Republicans Sabotage Their Own Cover Story
They're about to expose their one politically safe "defense" of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and "DOGE" as a scam.
Over the past few years, we’ve graduated from a political discourse dominated by Republican bad faith about budgets, deficits, debt, and taxes to one dominated by Republican bad faith about everything.
But the good old days are back.
Kind of…
For a generation or more, the Republican modus operandi was to run up huge federal deficits under GOP presidents, lose power, then have some find-Jesus moment and start pretending to care about fiscal responsibility. Easy money while they’re in charge, austere budgets for Democrats. When, under this paradigm, Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a rare budget surplus, Republicans got fast to work squandering it on enormous tax cuts for the rich and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The moment Barack Obama came to power, Republicans switched masks again: They morphed into eccentric scolds who claimed to care about deficits but also insisted taxes must never increase.
And for a time it worked. The national political media swallowed the schtick whole. From 2009-2017, most reporters flushed their memories of the Bush years, and treated the GOP commitment to “fiscal responsibility” as deeply ingrained. In their defense they weren’t the only ones who played patsy. Obama and congressional Democrats did, too, at least in the early days, thinking they could break the GOP’s anti-tax streak and be rewarded politically for striking a bipartisan “grand bargain” of phased in tax increases and spending cuts. A misreading of Republican fanaticism, economic necessity, and public opinion.
Republicans pulled the switcheroo again on January 20, 2017. They didn’t inherit surpluses from Obama—not after saddling him with the Great Recession—but after eight years, the economy was in good shape, and deficits down to sustainable levels. Trump obliterated his inheritance within one year on a multi-trillion dollar corporate tax cut, and higher discretionary spending. He called himself the “king of debt.” By 2019—that is, even before COVID-19—he’d generated the country’s first-ever boom-times trillion dollar deficit.
The mismatch between the GOP’s Paul Ryan-era rhetoric and the governing reality of Speaker Paul Ryan working on behalf of Donald Trump did actually make an impression on reporters, and on the GOP itself. Republicans threw all manner of bad-faith nonsense at Joe Biden, but they didn’t really revive their staged hyperventilating about deficits. The rhetoric of fiscal responsibility didn’t factor heavily into the politics of the Biden era at all.
Now that Trump’s back, though, something interesting is happening. Republicans are once again testing whether the press corps can keep track of what’s real and what’s make believe. They’ve mounted an insincere defense of Trump’s lawless assault on his own government by claiming the high ground of fiscal-responsibility—while simultaneously embracing a multi-trillion dollar tax cut for the rich. The only difference between then and now is they’re striking the false pose of the budget hawk while they’re in power, making the hustle unusually clear.
BOTTOM LAWLER
I suspect that on the day they were sworn in almost two months ago, most congressional Republicans expected our relative indifference to fiscal politics would continue. Trump would be inaugurated, he’d wet his beak as usual, and then they’d get to work (also as usual) on a huge, deficit increasing tax cut—paired possibly with smaller cuts to health care and food stamps—without generating a bunch of questions about their principles or how these tax cuts would affect interest rates and inflation.
Events had something else in store.