Republicans Do Not Actually Want Donald Trump to Talk About Policy

Not really.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

One of the unintentionally hilarious aspects of Trump’s emotional meltdown over the past few weeks has been the oft-declared GOP sentiment that Trump try to focus on policy. For example, Fox Business’ Charles Gasparino recently tweeted his despair about Trump, characterizing him as “an undisciplined candidate who is literally downplaying major issues that could crush ANY democratic candidate so he can indulge in nonsense like attacking Brian Kemp and more.” A top Trump ally told Axios’ Mike Allen and Jim VaneHei: “To get past the media force field protecting Harris… [Trump] knows he needs to be very specific with his policy contrasts and is planning on debuting a hard-hitting stump speech very soon.”

This USA Today op-ed by Dace Potas serves as a useful exemplar of all the other GOP quotes given to reporters recently:

[Republicans] have missed the opportunity to show Americans that conservative policies are better for the country.

Instead, Trump is still talking about President Joe Biden, and his campaign is slipping behind in the polls because of it….

Her own past extreme views on fracking to extract oil and gas from rock, on the border and on policing could all come back to haunt her. Harris has gotten ahead and walked back some of these stances. But if you are backpedaling, you are ceding ground, and the Trump campaign would be wise to capitalize. 

They haven't so far….

Republicans would be wise to hit Harris hard on policy right now. Instead, Trump is spending time continuing to talk about Biden, as he did for much of his Thursday press conference,  rather than the new threat that is right in front of him. He's focusing on insults more than he is on solutions, which has been a staple of his movement.

Now let’s pause for a moment to savor the modern GOP, which has purged an awful lot of its policy intelligentsia over the past eight years, suddenly wanting to see a general election campaign based strictly on the issues. That is particularly rich given Donald Trump’s well-documented and widely discussed knowledge deficits and tendency to deflect policy questions with personal insults. Is the GOP seriously arguing that Americans should trust a 78-year old who can’t tell two black men apart to be dictating interest rate guidance to the Fed?

The answer to this query is obviously “no” the moment one takes even a minute to critically examine the GOP’s lament. Here’s the thing: Republicans do not really want Trump to talk about policy, not really. And the evidence for this is that Republicans and the Trump campaign are now trying their darnedest to obscure their most articulated policy vision for the next GOP term. I speak, of course, of Project 2025, the 900-page transition planning document for the next Republican president.

A lot has been written about Project 2025, so I’ll let Vox’s Andrew Prokop do the necessary summarizing:

Project 2025 is the conservative movement’s detailed and specific plan for what the next Republican president should do with his power, including its preparation to put that plan into action. Basically, it’s an attempt to make the second Trump term way more organized and effective than the first.

Organized by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and advised by more than 100 conservative groups, Project 2025 has put forth a 922-page list of policy recommendations, going agency by agency in the federal government.

It is not a pie-in-the-sky policy agenda full of bold but empty promises. It is crafted to be a list of things the next president’s appointees really can do, put together by many people who served in top posts under Trump last time and could well do so again.

Now the funny thing about Project 2025 is that late last month its policy work was shut down. According to the Washington Post’s Isaac Aarnsdorf and Josh Dawsey, “The right-wing policy operation that became a rallying cry for Democrats and a nuisance for Republican nominee Donald Trump is trying to escape the public spotlight and repair relations with Trump’s campaign…. While some participants in the project started avoiding interviews and public appearances, Trump advisers grew furious that Heritage leaders continued promoting the project and feeding critical news coverage.” Furthermore, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — the architect of Project 2025 — delayed publication of his own book until after the election in order to not call any more attention to it.

The Trump campaign’s efforts to distance themselves from Project 2025 are pretty laughable.¹ I mean, FFS, JD Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book! One doesn’t need to do much more policy work when the 900+ page policy guidance and the GOP LinkedIn database already exists!

But this ham-handed effort raises a question: if the campaign folks want Trump to focus on policy, why are they even trying to create daylight between themselves and the most detailed GOP policy proposals?

It’s probably because Project 2025 polls horribly. FiveThirtyEight’s Tia Yang has the numbers:

A growing majority of Americans are hearing about the controversial proposal, and a significant share also disapprove of it and closely associate it with Trump, despite his concerted attempts to distance himself from it.

Two different YouGov polls conducted for the University of Massachusetts Department of Political Science and The Economist in the last two weeks each found that between 70 and 80 percent of Americans had heard about Project 2025. YouGov/The Economist found that 47 percent thought Trump at least somewhat supports the plan, similar to the 45 percent who said it "accurately describes what Trump stands for" in a mid-July survey by Navigator Research, a progressive-aligned polling outfit. Recent Navigator surveys also compared attitudes toward the project in late June versus mid-July, and they found that the project had become both more familiar and less popular among Americans across the political spectrum.

