One astute conservative student of the realignment likened the legislation “to a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making.”
“[It’s] not something that has an especially coherent logic to it or much prospect of actually accomplishing the things that I think people want,” Oren Cass, founder of the think tank American Compass and a leading advocate of conservative economic populism, told POLITICO Magazine recently.
The failure to imbue the legislation with more of a Trumpist ideological throughline may be due to a few factors; perhaps it’s Trump’s well-known aversion to wonky policy details, or the fact that most Republican lawmakers are still loyal to the Reaganite economic policy they came up with even as they now publicly bow to Trump.
But whether the sprawling bill is ultimately judged a policy success or failure, it lacks an original vision to hold together the constituencies Trump has improbably knitted together — tax relief, border spending, safety net cuts and Biden policy rollbacks aren’t a theory of the case. Sure, it has a few Trumpian frills that nod to the president’s populist campaign pledges, but they are largely small-bore and were scaled back by senators anyway. “No tax on tips” became a temporary tax deduction on tips, for instance. The brief musings about a tax hike on upper-income earners quickly were extinguished by opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Decades from now, no one will point to this legislation as a key building block of a lasting Republican coalition. It’s more likely to be remembered for the $3.3 trillion it is estimated to add to the national debt.
The legislation isn’t just a missed opportunity. It’s also a striking departure from the more disciplined efforts to reshape and reckon with an evolving party that happened in the last Republican administration before Trump. When George W. Bush occupied the White House, Karl Rove, his political architect, pursued a master plan to lock in the party’s newly emerging coalition and ensure its viability over the long haul. The creation of Medicare Part D, the program’s new prescription drug benefit, was designed to blunt the Democratic advantage on health care issues. Immigration reform, which failed, was a nod toward consolidating Bush’s gains with Latino voters.
The Iraq debacle made the efforts moot, but some of the residual effects of Rove’s work remains visible today: the GOP’s edge in the exurbs, its dominant position among evangelicals, the party’s gains with Catholics.
If anything, the megabill threatens to peel off some of the new constituencies of the ascendant Republican coalition or give them cause for concern. The Medicaid spending cuts stand to hit working class people of color and in rural America hard, from the Trump Belt of Appalachia to the Southwest. The income tax cuts and expanded child care tax credit will be warmly welcomed, but wealthier Americans will benefit more.
It’s revealing that there is no quarter of the new coalition that is wildly enthusiastic about the package. Polling suggests Americans largely disapprove of the megabill, though there is support for some of its individual provisions. More important, from the standpoint of the future of the MAGA coalition, are findings like this one: According to a June Washington Post-Ipsos poll on the bill, non-white, non-college graduates — an important part of the new coalition — oppose it by a 41 percent to 18 percent margin. Without voters like them, it isn’t really much of a realignment.
Thursday, July 3, 2025
The Megabill Missed Opportunity
