What is Donald Trump Playing At?

A big beautiful bill from a president without a vision is a guarantee of a small, dark future.

Photo by salvatore ventura on Unsplash

Donald Trump is many things, but highly ideological is not one of them. He knows what he doesn’t like: Immigrants, NAFTA, liberals, the fake news media, germs, windmills. He knows what he wants to do: Restore American manufacturing. Return white men to their natural positions of power and dominance. Make himself richer. Make himself more powerful.

But Donald Trump, for all of his bluster and his Make America Great campaign slogan, doesn’t really have a vision for what America will be if he gets his way. There isn’t a grand, overarching plan here. There is just retribution and vibes.

More traditional and savvy Republicans, by contrast, do have clearer visions of the world they want. Those visions sometimes clash and they have evolved significantly under Trump, but today they generally include some iteration of traditional religiosity, patriarchal family formations, more power in white male hands, far fewer immigrants, and businesses that are unfettered from regulation and taxation. We see some of these ideologies show up in Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, upon which there are many different conservative fingerprints, and which is indeed very big – and very distinct from anything that might have been supported by the old GOP that claimed to care about fiscal responsibility, or at least about not torpedoing the country into enormous debt at the same moment that tariffs then no tariffs than maybe some tariffs were making the US dollar look a whole lot less reliable.

But the incoherence of Trumpism does not mean that the policies of the Trump administration aren’t shaping up to something. The are. What we’re getting from the Trump hodgepodge of sometimes-incoherent often-damaging policies is an America being made into a dumber, poorer, more isolated place.