The prevailing opinion on President-elect Donald Trump is that he\u2019s unpredictable, a man of no fixed views who transcends traditional notions of right and left.<\/p>\n
\u201cDonald Trump is post-ideological,\u201d Trump\u2019s campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, said at a Harvard University conference last week.<\/p>\n
With Trump, \u201cyou will have no idea each morning what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said earlier, \u201cbecause he will have no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe. But if you watch what Trump does, not what he says \u2014 which at this point, mostly means the choices he makes for Cabinet positions \u2014 he doesn\u2019t look unusual at all.<\/p>\n
In Trump\u2019s picks for economic and domestic policymaking jobs, there\u2019s a consistent underlying thread. And no, it\u2019s not that so many of them are billionaires.<\/p>\n
Most of them could have been nominated by any GOP nominee, including Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. There\u2019s nary a populist among them \u2014 not even the conservative kind.<\/p>\n
\u201cConservatives are happy,\u201d Scott Reed, a political advisor to the business-establishment U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a mainstream conservative list of very competent people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Take a look at the names.<\/p>\n
Steven Mnuchin, the choice for Treasury, is a billionaire who worked for Goldman Sachs before buying a bank of his own. (Like Trump, he was once a Democrat, but he\u2019s a Republican now.) Mnuchin says his first priority is cutting taxes, especially corporate taxes.<\/p>\n
Wilbur Ross, the Commerce secretary in waiting, is another billionaire investor. His main cause is negotiating better trade deals, but he also wants to dismantle most of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law.<\/p>\n
Tom Price, at Health and Human services, is a six-term GOP congressman who wants Medicare and Medicaid revamped and managed mostly by the private sector \u2014 once Obamacare is repealed, of course.<\/p>\n
Betsy DeVos, the choice for Education, is a champion of privately run charter schools and voucher plans to help parents pay private school tuition. Before Trump, she supported Jeb Bush.<\/p>\n
At Transportation, Elaine Chao spent eight years in George W. Bush\u2019s Cabinet, and she\u2019s married to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. It\u2019s hard to get much more establishment than that.<\/p>\n
Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon, may add a dash of eccentricity at Housing and Urban Development \u2014 in part because he has no real experience in housing policy \u2014 but his views are pretty standard for the GOP. Carson once called fair housing a \u201cfailed socialist experiment\u201d and told a television interviewer that \u201cpoverty is really more of a choice than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s not a populist insurrectionist in the bunch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a business-friendly Cabinet of pragmatists,\u201d a top corporate lobbyist in Washington told me, asking for anonymity to protect his multinational clients. \u201cThese are people orthodox Republicans can work with.\u201d<\/p>\n
What happened to all the populism in Trump\u2019s platform that made him the champion of so many white working-class voters? It\u2019s been quietly downsized since Election Day.<\/p>\n
The wall Trump promised to build along the southern border is now a fence.<\/p>\n
The trillion-dollar infrastructure program to build roads, bridges and airports has shrunk to $550 billion, and most of that \u2014 if Congress agrees \u2014 will be private sector investment, not government money.<\/p>\n
\u201cDrain the swamp?\u201d Yes, there\u2019s a rule barring lobbyists from serving in the transition \u2014 but they can get around it simply by revoking their lobbying registration.<\/p>\n
Trump and Ross say they still plan to renegotiate NAFTA and other trade deals, but they plan to do it patiently, not abruptly. \u201cTariffs are the last thing,\u201d Ross told CNBC last week. \u201cTariffs are part of the negotiation.\u201d<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean Trump has forgotten his working-class voters.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s offered them a series of grand gestures. He\u2019s renounced his salary as president. He wants to cancel the contract for a new Air Force One to save money. He jawboned Carrier into keeping 730 jobs in Indiana in exchange for $7 million in tax credits.<\/p>\n
All brilliant marketing, and enough to launch a victory tour \u2014 rallies in Ohio last week, North Carolina Tuesday night, Iowa and Michigan next.<\/p>\n
So far, in practice, Trumpism looks like mainstream conservatism plus tougher trade negotiations \u2014 and now, circuses. Just like the campaign.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may email him at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The prevailing opinion<\/a> on President-elect Donald Trump is that he\u2019s unpredictable, a man of no fixed views who transcends traditional notions of right and left. \u201cDonald Trump is post<\/a>-ideological,\u201d Trump\u2019s campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, said at a Harvard University conference last week. With Trump, \u201cyou will have no idea each morning what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-28747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28747"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}