A Blueprint for a Donald Trump presidency.
If President Donald Trump’s first week in the oval office has surprised you in any way, you are not alone. Indeed, most Americans had been united in their hope that his campaign rhetoric — of Muslim bans, border walls, and climate denial — was simply part of the circus that is Donald Trump, but would inevitably subside after his inauguration. This hope seems to have vanished entirely.
Being surprised by his first week in office (that it has actually happened) is one thing, but if his actions have shocked you at all, it might mean that you haven’t been paying attention to an increasingly significant portion of the Republican Party for the last 15+years. Some of the more worrying policies that Donald Trump has begun to impliment — the EPA crackdown, the religious bigotry, the extreme military might — are just some of the brands of policies that have been brainstormed and refined among intellectual groups within the Republican Party for years — long before a Donald Trump presidency was ever possible.
One of these organizations, the Republican Study Committee (RSC), has produced alternative budget proposals for every fiscal year, in one form or another, since the mid 1990s. The most recent of such proposals, The Blueprint For A Balanced Budget 2.0, outlines the committee’s visions and goals of achieving a balanced budget by fiscal year 2026. As could be expected from the RSC, a Republican caucus comprised of 172 of the most conservative politicians our House of Representatives has to offer, the steps required for these visions and goals to become reality are quite drastic.
Despite the proposal’s misleading name, it is far more than an alternative view of our nation’s spending habits. As then-chairman of the RSC, former Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman, points out in the budeget’s opening statement, the document is a proposal “of the principles and values that [the RSC] believe should guide our nation.” With his questionable use of the word “guide” aside, the proposal is little-more than a call for the complete deconstruction — or privatization — of scores of fundamental federal organizations, agencies, programs, grants, and funds. From federal employee pension plans, to technology development funding; from social services block grants, to the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; from education policy, to our virtual removal from the United Nations, the “budget’s” intentions are clear: if the federal government is involved in any way, budgetary or otherwise, it shouldn’t be — and it won’t be if the RSC has anything to say about it.
So you might be asking yourself what Donald Trump’s administration has to do with the RSC’s 2017 budget proposal. After all, he’s a political outsider, right? He doesn’t have anything to do with an entrenched republican think-tank comprised of rich career-politicians, does he?
Before we answer these questions of what he is, it’s important to remember a few more things that Donald Trump is not: prepared, experienced, or a politician. He has never worked in the public sector in any capacity. He has never been on a city council, a school board, let alone held significant public office. And to those touting his business acumen as being experience-enough: we can’t forget that he has also never controlled a publicly-traded company for a single day in his life. He has absolutely zero experience with public accountability — an alarming thing to be true of the person elected to our nation’s highest office. This has all kinds of serious implications for our country, but here the focus is on his overt lack of understanding of social policy in any sense.
A remarkable portion of the job as president involves understanding social problems and implementing the changes needed to bring about logical and effective solutions. President Trump is incapable of doing this because he does not have the knowledge of societal systems required to maneuver a complex country further through the 21st century. He is a business man; his experience is in making money, and nothing else. He doesn’t understand the complexities of transportation policy, the intricacies of farm subsidies, or the public value in technology development. Ask yourself how he could be ‘for’ alternative green energy production, electricity assistance commissions, or world leadership centers, when he has been taught and trained his entire life to look at the bottom line first. He simply does not have the pedigree required of a public official, because he does not know how to examine problems from a social perspective — this is clear. And it becomes even clearer when you recognize the utter boredom he displays in the presence of any policy-related discussion whatsoever. Its almost as if he doesn’t even understand whats being discussed, most-probably because he does not. Enter Mike Pence.
When Donald Trump announced Mike Pence as his vice-presidential nominee back in July, most critics were preoccupied with the questionable behavior he displayed — while governor of Indiana — in relation to LGBTQ rights, women’s health issues, and taxes. Too few, however, brought up an arguably more-questionable aspect of Pence’s past; his time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee from 2005–2007, while he was still a representative from Indiana. These were the years wherein Mike Pence truly became what he is today: a staunch advocate for conservative life values, small and decentralized federal government, and the privatization of fundamental (and successful) public services. He famously introduced the “tax payers bill of rights” in one alternative budget proposal during his time as chair, and has consistently employeed other radical buzzwords to encourage a specific level of fear and anger toward the federal government. And the biggest concern: he knows how government works. He understands the monotony of congressional proceedings, the complicated workings of Washington bureaucracies, and how to present a friendly narrative to the public: all exactly what Donald Trump was/is lacking.
The reality of our situation is clear: our president is as unfit for his job as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were for theirs. He will be controlled throughout his presidency by the same mechanism that controlled Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush throughout theirs: ignorance. He will have no idea what is happening on a fundamental level from day to day, as neither Reagan nor Bush did, and he will not care about the societal destruction he leaves in the wake of his search for public acceptance of any kind. This is why the focus needs to be on Mike Pence and the other far-right advocates Donald Trump has surrounded himself with: the people who are now effectively in control of our country.
As we all sit back in fear watching anti-muslim bans, border walls, and department-wide gag orders take effect, remember that there is a (public) blueprint that Donald Trump seems to be following. We don’t have to be shocked about these things any longer — indeed, we can be prepared for them.