The Devil and Tom Donohue

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

• June 20, 2018

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Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, speaking at an event in January.CreditAndrew Harrer/Bloomberg

News item #1: The Trump administration is taking thousands of children away from their parents, and putting them in cages.

News item #2: House Republicans have released a budget plan that would follow up last year’s big tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy with huge funding cuts for Medicare and Medicaid.

If you think these items are unrelated, you’ve missed the whole story of modern American politics. 

Conservatism – the actually existing conservative movement, as opposed to the philosophical stance whose constituency is maybe five pundits on major op-ed pages — is all about a coalition between racists and plutocrats. It’s about people who want to do (2) empowering people who want to do (1), and vice versa.

Until Trump, the ugliness of this deal was cloaked in euphemisms. As Lee Atwater famously put it,

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.

But the reality was always there. The conservative economic agenda has never been popular, and it is objectively against the interests of working class voters, whatever their race. In fact, whites without a college degree are the biggest beneficiaries of the social safety net. Nonetheless, these voters supported the GOP because it spoke to their racial animosity.

Now, to be fair, for a long time the GOP establishment managed to pull off a kind of bait-and-switch with this strategy, using race to motivate voters who would otherwise oppose its agenda, then putting the racism back in the closet once in office. George W. Bush did a lot of terrible things, but give him this much credit: he tried to dampen the xenophobia that was trying to break out after 9/11, rather than fanning the flames.

Ultimately, however, this bait-and-switch was bound to be unsustainable. Sooner or later the people who voted for white dominance at their own economic expense were going to find a champion who would deliver on their side of the bargain.

And now they have. Trump doesn’t say “nigger, nigger, nigger” – or at least I haven’t seen that. But he does talk about “animals” trying to “infest” America, which is arguably even more dehumanizing. And the cruelty of his border policy actually surpasses the days of Jim Crow; it harks back to the slave trade.

Now, many in the plutocrat wing of the GOP seem to be genuinely dismayed by where this is going. 

They aren’t themselves racists, or at least they aren’t crude racists. But so far they’ve been unwilling to go beyond hand-wringing. Remember, just two Republican senators could stop all of this by saying that they’ll refuse to support Trump judicial appointments and legislation until the cruelty stops; they could bring all the evil to a dead halt by threatening to caucus with Democrats. But not one has stepped forward – because taking such a step would endanger conservative economic policies, and those are evidently more important than human rights.

So pardon me for being cynical when I see Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – a man who turned the chamber into a relentlessly political organization, throwing all its weight behind the GOP – declaring that the child separation policy is terrible. “This is not who we are,” he says. Sorry, Mr. Donohue, but it is who you are: you made a deal with the devil, empowering racism and cruelty so you could get deregulation and tax cuts. Now the devil is having his due, and you must share the blame.

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