President Donald Trump, with the help of congressional Republicans, has made a bill that is a “crowd-pleaser” — but not for the conservatives the GOP has traditionally represented, according to Bloomberg columnist David M. Drucker.
“Voters generally, particularly on the left, have always found some reason or another for opposing legislation that asks them to participate in the solution to Washington’s fiscal challenges,” Drucker, who is also a Senior writer at Dispatch, said. “It’s why tax hikes on the so-called rich are so popular and such an easy political message to wield.”
Conservatives, for their part, are known to want a balanced budget and to reduce the country’s deficit. However, the House spending bill, which is now lingering in the Senate, doesn’t appease what would have been considered the GOP base.
According to Drucker, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is loaded “with a series of crowd-pleasers, expansions of existing tax breaks plus some brand-new ones.”
The Dispatch writer believes this lack of fiscal responsibility shows “the Republican Party and the voters it represents” have changed.
“In the pre-Trump era defined by President Ronald Reagan, fiscal responsibility and small government had currency with grassroots conservatives who formed the heart of the GOP base,” Drucker said.
“But today’s Republican base voters are different than their forebearers, courtesy of a Trump populist makeover.”
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“The 45th and 47th president over the past decade attracted legions of working-class voters to the Republican Party.” Drucker noted, “For the most part, these newer Republicans are former Democrats who joined the GOP for cultural reasons.”
Now they are changing the expectations of the GOP because these voters, “brought with them their preference for government safety-net programs and general lack of concern about the debt (qualities that have long defined grassroots Democrats).”
Drucker believes, “Simultaneously, suburban voters inclined to value fiscal responsibility generally, and debt reduction specifically, have drifted away from the GOP.”
“The result is a Republican governing coalition much more enamored of government spending than it used to be and far less concerned about the federal debt,” the columnist added, “even though it has grown to more than 120% of the entire US economy — problematic to say the least.”