Bush's EPA director suspects Trump's big business backers feel "buyer's remorse"
I spoke with former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman.
New Jersey Republicans have historically been more liberal than their national counterparts.
In the mid-20th century, the NJ GOP successfully pushed on their party for the presidency so-called “establishment” Republicans like Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower (the last of whom actually became president). In the process, they staved off far right forces led by their party’s most reactionary leaders, from Joe McCarthy (of “McCarthyist” witch hunts notoriety), Robert Taft (son of the former president) and Barry Goldwater (who in 1964 finally won the party’s nomination, lost the election — but forever pushed the GOP to the right).
Flash forward to 2025 and the roles are juxtaposed. The extreme conservatives are led no longer by McCarthy, Taft and Goldwater, but by President Donald Trump and those who follow his cult of personality. The moderate Republicans are, if not extinct, at least on critical life support.
Hence why Christine Todd Whitman, a distinguished two-term New Jersey governor and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head, leads not the Republican Party, but the centrist Forward Party. The New Jersey Republicans, once known for leading their national party’s moderate-liberal wing, are now indistinguishable from the rest of the MAGA movement, as evidenced by the dirty tricks run by Jack Ciattarelli in his gubernatorial campaign against Mikie Sherrill (if Sherrill wins, she’ll be New Jersey’s second woman governor… after Whitman became the first.)
It is also why I spoke with her for Back Seat Socialism — because, as Mark Twain once put it, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.
It reminds me of how Disney rescinded its decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel once they saw the financial consequences. Do you think that maybe, on a broader scale, not just in terms of the environment, but in general, the business community might realize that Trump’s extremism is too far, that even if you’re conservative, this is way beyond the pale? Is there any reason for optimism, in your opinion?
I think you’re seeing buyers remorse these days. It’s not everywhere. It’s not everyone. But there are a number of people that are finally saying, no, no, this is not what we wanted. We wanted change. We wanted to reduce regulations because we hate them. We don’t like government in our business. So we were delighted that we had somebody that swore they were going to take it out. But this is getting over the top.
And the inconsistencies is something also that really drives business and the private sector nuts. I mean, these tariffs: up, down, they’re good, they’re not good. The TACO approach of this president is very unsettling to the investment community and the business community. They’d like to have a little more certainty and we seem to be going more and more off the rails every day.
I love it that you said TACO Trump always chickens out. I wrote my master’s thesis on 19th century tariff policy. So when I hear Trump talking about raising tariffs as a way of making America more economically competitive, it baffles me that he isn’t laughed at. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I’m sincere. I can’t imagine that these issues which were resolved over a hundred years ago by brilliant economists are still being discussed. I’m curious, I know we’re now way off from e from ecological issues, but you mentioned TACOs, the TACO acronym. Do you feel other business people roll their eyes when talk, when Trump talks about how he’s going to use tariffs to make America’s Rust Belt revived? What are your thoughts?
I just feel like anybody who understands basic economics knows that there is a place for tariffs, for some tariffs, but this is out of control now. It does come back around on the American consumer. Farmers are having a terrible time right now. They can’t sell soybeans, they’re having to plow them under. They can’t get sell their cattle, prices are going up. He may say the economy’s great and prices are fine, but you talk to any housewife that goes to the grocery store and they’ll tell you no, in fact, prices are still very high and they make it difficult for me to support my family.
He’s trying to convince people that this isn’t a problem because he’s firing people from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and he’s firing people who track inflation. My suspicion is that if people’s prices are going up, it doesn’t matter if the government statisticians says that isn’t happening, they’ll know it’s happening because it hurts them directly.
Of course, yeah! They know it’s happening. You can’t fool them on that. They know when gas prices go up, they know when the price of beef or eggs or milk goes up, because that’s something they deal with every day. And you can tell them until you’re blue in the face that that’s not happening. But they know it.
Or I can just talk about living in Pennsylvania. Farmers are having problems here because of all the undocumented immigrants that were deported. They don’t have a workforce.
Right, exactly. Well, I always wonder… Nobody’s ever written the story or talked about what happened at the Hyundai plant when they took away 500 and some odd employees in the middle of a shift. What happened that day? What happened to production? What’s happening to production now?
You take that many people away…
And the scary thing is that ICE agents, I mean, there are a lot of them that are really good people. They believe sincerely, and we should arrest illegal immigrants who committed crimes. We should be getting at them. But we also, on the other hand, have to start to put together a plan to help people get to be legal in this country and not arrest them when they’re turning up for their hearings to get legal. I mean, that sends just a backwards signals and scares people away from going through the process, such as it is. But we make it very cumbersome and both parties are guilty in this one. I mean, neither party wants to solve this problem because it’s great for the base, gets the base all excited. This is why the Forward Party exists
What I’ve noticed is, the Forward Party often does is critique how both parties will, how the two main parties perpetuate a lot of the same problems, because it’s mutually beneficial.
Right. That’s exactly why we exist. We exist as a home for those people who feel they don’t have it, which is 50% of the registered voters these days are independents, registered independents. What we’re saying is it’s never good when the parties get to this point, which our founding fathers, by the way, warned us about, they were very skeptical about the potential for this happening when policy takes a back seat to politics. And that’s what’s happened. Nothing is looked at through the policy prism of, “How do we solve this issue?”
It’s more looked at, “How do we keep, if this is a really good issue for us, for our base, how do we keep it going?”
At the end of 2001, beginning of 2002, George W. Bush sent up a bill to Capitol Hill on immigration. And it was a good bill. It was a decent bill, but you expect the Congress to do what Congresses do, which is to take a piece of legislation from the executive branch and play with it and change it and make it better, hopefully
They never even held hearings. Neither side wanted to hold hearings. They didn’t want to solve the problem. And that’s what’s wrong with the system today. The two parties, when you have 70% of the elective offices in any given year uncontested, we as the American people lose. And so Forward is the alternate, Forward is there to provide that opportunity for people to have a choice or the choice.
You remind me of George Washington’s farewell address. He warned that “sharpened by the spirit of revenge” that partisanship could lead to a dictatorship. And he elaborated “the disorders and miseries, which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual. And sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”
As I say of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, when asked “What kind of a government?” he said “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Back Seat Socialism
Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.