In the Time of Peak Trump

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, February 20, 2025

 

We have reached Peak Trump.

 

When you stop and think about it, that is a thoroughly remarkable thing to write in the year 2025. Donald Trump first arrived on the political scene a decade ago. He won the presidency in 2016, served as president from 2017 to 2021, and, during that time, was impeached twice. He lost reelection, brazenly lied about it, helped inspire a riot, and was subsequently convicted of a series of felonies. And yet it is now — not five years ago, or six months ago, or for a brief hour the day after he beat Hillary Clinton, but now — that Trump has reached the apex of his popularity and power. Objectively, that is astonishing, isn’t it?

 

Human beings tend to overestimate how important or unusual the things currently happening to them are, but, in this case, some superlatives are in order: This has been the most impressive comeback in the history of modern politics. And it is precisely because it was the most impressive comeback in the modern history of politics that the scale of Trump’s second victory has tended to be overstated. Relative to most of the elections in America’s past, his win in 2024 was decisive but ordinary. Relative to where Trump found himself two years ago, it was a landslide. This mismatch — between the size of his triumph (and the size of his party’s majorities in Congress) and the scope of the “vibe shift” that attended his election — is the source of most of the opportunities that Trump now enjoys. It is also the source of all the risks. Formally, there is no such thing as a “mandate” in American politics — and there is certainly no such thing as a mandate that permits the president to violate the Constitution, refuse to faithfully execute the laws, reject Congress’s oversight, abuse prosecutorial powers, or ignore court decisions. Still, voters do tend to internalize the manner in which a president came to occupy the office, and, for now at least, voters are higher on the new Trump administration than they were on the first one.

 

Simultaneously, they are unusually sour toward the Democrats, who have just recorded their lowest approval rating in decades. Were an alien to come down from Planet Sprog and spend a couple of days examining our politics, he could be forgiven for concluding that American progressivism had been totally and permanently vanquished and that Trumpism was set to romp for 20 years. The Right is jubilant, confident, and impatient. The Left is shocked, dispirited, and unsure where next to feint.

 

A key reason for the Democrats’ having adopted their supine posture is that, ten years into the Extended Donald Trump Experience, they are at a loss as to what else they might try. And, at this point, who can blame them? They warned the public that Trump was a threat to democracy. It didn’t work. They enmeshed Trump in a series of legal fights of varying legitimacy. It didn’t work. They tried to project Joe Biden’s age and senility onto Trump. It didn’t work. They insisted that, if Trump did win, it would be the result of America’s esoteric institutions — in particular, the Electoral College — and thus that it would not really count. It didn’t work. Worse still, Trump swept the swing states, won the popular vote, and put up unusually good numbers for a Republican among young people and minorities. It is telling that, three weeks into the second Trump administration, the real venom from the Left was being launched not at the president but at Elon Musk. It is also telling that, despite Trump’s having been cast as something uniquely dangerous, the Democrats feel most comfortable going after his administration for its desire to cut government spending, abolish federal departments, and reduce the power of the bureaucracy — all priorities that Republicans held long before he took over the party — rather than for his demolition of the DEI infrastructure, his ostentatious deportations, or his destruction of the Biden administration’s electric-vehicle agenda.

 

For a long time, it was reflexively assumed that a second Trump administration would be a catastrophe from the start. “Who will want to staff it?” asked skeptical observers. “What could its objectives possibly be?” Truth be told, I was among those who were sympathetic to this view. But I was wrong. Not only was Trump well prepared to take office, as the flurry of executive orders he immediately issued confirmed, but the aims that those orders reflected were both numerous and ambitious. As ever, I have many disagreements with Trump and those who surround him. I also like a great deal of what he has done thus far. In any event, he has hit the ground running, not only on his signature issue of immigration enforcement but in areas as diverse as climate, energy, civil rights, women’s sports, and light bulbs. There are many downsides to being a lame duck president, but there are advantages, too — especially if you have already given up trying to get good press coverage. I have long been irritated by the claim that “only Trump” could have won the elections in 2016 and 2024, or proposed this or that policy, or screwed his courage to this or that sticking place, because, usually, it is untrue. In the last few weeks, however, I have been handed a few persuasive counterexamples. Would another Republican president really have had the guts to reverse affirmative action policies all the way back to 1964? How about embarking on an audit of the entire federal government, headed up by the world’s most eccentric inventor? I’m not so sure.

