Trump’s Second Term Agenda Revealed, Sort Of

By Yuval Rosenberg

Trump’s Second Term Agenda Revealed ... Sort Of

It’s President Trump’s party now. Yes, we’re referring to this
week’s Republican National Convention, where Trump formally was
renominated on Monday to take on Joe Biden in November’s
presidential election. But we’re also referring to the Republican
Party itself, which chose
not to adopt a new platform for 2020 and instead
over the weekend passed a
resolution saying that it “has and will continue
to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first
agenda.”

What’s on that agenda for the next four years? Trump has

struggled repeatedly to answer questions about
what he wants to accomplish if given a second term, but his
campaign on Sunday released a bullet-pointed list of
50 “core priorities” under the banner “Fighting
for You!” Even for a PowerPoint era, the lack of detail was
glaring, though the campaign said that Trump would provide some
additional details in speeches over the coming weeks.

Some examples of the big promises on Trump’s list:

  • Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months
  • Create 1 Million New Small Businesses
  • Cut Taxes to Boost Take-Home Pay and Keep Jobs in America
  • Develop a [Covid-19] Vaccine by The End Of 2020
  • Return to Normal in 2021
  • Make All Critical Medicines and Supplies for Healthcare Workers
    in The United States
  • Cut Prescription Drug Prices
  • Lower Healthcare Insurance Premiums
  • End Surprise Billing
  • Cover All Pre-Existing Conditions
  • Protect Social Security and Medicare
  • Teach American Exceptionalism
  • Pass Congressional Term Limits
  • Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home

The Republican National Committee resolution said that
“the media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the
RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020.” Here’s some of what they
had to say:


The Washington Post Editorial Board: “The
Republicans are announcing that they stand for nothing. The party’s
only reason for being is to gain and retain power for itself and
its comparably unprincipled leader. … Many of the party’s senators
and other leaders used to have principles, or at least claimed to.
They believed in fiscal rectitude, free trade, limited executive
power. Now they have fallen in line behind a president who believes
in none of that. So, are they the party of managed trade, unbridled
presidential power, unlimited debt? No one wants to say that.
Instead, they define themselves as the party of Donald J.
Trump.”


Politico’s Tim Alberta: “It can now safely be
said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure,
that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of
personality. … Everyone understands that Trump is a big-picture
sloganeer—‘Build the wall!’ ‘Make America Great Again!’—rather than
a policy aficionado. Even so, it’s astonishing how conceptually
lifeless the party has become on his watch. There is no blueprint
to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There
is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There
is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution
to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the
cost of housing or childcare or college tuition. None of the
erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and
Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to
Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived
as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to
repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no
plan to replace it.”


Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein: “So Trump is
supposedly going to produce 10 million new jobs in 10 months, but
there’s nothing — really, nothing at all — about how to fulfill
that promise. Same with a million new small businesses. The
president plans to ‘Build the World’s Greatest Infrastructure
System,’ which sounds nice, but given that he’s been promising the
same thing for almost four years and hasn’t yet sent a bill to
Capitol Hill, some might find it hard to take it seriously. ‘Wipe
Out Global Terrorists’ also seems ambitious, but the plan contains
nothing about how it would be done in practice or how it squares
with the promise to ‘Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops
Home.’”


The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman: “The truth is
that the resolution more clearly describes today’s Republicans.
They have some things they want to do, sure — cut taxes, gut
environmental regulations, restrict abortion rights — but mostly,
what unites the party is that they hate Democrats and they worship
Trump. That’s about all you need to know.”

Just 31% of Americans Approve of Trump’s Handling of
Pandemic

Republican officials from President Trump on down say they’ll
deliver an “uplifting and
positive” message at their convention this week. Take
that forecast with a heaping dose of salt – you can expect plenty
of negative attacks this week; Trump
made several in remarks to the convention Monday
after formally securing the GOP nomination.

“What they’re doing is using COVID to steal an election,” Trump
said of Democrats. “They’re using COVID to defraud the American
people — all of our people — of a fair and free election.”

The problem for Republicans, as NBC News’s Shannon Pettypiece

notes, is that “selling a success story to an
electorate where the vast majority believe the country on the
wrong
track may be a heavy lift.”

A
new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for
Public Affairs Research highlights the challenge. Overall, the poll
finds, just 31% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the
coronavirus pandemic, while 68% disapprove. (After failing to
deliver another coronavirus relief package this month, Congress
fares even worse, as just 13% approve of how “leaders in Congress”
are handling the pandemic, while 65% disapprove, up 7 percentage
points from July.)

Even among Republicans, approval of how the federal government
is handling the virus is at just 43%, high only in comparison to
the 10% approval among Democrats.

Growing majorities of Americans now say that the government
isn’t doing enough to help individuals, small businesses or public
schools. And just 23% think the country is heading in the right
direction, compared to 75% who say it’s on the wrong path.

