Chris Carlson/AP Photo
There’s no official GOP platform this year, and featured policy achievements are insubstantial.
My two cents on Republican messaging won’t buy you much. But in my view, the party’s convention has been effective, at least for the constituencies the GOP wants to reach. Whether those constituencies are enough to win a national election is questionable, but they’re out there and they’re real.
Convention speakers have seeded enough talk about the impending socialist destruction of our way of life, with a dash of effete know-it-all liberals talking down to real Americans, to flatter their base. But they’ve also given right-leaning fence-sitters who don’t really like Trump enough cover to vote for him. The cover comes in two forms: showing enough diverse faces to convince these voters they’re part of a multicultural party (looking just at the race and ethnicity of current elected officials who spoke on the first two nights, the GOP is 41.7 percent nonwhite), and offering up just enough policies that evince a modicum of compassion for the “forgotten men and women” of the country.
Just as the handful of nonwhite politicians on stage masks the monochromatic nature of the Republican Party, and is intended to allow voters to absolve them of guilt, the delicately selected policies highlighted at the convention are an exercise in deception. If you went just by the convention rhetoric, you would think that the GOP is a party mostly concerned about rolling back criminal justice abuses, healing the terminally ill, and giving the poor a shot at success. It creates a kind of whiplash, as the primary policy content being relayed to a national audience is so disconnected from the animating agenda of this and every Republican administration of the past 40 years: tax cuts and deregulation at home, belligerence abroad. The major policy innovation of the Trump era—racism disguised as immigration policy—does not alter the strangeness of the policy shout-outs on display.
It’s worth detailing this policy menu, so its smallness can be fully understood. This is what America has heard as the Republican agenda this week:
Opportunity zones: Numerous convention speakers, most particularly Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), have cited opportunity zones as a critical feature for urban renewal. You would think that the entire $1.9 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went toward this investment strategy, rather than the $7.7 billion over five years that the opportunity zones portion is estimated to provide.
So what are opportunity zones? They are a tax shelter for rich people to get breaks on their capital gains taxes if they invest in development in low-income areas. It’s an idea that’s been around since the days of Jack Kemp, and they work primarily to enrich wealthy investors rather than benefit downtrodden communities.
The Trump-era iteration has followed exactly that script, with most of the money going toward large-scale real estate projects that would likely be built anyway. The Urban Institute found in June that, because these investors want a return, they tend not to put the opportunity zone money into affordable housing or local businesses or other community improvements. And the areas selected to be listed as opportunity zones are often rapidly gentrifying areas that don’t fit the profile of lifting up poor neighborhoods: one opportunity zone was set in a yacht marina in Florida.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was primarily about cutting corporate taxes by 40 percent and enriching the wealthy. Opportunity zones actually serve that purpose.
Right to Try: Rather than focusing on the party’s still ongoing effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the main health care message at the convention has been about “right to try,” which allows terminal patients access to medical treatments that have yet to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This is a libertarian law, passed in May 2018, that is part of a larger effort to demonize the FDA for an overstated “backlog” of drug approvals, with an eye toward sacrificing public safety entirely. You know it’s more about an argument than a real policy when you learn that, a year into its passage, no more than a handful of patients had actually gotten access to treatment. Furthermore, the FDA told Congress in 2017 that they “approved 99 percent of patient requests” for right to try.
Drug companies have been the primary obstacle to terminally ill patients securing treatment because, since they can’t overcharge patients under the law, they are reluctant to hand the drugs over. This is consistent with drug companies being undeterred in the drive for profit. Despite boasts from President Trump, drug prices are higher now than they were in 2016. He’s done essentially nothing to slow or stop their rise.
The primary policy content being relayed to a national audience is so disconnected from the animating agenda of this and every Republican administration of the past 40 years.
Telehealth: Another health care plank touted at the convention has been Trump’s order to allow hospital providers to be covered under federal health programs for telemedicine consultations. During the pandemic, this was incredibly necessary. It’s also a solution to the problem of rural hospital closures that has been ongoing for years and grown worse under Trump. Nineteen rural hospitals closed last year, the most during this decade. States that haven’t accepted the Medicaid expansion, all of which went for Trump, have fared much worse with rural hospitals. Giving somebody access to a doctor over the internet is fine, but an actual hospital would be better, and the government has yet to deal with the real causes of the crisis: regional inequality, private equity purchase of hospital networks, and corporatization of health care.
Help for farmers: On night two, a dairy farmer from Wisconsin lauded Trump’s concern for family farms. Yet Trump’s own agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, told a Wisconsin farmer at the World Dairy Expo just last October, “In America the big get bigger and the small go out. I don’t think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.”
His policies have backed up that bigger-is-better viewpoint. Trade wars with China left grain and soybeans rotting in the fields. In the massive bailout Trump gave to farmers to cover up his own policies, over half went to the richest 10 percent of farmers. Assistance for corn growers was a mere penny per bushel.
As well, Perdue dissolved the agency that protects family farmers from Big Ag repression, known as the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA). Milk prices have collapsed since Trump came into office; dairy companies now send farmers suicide hotline information in their weekly checks. If any real assistance for family farmers has ever been offered, it’s hard to spot.
The First Step Act: When not lauding cops at a time of insidious police brutality and demanding law and order, convention speakers praised Trump for setting inmates free, dramatized by a live pardon on night two. The First Step Act, which freed several thousand federal inmates, is often name-checked. This bipartisan bill included a number of sentencing and re-entry reforms and other recidivism-reducing activities. But how the First Step Act has been handled during the pandemic is perhaps a window into the hollowness of the commitment.
In April, Attorney General William Barr issued a memo calling for the compassionate release of prisoners at risk of infection from COVID-19. Months later, almost nobody has been released, despite 1,000 deaths in prisons and jails from the virus. Meanwhile, the federal government has scheduled several executions, the first in federal cases since 2003. On top of closing investigations into local police departments and facilitating their receipt of military equipment, the idea that Trump is a criminal justice champion appears … out of step.
OVER THE YEARS, the Democrats have had a mixed record on these issues, but they haven’t cherry-picked tiny parts of their agenda for a national viewing public as a strategy to hide the real policy aims. The Republicans decided not to compose a platform this year, instead releasing 50 bullet points from the Trump campaign, which mostly don’t mention the above policies and some of which directly contradict them (their opposition to ending cash bail, for example).
It’s not as if the real Republican agenda is well hidden. The only major legislative action in Trump’s first term was a giant tax cut on corporations and the rich. The most wide-reaching bipartisan bill was bank deregulation, matched by a broad deregulatory assault within executive branch agencies. Immigrants, including legal ones, basically cannot get into the United States anymore, and this is the animating principle of the Trump era. Everyone who’s been following along every day—with the single exception of the days of the GOP convention—knows this to be true.
And in brief moments, the mask slips. “Lifelong Democrat” Bob Vlaisavljevich, the mayor of Eveleth, Minnesota, endorsed Trump at the convention on Tuesday. He comes from the Iron Range, an ancient Democratic area that has been devastated by neoliberal trade policies that bolstered Chinese manufacturing. So what did this small-town mayor say drove his support for Trump? “Cutting our taxes” and “rolling back senseless regulations,” while fighting “the radical environmental movement dragging Democrats to the left.”
Opportunity zones didn’t get a mention.