Unfavorable views of the project rose the most among Democrats, for whom the plan's net favorability dropped by a whopping 36 percentage points, but it also became less popular among the smaller share of Republicans who had heard of the project: Net favorability for Project 2025 dropped 9 points among those who identified as MAGA supporters and 17 points among other Republicans.

When it comes to what specific policies within Project 2025 Americans dislike, the University of Massachusetts poll found that a majority of respondents disagreed with policies like "firing thousands of federal employees and replacing them with appointees loyal to the president" (-56 percent net support) or "reducing federal civil rights protections for lesbian, gay, and transgender people" (-29 percent net support). A YouGov poll in early July found similarly low support for policies like withdrawing federal approval for the abortion pill mifepristone (-26 percent net support) — though other proposals were somewhat more popular, like deploying the military to help with arrests along the U.S.- Mexico border (+11 percent net support) or outlawing pornography (an even split).

Even if one looks past Project 2025, Trump’s other policy proposals make even some Republicans nervous. A few of Trump’s foreign policy ideas are so hawkish that they make John Bolton nervous. In other foreign policy issues, Trump is impossible to take seriously. I doubt even the hardcore MAGA folks really believe that Trump will end the Russo-Ukrainian War in one day.

So if Republicans want Trump to focus on policy, but talking about Project 2025 is a no-no, what policies could Republicans possibly be talking about?!

My hunch is that Republicans do not want Trump to talk about policy so much as they want him to talk about issues. They would like Trump to rant and rave about crime, inflation, and illegal immigration. He doesn’t need to proffer solutions to any of these problems — especially since, as the links suggest, all three are trending in the desired direction already. But the more that Trump can talk about them, the more primed Americans might be to Trump’s general “the world is going to hell and we should be mad about it!” vibe.

The problem that Trump and the Republicans have is twofold, however. First, as Axios’ Zachary Basu explains, Harris is constructing a very different campaign from Trump, and it sure seems to be working better:

Former President Trump sees fear as the primary motivator — fear of illegal immigration, crime, inflation, a declining America. He believes swing voters will embrace his darker view and demand protection, even if they don't love his style.

Vice President Harris sees hope (or conflict exhaustion) as the primary motivator — hope to move beyond Trump and fighting, hope in a rising/rebounding America. She believes voters are tired of doom-and-gloom….

"There's a large segment of America that does acknowledge things are tough out there," veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz told Axios. "But they're tired of getting yelled at, and they're tired of gloom and doom. And they want hope rather than blame."

The second problem is that, as Politico’s Jeff Greenfield notes, Harris has stolen Trump’s most important piece of political mojo — his mantle as a change candidate:

A sitting vice president has become the “change” candidate.

It’s almost a violation of the laws of the political universe. By definition, a vice president looking to inherit the Oval Office has been part of the outgoing administration, and there’s only so much distance that a vice president can credibly put between them and their boss….

The sudden elevation of Kamala Harris, along with the identity and character of her opponent, has — for now at least — made her the candidate who embodies change, no matter how little her policies differ from the current president. That this happened by accident rather than design does not make it any less potent as a political asset.

And worst of all for Donald Trump, it deprives him of one his greatest powers. Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 on a promise to smash the status quo. Now he faces credible charges that he represents the past — and there’s a telegenic, younger contender eager to make that case.

This explains why Republicans in general and Trump in particular have become so flummoxed. The larger Republican party is keenly aware that Trump’s personal attacks on Harris will not redound to the GOP’s benefit. But neither can they talk about their actual policy platform because most of it is hideously unpopular. And Trump banging on about how the country is a hellhole is not having the same effect on Harris that it might have on Biden — which might explain why Donald Trump keeps trying to drag him back into the race. In other words, Trump and the GOP have no idea what to do.

Republicans don’t actually want Trump to focus on policy, because GOP policies are extremely unpopular. They want the general election campaign to focus on GOP-favorable issue terrain.

With each passing day, however, Harris is making it more difficult for such an approach to work.

1. As the WaPo story notes, “contributors include close Trump advisers such as former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, and former White House economic adviser Peter Navarro. Miller has denied his involvement in Project 2025, but his America First Legal group is a participating organization, and his deputy, Gene Hamilton, wrote the playbook’s chapter on the Department of Justice.”