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Will Trump's Cafeteria Conservatism Win Again?

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Donald Trump seems to relish stirring the troubled waters of race, gender and ethnicity. But the other big surprise of the presumed Republican presidential nominee's rise has been his unexpected emergence as a working-class hero.

Weird as it may sound, that's the big, underappreciated ideological difference that forced House Speaker Paul Ryan, Trump's highest-ranking skeptic in the Grand Old Party, to hold a meeting to find "common ground."

After 45 minutes of discussing "the core principles that tie us all together," as Ryan put it, they came out all smiles and issued a joint statement that recognized their "many important areas of common ground." Well, good luck with that, guys.

The ideological differences between Ryan and Trump are profound, particularly for a party whose purity police always are on the lookout for "RINOS," Republicans in name only.

Trump, by contrast, is a cafeteria conservative, picking the planks of conservative orthodoxy that he likes and rejecting others in the way that most of us choose chicken or fish on a buffet line.

The billionaire showman has gotten away with it because his flexible conservatism has lined up with his mostly white, working- and middle-class supporters' beliefs more closely than the policies of the mainstream GOP have.

 

He has famously responded to Republican inaction on immigration by promising to build a border wall, "make Mexico pay for it" and expel millions of undocumented immigrants who already are living and working here.

Under the banner of "America First" isolationism, he attacks existing trade deals as the jobs-exporting products of "stupid people" in both of the parties that run Washington. He would impose punitive tariffs, he says, which brings cheers from his rally crowds; if enacted, however, tariffs would trigger trade wars.

But Trump's beliefs can turn on a dime, despite his party's low tolerance for flip-floppers. Remember his early call for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States?" On Wednesday, the day before he met with Ryan, Trump said that was "just a suggestion."

He also famously shifted his position on abortion rights several times within hours of declaring in an interview that women who seek abortions where abortion is illegal should receive "some form of punishment." Two days later, he settled on leaving abortion law the way it is now until he can "change the law through his judicial appointments and allow the states to protect the unborn."

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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