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Welcome back.
We're joined now by Oren Cass, who's the founder and chief economist at American Compass.
Welcome to Washington Journal.
Well, thanks for having me.
Can you tell us a little bit about your mission at American Compass and how your organization is funded?
Sure.
Our mission directly is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation's liberty and prosperity.
And, you know, so what that means in practice is really focusing a lot on economic policy, trying to get away from this model that just says all growth is equally good and we'll somehow make it up to everybody who gets left behind, making sure it's a much more broad-based growth.
And as a result, we're funded by a really interesting set of some individuals, some corporations, and a lot of foundations all the way across the political spectrum.
Speaking of the political spectrum, where would you say that your group sits in terms of ideology in politics as well as economics?
Well, we're definitely on the right of center.
I think we're clearly identified as a very conservative group.
But at the same time, it's interesting.
We spend most of our time on arguments within the right of center, really working on a lot of these fights that are going on among conservatives about how to move forward.
Obviously, the Republican Party today is not the same one of John McCain and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
And so, you know, we work a lot with folks like now Vice President-elect JD Vance, now nominee for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, on trying to shape the future direction of the conservative movement.
You had an op-ed in the New York Times, or a guest essay, I should say.
Trump is about to face the choice that dooms many presidency.
What is that choice, and why did you need to write this now?
Well, I think it's an especially interesting situation for Mr. Trump because, you know, it's been 100, almost 150 years since we've had a president who was out of office and then coming back into office.
So he kind of gets a second chance at doing a first term.
And, you know, typically what we see when a new president is coming in, they've just spent all of this time campaigning, making commitments to voters, trying to win their support.
And all of a sudden, everything flips.
Now you're the president-elect, now all of those special interest groups, all of those donors, everybody's trying to get your support for their own priorities.
And I think it's a place where, you know, right at the beginning, we typically see administrations really struggle where they do a lot of the stuff that the activists really want, that the donors really want.
And the voters kind of look around and say, wait a minute, this isn't what we were expecting at all.
And typically then in the next midterm election, you see the president's party get wiped out.
And so, you know, I think the point of the piece that I wrote and what is such an important moment right now is to see can Mr. Trump remember why it is he was actually elected, what he's going to have to do to be a successful president, or does all of the attention focus to what people are talking about at the bar at Mar-a-Lago, which isn't the stuff that's going to get it done.
Now, when it comes to Trump's first administration, how close do you think he got to some of these pro-worker economic policies that you support?
And in general, what did you think of his economic record?
Well, I think his first term was a really interesting situation where, you know, I like the metaphor of the dog that caught the car.
Obviously, people were very surprised that he won, and it was a situation where there hadn't been a lot of work done to develop the kinds of policy ideas, to develop the bench of talent that you could bring into an administration that was going to do that kind of work.
And so what I think you really saw in his first term was, you know, he gets to the White House, who's in Congress?
Well, Paul Ryan is the Speaker of the House.
And so what are the big legislative priorities?
It was a big corporate tax cut, and it was trying to repeal Obamacare.
And I think those probably weren't the right places to focus.
On the other hand, in places where a lot of thinking and work had already had been done in terms of stronger immigration enforcement, in terms of much more aggressive trade policy and confronting China, that's where you saw him get more done.
And I think especially on trade, you know, Ambassador Bob Lighthizer, who was U.S. Trade Representative, who's a candidate for Treasury Secretary now, he knew exactly what needed to be done.
Trump gave him the power and the space to go do it.
And so I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress on the trade issue with China.
Now, you mentioned earlier that you're working with Vice President-elect JD Vance.
I want to play a portion of his speech accepting the vice presidential nomination in July.
Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I'd be standing here tonight.
I grew up in Middletown, Ohio.
A small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community, and their country with their whole hearts.
But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America's ruling class in Washington.
When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.
When I was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.
When I was a senior at high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
And at Each step of the way in small towns like mine in Ohio or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan.
In states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war.
Orin Cass, what is your assessment thus far of President-elect Trump's picks for his cabinet, as well as what you're hoping to see from Vice President-elect JD Vance when it comes to economic policy?
Well, I think something really interesting that you notice in that clip from JD Vance is that he's actually pairing together two different issues where the Republican Party has really shifted on free trade and economic policy.
The Republican Party and for that matter, the Democratic Party, as he noticed with Joe Biden, was overwhelmingly focused on just embracing free trade and ignoring places like Ohio that were going to be hurt by it.
And also then on foreign policy, it was sort of a parallel process.
You had both Democrats and Republicans just kind of going around looking for wars to start and not thinking about the people who were going to have to fight in those wars.
And so what I think what you see with Trump and Vance and in the picks they've started to make is obviously a different way of thinking about that.
So far, the picks have been more on the foreign policy and military side.
And so, you know, I think somebody like Senator Rubio at the State Department is a really excellent pick.
You know, he has been really at the forefront over the last decade of making the case that we need to rethink all of this.
We need to recognize that our main adversary is China, that our economic and foreign policies are entangled.
What we do on economics has a huge effect on what we can do in foreign policy, what it means for our national security.
And so I think he's going to bring much needed change and leadership to the State Department.
On the economic side, it's interesting to see those are the picks that haven't really been made yet, right?
There's still a debate about Treasury Secretary, you know, who's going to be somebody who actually will carry forward President Trump's vision and not just kind of be another Wall Street banker, which we tend to see, especially in Republican Treasury departments.
And then likewise, picks like commerce, labor.
These are now the issues that are at the heart of our economic policy.
And I think, as someone like JD Vance has spoken about a lot, having a labor policy that is much more focused on the interests of workers, having a Commerce Department, for instance, is in charge of the CHIPS Act, which is all of the investment that we're doing to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to this country.