'Why bother?' Trump blamed for collapse of policy debates in presidential race

Donald Trump has hollowed out political discourse so thoroughly that few politicians from either party now bother to offer real policy solutions, according to a new analysis.

The Republican nominee often promises far-fetched solutions without a plausible course of action, such as his recent pledge to cut energy prices by half or "defeat inflation" in his first 100 days in office. And the media often uncritically amplifies those proposals, wrote Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell.

"A preposterous promise on a 100-day timeline is still preposterous. (Arguably more so)," Rampell wrote. "Yet seemingly, the entire Republican Party — and much of the media — have chosen to treat such nonsense as though it were a Very Serious, Big-Brained policy treatise. How do we know? Because it’s precisely this kind of vacuous promise that Trump allies say they want him to talk about."

Republicans have been begging Trump to stick to policy rather than focus on personally attacking Vice President Kamala Harris, but his GOP allies aren't any more specific about solutions to the issues voters tell pollsters they care about.

"It would probably make sense for the former president to focus on these issues, given that voters rank them among the most important problems facing the country and are inclined to believe Republicans will handle them better than Democrats," Rampell wrote.

"But grumbling that it’s raining is not a policy. Offering people umbrellas, or perhaps a route to shelter, is. Neither Trump nor his allies have gotten around to the umbrella part of the equation."

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The problem is, voters don't really like Republican policies — like cutting corporate taxes, abolishing the Education Department or implementing the "Project 2025" agenda — when they learn more about them, she wrote. But even Democrats have taken the low-stakes position of identifying problems while promising only vaguely to fix them.

"If you’re a Democrat, why bother crafting any careful, detailed proposals, with all their trade-offs and vulnerabilities?" Rampell wrote. "Why bother trying to understand the underlying causes of inflation when you can simply pledge to make high prices illegal?

"Perhaps tellingly, more than a month into her presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris still doesn’t have a 'policy' section on her campaign website."

"There’s always been a temptation for politicians to under-plan and overpromise, to pledge outcomes without detailing the inputs," she added. "But just as Trump has lowered the bar for politicians’ character and ethics, he’s degraded our expectations for governing, too."