New York Times
By Josh Barro
February 10, 2016
Donald
Trump’s rise from joke candidate to likely Republican nominee surprised
all the supposed experts, including me. But 2,000 miles from
Washington, in the southwestern
American desert, we should have seen an early warning.
In
Arizona, there was a sign that Republican voters could be drawn to a
candidate who combines anger and flexibility, who is a hard-liner on
immigration and a moderate
on government spending.
Remember
Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona from 2009 to 2015? If you don’t live in
Arizona, you probably know her for two things: signing Senate Bill
1070, the controversial
immigration enforcement law that was partly struck down by the Supreme
Court, and wagging her finger at President Obama on an airport tarmac.
You
might not know that while Ms. Brewer outraged the left, she also
angered the conservative establishment by breaking with small-government
orthodoxy. The same Governor
Brewer who wanted immigrants to show their papers to any police officer
with “reasonable suspicion” also sought a temporary sales tax increase
to close a budget gap and for Arizona to accept the Medicaid expansion
under the Affordable Care Act. She won both
fights over loud objections from the right.
Long
before Mr. Trump began his campaign, Ms. Brewer seemed to understand
that Republican voters and conservative elites don’t necessarily care
about the same issues.
A Republican candidate can thrive while taking an unorthodox approach
on taxes and spending if he or she also addresses Republican voters’
outrage over unauthorized immigration and their dislike for President
Obama.
“Voters
want somebody that can solve the problems and can do it effectively and
do it right,” she said in a recent interview. “They just don’t want
somebody that says
‘no, no, no.’ ”
National
Review, the conservative magazine that devoted an issue last month to
anti-Trump arguments, attacked Ms. Brewer in 2013 as “exemplifying that
unfortunately common
strain of Republican leadership that is uncompromising in rhetoric but
opportunistic in reality.” It’s a sentence that could easily have been
written about Mr. Trump.
They
were writing about Ms. Brewer’s choice to urge her state’s legislature
to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. At the time, other Republican
governors were turning down
the federally funded benefit on their residents’ behalf, thinking that
refusals would undermine the health law. That approach did not strike
Ms. Brewer as pragmatic.
“Although
I didn’t support Obamacare, I support taking care of the poor,” she
said. “I was able to bring those millions of dollars into the state. If
we didn’t take them,
they would go to someplace else.”
There’s
something very Trumpian about this approach: You argue your side,
sometimes acrimoniously, but you don’t turn down a good deal, even with
your sworn opponent.
So
she twisted arms — hard — to get the expansion through a resistant,
Republican-controlled legislature. She declared that she would veto any
budget that did not expand
Medicaid, then threatened that she would veto all bills the legislature
sent her until it expanded Medicaid. She followed through on the
threat, and eventually enough Republicans acquiesced.
Before
the Medicaid issue, Ms. Brewer alienated national Republicans by
seeking a sales tax increase. In 2010, the anti-tax activist Grover
Norquist called Ms. Brewer
a “lousy governor” who used immigration politics as part of a “clever
strategy to get people to focus on something other than her
billion-dollar tax increase.” Again, it was a preview of establishment
complaints about Mr. Trump, who combines a hard-line position
on immigration with moderate stances on several economic issues.
Ms.
Brewer defended her fiscal choices, and noted that voters had sided
with her. “I never thought in my worst nightmare I’d go out and ask
people to vote for a tax increase,
but I knew I had to be pragmatic,” she said. Voters passed it in 2010
with 64 percent of the vote, over the objections of conservatives,
including Senator John McCain and Jon Kyl, then Arizona’s other senator.
Ms.
Brewer’s tax apostasy fueled support for a primary challenge from the
state treasurer, who was competitive with her in early polls. But the
fight over the immigration
law consolidated Governor Brewer’s support among conservative voters
and he ended his campaign; she was easily renominated and re-elected.
Mr.
Trump has promised not to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid
because he’ll “make us so rich” we won’t have to — not an encouraging
message for a conservative
establishment that has long sought entitlement reform. And it’s not a
message that seems to have hurt him at all with actual Republican
voters.
Given
their political similarities, you will not be surprised to learn that
Ms. Brewer is a fan of Mr. Trump, whom she calls a “truth-teller.” (I
asked if he’s telling
the truth when he says he’ll get Mexico to pay for a border wall, and
she said, “Maybe he’s got a way.”)
The
secret with Mr. Trump is not so much that he tells the truth as that he
tells the “truth.” He gives voice to ideas held by many Republican
voters that have been suppressed
by Republican candidates because they’re not shared by Republican
elites. Some of these ideas are moderate and some are extreme; some are
valid and some are odious. But they are all popular in a Republican
primary.
There
is a reason that Ms. Brewer won her primary and that the former House
majority leader Eric Cantor lost his. It should have been a warning that
Mr. Trump would be
far more appealing than establishment elites thought he would be.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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