Not Antichrist, but Anti-Bush: Explaining Trump

The Bush-Clinton-Bush era was one of surprising continuity

(White House photo by Eric Draper)

By Amity Shlaes

This essay is adapted from Amity Shlaes’s regular column “The Forgotten Book,” which she pens for “Capital Matters” as a fellow of National Review Institute.

Since just about the Stone Age—say, the 1990s—Republicans have called for replacing the income tax with a consumption tax, for defunding USAID, for abolishing the Department of Education, and for reforming Social Security. Those well into middle age recall when two former education secretaries, Lamar Alexander and William Bennett, pushed for the department’s demise. Or when a much younger Mitch McConnell joined Jesse Helms in recommending that USAID be swallowed whole by the State Department.

Yet under the politicians the Republicans elected, such goals melted into kinder, gentler compromise. Seen from Mars, or, for that matter, anywhere beyond the Acela Corridor, the policies of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush look remarkably similar.

Republicans expected President Joe Biden to pursue policies along the same line. After all, Biden hailed from Delaware, until recently the sweetheart state of CEOs. First elected to the Senate in 1972, Biden was a known, unthreatening quantity, something he seemed to confirm by the fashion in which he earned the Democratic nomination over rivals to his left. Many heaved a sigh of relief when he nosed past Bernie Sanders. Hence their shock when Reliable Joe proved susceptible to policy recommended by AOC and the new ideologues.

And hence the shock of both many Republicans and all Democrats now that President Trump is actually attempting to do those things many in the GOP have long advocated. As someone commented on X the other night, “Trump and Co. are holding conservatives to what they say they have been ‘for’ for almost a century.”

Expensive Priorities

This shared sense of shock can best be explained by looking back at George W. Bush’s own account of what he aimed for, and accomplished, while in office. In Decision Points, Bush reminds us that he did not seek to replace the income tax with a flat tax or a consumption tax, the kind of dramatic proposal that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has mooted. While a candidate, the then-governor of Texas called for tax cuts. These cuts were valuable but hardly revolutionary. In the Edenic months before September 11, the 43rd president did see into law a $1.35 billion tax cut, the largest since Ronald Reagan. The bill reduced the top marginal tax rate to 35 percent, undoing some of the damage of Bill Clinton’s tax hike, and making good of a reversal by his father. The campaigning “41” had sworn to voters he would not undo Reagan’s work—“Read my lips. No new taxes”—and then agreed to an increase in rates during Desert Shield, the first stage of the Gulf War.

But that 35 percent was still well above Ronald Reagan’s top rate of 28 percent. And the reason for the modesty of the cut was that Bush and Congress felt the need to lard the 2001 bill with tax givebacks that were more political than economic: widening the child credit, for example, or taking the lower earners off the rolls entirely. Still, Bush contents himself with having delivered “tax relief to help the economy out of recession.”

When a genuine economic disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, came along, Bush did not, to put it traditionally, let the market clear. He opted, with one big exception—Lehman—for the expensive, softer path, bailout. In his memoirs, he even blames others, repeating a famous line: “Wall Street got drunk, and we got the hangover.”

Al-Qaeda made Bush a wartime president, and like any wartime president, “W” chose to support USAID, not demolish it. USAID money, he notes with justifiable pride, “helped more than three million Afghan children return to school,” instead of cowering at home under the Taliban. Furthering his own legacy, Bush built out a kind of auxiliary USAID, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR’s success—again, admirable in isolation—guaranteed mission creep, which duly materialized.

But it was on the purely domestic education issue that Bush disappointed conservatives most. Abolition of the Department of Education he dismissed from the start, as he recalls in the book, as “unrealistic.” Indeed, as president, he gave his signature program a name so ambitious it proved a license for further spending: “No Child Left Behind.” Spending on Title I No Child Left Behind programs increased by 59 percent under the president. Where Bush sought to make education cuts, he often faltered. As for Bush’s Social Security reform—modest and logical—that was a casualty to the Surge, the military ramp-up after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Traps to Avoid

Where does the fault lie?

With conservative voters, who chose to deceive themselves about moderate candidates. With Congress, which failed to recognize the merits of strong conservative economics, or to puncture the ballooning of the new military-industrial complex.

It is wrong in any case to lay all the blame on the Bushes, both gentlemen and both strong leaders inclined by temperament or circumstance to focus on foreign policy. The skill with which George H. W. Bush negotiated reunification of Germany and the toppling of communism in Soviet Russia was stunning. The president was proud of his New World Order and believed, as many of us did, that halting Iraq in its tracks in 1991 would preserve that order. If domestic concessions were necessary to attain his foreign policy goals, Bush Sr. was ready to make them.

Two disasters bookended the presidency of George W. Bush, September 11 and the 2008 crash. These disasters vastly curtailed the ability of the second Bush to push through even those domestic reforms he did campaign for: the reform of Social Security, for example. Still, the result of this chain of events was that Bush-Clinton-Bush are now melded into American memory as one era.

Whether President Trump himself can avoid some of the traps that constrained his predecessors we don’t know. His “occupy Gaza” plan, if real, could out-neocon the people Trump fans slam as “neocons.” It could prove as costly as either the Iraq War or Afghanistan. The methods by which the Trump administration moves are disconcerting. Their constitutionality will be adjudicated for years. Still, it shouldn’t be so surprising that even some non-MAGA supporters are cheering at, say, the drama of defunding USAID. At least this time, the president started like he means it.

Amity Shlaes chairs the Coolidge Foundation, is the author of Great Society, and is a fellow of National Review Institute. A version of this article first appeared in National Review’s “Capital Matters.”