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By David French

Opinion Columnist

If you live in Red America, as I do, you’re familiar with two conceptually incompatible arguments for Donald Trump. We’ll call them the MAGA argument and the Republican argument.

The MAGA argument can be summed up in three words: Burn it down. Trump’s core supporters are convinced that the American establishment is irretrievably corrupt, that America is in its last days and that only the most dramatic action can save the Republic. They think the Trump of Stop the Steal and Jan. 6 is the real Trump, and they can’t wait to see him unleashed.

The Republican argument is different. These are the voters who still think they belong to a party of limited government and individual liberty. They look back at the first two years of Trump’s term — when he nominated conventional Republican members to his cabinet, selected conventional conservative judges to the federal bench and passed a conventional Republican tax cut — and think that will happen again.

These Republicans look at Jan. 6 as an aberration. They’ll tell me that concerns about democracy are overblown and that what they really want is cheaper groceries at home and less chaos overseas.

“I’m voting for Trump’s policies,” they tell me, “not his tweets.”

In other words, one set of voters is voting for Trump with great joy and enthusiasm because they absolutely, positively take him seriously. Another set of voters is voting for him in part because they don’t take him seriously at all.

Both sets of voters can’t be right.

So let’s take the Republican policy challenge. Are his policies actually better than his tweets?

No, they are not. For Republicans to believe that Trump will govern responsibly, they have to believe that his campaign is a lie. Because if you actually listen to Trump, he’s not promising peace and prosperity. He’s promising conflict, chaos and economic policies that make no sense if inflation is a prime concern.

Are you thinking of voting for Trump because prices are too high? His proposed policies would almost certainly make inflation worse. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 leading economists found that 68 percent believed inflation would be higher under Trump than Kamala Harris. Only 12 percent thought Harris’s policies would exacerbate inflation more.

Trump’s extraordinary dedication to tariffs (earlier this week he said, “To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff’”) is a chief reason for economists’ concerns. The cost of tariffs — taxes imposed on foreign goods imported to the United States — tends to be passed on to the consumer. Indeed, that’s part of the entire point of the exercise, to make foreign-made goods more expensive for consumers so that they’ll buy domestic products.

It’s not just tariffs that could drive prices higher. Even setting aside the practical impossibility and moral horror of Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations, it could also have an inflationary effect by disrupting the American labor supply.

In fact, as Jack Herrera documented in a comprehensive Texas Monthly report, concerns about labor disruption are one reason even hawkish red states like Texas haven’t truly cracked down on the hiring of illegal immigrants.

“Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber,” Herrera wrote, “Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and........

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