By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | November 21, 2024
In what must be the millionth time never-Trumpers have predicted this, New York Times columnist David French claimed this week, pointing to appointments he doesn’t like, “Donald Trump is already starting to fail.”
But what really worries people like French and those on the left isn’t that Trump will fail. It’s that he’s off to an outstanding start and has the wind as his back to succeed.
And by that, we don’t mean he will live up to the left’s gross mischaracterization of Trump as a fascist, but that he will actually do what he’s promised: gut the administrative state, restore order to the southern border, and get the economy moving again.
Think about what Trump was up against and what he accomplished in his first term.
After winning in 2016, Trump struggled to appoint his team. On inauguration day, he’d named only 29 of his 660 executive department slots, and ended up with several Obama holdovers.
His support from the public – and even his own party – was weak. He didn’t win the popular vote. Protests erupted all over the country in response to his victory. In the first two years, Republicans sidelined his effort to start building the wall and killed his plan to repeal Obamacare. Embedded bureaucrats thwarted his agenda wherever they could.
And, of course, Trump was immediately dogged by the Russia hoax, which would drag on for his entire first term.
Even with all those handicaps, look at what Trump managed to achieve: a massive pro-growth tax cut that drove unemployment to 60-year lows, an unprecedented peace deal in the Mideast, significant cuts to regulations, the elimination of the hated Obamacare individual mandate, a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, ISIS defeated in short order (after Obama dawdled and said it would take years to accomplish), energy independence for the first time in decades, record low unemployment and low inflation.
This time around, Trump is making appointments at “breakneck speed,” as the New York Times put it, filling key posts with an eclectic group of reformers from inside and outside government who are eager to carry out his agenda, or as the Times lamented, he’s “picking people he considers true loyalists.” (Imagine that.)
Having won the popular vote and dramatically expanded the Republican base, Trump’s support from the public and his own party is far more secure. Unlike in 2016, Democrats are demoralized and fractured.
There were several important reforms – like Remain in Mexico at the border, regulatory rules for agencies, and the like – that either came late in his term or he wasn’t able to enact. He’s not going to make those mistakes again.
His naming of Tom Homan as border czar and Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to wring out federal waste and dismantle the regulatory state are two of many very good signs in this regard.
In their Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday, Ramaswamy and Musk laid out their vision for DOGE in uncompromising terms.
“The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long,” they said. “That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”
And this time around, Trump won’t be under constant attack from a weaponized Justice Dept.
All of this bodes well for Trump 2.0, and it is terrible news for big-government leftist and status-quo Republicans.
At the end of Trump’s first term, we wrote about his “remarkable presidency” and noted that “More than any other president of recent memory, Trump fought hard for average working Americans. And contrary to the epithets thrown at him by his far-left detractors in the Democratic Party, his policies helped low-income and minority Americans most of all.”
At the end of his second term, we expect we’ll be writing an even more glowing assessment.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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