Levin and a loosely affiliated squadron of academics, think-tankers, journalists, and political strategists designed a fleet of forward-looking free-market solutions that shared a simple premise: that the post-Reagan GOP had become reflexively servile to corporations and the wealthy and no longer offered much to the middle- and working-class Americans left behind by the forces of globalization, deindustrialization, and an uneven recovery from the Great Recession. It was, at its core, the same critique that would drive Trump to see political gold in the “American carnage” of hardscrabble towns battered by decades of economic dislocation.
“Reaganism arose to deal with barriers to prosperity being put up by an overly aggressive, interventionist government, and obviously there are still such barriers in the way,” Levin says. “But what we have now more obviously is the breakdown of fundamental institutions, from the family and community, to the very nature of the workplace for a lot of Americans.”
His crew’s ideas were provocative and compelling: tax reform centered on child tax credits to benefit working families and earned-income credits to incentivize work; eliminating subsidies across the board to level the playing field for little guys competing with Big Business; overhauling the immigration system to prioritize high-skilled labor; and limiting, perhaps temporarily halting, the inflow of low-skilled workers.
They gained a critical mass of media attention with op-eds, speeches, and policy conferences in 2013 and 2014. For the first time in two decades, there was authentic energy penetrating the party’s political class, if not its blue-collar base, that could be traced to new intellectual experimentation rather than old ideological rhetoric.
In Congress, the Reformicons found natural allies in the GOP’s swelling crowd of Gen X legislators who felt a certain detachment from establishment orthodoxy. Chief among them was Ryan, now the highest-ranking official in the Republican Party. He knew he might not stay on top for long; he certainly hoped that the next president would be a Republican. But more specifically, he hoped that the next president would be a Republican willing to challenge the status quo.
Surveying the GOP presidential field and seeing several like-minded individuals—Bush, Rubio, and even Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, less a conservative visionary than an accomplished agitator—Ryan knew that his speakership, in partnership with one of them as president, could result in a policy revolution for a party stuck in the 1980s.
So, he seized the Speaker’s gavel and got to work, crafting a comprehensive set of proposals on poverty, health care, and taxation that Republicans could run on in 2016, and that could serve as a ready-made agenda for whichever kindred spirit won the White House.
And then, as Ryan so delicately puts it, “Donald Trump sort of overtook things.”
IT WASN’T MERELY THAT TRUMP HAD ESTABLISHED A COMFORTABLE lead in virtually every national poll of the Republican primary. It was that he was driving the conversation and dominating the media coverage like no presidential candidate America had ever seen. Every interview, every press conference, every early morning tweet or late-night leak from his campaign blocked out the sun.
Trump had spent decades manipulating the New York City tabloids like a puppeteer. Now the candidate was doing likewise to the political press corps. Nightly newscasts worked him into every show. Cable networks carried nearly all his campaign events live. Even the Sunday shows, hallowed for their self-important equanimity, got in on the act, allowing Trump to call into the programs rather than appear on set—something unheard of for any other politician.
When the primary contest had concluded, independent estimates suggested that Trump had received more than $3 billion in free media coverage. And he did not let it go to waste.
It has often been said that Trump has no core ideology, that he is a man without conviction. This is dangerously false. Any casual examination of Trump’s writings and remarks going back three decades reveals an opportunist who, while fluid in partisan affiliation and most of his policy positions, cleaves to a few bedrock beliefs. They revolve around the notion that globalization is irredeemably injurious to American society; more specifically, that unrestricted levels of immigration, uneven trade deals, and unchecked foreign cheating have undermined the American business and the American worker.
None of these arguments, in isolation, is necessarily wrong or even wrongheaded. Indeed, Trump’s ascent in 2015 was a confirmation of the novel, systemic problems plaguing much of the electorate and the failure of both parties to advance relevant solutions for addressing them.
Yet his policies, rather than leaning forward into the challenges posed in a hyperconnected new century, suggested turning back the clock, looking inward in the hope of returning America to familiar terrain rather than daring to discover the uncharted. Trump spoke like the CEO of an aging conglomerate bereft of new ideas, one that recycles vintage labeling to inspire nostalgia instead of creating new products to attract the next generation of consumers.
The marketing campaign was called “Make America Great Again.” And it sold like hotcakes—particularly when printed on his iconic red baseball cap.
“When I listen to Donald Trump, I hear the America I grew up in. He wants to make things like they used to be,” Pam McKinney said outside a Trump rally in Arizona in 2016. She and her husband, Lee Stauffacher, had recently moved there to escape the “welfare state” of California.
“Where I grew up, in the San Joaquin Valley, it was a good, solid community, but it fell apart when the government started pandering to all of these immigrants who don’t understand our culture and don’t want to assimilate,” she said. McKinney stiffened. “I’m okay with immigrants as long as they’re legal. But they need to assimilate to our culture. They can have their culture at home. In public, you’re an American. They’re celebrating their own holidays instead of ours.”
She continued: “I was born in the fifties, when women stayed at home and men went to work and houses and cars were affordable. We had manufacturing jobs, good jobs. We used to farm in the San Joaquin Valley. It was called the Bread Bowl of America. Now we get our fruits and vegetables from South America. I remember praying in school, but then that got stopped, too. Trump gives us a chance to take things back.”
America during the rise of the forty-fifth president was witnessing a sweeping and unprecedented demographic transformation, becoming younger, better educated, more diverse, more urban, more secular, and more dependent on a globalized economy. These trends showed no sign of reversal, hence the RNC project attempting to recalibrate a party that had long depended on older, white, rural, working-class, religious voters. The biggest driver of America’s change was the ethnic diversification of the electorate and its political implications.
California became a majority-minority state at the turn of the century. By 2016, whites were 38 percent of its population and dwindling;2 in turn, the GOP became extinct. McKinney and Stauffacher fled to Arizona, only to feel a sense of déjà vu: Over the past twenty-five years, the state’s Hispanic population had nearly tripled, and whites had gone from 74 percent of the population to 56 percent. Minorities would be the majority by 2022, and Democrats planned to end the GOP’s monopoly on the state. (Clinton’s campaign would spend millions in Arizona while all but ignoring the traditional Democratic stronghold of Wisconsin.)