The passage of Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ offers a lesson that narratives are just as important as interest-group politics for a party’s agenda
These subsidies were considered by many as immune to a change of presidents since they created new jobs and profit opportunities for firms in traditionally Republican-voting “red” states. As allergic as the Trump-controlled Republican Party is to green policies, conventional wisdom went, it would not dare take away these benefits. But then it did.
Where did the conventional wisdom go wrong? Scholars who study how political decisions are made tend to focus on economic costs and benefits. They reason that legislation that creates material gains for organised, well-connected groups at the expense of diffuse losses to the rest of society is more likely to be passed. Many elements of Trump’s bill are indeed well explained by this perspective: in particular, it engineers a dramatic transfer of income to the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
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