Trump Is Not Different

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, May 22, 2025

 

The House of Representatives has passed the “big beautiful bill” (BBB). It will now travel down the assembly line to the Senate, where, in all likelihood, it will remain mostly intact.

 

This is disappointing news, for the BBB — could we perhaps stop calling omnibus legislation “BBB”? — is not a good law. It undoes much of what was good about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It includes a bailout for blue states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. It declines to effect a full repeal of the disastrous and dishonest “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022. And, above all else, it fails to cut spending. As a result of its changes, the nation’s tax code will become more dysfunctional, our federal deficits will grow yet bigger, and our already-spiraling national debt will continue to mount indefinitely.

 

To those who point out these shortcomings, an exasperated rejoinder is offered. “But,” the bill’s apologists will say, “given the nature of the party’s coalition, and the narrow majorities that it enjoys in Congress, this is really all that the GOP could do.”

 

This, in part, is true. But it is also extremely annoying to hear, given that, for nearly a decade now, Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP has been explained and defended on the grounds that only he could put an end to the “failure” of the “establishment” to “fight.” Ask any MAGA-splainer for an account of the pre-Trump Republican Party, and you will be told some variation of the same tale: That, for decades, the GOP was run by a bunch of lily-livered, cocktail-party-loving moderates, who, despite saying all the right things come election season, invariably refused to make good on their promises. Sure, those people talked about cutting spending and repealing Obamacare and reforming welfare and limiting the ability of the progressive-run blue states to use the Treasury to prop up their failed models. But, when it came to it, they never actually delivered — and, worse still, they reserved the worst of their opprobrium for the right-wing hardliners who were trying to engender change. This being so, they ask, can it really be any surprise that Donald Trump was selected as a corrective?

 

I have never found this narrative persuasive. But now? Now, I think it’s a bad joke. Throughout the process that led to the House’s passage of the BBB, the Trump-led GOP has behaved in precisely the same manner as did the old guard that it claims to disdain. In his recent address to Congress, Trump promised that, “in the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget.” And yet, just two months later, Trump did exactly the opposite, demanding the passage of a bill that massively increases our annual budget deficits, instructing Congress not to “f*** around with” Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, proposing all manner of arbitrary and frivolous giveaways, and publicly attacking the handful of concerned Republicans who are serious about fiscal discipline.

 

As a realist, I am open to the argument that the GOP had no alternative but to take this course. I am not, however, receptive to the case that Trump ought to be judged differently than was everyone who came before him. Politics is real; but it was not invented yesterday. Coalitions need management; but that has been true from the dawn of time. Electoral math is determinative; but its axioms do not change depending on who is at the top of the ticket.

 

In 2013, I watched with bemusement as the wing of the party that eventually glommed onto Trump insisted that, from their position within the minority, the Republicans must force President Barack Obama to repeal his entire presidency. Back then, anyone who thought that this would not work was called a “RINO,” a stooge for the “GOPe,” or a weakling, and accused of yearning for a squishy “uniparty” that did not desire reform. Today, by bizarre contrast, the quickest way to be tarred with such labels is to criticize the Republicans for not using their full control of the federal government to pass the same conservative policies that were once treated as compulsory. This is ridiculous. A fair conclusion to draw from the contents of the Republicans’ “big beautiful bill” is that the American right still does not have the votes — or the public support — to pass meaningful reform, and that, political gravity being what it is, this unfortunate fact has now beleaguered Donald Trump in the same way as it beleaguered his predecessors. An unfair conclusion to draw is that Donald Trump is pure and inspired and irreproachable and unique, and that, if even he has failed to bring about what others could not, politics must work differently now than it once did. That is special pleading.

 

Amid the final negotiations over BBB, Trump told reporters that he was “a bigger fiscal hawk” than his critics, before concluding that “there’s nobody like me.” Neither of these claims is true. Trump is in no sense a fiscal hawk, and there are, in fact, hundreds upon hundreds of politicians just like him — who, having presented themselves as the saviors who would finally break through the lines, have failed in exactly the same manner, and for exactly the same reasons as before.