Thursday

March 28th, 2024

National

Ryan becomes latest conservative to bet he can bend Trump to his own policy agenda

Jim Tankersley

By Jim Tankersley The Washington Post

Published June 3, 2016

WASHINGTON --- Paul Ryan has made very clear what he would do if he ran Washington. Donald Trump has not. That is both the opportunity and the danger that Ryan, the Speaker of the House, embraced on Thursday when he endorsed Trump for president.

Ryan has spent more than a decade in Congress laying out plans to cut tax rates, including for top earners and corporations; to slash federal spending, including the near-complete elimination of federal programs outside of the military and safety-net programs such as Medicare and Social Security; and to overhaul government services for the poor, to reduce the amount spent upon them and attempt to encourage more people to work their way out of poverty. He favors free trade and has in the past supported immigration reform, though he has vowed not to bring the issue to a vote under President Barack Obama.

Trump has spent the past year, as a candidate for president, laying out a few core policy proposals - and then waffling or obfuscating on large swaths of his agenda. In just one example, he has alternatively promised to pay off the entire federal debt within eight years; to refinance the debt in ways that many experts worry would undermine America's credibility with its creditors; and to take on more debt in order to increase federal spending on infrastructure.

None of those positions is Ryan's position. Which one would be Trump's as president is anyone's guess.

There are other areas where the men clearly disagree.

Trump repeatedly promises to deport the 11 million Americans who are living here illegally; Ryan would not. Trump wants to slap tariffs on China, Mexico and other trading partners in hopes of bringing outsourced manufacturing jobs back to America, which is a direct attack on Ryan's support for lower tariffs and freer trade.

Trump has promised not to touch Social Security or Medicare. His tax plan includes rate reductions for the middle class that far exceed Ryan's past proposals, and which independent analyses suggest would swell the federal budget deficit far more than Ryan's would.

Ryan is betting those differences pale in comparison to the policy areas where he and Trump appear likely to find common ground. He laid out several of those in his column effectively endorsing Trump. They include rolling back federal regulations in areas such as the environment and financial services, repealing Obama's signature health care law and replacing it with a more conservative alternative and, of course, cutting taxes.

The speaker also appears to be calculating that, by backing Trump now, he can increase his role in filling in the blanks - or stopping the spinning wheel - in the GOP nominee's policy agenda. (It is, of course, hard to see how much leverage Ryan really would have had if he did not endorse and Trump had won.)

As researchers at the financial firm Nomura pointed out in a note to investors this week, the "issues" section of Trump's website lists only seven topics, and his plans total just 9,000 words. "In contrast," the researchers wrote, "at roughly this point during the campaign in 2000, Governor George W. Bush published a 450-page book of speeches offering detailed policy proposals on everything from education to tax reform to the environment to trade and Social Security."

The researchers also note that Trump has few discernible policy advisers, particularly on economics; that he has often characterized his existing proposals as starting points for negotiation; and that his fondness for deal-making, as an end to itself, raising the uncertainty over which plans Trump would champion to the end and which he would abandon.

Ryan's best hope, with his endorsement, is that he is positioning a Republican Congress to send its preferred bills - the Ryan agenda, or big chunks of it - to Trump, and that Trump would sign them. His worst fear is that Trump drives the agenda far from Ryan's blueprint, toward higher deficits, more spending, protectionist trade policies and a federal safety net that is largely unchanged from what it looks like today.

House Republicans, Ryan writes in his endorsement column, are "offering a bold policy agenda, by offering a better way ahead. Donald Trump can help us make it a reality."

Trump could just as easily say the opposite - he will drive the agenda, the House will help make it reality.

Which seems more likely?


Previously:
05/05/16: Donald Trump's America: In his own words
05/02/16: Cruz's pick of Fiorina shows why Trump's rivals still haven't stopped him
03/28/16: A Trump trade war could cost the US millions of jobs, an analysis suggests
03/17/16: Republicans had a plan for the middle class, and Donald Trump killed it
02/25/16: There's a very good reason for Rubio and Cruz not to destroy Trump
02/16/16: The economist who vouched for Bernie Sanders' big liberal plans is voting for Hillary
10/23/15: Paul Ryan isn't a hypocrite on family time

Comment by clicking here.

Tankersley covers economic policy for The Washington Post. He's from Oregon, and he misses it.

Columnists

Toons