The hard part of governing isn’t identifying what voters are mad about. It’s figuring out what to do about those complaints.
That is what a candidate’s “policy” agenda is supposed to address. Alas, Donald Trump has so degraded the state of policy discourse that few politicians are even trying to come up with real solutions anymore.
The Republican presidential nominee often promises fantastical outcomes, without any plausible mechanism for how, as president, he would deliver them. Most recently, Trump promised to cut prices, with energy prices specifically falling by 50 percent. How? No explanation necessary. He simply declares it will happen, and the media and his allies amplify his claims.
Sometimes, he dresses up his promises with bureaucratic pageantry. “On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign an executive order directing every Cabinet secretary and agency head to use every tool and authority at their disposal to defeat inflation and bring consumer prices rapidly down,” he said at a recent North Carolina rally. “I will instruct my Cabinet that I expect results within the first 100 days, or much sooner.”
But a preposterous promise on a 100-day timeline is still preposterous. (Arguably more so.) Yet seemingly, the entire Republican Party – and much of the media – have chosen to treat such nonsense as though it were a Very Serious, Big-Brained policy treatise.
How do we know? Because it’s precisely this kind of vacuous promise that Trump allies say they want him to talk about.
For weeks, Republican politicians and advisers have urged Trump to pivot away from personal insults and toward “policy.” Trump himself has derided these pleas as too dry or too wimpy. “They say to me, ‘sir, please stick to policy. Don’t stick to personality,’” he said in a mocking tone at a rally last week.
But when pressed on what it means to talk about “policy,” his supposedly fun-killing allies just cite various things voters are mad about.
“I told President Trump then and now, you’re going to win this thing if you focus on policy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Sunday, repeating advice he’s been offering for weeks. His specific examples, which he mentioned multiple times: “Gas was $1.87 a gallon when President Trump left office. We had the most secure border in the last 40 years. Inflation was down, not up, and the world was not on fire.”
Other Republican officials, including former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway have similarly urged Trump to talk about inflation, immigration, crime and so on.
But these are problems, not solutions. It would probably make sense for the former president to focus on these issues, given that voters rank them among the most important problems facing the country and are inclined to believe Republicans will handle them better than Democrats. But grumbling that it’s raining is not a policy. Offering people umbrellas, or perhaps a route to shelter, is. Neither Trump nor his allies have gotten around to the umbrella part of the equation.
The challenge for Republicans is that if they did explain their plans and positions more often, voters might realize just how bad they are. For instance, nearly all of Trump’s major economic policies would worsen inflation (mass deportations, devaluing the dollar, politicizing the Federal Reserve, imposing new global tariffs of 10 percent or higher).
The politics of his policy positions aren’t great, either. Of 28 major Trump proposals YouGov asked about in June (on both economic and noneconomic issues), only six were favored by most respondents. For example, 6 in 10 Americans oppose his proposals to cut corporate taxes and to abolish the Education Department.
Not to mention the 900-page, dystopian Project 2025 “policy bible,” which Trump is trying to distance himself from.
Given that simply identifying voter gripes appears to be the bar for seriousness, perhaps it’s unsurprising that Democrats also seem to be watering down their own policy proposals – on taxes or anything else.
When he was president, Trump promised a “much better health care” plan and faced no consequences when that allegedly “terrific” and “less expensive” miracle plan failed to materialize. He likewise pledged 6% economic growth and to eliminate the federal debt – and exited office with no road map, or record, for either.
So if you’re a Democrat, why bother crafting any careful, detailed proposals, with all their trade-offs and vulnerabilities? Why bother trying to understand the underlying causes of inflation when you can simply pledge to make high prices illegal? Perhaps tellingly, more than a month into her presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris still doesn’t have a “policy” section on her campaign website (which Republicans, suddenly cosplaying as policy wonks after not even releasing a party platform in 2020, love to point out).
There’s always been a temptation for politicians to under-plan and overpromise, to pledge outcomes without detailing the inputs. But just as Trump has lowered the bar for politicians’ character and ethics, he’s degraded our expectations for governing, too.
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Reach Catherine Rampell at crampell@washpost.com.
