News

Trump's run on pretty anti-immigrant speech, but he's pretty moderate in most other respects. He's probably the least-religious president we've ever had, and ran for the "religion party" ticket; he had to run with Pence to make up for lack of appeal to social conservatives. He advocated for (well, or at least gave the impression of) fairly-protectionist policy and ran for the free trade party's ticket. Since the start of the Cold War, the GOP's tended to be the hawkish party, and he ran on a relatively noninterventionist platform (though I'll concede that there's always been a paleoconservative isolationist faction, but it's been relatively weak for quite some decades).

Trump constantly says outrageous stuff -- he definitely makes it a point to be politically incorrect -- but his policy is actually not especially exciting.

I looked at his website way back in the 2016 election before his campaign had built up any steam. This was back when Hillary was running a nice, typical website, long list of issues, you know what campaign websites normally look like. At that point in time, he -- hillariously -- had only three issues on his campaign website. And none of his actual positions represented much of a change from the status quo:

• Opposition to FTAs; at the time, we had been negotiating TPP with the Pacific Rim countries and TTIP with the EU. Both had effectively failed already at this point. Trump gave the public the impression that he was responsible for this, but it was something that was going to happen under Obama or not. He also spent a long time complaining about NAFTA. Thing is, I already had listened to speeches from a few politicians who had played this game with NAFTA (e.g. Ron Paul complains a lot about NAFTA but is quieter about why he opposed it, because it wasn't permissive enough, whereas most people listening to him are upset that it isn't restrictive enough). I had a pretty good guess that Trump was going to pull similar shennanigans on policy, looked at his white paper and sure enough, no specific changes, just lots of fluffy emotional text giving the impression that he was in opposition. And in office, he took NAFTA, negotiated a few minor changes, and then renamed it to USMCA. Having kicked the legs out from decades of time that manufacturing unions had built public opposition to NAFTA, he left the thing alone. So, he advocated for a position that sounded unusually close to the position that the folks on the left side of the spectrum wanted and, in fact, essentially left existing policy alone.

• Opposition to immigration. Now, you could make a fair argument that he worked pretty hard to sell a nativist image. But his actual policy also wasn't particularly notable. He put through one regulation that SCOTUS was pretty sure to shoot down and kept it a constant source of political theater for a significant chunk of his term. He made an enormous deal out of his wall, kept it in the news, gave the impression without ever saying so that he was going to build a wall along the entire border. But this isn't even a new game to play from Trump. Bush Jr used the same shtick back when he ran. In his case, it was a "fence" and played a less-prominent role in his campaign.

• Gun rights. He has no specifics and this is trivial to do: just don't involve yourself in additional restrictions. This has been a pretty stock generic Republican point because it costs nothing to do ever since the Democrats did the federal Assault Weapon Ban, which was not popular and sunsetted; it's something that every candidate just slaps on their page.

Hell, Trump was a Democrat back when Bush Jr was in office.

But Trump is far right. The news says so.

If you read news media that favors the Democratic Party, it will say that Trump is far right. If your regular news sources favor the Democratic Party, you have probably read a lot of articles over past years that say that.

If you read news media that favors the Republican Party, you will find plenty of material that will say that Biden is far left.

But Biden's not far left! That's ridiculous!

Yup. But presenting someone as being extreme is a good way to make them less appealing. You can find people who will self-identify as "left-of center" or "right-of-center", even "left" or "right". But very few politicians will call themselves "far left" or "far right". That's usually a label used by the media favoring the other side.

There are a lot of things that I don't like about Trump. But they mostly deal with his presentation and the tactics he uses. I dislike his willingness to make contradictory statements. I don't like the fact that he tries to piss people off about someone else -- especially via dishonest claims -- and exploit that anger. I dislike his willingness to disregard the political-consensus-building role that elections have, to concede, though I'll grant that maybe if there's a problem there, it needs to be fixed in the underlying system. But he's extraordinary mostly in his presentation, not in the policy that he's adopted. We had him for four years. US policy didn't change much, certainly not from mainstream Republican Party policy.

When Trump first ran for office, I remember Bill Kristol -- a conservative commentator who really dislikes Trump -- stating that most of what Trump says is misdirection. Basically, Trump can't force the media to say what he wants. But he can make a colossal amount of noise about something outrageous that they cannot resist covering, so that they talk about that instead of whatever meaningful actual policy stuff is going on. The coverage may not be positive, but it lets him direct the media narrative -- it's all about whatever outrageous thing he said on Twitter. I was a bit skeptical at the time. I could believe that Trump wouldn't change much on NAFTA because I'd seen other Republican politicians play the same game he was, but had a harder time buying that on immigration. But that was, I think, pretty accurate as an assessment. Most of what is unusual about Trump are the outrageous things that come out of his mouth when he's politicking. It's not really his policy.