 

He’s available, too. Love him or hate him, the man is around. Not long after his inauguration, Trump sat for hours in the Oval Office, surrounded by journalists, chatting about anything that entered his head. The sight was shocking for two complementary reasons: (1) for the last two years of his presidency, Joe Biden may as well have been dead, and (2) however alive a different replacement president might have been, he would still never have quite reached the level of relaxed showmanship that Trump is currently exhibiting. The man is sui generis. He is genuine, too — in ways that are both disastrous and useful. Currently, while he remains in the afterglow of his victory — a victory that he clearly regards as a vindication — this authenticity is mostly useful. From the outset, Trump’s core message has been that everyone else in politics is a faker. This isn’t true, yet one cannot help but feel that, as has long been the case, Trump has been fortunate in his enemies. He took over from a president who was the beneficiary of a gigantic cover-up, having beaten a nominee who was singularly unable to decide what she believed or what motivated her, much less put it into words. For a few months, at least, his habit of emphatically sharing every thought that enters his head will be sanctioned if just for its stunning contrast with what come before.

 

And then? Well, therein lies the risk. Far and away the greatest risk attendant to Peak Trump is that, having been caught up in its euphoria, the MAGA movement will conclude that History is over, that a new age is upon us, and that it is destined to win forever. This instinct is common. It is also extremely foolish. There is no such thing as a permanent victory in politics, and, given how uniquely restless the American electorate tends to be, there is rarely even such a thing as a generational advantage here. Once upon a time, George W. Bush’s reelection supposedly heralded disaster for the future of the Democratic Party. Just four years later, we were told that the Republicans had been reduced to a “rump.” In the time since that latter declaration, Congress has flipped between the parties many times, and we have had two Democratic presidencies (Obama and Biden) and two Republican presidencies (both Trump). Today, some are convinced that a new permanent majority has been born. It has not. It is indisputably true that Donald Trump has tapped into dissatisfaction with the status quo. It is not true that this talent inoculates him against traditional political dynamics. If he, too, becomes disdained, he and his party will be kicked out of office in the same way everyone else has been.

 

Trump won last year because the American public disliked Joe Biden, resented the inflation that he and his party had helped cause, wanted the border secured, and had tired of wokeness. He also won because Kamala Harris was a shallow, babbling, arrogant idiot. Up to a point, voters will indulge Trump in his foibles — his political survival has made that much clear — and they will tolerate his more eccentric projects. But, once the honeymoon is over, they will continue to do so only if he can deliver on the basics. The electorate is much less ideological than are most political obsessives. If the ideas that a given candidate presents happen to line up with material improvements in their lives — even if by accident — they will typically support them. If they do not, they become annoyed. Polls consistently showed that, by the summer of 2024, Americans had come to look back on the Trump years — in particular, at 2019 — as a time of peace, prosperity, and relative cultural sanity. It is unlikely that the Democrats’ attempt to cast Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) project as a “constitutional crisis” is going to yield many benefits for the party. Likewise, I am skeptical that the Left will regain the affections of the country’s swing voters by returning to the hyperbolic everyone-is-Hitler playbook that now seems so tired and pathetic. But as stand-ins for other sins, those gripes could yet become potent again. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” remains the most powerful question in politics. Ensuring that the answer is yes ought to be the Trump administration’s No. 1 goal.

 

This involves keeping its eyes squarely on the ball. It also involves remembering that reputations are easier to lose than to acquire. One of the greatest strengths that Donald Trump has at present is that he is broadly associated with “common sense.” Inexplicably, the Democratic Party has decided to cede the field on questions such as affirmative action, men in women’s sports, plastic straws, elementary border security, school curricula, antisemitism, and more, and, unable to believe his good fortune, Donald Trump has stepped in to fill the void. But with power comes temptation, and with the assumption of unending power comes seduction toward recklessness. As a rule, the American public tends to side against whomever it considers the zealots in the culture war. Currently, that means the Democratic Party. But, given the thermostatic nature of the modern electorate, it does not have to. In areas such as taxation, spending, immigration, affirmative action, and gender ideology, the Trump team is perceived as a corrective. If, as is entirely possible, it begins to exhibit some fanaticism of its own — as it did with Trump’s blanket pardons for the criminals of January 6, as well as his gleefully threatening Canada with massive tariffs — that will change. There exists a considerable gap between the political views of the median voter and the political views of the dedicated New Right. If Trump and his team forget that, Peak Trump will swiftly plummet to the nadir.

 

For a while now, observers have been asking why the two parties can’t bring themselves to be “normal.” “To be normal,” I have often heard it said, “could be to dominate American politics for a generation.” That, evidently, is an overstatement. But there is some truth to it nevertheless. At his best, Donald Trump is an iconoclast whose mission is to cut through the establishment with the simplicity of a small child asking “Why?” At his worst, he is an ill-disciplined narcissist whose chief political instinct is to search for praise and supplication. Which Donald Trump we see more of over the coming year will determine whether Peak Trump ends up being a transient artifact of the last election cycle or a genuine reorientation of the country and the world.