The spectacle unfolding in Milwaukee is just that — a show.
“There’s a lot of false information,” Donald Trump told Bloomberg’s reporters in a wide-ranging interview published Tuesday. The remarks were occasioned by Trump’s reported irritation with the “unauthorized freelancing” by those who claim to speak for the former president. He’s “eager to set the record straight.” But Trump’s interpreters could be forgiven for their confusion. It seems much of the misinformation surrounding his policy preferences is coming straight from the Republican National Convention.
On the RNC’s opening night, for example, observers witnessed the rebirth of the GOP as a statist party deaf to conservative orthodoxy around the superiority of free markets. It would now be a protectionist party at ease with heavy-handed interventions into private affairs, so long as those interventions are designed to engineer the optimal society.
For example, the event’s keynote speaker, Teamsters’ Union president Sean O’Brien, bombarded convention attendees with attacks on “big banks,” “corporatists,” “big business,” and the corrupt elites who owe their allegiance to “no party” and have “no nation.” The Republican Party’s adoption of conventional Democratic rhetoric seemed to dovetail with Senator J. D. Vance’s debut as the party’s vice-presidential nominee. The Ohio senator’s economic instincts are closer to Elizabeth Warren’s than Paul Ryan’s. It would be easy to conclude that July 15 signaled the dawn of a new era in which America would be dominated by two parties with the same dim view toward the capacity of individuals and private enterprises to manage their own affairs.
Not so, according to Donald Trump. At least, not entirely:
Trump says he reminded the assembled executives that in 2017 he slashed the corporate tax rate “from 39% to 21%” (actually from 35% to 21%) and vowed to push it lower still, to 20%. “They loved it, they were happy,” he recalls. He adds that he wants to cut the rate even lower than that: “I would like to get it down to 15.”
Further cutting the corporate tax rate to spur economic growth doesn’t just conflict with O’Brien’s agitation. It conflicts with Trump’s own devotion to the imagined efficacy of across-the-board tariffs, which he seems wholly convinced will grow the economic pie and generate enough government revenue to finance any and every costly governmental project he envisions. But Trump didn’t just reject his acolytes’ attacks on “corporatism.” He disavowed the attacks on elites — or, rather, those elites who have said nice things about him:
He’s changed his view of the man he attacked on Truth Social last year as “Highly overrated Globalist Jamie Dimon” and now says he could envision Dimon, who’s thought to be contemplating a political career, as his secretary of the Treasury. “He is somebody that I would consider,” Trump says.
As Bloomberg’s reporters note, Trump’s change of tune coincided with Dimon’s remarks to this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos in which the JPMorgan Chase CEO confessed that Trump got a lot right during his first term in office. The former president is unlikely to have undergone an ideological transformation. Rather, he’s responding warmly to a former critic’s conversion. There’s nothing Trump seems to like more than to see an erstwhile detractor bend the knee.
Trump’s inconstancy was on display when Bloomberg’s reporters probed him for his thoughts on the Chinese threat. Trump remains committed to a global trade war, though one that focuses on China as the primary belligerent. “In addition to targeting China for new tariffs of anywhere from 60% to 100%,” Bloomberg’s report read, “he says he’d impose a 10% across-the-board tariff on imports from other countries.” But when it comes to deterring actual hostilities or even countering Chinese information-warfare operations inside the United States, Trump is getting cold feet:
Trump makes it clear that, despite recent bipartisan support for Taiwan, he’s at best lukewarm about standing up to Chinese aggression. Part of his skepticism is grounded in economic resentment. “Taiwan took our chip business from us,” he says. “I mean, how stupid are we? They took all of our chip business. They’re immensely wealthy.” What he wants is for Taiwan to pay the US for protection. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?” he asks.
“Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” the former president observed. “It’s 68 miles away from China.” He declined to finish the thought, but we can. It is not dissimilar from those in his orbit who insist that the U.S. has no permanent interest in Ukraine’s security — or, for that matter, Europe’s — because America’s geographic proximity to both is more than Russia’s. In his heart, we can deduce that Trump doesn’t have the heart to deter conflict in the South China Sea by communicating in no uncertain terms that aggressive action would be met with an overwhelming American response.
Trump is getting squeamish on TikTok, too:
Discussing his recent embrace of the Chinese-owned social media platform, where he’s already quite popular, Trump mentions that banning it in the US would benefit a company and a CEO he has no desire to reward. “Now [that] I’m thinking about it, I’m for TikTok, because you need competition,” he says. “If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram—and that’s, you know, that’s [Mark] Zuckerberg.” It’s an outcome he won’t abide. He’s still stung by Facebook’s decision to bar him indefinitely in the wake of the Jan. 6 attacks. “All of a sudden,” Trump grouses, “I went from No. 1 to having nobody.”
Bloomberg’s speculation that Trump’s warmth toward TikTok is an outgrowth of his hostility toward the Facebook founder, not an informed assessment of the threat posed by the Chinese social-media app. TikTok, we should remember, is banned by law from being downloaded onto mobile devices used by employees of the federal government. It is currently compelled by congressional edict to dissolve its ties with entities linked to the Chinese Communist Party. It would take an act of Congress to undo these sensible measures, but Trump’s power to persuade the members of his party should not be underestimated.
These pivots also conflict with the generally hawkish approach toward China that Trump’s party has taken during its nominating convention. Vivek Ramaswamy name-checked the People’s Republic during his speech to convention attendees, noting that it is a threat that has set out to “defeat us.” Vance has called Beijing “the biggest threat to our country,” which we cannot meet if we also attempt to secure our national interests in Europe. “We need a president who will seal the border, aggressively prosecute drug dealers, and stop Communist China from poisoning our children,” said Anne Fundner, a bereaved mother whose son died of fentanyl poisoning. But if we are to take Trump’s remarks at face value, stopping Communist China begins and ends with sealing up America’s borders and hoping for the best.
The convention’s programming has been designed to appeal to as many ordinary Republicans as possible while slapping a fresh coat of lacquer onto the former president. But it’s all a show. As the better part of the last decade has shown, the policies the Republican Party pursues are those that flow from Donald Trump’s mouth. Americans would be well advised to take the spectacle unfolding in Wisconsin with a grain of salt.