Some Republicans Are Finally Realizing They Wrecked the Middle Cl***

It’s not just Vance. In increasing numbers, Republican politicians are waking up to the reality that their economic policies have screwed just about all of us out of their fabled “American dream.” Consider Trump’s executive order from January, aimed at keeping investors out of single-family home markets. Senator Bernie Moreno helped make it law in the recent housing bill. It’s a sensible policy, but telling American consumers what they can and can’t buy, well, that’s anathema to the free market economics of the GOP. Or, in a similar moment of realization, Senator Josh Hawley lodged complaints last year that accomplishing the Republican dream of slashing the social safety net in the Big Beautiful Bill was “politically suicidal” and demonstrative of the GOP’s longstanding fealty to what Hawley called his party’s “old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital, and deep cuts to social insurance.” Even Marco Rubio during his Senate confirmation hearing last year admitted that “free and unfettered trade at the expense of our national economy has shrunk the middle cl*** and left the working cl*** in crisis” —a remark that sounded eerily similar to the Marxian theory that free trade accelerates inequality.

The particularly inconvenient thing about Republicans realizing they’ve caught the car at this moment is that they’re presently in lockstep behind Donald Trump who, as a dedicated transactionalist, has stacked up a jenga tower of economic policies that are largely short-sighted. Not the sort of ideas you would use to rebuild a party platform that has failed, let alone revive a crumbling economy.

The president’s zany economic policies (as much as they can be coherently understood) are best characterized as nationalist, sharp reversals of decades of Republican doctrine. When, in 1987, Ronald Reagan implemented tariffs against Japan over a semiconductor tiff, he complained that “imposing such tariffs or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind are steps that I am loath to take.”