Donald J. Trump’s presidency was a major turn away from the Republican Party’s long embrace of free-market economics. If the Republican platform is any indication, a second Trump term would be a near-complete abandonment.
The 2024 platform, which was released last week and is expected to infuse the Republican National Convention that starts in Milwaukee on Monday, promises action on what have become Mr. Trump’s signature issues: It pledges to pump up tariffs, encourage American manufacturing and deport immigrants at a scale that has never been seen before.
What it lacks are policy ideas that have long been dear to economic conservatives. The platform does not directly mention fiscal deficits, and, apart from curbing government spending, it does not make any clear and detailed promises to rein in the nation’s borrowing. Other policies it proposes — including cutting taxes and expanding the military — would most likely swell the nation’s debt.
The Republican platform also does not mention exports or encouraging trade. And while the document insists that the party will lower inflation, long a pertinent issue for economic conservatives, it fails to lay out a realistic plan for doing that. Chapter One of the document, titled “Defeat Inflation and Quickly Bring Down All Prices,” suggests that oil-friendly policies, slashed government spending, decreased regulation, fewer immigrants and restored geopolitical stability will lower price increases. But few economists agree.
In fact, many analysts have said Mr. Trump’s suggestions on the campaign trail so far could lift prices, particularly his proposals to deport immigrants en masse and apply tariffs of perhaps 10 percent on most imports and levies of 60 percent on goods from China.
“Measures to reduce migration and to protect the economy through tariffs and trade blockages are all highly inflationary,” Steven Kamin, a former Fed staff official who is now at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview last week. When it comes to both deficits and trade, he said, there is a “populist dismissal of the prescriptions of academics and elites.”
Some laissez faire ideas prevail — among them, fewer regulations and lighter taxes. But both Mr. Trump’s promises in his speeches and at rallies and the official Republican platform show just how much the G.O.P. has morphed into the party of protectionist populism in the 21st century.
The shift has been relatively rapid. The Republican Party’s last platform, issued in 2016, stressed measures to reduce the national debt, in addition to reforming taxes and lightening regulation. That earlier platform called for broadening trade agreements with like-minded nations, saying that “international trade is crucial for all sectors of America’s economy.”
And it took a more limited viewed of the role of government in the economy. “Government cannot create prosperity, though government can limit or destroy it,” it read.
In 2020, the Republican Party did not issue a platform. Instead, it “enthusiastically” supported Mr. Trump’s America-first agenda. That is why the newest platform is notable: It formalizes and clearly lays out just how far the party has moved toward embracing Mr. Trump’s worldview since his first bid for office.
“It’s a fundamentally different platform than in 2016,” said Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “The party is becoming whatever President Trump wants it to be.”
This year’s Republican platform decries “a blind faith in the siren song of globalism,” and says that “the Republican Party must return to its roots as the Party of Industry, Manufacturing, Infrastructure and Workers.” (The platform adopts not just Mr. Trump’s ideas, but also his embrace of random capitalization.)
In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said the Republican Party platform reflected Mr. Trump’s “tested economic agenda that delivered a booming economy once and will do so again. By cutting regulations and taxes and using the leverage of the United States to negotiate better trade deals around the world, President Trump built the strongest economy in American history.”
The ideas that Mr. Trump has been talking about now are a continuation of a three-pronged approach he started back in 2017, said Joseph Lavorgna, a former Trump White House economic official who is now the chief economist at SMBC Nikko Securities. It is focused on cutting taxes, lowering regulations and increasing energy production in order to foster “on-shoring and reindustrialization.”
“It’s definitely a more populist approach,” he said.
Some of the pivot away from free-market ideals reflects a bipartisan shift in priorities. For example, neither Republicans nor Democrats have shown a willingness to cut the government’s deficit in recent years.
“Neither party are fiscal hawks — that’s the reality of it,” Mr. Lavorgna said.
An analysis by Moody’s recently suggested that the budget deficit would most likely stabilize at just above 5 percent of annual output in the coming years if Mr. Biden were re-elected with a divided Congress. It would climb to 6.4 percent if Mr. Trump won along with a Republican sweep, and increase to a more muted 6 percent if Mr. Trump won along with a divided Congress.
Likewise, both Democrats and Republicans have become sharply more skeptical of free trade in recent years, questioning the consensus that prevailed in the 1990s and early 2000s that open flows of goods would lead to greater prosperity.
As China’s economy has grown and the country has come to dominate global industries like electric vehicles and solar panels, both parties have embraced the idea of greater trade protections for American factories. Mr. Trump added tariffs on more than $400 billion of imports during his first term, and Mr. Biden has largely kept those levies intact.
But Mr. Trump is promising a much more aggressive agenda on trade if he is re-elected — an about face from the more free trade orientation of the Republican Party in previous decades.
Like Mr. Trump, the new Republican platform calls for broad, “baseline tariffs” on foreign-made goods, and floats the idea of making tariffs with foreign countries reciprocal. It proposes phasing out imports of essential goods, banning companies that outsource jobs from selling goods to the federal government and stopping China from buying American real estate and investing in U.S. industries.
It also calls for stripping China of its “most favored nation” status, which allows it to trade on similar terms to other members of the World Trade Organization. The proposal has recently gained support in Congress among both Democrats and Republicans, though it raises questions about what level of tariffs would be imposed on China, which continues to sell a steady stream of cheap goods to American consumers.
As that happens, politicians are increasingly embracing tariffs and subsidies as standard tools for managing the economy, trade experts said.
“Every poll has been that people are in favor of tariffs to bring back domestic production,” said Michael Stumo, the chief executive of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates more protectionist trade policies. “There’s a competition for the blue collar vote. The Dems are losing it, the Trump Republicans are gaining it.”
Mr. Trump is working to solidify his white, working- and middle-class base by emphasizing a mixture of economic nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric. Free-market economics have been replaced by a new, more disjointed, set of ideas.
“If there’s a philosophy, it’s an incoherent one,” Ms. Dolan said.
If anything, the unifying theme in 2024 is the candidate himself.
“It’s just a series of outtakes from Trump’s rallies,” said Marjorie Hershey, a professor emerita of political science at Indiana University Bloomington. “It says that the Republican Party is now a fully-owned subsidiary of Donald Trump.”