SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Nate Cohn
The long-awaited break-up between US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk was as personal and petty as anticipated, and yet it’s a sign of something much more than a conflict between two of the world’s most powerful and mercurial men.
It’s a signal that Trump is not finding it easy to hold his populist conservative coalition together.
Then president-elect Donald Trump, with Elon Musk and J.D. Vance at a college football game in December.Credit: AP
At the beginning of the year, Trump’s coalition did not seem so vulnerable. To an extent unmatched since at least Ronald Reagan, it seemed as if Trump could enact a conservative agenda and find considerable support from the public. By raising tariffs on China, deporting immigrants lacking legal status, increasing oil production, cutting spending or fighting the “woke” left, he could stay on solid political ground.
Whether it’s because of his own limitations as a manager of competing players, the excesses of his own policies or the growing challenge of the national debt, it doesn’t appear to be so straightforward for Trump to hold the gang together.
The second Trump coalition is fraying
Trump won a second term with a much broader political coalition than the one that brought him to the presidency in 2016.
Trump attends a UFC-316 mixed martial arts event in New Jersey on Saturday (US time), after his blow-up with Elon Musk.Credit: AP
He added millions of young and non-white voters to his base of older, white, working-class populists and stalwart Republicans. He also added considerable support from anti-woke and anti-establishment elites who previously backed Democrats.
These new Trump supporters were very different from the voters who backed him in 2016. They were neither traditional Republicans nor conservative populists drawn to Trump’s pitch on issues like trade and immigration.
Instead, they were animated by issues that weren’t so potent back in 2016, like the excesses of the “woke” left and pandemic-era public health policy or anger at rising prices, crime, homelessness and an influx of migrants. In different ways, Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Musk each epitomise different facets of this enlarged Trump coalition.
It seemed possible that vehement opposition to progressives would hold everyone together during the presidency, as it did during the campaign, and that maybe Trump would also do enough to please each group and avoid alienating a constituency.
Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr at the White House in May. Credit: AP
Less than five months into Trump’s term, there are indications that this broader coalition is fraying. Polls suggest many young and non-white voters who backed Trump in November now disapprove of his performance. There haven’t been as many examples of elite defections, but there have been many signs of queasiness with the excesses of his policies. The extent of Trump’s tariffs, his defiance of the courts, his attacks on high-skilled immigration and higher education, and more simply go beyond what many of Trump’s backers thought they were signing up to support.
Musk’s defection is not necessarily representative. His grievances may be personal as much as they’re about policy. Still, Trump failed to keep Musk on board, and it seems to have been at least partly because of the challenge in reconciling the ideologically diverse factions in his orbit. And while Musk complained most loudly about how much the Republican tax and spending bill would add to the national debt, the possibility that other policies were a factor – like attacks on international students or reducing support for renewables – shouldn’t be discounted.
And even if other Trump policies, like deportations or universal tariffs, weren’t problems for Musk, they might well erode Trump’s support among other members of his coalition.
The return of deficit politics
For the past decade or so, deficits haven’t been a major issue in American politics. This is changing fast.
The US fiscal picture has become markedly worse over the past few years. The national debt is projected to be well over 100 per cent of gross national product in a decade. Already, interest payments on the debt have reached nearly one-fifth of federal revenue. The country is projected to have trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, even during a period of low unemployment and economic growth. High interest rates will make it expensive to finance additional debt.
The deteriorating fiscal situation is beginning to affect politics, most obviously in the challenge of passing a big tax and spending bill. In the past, it was easy enough for Republicans to cut taxes. Now, with the deficit and interest rates so high, a nearly $3 trillion ($4.6 trillion) expansion in the debt over the next decade is suddenly not so easy to swallow.
This challenge for Republicans won’t go away. The alliance between traditional and populist conservatives was much easier when Trump could promise tax cuts while sparing popular entitlement programs. As the burden of the debt mounts, this win-win proposition will be hard to sustain.
Less obviously, the same fiscal issues will be a major challenge for the Democratic coalition as well. With all the fighting between progressives and moderates over the past decade, it’s easy to overlook that deficit spending made it much easier for the party to stay unified. Mainstream Democrats could bridge the gap between the party’s ideological wings by campaigning on investments in infrastructure and renewable energy as well as on modest but significant expansions of the social safety net, like paid family leave. The debt issue might prove to be even a bigger one for Democrats than Republicans.
It’s hard to say whether the Republican mega-bill is really the reason Musk broke with the president. Still, he called the bill an “abomination”. And the potential power of this issue over the longer term should not be underestimated.
When interest payments reached a similar share of federal revenue back in the early 1990s, it helped break up the Reagan coalition and propel the rise of Ross Perot. If over the next few years the national debt becomes an existential issue for voters, all bets are off.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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