The poll of 1,075 adults was conducted August 17 to 19. It
has a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points.

Quote of the Day: Biden Talks Tax Hikes

“I will raise taxes for anybody making over $400,000. Let me
tell you why I’m going to do it. It’s about time they start paying
a fair share of the economic responsibility we have. The very
wealthy should pay a fair share. Corporations should pay a fair
share. The fact is, there are corporations making close to a
trillion dollars and paying no tax at all. I’m not punishing
anybody. This is about everybody paying their fair share.”

– Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, in an

interview with ABC News’s David Muir. Biden also
said that “there will be no raising taxes” on businesses that
employ less than 50 people.

The House Approved $25 Billion for USPS, but Senate Has No
Plans to Vote on Bill

The House passed a bill Saturday that would provide $25 billion
to support U.S. Postal Service operations and prevent the agency
from making a variety of operational changes in the run-up to the
election.

The vote was largely along party lines, although 26 Republicans
crossed the aisle to support the measure, defying GOP leadership
and President Trump, who had encouraged lawmakers to oppose the
bill in support of his effort to delegitimize mail-in voting.

A mail slowdown: The bill, which received a vote during a
rare Saturday session by representatives called back to Washington
from their summer break, comes amid charges from Democrats that the
Trump administration is intentionally sabotaging the mail system,
both for short-term political gain ahead of an election that is
expected to involve record levels of mail-in voting and as part of
a longer-term, ideologically-driven effort to privatize the postal
service.

Whatever the motivation — Postmaster General Louis DeJoy says he
simply wants to increase efficiency and improve the agency’s
finances — the USPS has made a series of operational changes in
recent months, including a reduction in overtime hours for postal
workers and the removal of sorting machines and mailboxes. There
have been reports of a slowdown in mail delivery in the wake of
these changes, and on Saturday the House Oversight Committee
released internal USPS communications that documented recent delays
in first-class mail.

Postmaster General says no thanks: DeJoy, a wealthy Trump
donor who assumed his position as Postmaster General in June, told
the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
Friday that he doesn’t want the funds that the bill would provide,
despite the fact that the Postal Service Board of Governors had
requested that amount earlier this year. “If we just throw $25
billion at us this year and we don’t do anything, we’ll be back in
two years,” DeJoy said.

What’s next for the USPS: The White
House threated to veto the bill last week, and Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he does not plan to take it up in the
Senate. While the bill has virtually no chance of becoming law,
additional funds for the USPS could play a role in the stalled
negotiations over the next coronavirus relief bill.

Op-Ed of the Day: A Major Problem for the $26.5 Trillion
National Debt

The national debt is rapidly running higher as Congress spends
trillions on coronavirus relief efforts, but James Clark, the
deputy assistant secretary for federal finance in the Treasury
Department during the Obama administration, says there are more
serious issues than the cost of servicing what is now $26.5
trillion worth of U.S. debt.

Writing at Bloomberg Monday, Clark says that the most pressing
issue for the debt is more political than financial. In his
experience managing the nation’s public finances, the major
purchasers of Treasury offerings typically have been more concerned
about the health of the U.S. political system than the ability of
the country to make its payments, since the former defines the
latter:

“When my team and I met with the biggest buyers of U.S. debt,
our conversations centered on the way in which our government
functioned. The cost of servicing the debt and the structure of our
portfolio took a back seat to questions about how our government
operated. After the debt limit crisis’ of 2013 and 2015, our
creditors focused almost exclusively on how we would correct a
problematic system that turned fulfilling our financial commitments
into a domestic political bargaining chip.”

Clark says that debt investors were also interested in how the
U.S. spends its public funds: “Repairing the damage from the 2008
financial crisis, buttressing housing, building infrastructure and
expanding access to healthcare were rightly understood by our
creditors to pay dividends over the long haul,” he says, and
confidence in the U.S. spending wisely and competently has a lot to
do with the low interest rates the U.S. pays on its debt.

While this interest in the political underpinning of debt
issuance has worked in the country’s favor over the last few
decades, current political conditions are making some observers
worry about what comes next:

“Creditors’ confidence in the U.S. government is being tested
on an almost daily basis. President Donald Trump’s tax cuts were
supposed to ‘pay for themselves’ and help the middle class, but
cost $1.9 trillion and contributed to greater income inequality.
Although a few cases of fraud have been uncovered, the full extent
of fraud and misuse of funds within the Paycheck Protection Program
is unknown, as the vast majority of the recipient names have not
been released.”

Clark warns that the corrosive political polarization the U.S.
is experiencing, along with the degradation of public services, is
likely a greater threat to the country’s standing than the growing
debt: “Rebuilding confidence in our democratic institutions and
transparently demonstrating that any stimulus package is used
productively is the best way to ensure the sustainability of our
national debt, no matter its size.”


Read Clark’s full op-ed here.

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