The day before Donald Trump reflected on “Second Amendment people” and their response to Hillary Clinton’s taste in judges, he made news with a speech about economics. To The New Republic’s Brian Beutler, the takeaway there was that Trump had “adopted [both] Paul Ryan’s tax policy and the GOP’s gaffe-centered 2012 campaign strategy of misquoting or misrepresenting the Democratic candidate’s words.”
In a Monday post, Beutler argued that the two were related since Trump, “vulnerable to criticism from Hillary” on tax issues, has taken the offensive by lying about Clinton’s tax proposals -- specifically, by “claim[ing] that she pledged to raise middle-class taxes…This never happened, not even in a slip-of-the-tongue kind of way. Clinton specifically promises not to raise taxes on the middle class. But pretending otherwise is the only way Trump can neutralize the weaknesses his new tax policy creates.”
According to Beutler, who opened his post with “Donald Trump is now running Mitt Romney’s campaign plus racism,” Trump’s approach is a throwback to the summer of “you didn’t build that”:
As a rhetorical gambit this closely resembles the way Republicans distorted and decontextualized President Obama’s words four years ago, to make him seem hostile to business owners, and blunt Democratic criticism of Mitt Romney’s regressive economic policies. It was a dishonest and ineffective strategy then, and it won’t work any better today.
Beutler contended that Trump, facing problems that included “the threat of mass defections” among Republicans, “recognized the main thing holding the party together is Ryan’s willingness to tolerate racism and authoritarianism out of blind faith that Trump will sign the House GOP agenda into law. So Trump adopted much of that agenda.”
