By Publicly Condemning Kim Reynolds, Trump Disqualifies Himself
If your contempt for policy alone could delegitimize your candidacy…
Among the perhaps less fervent cohort of Trump supporters, what you will often hear is that while they don’t like Trump’s personality, they like his policies.
But since Trump didn’t really have policies (his foreign policy was all over the place, his trade policy was downright primitive, his immigration policy was premodern, his fiscal policy was asinine, cutting taxes without cutting spending at all, heaping trillions of dollars on the debt), I’ve always concluded this defense was an evasion, concealing that one likes Trump probably because he has a bad personality—he’s not PC they point out proudly. And this denial betrays a guilty conscience. Because if one has too much shame to admit it in polite society, then one knows Trump is a bad human being.
Nothing Trump has done lately is more revealing of his contempt for policy than his public disparagement of conservative Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds. Marc Thiessen writes in his responding Washington Post column, “Why Republican Politicians Should Emulate Kim Reynolds,”
Reynolds’s crime? Staying neutral in the GOP presidential primary. “I opened up the Governor position for Kim Reynolds, & when she fell behind, I ENDORSED her, did big Rallies, & she won,” Trump blared on Truth Social earlier this month. “Now, she wants to remain ‘NEUTRAL.’ I don’t invite her to events!”
This is ridiculous. Never mind that Iowa governors of both parties have traditionally stayed neutral ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. Why would Trump — who presumably wants Iowa Republicans to pick him in January and maintain the aura of the inevitability of his path to the nomination — attack the governor those voters love. Remember that Trump won the state by eight points in 2020 while Reynolds won by 18.6 two years later.
As my longstanding subscribers may remember, I’m one of Kim Reynolds’s most ardent admirers, having written one blog post praising her magisterial bypass of the culture wars by way of just giving parents school vouchers, and another glowing post where, after watching an event she did at the Cato Institute, I expressed my wish for her to run for president. Because I got a Nikki Haley tee shirt last week, I wouldn’t want anyone to think my approval of Reynolds has diminished in the slightest.
—If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s one of my most inspired blog posts.
Poised, sincere, gracious, folksy, very sharp, and most importantly principled, Kim Reynolds is also perhaps the most ruthlessly neoliberal public servant in the country.
She gave Iowa parents $7500 in Education Savings Accounts, so they can afford to send their kids to whatever school they choose (including public schools if one chooses). She has gone the furthest to lower taxes of any Republican governor in the country from 9% to 3%, with the hopes of removing the income tax and instituting a flat tax. With the added growth derived from the tax cuts, combined with cuts to spending, she balanced Iowa’s budget, leaving the government with a budget surplus, a great portion of which she allocated to education.
KC Mcginnis Wall Street Journal
Thiessen recounts in WAPO,
Conservative politicians routinely promise and then fail to eliminate government agencies, but Reynolds actually did it — reducing the number of cabinet departments in Iowa from 37 to 16. When she took office, she said she discovered that, on a per capita expenditure basis, Iowa was spending $2,100 more than deep-blue Illinois. “We cannot continue to support the level of government that we have in this state,” she said, because the size and scope of government “is preventing me from continuing to reduce taxes, and I am determined to get that done.”
She defied some of her fellow conservative lawmakers (which she does continually) to expand voting access for 40,000 former convicts. And facing a labor shortage of 75,000 job vacancies, she opened up Iowa’s economy to refugees with a program for assimilating them into Iowan society. Months ago I read Niskanen Center’s immigration advocate Kristina De Pena’s article in the New York Times, in which she prefaces,
The three of us have connections to Iowa, where the governor, Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and the state’s Department of Health and Human Services recently announced a program that supports refugees from around the world, with a focus on Afghan people in particular. That includes providing grants to organizations that enhance “community integration, English proficiency, digital literacy, banking and financial planning, transportation, health and wellness, services for older refugees and youth supports.”
But more recently, Thiessen informs us, Reynolds cracked down on the Marxist progressive left’s efforts to mix transgender people in sports that don’t correspond with their biological sex, signing a law that would uphold sex-segregated sports and spaces. And she banned the instruction of Critical Race Theory in public schools.
She also signed a 6 week heartbeat abortion bill which is perhaps the one policy of hers with which I would adamantly disagree. I’m pro-choice, because it’s my belief that life begins at birth when one comes into existence, not conception, before one has any self-awareness, and I’m a thoroughgoing atheist who neither believes in God nor the existence of any higher power. However, because I think Roe was unconstitutional, and I’m a strict originalist, I do agree with the Dobbs decision to leave the abortion question to the states (next I would add, I think the court should take down same sex marriage too). And while I consider it fair that every state freely decide its own abortion policies, I must say I find 6 weeks too strict. 15 weeks would be a lot more sensible. (Not that I care particularly about abortion either way. It’s a nonissue for me. This is a subject for another blog post, but I think if I accidentally got a girl pregnant, for example, it would make little difference to me whether she wanted to bring it to term or not. You can have it or not have it. I would support your choice regardless because I did not intend to get you pregnant god damn it! — you see, I am a pro-choicer not out of some ideological belief that it’s a woman’s choice and all that, but out of indifference or ambivalence rather.)
So as you can imagine, after months of singing her praises, it outraged me that Trump would have the poor taste to insult Kim Reynolds, who has done so much and who works so hard, to reduce the cost of living, protect individual liberty, promote economic growth, shrink the size of wasteful meddlesome government, and expand the range of free choice in private endeavor. If the just goal of politics in the neoliberal sense, is to best enable individuals to live their own lives, then she is the gold standard. I should think Milton Friedman would be very impressed with her tax reforms.
Kim Reynolds is a great old school, pre-Trump, Paul Ryan Republican, a budgeter and a tax cutter. She’s neoliberal in the sense that her philosophy is more in line with libertarianism than conservatism. That Trump would have the impudence to assail such a successful and popular red-state governor, is highly revealing of his contempt for liberty. If not that, it shows a callow disregard for someone whom, on the contrary, anyone who considers himself in any way conservative, one should revere.
When we talk about what makes Trump so bad for America we tend to fixate on the depravity of his character and his authoritarian challenge to the rule of law. In doing so we neglect the more mundane yet pragmatic case against his statesmanship.
What about the way he’ll impulsively tear into a policymaker, just because she won’t kiss up to him?
— Jay