Trump Dotes on Despots and Fiscal Fiasco At best, he disregards prudence, decency and facts. He’s altering conservatism itself. By William Galston
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-dotes-on-despots-and-fiscal-fiasco-1452642277
I swore that I wouldn’t write another column on Donald Trump this month, but the mouthy New York billionaire has forced my hand.
Over the weekend a New York Post headline smacked me in the face: “Trump praises Kim Jong-un’s murderous ascent to power.” I double-checked to make sure it wasn’t the Onion instead. It wasn’t. So I read on.
Here’s part of what Mr. Trump had to say about the North Korean dictator in Iowa on Saturday: “You’ve got to give him credit. He goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss. It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one.”
Machiavelli, who admired Hannibal for his “inhuman cruelty,” would have said it more elegantly, but the sentiment is the same.
This is not the first time Mr. Trump has praised an autocrat, and it probably won’t be the last. In December Vladimir Putin called him a “very bright and talented man.” Informed of this news, Mr. Trump said it was “a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”
When a stunned Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” pressed him about Mr. Putin’s thuggish rule, Mr. Trump shot back, saying: “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.” Mr. Scarborough pressed on: What about the murder of Russian journalists? Mr. Trump: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”
Conservatives habitually bash liberals for allegedly espousing “moral equivalence” between the United States and undemocratic regimes. I ask my conservative readers: Honestly now, have you ever heard a franker, more unabashed embrace of moral equivalence than the stuff the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is serving up? Do you care enough to bestir yourselves?
There is a word to describe the type of politics Mr. Trump’s amoral admiration of strength implies, and it isn’t democracy. If he had started out in Belarus, he would be Alexander Lukashenko. And if he were Russian, he would be one of Mr. Putin’s oligarchs, flattering him to his face while secretly scheming to replace him.
At best, Mr. Trump is guilty of disregarding prudence, decency—and facts.
Consider his plan for cutting income taxes and corporate taxes. According to the Tax Foundation, Mr. Trump’s proposals would reduce revenues by almost $12 trillion over the next decade—or by $10.14 trillion even when the cuts’ dynamic effects on growth are taken into account.
The Tax Foundation’s dynamic scoring model is on the aggressive end of the continuum. Last month, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center ran Mr. Trump’s proposal through its own widely respected model. Over a decade beginning in 2017, the Trump tax cuts would reduce revenues by $9.5 trillion; in 2027-36, by $15 trillion. The additional interest costs during those two decades add up to $9.6 trillion. Overall, Mr. Trump’s plan would more than double the national debt as a share of GDP.
In fairness, these interest-rate and debt calculations assume that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts are not offset by equivalent spending cuts. In 2025, the Tax Policy Center calculates, this would require cuts of 82% in discretionary spending, which funds the military as well as domestic programs, or 41% in outlays for Social Security and Medicare.
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Trump has not deigned to enumerate his plan for cutting spending, and my advice to small-government conservatives is not to hold your breath. As he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013, “If you think you are going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you are going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen.” In his view, paying Medicare and Social Security benefits in full is “honoring a deal.”
So Mr. Trump’s tax plan would be a fiscal disaster. Would the working and middle classes at least reap huge benefits? Not a chance. According to the Tax Policy Center, taxpayers in the second quintile would see a gain of 3.1% in their after-tax income; in the third (middle) quintile, 4.9%. Meanwhile, the top 1% of taxpayers would experience a 17.6% boost, and the top 0.1% (the people Mr. Trump consorts with when he takes time off from his populist rallies) would gain 18.3% from an average annual tax cut of $1.78 million.
But Mr. Trump’s largest impact on his party comes neither from his foreign-policy amorality nor his fiscal recklessness, but rather his distinctive brand of nativism. Mr. Trump’s hard line on immigration, coupled with his resilience atop the polls, has begun to redefine American conservatism. There was a time when Ronald Reagan, Steve Forbes and Jack Kemp could favor a welcoming immigration policy without losing their conservative credentials. That may no longer be possible.
Conservatives who deplore this trend have no time to waste.
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