proved popular, if flawed, and the greatest change it brought, perhaps, was an afterthought when the legislation was first passed: an expansion of Medicaid in many states, including those that are GOP-run. As Republicans try to gut Medicaid, defending health care for the poor is a good start. Democrats, eventually, will have to go further. Originally, Obamacare was supposed to have a public option, and Biden, as president, didn’t even make a pretense of trying to pass one through Congress when Democrats were in the majority.
The new Democratic economic agenda will have to be memorable and also obvious. Better health care is a beginning: if not a public option, then an option for any American, regardless of age, to buy into Medicare. Or there can be a new push to raise the Medicaid threshold even higher, allowing those in the middle class to participate in the program. Health insurance companies will revolt, but they’re not terribly well-liked, anyway. If Democrats want to battle for the working class again — which would mean winning the economic argument against the GOP — these are the fights they’ll have to take on.
