A little hypocritical partisan tripe is generally expected from political parties, even in the best of times. But watching the GOP become cheerleaders for pork-stuffed, debt-laden, omnibus spending bills and tax-by-diktat trade policies is truly a sight to behold.

The Washoe County Republican Party’s recent defense of Trump’s tariffs, for example, highlights just how far from its “limited government” rhetoric the party has strayed. 

In response to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) lamenting the affect tariffs are having on grocery prices, the Washoe GOP lashed out with a dizzying compilation of disjointed talking points that should leave Reaganite Republicans wondering what, exactly, happened to the fiscal hawks who used to dominate conservative politics. In a single tweet, the party asserted that the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has brought us $1.6 trillion in savings, that tariffs are no worse than sales taxes and that California’s tax policy is what actually ails cash-strapped Nevadans at the grocery store. 

Pretending that HR1 resulted in $1.6 trillion in “savings” requires an almost comical divorce from common sense, considering just how laden with debt the pork-filled omnibus monstrosity was in reality. As the single most expensive bill in more than a decade, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” is estimated to add $3.4 trillion to our already ballooning national debt — a sum that grows to more than $4 trillion when the cost of that debt is added to the calculation. 

And while some of that debt is due to the traditionally conservative policy of lowering various tax rates, pretending that the bill is anything other than a continuation of Washington, D.C.’s, longstanding tendency to vastly overspend is ludicrous. 

Indeed, President Donald Trump’s track record on spending is hardly what anyone could call fiscally conservative. Even before the pandemic, his first term dramatically increased the nation’s debt, and there’s no indication that his second term will be much better for our fiscal future.

Despite Elon Musk’s DOGE project and local GOP organizations claiming massive spending bills are really cuts, this year’s deficit is likely to be larger than that of the last three years. Not since the unprecedented, pandemic-fueled deficits of 2020 and 2021 has the federal government overspent quite so much. 

Surely, if President Joe Biden’s overspending is worth a little political outrage, as the Washoe GOP insists it is, then Trump’s propensity for deficit spending ought to merit at least some degree of criticism as well. 

But it’s not just the party’s blind spot regarding spending that demonstrates its drift away from any semblance of fiscal responsibility. Republicans have also apparently learned to unshackle themselves from the sort of anti-tax sentiment inspired by fiscal hawks such as Grover Norquist — a sentiment that had previously been a cornerstone of conservative ideology. 

For example, while the Washoe County GOP rightly derided California’s gas prices and regulatory environment as a (partial) driver of higher prices here in Nevada, it brushed off any possibility that taxing foreign imports might be squeezing consumers in a similar fashion. 

Apparently, when a Democratic governor taxes the fuel we use in Nevada, he’s recklessly contributing to price inflation — but when a Republican president arbitrarily levies massive taxes on huge swaths of consumer goods, he’s merely engaging in “the art of the deal.” 

The truth, of course, is that all forms of taxation — including the president’s beloved tariffs — contribute to the cost of consumer goods. And while some taxes are transparent and relatively painless, tariffs are complex and opaque taxes on products that often inflict far more cost than the mere levies itself.

According to the Tax Foundation, the ever-changing slew of tariffs being imposed by the White House are costing the economy upward of 800,000 full-time American jobs — an estimate that doesn’t even consider the likelihood that further economic growth is being stifled by the sheer uncertainty caused every time the president announces some new trade policy in a surprise Truth Social post. 

Considering the complexity of complying with tariffs and Trump’s never-ending changes to the rates, it’s hard to imagine a single tax policy capable of more widespread chaos and disruption than the current tax-by-whim approach to international trade. China’s decision to halt virtually all importation of American soybeans, for example, has become so onerous for American farmers that even the White House is now weighing the possibility of a bailout for the industry. 

Contrary to the postulations of the Washoe County GOP, that’s far more painful than, say, a mere sales tax. 

To be clear, Cortez Masto is not exactly some fiscally conservative budget hawk herself, but the arguments she has put forward against an ever-changing tariff regime shouldn’t seem outlandish to the self-described “conservatives” in the GOP. In fact, those arguments are basically the same sort of objections the right has long raised to a multitude of other onerous taxes.  

Government spending and complex tax structures aren’t good for businesses or consumers — especially as we struggle with the lasting effects of high inflation and low wage growth. 

A supposedly conservative political party arguing instead that the most expensive bill in a decade somehow represents trillions of dollars in savings, or that arbitrary taxes on imported goods aren’t increasing prices, is the sort of cartoonish doublethink that belongs in a George Orwell-inspired satire. Unfortunately, this isn’t some work of allegorical fiction commenting on political matters, it’s the current state of Republican politics. 

Apparently, taxing and spending is now a “conservative” fiscal policy in the era of Trump. At this rate, it won’t be long before the GOP insists that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.