Trump's economic team is on a collision course with reality

Making the budget math work is really hard

Many of Donald Trump’s appointments reflect the highly personalistic nature of his politics. His health team thus far features a mix of wildly under-qualified individuals (RFK Jr.), people with impeccable credentials (Jay Bhattacharya), and others who are somewhere in between (Dr. Oz). But they’re all pretty eccentric, and it’s not clear that they really have a unified view on major public policy questions. I have no idea what any of these guys think about Medicaid, for example. The only thing they really have in common is that they backed Trump in his disagreements with the public health establishment over the Covid pandemic.

The national security team is even more all over the map, ranging from conventional GOP hawk Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to possible Russian intelligence asset Tulsi Gabbard as DNI.

All of these people have decided to pretend to believe that Trump agrees with them on key issues, so they’ll work for him and hope for the best in terms of influencing policy. That’s an attitude that even clearly extends to his Vice President and heir apparent J.D. Vance, who (like Rubio) called Trump a huckster and a scammer, but eventually decided that Trump is a really effective huckster and scammer, so he should jump on the bandwagon and try to wield influence from the inside.

As Charlotte Swasey writes, while many people find this incoherent and egomaniacal approach to politics off-putting, it has a lot of genuine electoral upside for the GOP: “By forcing Republicans to embrace his weird, self interested, quasi-populist brand, he’s expanded their appeal across the electorate and made them tolerate more heterodoxy.” You might get canceled in GOP circles for saying it’s bad that Republicans now have one sexual assaulter in the Oval Office and another in charge of the Defense Department. But you’re allowed to believe basically anything about substantive public policy and remain a MAGA foot soldier in good standing, as long as you’ll say that Trump is a good guy, persecuted by “elites” and “the establishment.” The selection of random flunkies to run agencies like Agriculture, Justice, Housing, and Transportation is consistent with that — these are just Trump loyalists, nobody knows or cares what Brooke Rollins thinks about agricultural policy.

The big exception is the economic team, where Trump seems to have sweated his choices and where most of the players are big names.

This team is more substantively impressive than his other picks, and financial markets have (so far) greeted Trump fairly enthusiastically as a pro-business Republican who’ll be good for growth and good for profits.

But I think it’s here that the limits of Trump’s “new” GOP come into play.