Lessons from the foreign aid votes

The past week has presented a fascinating object lesson in the continued tension over the direction of foreign policy and national security in the MAGA era, on what matters and what doesn’t, and who matters and who doesn’t, when it comes to finding a true forward-looking Trump-Reagan fusion. I wrote about this in the context of reviewing the new book by Matt Kroenig and Dan Negrea, who wrote a Ukraine-focused piece for Foreign Policy last week. But that’s just writing, not voting — and this week brought votes that include more useful indicators of what’s going on.

First, the most populist fringe of MAGA lost repeated and significant tests within the House, in opposition to the speaker they chose to elevate over Kevin McCarthy, who maintained his support from Donald Trump throughout. Trump never lifted a finger of serious objection to any of these foreign aid bills except to voice his repeated belief that Europe should pay more (they should, but many of them already are) and some handwaving of disagreement on TikTok’s forced divestment, which everyone knows isn’t driven by some deep-seeded ideological objection. The popularity of all these positions can be disputed, but they do generally represent the majority position of Republicans — and no one expects to suffer electorally for the votes they took on Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan or TikTok.

So what’s to be taken away from a very loud faction on the right just losing outright and the rest of the members in a very pro-Trump MAGA-driven House feeling free to vote the way they did? You can measure the real opposition on Ukraine not by the 112 Republican votes against aid, but actually as being around fifty-five members — the number of Republicans who voted against the Rule to advance the complicated package. Between the Rules votes, Ukraine, TikTok and FISA, these are areas where some of the populists may be taking positions that are less popular than they represent in their normal “the people versus the swamp” framing.

One way to look at it is a simple miscalculation on leverage — that with a border deal deemed impossible at this late stage of an election year, people who stuck to that line ended up forcing the conference to fold. Another is that developments with Israel, Iran and China have reset the foreign policy conversation in the past six months, drawing focus away from Ukraine and allowing Republicans to return to their hawkish standard. Republicans are most comfortable criticizing Democratic administrations for being too weak, and in each area this is what world events and the Biden administration allows them to do.

Overall, the conclusion reached in Washington this weekend will be seized upon by many people who declare themselves to be the greatest advocates for Donald Trump as indication that the Republican Party needs to be burned to the ground, or that Mike Johnson should be vacated, or that this is just the swamp reasserting itself. But that’s clearly not the case. Instead, it’s a sign that the GOP, which is now the party of Donald Trump, remains the party willing to spend significantly on the military when they believe it’s important, and unwilling to show a weak hand in defense of Israel or in opposition to China. And if Trump disagrees, he certainly never vocalized it. There’s a lesson in that, too.