The Trump Effect on Congress

The real danger of Trump isn’t that he might win, it’s that — at least for now — he doesn’t have to.

It isn’t revolutionary to say that Congress isn’t working right now. Approval ratings are near their lowest in history, productivity (measured in number of bills passed) is less than half of what it was during the “Do Nothing Congress” of 90 years ago and it’s become the standard of campaigns to run on a platform of fixing the system and ending the gridlock. And yet, despite the looming possibility of a government shutdown this fall and bitter upcoming fights on education and highway bills, when Congress left for its summer recess it seemed as though there was still room for bipartisan achievement on a host of issues. Criminal justice reform, after being endorsed by the Koch brothers earlier this summer, has become as much a Republican talking point as it is a Democratic one. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, championed by the President but lampooned by the Democratic caucus, seemed a rare opportunity for Republicans to back Obama on a major legacy achievement, indeed the largest free trade agreement in world history. And prospects looked good for a reconciled version of the Senate’s bipartisan-passed No Child Left Behind rewrite law.

Donald Trump, however, as Michael Grunwald detailed earlier this month in Politico, has single-handedly created a legitimate risk by his brand of tougher-than-thou, nuance-free populism that affects action on all these possible achievements. His bombastic, made-for-reality-TV approach to campaigning — too often written off or laughed at — should instead be cause for legitimate fear among Republicans and Democrats alike. To compete for airtime against a man who says he would lock up criminals “so fast your head would spin,” other Republicans, both running for President and in the Congress, are having to double down on the predictable “tough on crime” white identity politics of previous generations that seemed like they were going away.

This isn’t just an issue that could kill major criminal justice reform efforts that liberals have pursued for years. Conservatives, too, should be worried about the “Trump Effect” on Congress going into the fall. Because as long as he’s the Republican front-runner, their party’s anti-tax, pro-free trade platform will come under constant assault. Trump’s populism is formidable in that it isn’t constrained by ideology — a fierce conservative on immigration, he is also playing to the crowd on taxing the rich, reforming Wall Street and killing the President’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, all of which sound like pages ripped right from the Democratic Caucus’ talking points. The people who support Trump are as fed up with elite trickle-down Republicans like Jeb Bush just as much as they are with immigrants, China and others. A climate in which the leading Republican says that a trade deal supported by most Republicans is “so weak and pathetic,” and is just another example of the President’s softness towards China, will back congressional Republicans into an extremely difficult corner. As Grunwald says, Trump is going “full populist,” no matter what Republican leaders want, which would likely force lawmakers to choose between “wealthy donors and an angry base,” a demographic which has propelled them into the leadership of both Houses.

Those of us who watched the debate last week saw first-hand just how cavalier — and often improvised — Trump’s positions are. He somehow managed to avoid getting booed when talking about raising taxes on the rich, cutting Social Security benefits for billionaires, and being friends with Hillary Clinton. It’s surely hard to imagine another candidate who could pull that off. Trump has a total disregard for Republican orthodoxy, and is guided only by self-confidence and ego. It was almost painful to watch the ensuing scramble that caused among the other candidates, trying to one-up him or (failingly, in the case of Jeb Bush) fighting back against incredible or sometimes factually nonsensical assertions.

The “can-you-top-this dynamic” that defines the Trump candidacy will inevitably bleed over into the House and Senate as it has already done into other campaigns (for instance, Ben Carson saying he would use drone strikes on the Mexican border and Jeb Bush saying he would go to Trump’s right on criminal justice), which could only spell disaster for what looked to be a (somewhat) productive fall on the Hill. The House Freedom Caucus — a group to the right of the Tea Party which is trying to unseat John Boehner as Speaker — for instance, is refusing to vote for any budget that funds Planned Parenthood, one-upping the Speaker and Senate Majority Leader in an obviously futile fight they’re sure to lose. But that’s OK, according to the new MO caused by Trump’s campaign, because all that matters is the airtime and the braggadocio.

Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School Major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.