'Old ideas still dominant': Conservative reveals how Trump remains 'relatively weak'

27 May

U.S. President Donald Trump holds a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

In an article published in the New York Times Tuesday, conservative columnist Ross Douthat argued that President Donald Trump's influence within the GOP is "relatively weak, because the president is himself unclear as to what he wants."

"Trumpism as a transformative force is relatively weak, in part because Trump himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants," Douthat wrote.

"And here it’s hard to make the way the Republican majority intends to tax and spend cohere with other elements of the administration’s agenda, on trade and immigration above all," he added.

According to Douthat, "the old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas still dominant." He argued that Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" could have been passed under any Republican president in recent times.

Douthat said Trump holds a number of economic views that break from traditional Republican orthodoxy. This divergence led him to shift the party's stance to the left on issues like Medicare and Social Security. He has also cautioned GOP lawmakers against making changes to Medicaid and has, at times, even considered the idea of increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, according to the conservative commentator.

But Douthat notes that trade is the one area where Trump combines strong personal belief with enough political influence to compel Republicans in Congress to embrace significant change.

According to the author, another populist Republican — someone like Vice President JD Vance or Josh Hawley — might be more determined to overhaul federal spending priorities. But Trump tends to lack both the focus and the motivation to dive into such policy specifics. This unwillingness on Trump's part, Douthat argued, has left much of the GOP's economic approach largely unchanged.

"That default, in turn, does not cohere with the other elements of Trumpism. It doesn’t cohere politically with his populist appeals because it offers relatively little to the president’s downscale base. And it also doesn’t cohere as economic policy because it doesn’t match with the priorities implied by the president’s big trade and immigration moves," Douthat wrote.

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