As a reality TV star, Donald Trump seized the White House with an unusual slate of Republican pledges: take on China, tear up trade deals, restrict immigration. But as president, Trump has faced warnings from a long line of GOP stalwarts that he can’t win in 2020 by offering more of the same.
So, as the Republican National Convention looms, Trump and his team have scrambled to find new twists on old favorites to quell concerns about the question that has bedeviled him for months: What would he do with four more years?
A working group of top aides spent the last several weeks reviewing proposals attempting to answer that very question. They’ve discussed ideas to lower capital gains and income taxes, adopt new immigration measures, strike new trade deals and ax additional regulations. And on Thursday, the president is likely to speak about these ideas and more during his convention speech as he tries to draw a sharp contrast with the agenda of former Vice President Joe Biden. On Sunday night, the campaign released the broad outlines of its second-term goals — eradicating Covid-19, creating jobs, ending America's reliance on China, cutting drug prices, expanding school choice and defending the police — and promised to tease them out further over the next week.
Senior administration officials concede the second-term agenda will lean more toward pledges to continue Trump hallmarks than it will toward presenting entirely new ideas, creating a high-wire act for a president trying to both appeal to his base’s long-favored themes while also responding to criticism from within his own party. Looming over his speech is the pandemic and the way it has upended life and decimated the economy — Trump frequently boasts that he can resurrect America’s finances but is evasive about the rising coronavirus caseload, insisting Americans should start to resume their lives.
“No president is reelected on the basis of saying, ‘I’ve done a good job. Reelect me,’” said Karl Rove said, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush. “They have to say, ‘I’ve got a second act in me.’”
Informal Trump advisers like Rove and former Gov. Chris Christie have been telling Trumpworld both publicly and privately for months that the president must develop more serious second-term plans in order to win reelection. Christie sent Trump a memo back in June critiquing the campaign so far, part of which argued Trump needed to articulate his vision for four more years.
And to Trump’s critics, the president’s squishy plans up to this point highlight what they view as his flaws as a politician: a leader more interested in marketing and salesmanship than governing.
“He is a producer of a reality show, and he is a guy who looks for wedges, so this idea of, ‘What would you do with the next four years?’ You might as well ask that question in Greek,” said David Axelrod, the chief strategist for President Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. “They can create a working group in the White House, but there is a working group between Trump’s left and right ears and that generally wins out in these discussions.”
Trump officials and allies say any delay in articulating a second-term agenda stems more from the unexpected pandemic and economic downturn than the president’s level of interest in policy or his desire to beat Biden in November.
“He has been so intensely focused on all of the implications of coronavirus and the economic problems that he frankly had not thought about it,” said Newt Gingrich, a longtime Trump adviser and former Republican Speaker of the House, when asked about a second-term agenda. “He had a checklist and this came up in late August. You end up with only so much brain space and adrenaline and that is what happened.”
Trump has been given several chances to address the second-term question on friendly terrain but has yet to offer much. Trump essentially avoided the question in June with Sean Hannity — mentioning “experience” but not naming a single second-term goal. When Hannity gave him a second chance in July, Trump listed a few stock items: coronavirus, bolstering the economy, appointing judges.
So as Trump and Republicans gear up to make their case to the American people this week, questions remain about whether the president, who is running on a platform of “promises kept,” will also be able to define new “promises made.” The Republican National Committee simply rolled over its platform from 2016 saying the president will win with it again in the next election. Fallout from the coronavirus, which has put millions of people out of work, taking away the president’s plan to campaign on declining unemployment, a focus that helped incumbents like Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush win reelection.
With a struggling economy, the president has struggled to paint a distinct vision for his next four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In speeches and on Twitter, Trump has remained focused on relitigating the past election, the potential perils of mail-in ballots and attacking Biden, even as aides cull through policy ideas.
Inside the White House, a working group that includes chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump’s policy coordinator Chris Liddell, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and aides from the Domestic Policy Council have been working on his second-term agenda — and they have settled on a raft of ideas even as Trump and his team continue to work on his Thursday speech. Campaign officials say Americans should expect the president to roll out his agenda over the course of the GOP convention.
Historically, incumbent president’s second term plans involve a continuation of existing policies paired with one new big idea, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. George W. Bush, for instance, pushed to privatize social security at the start of his second term, a plan that quickly died once he was reelected. Obama continued to tackle progressive ideas like climate change and immigration, while emphasizing more executive actions, given the Republican-controlled Congress. Reagan spent his second term on an immigration reform package and additional tax cuts, while also focusing on negotiating a major arms agreement with the Soviet Union.
“I assume Trump will continue with deregulation, another round of tax cuts and immigration policy, with one big thing to boast about after reelection,” Zelizer said. “People running for president for the first time have great ambitions, but normally after four years, an administration is more seasoned and has a better idea of how Congress will react, and in some ways, is more prepared.”
White House spokesman Judd Deere said the administration “is engaged in an ongoing policy process for a bold second-term agenda” that moves the country past the coronavirus pandemic and “ensures we are a safer, stronger, more prosperous America.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella added that Trump will also focus on “reducing taxes and cutting regulations, appointing solid conservative judges to our federal benches and the Supreme Court, protecting healthcare for people with pre-existing conditions, securing our borders and ensuring we have a reliable coronavirus vaccine to keep Americans safe.”
Trump himself has vaguely teased some lofty foreign policy goals, pushing the questionable argument that countries like China and Iran will be more willing to negotiate with him if Biden loses. Trump recently struck a phase-one trade deal with China, but further negotiations have been cut off as relations between the two countries deteriorate. With Iran, Trump has pledged to get Tehran back to the negotiating table by imposing crippling sanctions on the country, although Iranian leaders have shown little interest in talking.
“Trump feels the [Iran] regime is getting desperate, but they know they can’t survive a second term and will have to negotiate on his terms,” said Rich Goldberg, a former Trump national security official working on Iran.
Administration officials said Trump is also aiming to hold a series of meetings with world leaders at the White House in coming months to emphasize his foreign policy credentials. The United States recently announced a deal it had helped negotiate that will establish full diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. And the White House has signaled it may try to get Trump and Putin together as part of negotiations over the soon-to-expire New START nuclear weapons treaty.
Yet there has been frustration among some Trump allies that the president remains too focused on things not related to the coronavirus or the economy, like his ongoing fixation with the Russia probe and evidence-free allegations of a government plot to undermine his campaign.
“We’re running out of time to refocus messaging properly,” said a top Republican fundraiser and Trump supporter. “The voters we want to reach in swing states and the Rust Belt are primarily concerned with how we will get their jobs back from China and keep their streets safe.”
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