By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
If he wishes to make his second term a success,
President-elect Donald Trump must learn a lesson from his much-disdained
predecessor and assiduously ignore all soothsayers who bring auguries of
unyielding triumph. Today, Trump and his allies are riding high. But it would
not take much to bring their salad days to a close. In early 2021, Joe Biden
felt ascendant, too. By the summer, he was hated.
Trump’s second election victory was, indeed, impressive.
But, truth be told, it was mostly impressive relative to expectations rather
than on its own terms. Trump won the popular vote by the 44th greatest margin
since 1824. He swept the swing states, but in a manner that, had 240,000 votes
gone the other way, would have led to a loss. And he lacked coattails in both
the Senate and the House. Given that, between leaving office in 2020 and
winning the Republican primary in 2024, Trump was impeached, indicted,
convicted, berated, ostracized, kicked off the ballot, and much more besides,
the mere fact that he will be returning to the White House is extraordinary in
and of itself. But he should not get out over his skis. He won the election
decisively, yes, but he did not blow off the doors. Those traps that ensnared
President Biden from the first months of his tenure? They’re still there, and
they’re still loaded.
There is a host of reasons that Donald Trump prevailed
earlier this month, but none of them is as important as that the voters did not
believe that the last team did a good job in the core areas that mattered to
them. Once the partisan lying and inevitable encomia have faded to dust, the
Biden-Harris administration will be remembered for spending its way into the
worst inflation in 40 years, and then pretending that it had done no such
thing; for presiding over a marked deterioration in global stability; for
inviting illegal immigrants to stream over the Mexican border; and for
attempting to cover up the decline of a president who we could all see had
grown too old for the role. At present, Donald Trump is seen as the potential
solution to all of these ills. But that word “potential” is key. The rough
story of the last 20 years of American politics has been one in which the
electorate hired a new guy to fix their ennui, and then, having soured on him,
fired him in favor of a newer savior. If Donald Trump can bring inflation under
control, secure the border, keep America strong and at peace, and avoid the
chaotic drama that tired the public out last time around, he has a chance to
break this cycle. If he cannot, he and his party will be turned out on their ears
in an instant.
It is common at present to hear that the president-elect
has a “mandate.” If Trump is smart, he will remove that word from his
vocabulary. Instead of a “mandate,” he ought to have goals, and those goals
ought to line up with those that are shared by the public. Economic growth is a
shared goal; ramming Matt Gaetz into the attorney general’s office is not.
Renewing his signature tax cuts while avoiding inflationary pressure is a
shared goal; treating the other party as if it were filled with traitors and
the Constitution as if it were optional is not. Securing the border is a shared
goal; indulging the worst whims of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not. International
peace is a shared goal; feuding with other Republicans in pursuit of “loyalty”
is not. Joe Biden won in 2020 on the back of a promise to restore normalcy.
Once in office, he threw all that out. Joe Biden is a warning. Donald Trump
would do well to heed it.
This is not to say that, as president, Trump should feel
obliged to discard every one of his foibles. The man is an eccentric, and his
eccentricity is a crucial part of his enduring appeal. Nevertheless, he should
understand that the public will tolerate idiosyncrasies from a politician it
believes is doing a good job far more readily than from a politician it
considers to be feckless, selfish, or distracted from the bread-and-butter of
his post. Simply put, Donald Trump’s quirks do not enable his accomplishments;
his accomplishments enable his quirks. Latitude is earned, not given. Had the
economy been roaring and the world been calm, the Democratic Party might have
been able to make “Dark Brandon” happen. Harsh reality put paid to that dream.
Which is ultimately to say that, big victory or small
victory, boring president or exciting president, mandate or no mandate, the
fundamentals of politics do not change. Peace, prosperity, and security were
the touchstones of electoral profit a century ago, and they are the touchstones
of electoral profit now. There is nothing magical about this commander in
chief, or about this Republican Party, or about this conservative movement. It
will live and die by the same swords as did its predecessors — and if it wishes
to thrive, it will begin by internalizing as much.
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