Wild Ideas

The Wild Ideas You Missed While Donald Trump Was Talking

Trump’s not the only Republican making dubious claims. He’s just the only one we’ve paid attention to.

By Michael Grunwald

After five Republican debates, most Americans know about Donald Trump’s provocative beliefs, like his desires to end birthright citizenship, stop Muslim immigration and kill families of suspected terrorists. Much less attention has been paid to Carly Fiorina’s conclusion that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, Mike Huckabee’s pledge to defy Supreme Court rulings he deems incompatible with God’s law, Rick Santorum’s claim that Islam is not protected by the First Amendment or Chris Christie’s threat to shoot down Russian planes and launch cyberattacks on Chinese leaders.

Those provocative beliefs, believe it or not, were also expressed during the five Republican debates. They were just overshadowed by the furor over Trump. It might be natural for an opposition party to sound bombastic during primary season, especially when its front-runner is blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bombast, but the debate transcripts read like a Democratic opposition researcher’s dream.

The good news for Republicans, arguably, is that their rhetoric has been so consistently over-the-top that it has started to sound routine; academics call this “shifting the Overton window,” the range of what’s considered politically acceptable. I’ve watched all the debates as well as the undercards live, but when I reviewed the transcripts, I was amazed how many radical statements had slipped under my radar. Ted Cruz called for putting the United States back on the gold standard. Marco Rubio accused President Barack Obama of destroying the U.S. military. Huckabee said Bernie Madoff’s rip-offs weren’t as bad as what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare. Lindsey Graham said his administration would monitor all “Islamic websites,” not just jihadist ones. I had even forgotten Trump’s claim that vaccines caused autism in a 2-year-old girl he knew.

Vaccines do not cause autism. Goldbuggery is crackpot economics. The U.S. military is still by far the strongest in the world. And what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare is give them pensions and health care. But none of those statements drew any pushback from the other Republican candidates, or, for that matter, the media moderators. Neither did Ben Carson’s assertion that if the United States had set a goal of oil independence within a decade, moderate Arab states would have “turned over Osama bin Laden and anybody else you wanted on a silver platter within two weeks,” which is wackadoodle on multiple levels.

After the first Trump-obsessed debate in August, I wrote about how the Republicans were racing to the right to try to attract the scraps of attention that weren’t going to Trump. My favorite example that night was Bobby Jindal’s promise to sic the IRS and the Justice Department on Planned Parenthood on his first day as president—basically, an impeachable crime. But that didn’t turn out to be an isolated incident. In fact, Cruz made the same promise in a later debate, except for the IRS part, presumably because he also vowed to abolish the IRS.

The Democratic candidates have also appealed to their party’s ideologically committed base during their primary debates, which, perhaps for that reason, have been scheduled at odd times when few Americans have been watching. But with occasional exceptions from socialist Bernie Sanders, who suggested that he wouldn’t mind 90 percent tax rates on the rich, they haven’t said much that felt particularly surprising or politically damaging. Debt-free college may or may not be a good idea, but it’s hard to imagine Republicans turning it into an attack line.

By contrast, the GOP debates have felt like madcap purity contests, with the candidates competing to demonstrate their commitment to supply-side tax cuts and foreign-policy belligerence, as well as their fierce opposition to illegal immigration and every imaginable government regulation. Rubio, supposedly the establishment alternative to Trump, vowed to repeal Wall Street reform in its entirety and oppose abortion without any exceptions. John Kasich, supposedly the moderate in the GOP race, vowed to “punch Russia in the nose.” Wild accusations by non-Trump candidates—that the independent Federal Reserve has kept interest rates low to prop up Obama, that Obama shows more respect to Iran’s ayatollah than Israel’s prime minister, that 300,000 veterans died last year while waiting for health care, that Obama is trying to strip away the sovereignty of the United States, that David Petraeus was prosecuted for sharing classified information with his girlfriend because Obama didn’t like him—have provoked no reaction whatsoever during the debates.

Democratic leaders have expressed glee about these nationally televised festivals of right-wing me-too-ism, but another way of thinking about them is as highly rated, mostly unrebutted advertisements for the notion that Obama is a disaster and America is in peril. So far, the Republicans have had more than 20 hours to tell the public that “the idea of America is slipping away,” that “we’re on a path to socialism,” that “America has been betrayed.” Nobody on the debate stage disagreed when, for example, Christie declared that Obama doesn’t respect the military or the police, or that Americans believed in a more prosperous future in January 2009 (when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month) until Obama “stole” that belief. You might not take Christie at his word that Obama is a “feckless weakling,” but when you hear it over and over, you might assume he must be missing at least some feck.

At times, a few of the Republican contenders have dared to challenge the magical thinking that has dominated the debates. Rand Paul has been a consistent voice against regime change as a cure for what ails the Middle East. Kasich has mocked the “fantasy” that massive high-end tax cuts would create balanced budgets. And Trump has bucked GOP conventional wisdom on foreign and domestic issues, denouncing the Iraq War as a waste of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars that could have shored up American infrastructure instead, while defending progressive taxation as a logical approach to raising revenue from those who can afford it.

When I slogged through the transcripts, I also noticed a few interesting ideas buried amid the can-you-top-this rhetoric. When he wasn’t accusing Obama of criminalizing Christianity while exalting the faith of Guantánamo detainees, Huckabee was often calling for more focus on chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer that cause so much pain and cost so much money. When she wasn’t telling whoppers about Planned Parenthood videos and Obama firing a general who never served in his administration, Fiorina kept pushing for “zero-based budgeting,” the idea that every program and agency should have to justify every dollar every year. When he wasn’t complaining that Obama cares more about anti-Muslim sentiment than anti-Semitism, Santorum suggested that veterans should get most of their care from private hospitals, and that the Veterans Administration should become a specialized center of excellence for military-focused health issues like prosthetics and PTSD.

But policy entrepreneurialism was not the gist of the Republican debates. The gist was that the survival of the United States is at risk; that Obama has been weak on ISIL and Assad and Russia and China and Iran and Hezbollah and every other distasteful figure on the world stage; that calling radical Islam by its name and “targeting the bad guys” and “taking the fight to the enemy” will solve all the problems in the Middle East. On domestic issues, the gist was that the United States in the Obama era has become a dystopia of rampant unemployment, high taxes, runaway deficits, porous borders and job-killing regulation—and that undoing what Obama did would make America great again.

These are presumably winning messages in a Republican primary. It’s not clear whether they would be in a general election. The reality of the Obama era, for all its warts, is that unemployment has dropped to 5 percent, the deficit has shrunk by two thirds, illegal immigration has plateaued, far fewer U.S. soldiers are dying abroad and Americans are more likely to be killed by lightning than by terrorists at home. The question is whether the run-for-your-lives talking points will crash into statistical reality, or whether they will gradually help create a new political reality.

The Democrats would say the GOP is simply defying reality—on climate, on economics, on the ease with which muscular foreign policies can fix the world, on just about everything. Then again, the GOP isn’t the party that’s hiding its debates on weekend nights. Its views may be extreme, but it’s airing its views for all to see. It’s acting like a confident party—perhaps an overconfident party—while the Democrats are acting like they’ve lost their feck.