Distasteful or even alarming though he may be, Donald Trump has presented a tantalizing possibility of a Republican who would take “a wrecking ball to many of his adopted party’s orthodoxies, proposing a vision of right-wing politics far more mercantilist, nationalist and statist than anything we’ve seen from the post-Reagan, post-Goldwater G.O.P.,” as Ross Douthat, among many others, put it. But the emerging cast in Trump’s administration, from the appointment of Tom Price to run the Department of Health and Human Services to the slew of bankers and other millionaires, suggests something different: On domestic policy, he has not wrecked his party’s domestic platform, but continued and even intensified it. And the single most emblematic development is the report that Lawrence Kudlow is the leading candidate to run his Council of Economic Advisers.
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