Donald Trump may be the “post-policy candidate,” but when you strip away the bluster and the outrageous commentary that have defined his campaign to find his occasional, substantive statements about public policy, a surprising fact emerges: Mr. Trump is a moderate Republican.

I realize this sounds like an odd claim, but stay with me for a bit. First you must keep in mind the Republican party context in which Mr. Trump is running.

At a 2011 debate, every Republican candidate for president vowed to reject any deal that exchanged $10 in spending cuts for a dollar in tax increases. Republicans in Congress have flirted with the debt limit and shut down the government in (failed) efforts to push their fiscal prescriptions through a divided government, rather than compromise. Grover Norquist, who has persuaded a large majority of Republicans in Congress to sign a pledge never to raise taxes, has cited a conservative line, “bipartisanship is another name for date rape.”

Mr. Trump is anything but ideologically rigid, and he certainly does not equate deal making with surrender, let alone rape. So far, he hasn’t signed Mr. Norquist’s tax pledge.