Donald Trump’s blistering attacks on trade deals with Mexico and China, regardless of how simplistic and distorted, have placed House Speaker Paul Ryan in an awkward spot, in part because of his own entrenched “free-trade” beliefs-and those of the Republican donor class he has so skillfully cultivated.
But Ryan’s position is most precarious because if he harbors ambitions for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination, he wants to avoid alienating the supporters of Donald Trump, whom, despite mounting criticism of his support for the New Yorker, he has continued to endorse. To balance his own fiercely held convictions on “free trade” and austerity policies with Trump’s contradictory economic direction, Ryan has been going through a remarkable set of contortions recently.
On August 9, during a visit to his economically declining southeastern Wisconsin district, Ryan made a carefully calculated concession to Trump’s anti-“free trade” position by reversing himself and coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership on vague technical grounds. (Around the same time, Trump made a long-delayed, pro forma endorsement of Ryan.)
But statements like Ryan’s qualified comments on the TPP are likely to have little impact on bridging the yawning canyon between the party’s donor class and a suddenly assertive base of blue-collar and small-business voters mobilized by Trump. This gap seems certain to persist far beyond November, with or without Trump’s leadership.
As Nicholas Confessore of The New York Times memorably recounts, in the long-smoldering conflict within the GOP, the “party elite … abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty. … From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country … disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders.”
“The American middle class is losing ground, no longer the majority and falling behind financially,” a Pew report grimly concluded. Finding their earnings stagnant or declining and anxious about job security, many non-college educated people are no longer content with the Republicans’ traditional economic agenda, which has combined unregulated offshoring of U.S. jobs, tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and cuts in vitally needed “entitlement” programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Ryan himself has played a highly visible role as the most outspoken advocate for shaping Republican agendas in this mold. “His ‘Ryan budgets,’ which called for large income tax cuts for the wealthy, lower taxes on capital gains, and the shifting of Medicare to a voucher system, became the gold standard for Republican policy, and drew plaudits from big donors for their seriousness and depth,” Confessore notes. Liberals, however, castigated Ryan’s budgets for their ruthless cuts to social programs like food stamps, and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman dismissed him as a “con man” for his failure to make even rudimentary
