The Non-policy Party
Republican scrambling on abortion is part of an ongoing struggle between the believers and the leaders
The shamelessness of the Trump/MAGA Republican Party went on full display this week, on the issue of abortion policy. What it really shows, I would suggest, is where things stand in the internal struggle over whether to be a fully post-policy party.
But first, the shamelessness. It starts at the top, obviously, wit h Trump quite openly test-driving positions before announcing one this week, all jumbled and incoherent in its attempt to make everybody please get off his back about it—and then kinda re-working and jiggering that position when the Arizona SJC decision blew the issue up in everybody’s face.
Downwind from the party and movement leader, Republican pols attempted to swerve along in Trump’s wake, some more clumsily than others.
The most entertainingly deft is Kari Lake, Arizona candidate for U.S. Senate and lickspittle par excellence at the feet of the former President. I highly recommend watching the five-minute video she put out on Thursday, in which she uses the word “choice” or “choose” three times in the first thirty seconds.
To be fair to her, Lake disowned her previous support for Arizona’s territorial-era ban more than a month ago; and throughout her current campaign has been trying to moderate her strong pro-life positions taken way back in [checks notes] 2022 when she was a young, impressionable gubernatorial candidate.
In the video, Lake tries to assuage pro-lifers whose much-desired bans she is abandoning. She does this by saying that America should reduce abortions by encouraging births—specifically, by following Hungary’s aggressive tax breaks for having children.
This surprised me, and leads to my point about whether the Republican Party has policies.
In trying to wriggle out of having a policy on abortion, Lake has stumbled into taking a position on something else: child tax credits. But loud voices in what I call the conservative marketplace don’t like child tax credits, which they have long claimed are handouts to undeserving women for having babies they can’t afford.
In fact, Republicans are right now blocking a child tax credit bill—one supported and voted on by Lake’s likely Democratic opponent, Representative Ruben Gallego—in the very U.S. Senate for which Lake is running. Hence, a recent headline in the Arizona Mirror: “Expanded child tax credit stranded in U.S. Senate by GOP comparisons to welfare.”
Here’s the trouble. The most vocal and engaged conservative voters really believe in the need for achieving policy goals that are promoted urgently on conservative media. Republican politicians—many of them, anyway, and those around them who care about being in power—understand that most of these policies are political disasters. So, they talk a lot using the rhetoric of, say, balancing the budget, or banning abortions, or deporting children, but try to avoid actually having to enact or cast a vote on those things.
The conservative marketplace then turns on leaders of those RINO Republicans, particularly those in positions of Speaker, Republican Senate Leader, or—prior to Trump—President.
Trump—a dedicated non-policy power-seeker, who you’ll recall decided not to even allow the party to adopt a convention platform in 2020—has largely avoided this backlash, which puzzled me as his Presidency went on. I believe he did so primarily by managing to get those Republicans to adopt Trump the individual as, himself, the ultimate policy goal. RINO is now used to mean ‘insufficiently loyal to Trump.’ Seems to me like classic authoritarian personality-over-policy stuff, but I’ll leave that analysis to my more learned fellow contributors to this newsletter.
Trump has been campaigning this time around on more policy positions than the previous two campaigns, but they are largely non-policy policies—such as his new abortion policy, intended not as an actual guide to what he’ll do but as magic words that he hopes will unlock an obstacle to regaining the White House. See also his ‘policy’ of opposing the border bill for similar reasons earlier this legislative session.
In fact, if Jonathan is correct that Trump didn’t have the nomination sewed up this cycle until the indictments, that suggests, I would argue, that this was the party forced to choose between policy (represented by Ron DeSantis’s claims of accomplishments) and non-policy represented by the need to defend Trump personally. They’ve made their choice.