During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan promised to strangle the newborn Department of Education in its cradle. On the campaign trail, he called it “President Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle.” Once in office, he didn’t let up: in his 1982 State of the Union address, Reagan again promised to dismantle the department, saying he would hand education dollars and control back to state and local governments.
For the next 40 years, abolishing the department remained a Republican pipe dream—that is, until this past month, when President Donald Trump began a serious effort to shut it down. Investigations by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service reportedly precede an impending executive order instructing the department to cease all non-mandatory activity and calling on Congress to terminate it fully.
Given how few initiatives a one-term president gets to undertake, it’s remarkable that Trump has decided to make such a classic Republican goal one of his legislative priorities. It also runs counter to claims—by Trump boosters and critics alike—that the 47th president represents a decisive break from the old days of the Reagan “dead consensus.”
Close your eyes to the news cycle for a minute, look at Trump’s actual policy objectives, and it becomes blindingly obvious: Donald Trump is a Republican. This core fact, rather than any allusions to the “far right,” is not only the key to understanding the president’s governing agenda; it also says something about the enduring popularity of old-school GOP positions.
Trump’s traditional Republican bent extends beyond the effort to kill the Department of Education. The entire DOGE agenda of deregulation is classic libertarian conservative, with its fixation on reducing government waste. House Republicans (presumably in consultation with the White House) are set to push a $4.5 trillion tax cut—because what Republican doesn’t like tax cuts? The president’s all-of-the-above energy policy so resembles conventional GOP proposals that his second Inaugural Address even invoked Sarah Palin’s famous line, “drill baby drill!” Even his promised large-scale deportations mirror, in effect, the policy of the George W. Bush administration, which deported some 2 million people.
Critics have called Trump’s legal agenda so extreme as to represent a “constitutional crisis.” In reality, he’s merely pursuing long-standing Republican governing objectives. His embrace of the unitary theory of the executive—the idea that the Constitution means it when it says the executive power is vested in the president—follows the example of Reagan and George W. Bush. A just-issued executive order mandates the executive branch comply with the Constitution’s constraints, including requiring the purging of regulations based on “unlawful delegations of legislative power.” Meantime, Trump’s judicial picks from his first term have been dismantling the very administrative state that many allege he wants to co-opt—another case where Trump has empowered the conservative legal movement.
One reason to believe that Trump is governing like a Republican is that he acted like this last time. In addition to the sterling conservative credentials of the 200 or so judges he appointed, his first administration’s primary agenda was generically Republican: a tax cut, border enforcement, and aggressive attempts at deregulation.
It’s worth observing that Trump is governing as a Republican because it exposes the supporters and opponents who suggested otherwise. Democrats, including President Joe Biden, routinely claimed that Trump represented a significant departure from an otherwise dignified GOP of days past (a claim blunted by the similar charges once made against Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush). Yet at a policy level, Trump seems to be following traditional GOP priorities.
Trump’s classic Republican agenda further challenges those who saw him as a tribune of the “new Right,” one who would eviscerate the Reagan consensus and leave the GOP establishment in the dust. The president has not, contrary to the wishes of movement luminaries like Steve Bannon, launched a national populist revolution akin to the New Deal. He has not inaugurated a Curtis Yarvin-inspired coup de état. Instead, he’s trying to cut taxes, shutter bureaucracies, and install originalists on the Supreme Court—all things that Republicans do.
Trump has certainly changed the GOP’s consensus in some ways. He’s shifted the party to the center on social issues, from abortion to IVF to weed. He’s sought to reconcile the GOP’s feuding foreign policy wings in his Cabinet, with hawkish picks like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz balanced by ultra-doves like Tulsi Gabbard. Most notably, Trump has pushed his party leftward on trade, antitrust, and labor issues, including with his controversial Labor secretary nominee, Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
One way to interpret these changes is as an ideological realignment, but a more precise term would be pragmatic recalibration. Trump’s instincts are often less about ideology and more about aligning the GOP with the median voter. His hardline stance on entitlements—he’s for them—is a big departure from Paul Ryan’s budget cutting. But it also matches that of voters, who overwhelmingly support programs like Medicare and Social Security.
If Trump is motivated by popularity, that’s a good sign for the many Republican standards he’s carried. A post-Trump GOP, if one can imagine such a thing, will still look to slash taxes, boost energy, strengthen the border, lean hawkish on foreign policy, and take a strong constitutionalist line on legal issues. About half the country will continue to vote for that package, even in lightly modified form.
In other words, the shock is not just that Donald Trump, after all the drama, is a Republican. It’s that, after all the drama, Republicanism is here to stay.
Top Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
