President Trump entered the political scene in 2015 without much of a grounding in conservatism.
In an earlier life, Trump had been adamantly pro-choice, to the point of backing partial-birth abortion. He supported gun control and tax increases. And he pointed to Canada’s socialist healthcare system as a “prototype” we should emulate.
Even during the 2016 election, he maintained some positions that were outside of the conservative orthodoxy. He said the government should provide healthcare for everybody and negotiate drug prices, said the minimum wage should be higher, signaled openness to higher taxes on the wealthy, and repeatedly promised massive infrastructure spending.
In practice, aside from being more protectionist on trade and taking a harder line on immigration, Trump largely abandoned these stances in office and pursued mostly conventional conservative policies.
He ended up being arguably the most pro-life president ever and avoided gun control in the face of high-profile mass shootings. He fought unsuccessfully to repeal Obamacare, but pursued regulatory reform to open up markets in areas such as short-term and association health plans. He did not try to get Medicare to negotiate prices directly with drugmakers. His tax reform, which lowered taxes on nearly everybody, brought down marginal rates, including on the wealthy. It was something that easily could have been signed by Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney.
Why did this end up happening? Some of this is likely specific to Trump — both fact that he was a blank slate on many policy issues and his sense that he wanted to take care of “his people” and deliver on his promises to them. But he certainly could have sold “his people” on lots of new infrastructure spending, a more populist tax bill, and an assault on Big Pharma, as well as other unconventionally Republican policy proposals.
In reality, however, Trump ended up being forced to govern by the coalition and political infrastructure that made up his team.
That is, Trump’s side included gun rights groups and pro-life organizations. It included business-oriented Republicans who were against taxing the wealthy or prescription drug negotiation. And it included small-government types who were skeptical of trillion-dollar infrastructure bills. He signed the tax reform package that was able to clear the GOP Congress. And when Trump had to staff up his administration, it was inevitable that he’d be drawing from various conservative think tanks and activist groups.
This is why I think that Joe Biden would largely govern to the Left. It’s true that he would come into office with nearly a half-century in politics and a much more well-defined political philosophy than Trump. But like Trump, he will come into office with a coalition, with a set of people he’ll need to govern and constraints put on what he can get through Congress. What can’t pass through Congress will be done through executive actions drafted by political appointees.
In the mirror image of Trump, he’ll be influenced by unions, pro-abortion groups, climate activists, government healthcare advocates, anti-gun lobbyists, social justice activists, and so on. He may appoint various older and traditionally liberal advisers, but he’s inevitably going to be filling out the staffing of his administration with young liberal and left-wing activists.
He ran in the primary as an Obama-Biden Democrat, but he’ll essentially reflect the current Democratic Party, which is to the left of where it was under Obama. He has already had to make a number of nods or accommodations to the Left.
Early in his candidacy, he abandoned his long-standing opposition to taxpayer funding for abortions and said he now believes abortions should be covered by Medicaid. Long an institutionalist who boasted of his bipartisan record, he has floated the idea of nuking the filibuster to get the liberal agenda passed. And he has gotten closer and closer to embracing the “Green New Deal.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who served as a Bernie Sanders surrogate and is one of the most liberal members of the House, recently argued that using the Biden campaign task forces as a way to get him to embrace more left-wing policies was a preview of how progressives would pressure Biden once he’s president. “I will be pushing him,” Jayapal told Comedy Central host Trevor Noah. “As soon as we get him in the White House and even before with these task forces that we had, we were able to significantly push Joe Biden to do things that he hadn’t signed on to before. So he is movable.”
The way modern politics works, there is not much room for “triangulation” once in office. Biden’s administration will be pushed by a coalition of liberal special interest groups, his administration will be staffed by many left-wing activists, and he’ll have to pass legislation through Congress with the votes of those on the Left. That’s why, in the current political environment, a vote in a presidential election is as much a vote for the coalition that a candidate is bringing into office as it is a vote for the candidate himself.
