A New Hope
By Todd Davis
Donald J. Trump was elected as the 47th president of the United States in a sweeping electoral victory. He stunned the prognosticators by taking the popular vote, which pollsters gave him only a 10% chance of winning. Along the way, Trump became a movement, a symbol for people who wanted hope and change. Republicans had, improbably, hijacked the message of American unity and populism that Barrack Obama successfully translated into a two-term presidency.
Obama’s coalition based on identity is exhausted and dead. His former vice president and the current commander-in-chief, Joe Biden will leave office as one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, was rejected by Americans across all racial, religious, and gender lines. Trump increased his vote share in nearly every measurable demographic. The Obama political tree has been repudiated. With that, we are entering a new era in American politics. And while Trump has been on the political stage for twelve years, this is new. Something different. Trump’s second term allows him, and America, something we in this country have always fallen in love with; a second chance. An opportunity at redemption. It’s a chance to get things right this time around. A chance to pull America back from the chaotic consequences of neoliberalism. A new hope for the country.
Back to the Future
Time Travel movies are prevalent in popular culture because they offer the audience a chance to experience nostalgia while either learning from previous mistakes or righting a wrong, redirecting the butterfly effect, that will enhance the present day. Back in 2016, Trump bombastically proclaimed to the nation he would “Make America Great Again.” Seemingly, Trump was promising disenfranchised voters that he would take them back to a time when America worked for them and their families. Back to an analog age where people proudly flew the Stars and Stripes, where Made in America meant something, and where Americans were the heroes of the story, not mustachioed colonial villains
Over the intervening years between Trump’s 45th presidency and Biden’s 46th, the MAGA movement took on a different meaning. Despite media attempts to fabricate a January 6th “insurrection” narrative and blanket attempts by both the media, government institutions like the FBI, and the president himself, Joe Biden, to paint MAGA as racist, the movement grew. Working men and women, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians; all began to empathize with Trump. MAGA was no longer about the past, it was now about the future. How would America look if things continued down the Joe Biden path versus how it might look if Donald Trump were back in charge? Voters, by the tens of millions, decided they wanted to be a part of Trump’s vision.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Trump will enter office in 2025 with a mandate from the American people. They have given him the presidency, a 51% majority in the popular vote, and control of both the House and the Senate. Americans agreed with Trump’s positions on the economy, and immigration, ending involvement in expensive foreign wars, and curtailing the obsessions with radical social issues. Trump will have every opportunity to enact his agenda.
The multiracial coalition that has coalesced around Trump is centered around a message of economic populism. And here is where the incoming president will face his greatest challenge. Millions of Americans are expecting Trump to make their lives better; to end inflation, to stop spending billions on losing endless wars abroad, and to secure the border protecting American jobs and resources.
Republican instinct, long embedded in the framework of the party, will push back against many of these objectives. For decades the Republican Party has been run by plutocrats like Willard Romney and Mitch McConnell. Men with a collection of houses who have deep-seated disdain for the people that elect them. None of the policies they produced ever helped people in Peoria. Rugged individualism with a side dish of colonial war. The GOP leveraged the inherent patriotism of Americans exploiting it for its benefit.
Most of the scions of the old Republican establishment are gone, exiled by the MAGA movement. They exist only in isolated pockets, never Trump islands rejected by the new base that forms the party. Yet still, there remains the specter of their vision, like Dracula, they are old and decrepit but remain hard to kill. The voters who put Donald Trump in the White House expect him to stay true to them and not to backslide into the traditional GOP and Neocon policy that tainted his first term.
Legacy Goals; Mount Rushmore
What is Trump’s goal for his second term? If you could sit him down and get a completely honest answer it likely would be that he wants to be viewed as the best president the United States has ever had. Or at least the greatest of the modern era. Trump wants to be figuratively the fifth face on Mount Rushmore. To accomplish this, we can expect Trump is going to move, with alacrity, on his big ideas agenda.
The rapid pace at which he’s filling positions within his second administration is a testament to how he wants to hit the ground running, a marked departure from the chaos and uncertainty that kicked off his first term. Susie Wiles, Chief of Staff. Pete Hegswerth, Secretary of Defense. Matt Gaetz, Attorney General. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence. Tom Homan, Border Czar. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Department of Health and Human Services.
There is a unity to these selections. A distinct vision that supports the rhetoric and promises made on the campaign trail. They represent a flag being raised in Washington, a resounding statement whose implication could not be clearer; no more establishment insiders whose only skill is the preservation of bureaucracy. Homan is going to deport illegal immigrants. Kennedy is going to take on Big Pharma. Tulsi will kneecap the three-letter alphabet intelligence agencies that have run amok unchecked for far too long. Gaetz helped launch the surging populist tide by deposing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy, with his tiny Ukrainian flag pins, was controlled opposition, a pliant face eager to enact policy contrary to the wishes of his voters. Matt Gaetz, as Attorney General, is a declaration of war against the Deep State.
Trump isn’t coming to Washington for the golf and Diet Coke. He’s coming to enact change. Real change. Change the country hasn’t seen for decades.
The Whirlwind
Trump told voters,
I am your justice…I am your retribution.
The theme of vengeance permeated his campaign rallies. Justice for the wrongs the incoming president felt he has suffered from Biden’s DOJ, but primarily justice for the American people who Trump has repeatedly said he stands as a proxy for. Called deplorables and garbage by Democratic would-be and actual presidents, abandoned, ignored, and looked down upon, there is a disdain for the country that runs thick through the Democratic establishment.
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party represents a chance for his people, and this historic multiethnic coalition is his people, to have a seat at the table they have been long denied. For far too long Americans have felt they haven’t had a say in the geopolitical and economic decisions the country has taken. Did anyone ask Americans if we wanted globalization? The displacement of capital from factories in the heartland to the cleared jungles of Mexico, China, and Vietnam; wherever land can be purchased cheaper and people can be paid less has benefited the oligarchy in America while leaving everyone else behind.
Cutting the government, the stated goal of the newly created Doge department jointly headed by Trump allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy sounds like an idea most Americans agree upon—until something is cut that those people rely upon. A gleeful massacre of government bureaucracy could hurt the country’s most vulnerable. Trump voters are taking a leap of faith that a benevolent cabal of billionaires will look out for their interests once the adrenaline rush of patriotism has faded.
Conflicting party identity will be a constant challenge for Trump as he tries to become the GOAT of modern presidents. The Republican Party is bifurcated into three segments whose views rarely align; the Donor class of wealthy billionaires, the primary voters a collection of small business owners, traditional chamber of commerce Republicans, and social conservatives, then the general electorate where Trump made huge gains. These are the people who don’t want taxes on tips and believe globalization has taken their jobs, culture, and country. This segment of the people now make up the vast majority of the Trump coalition.
The donor class wants tax cuts, less regulation, and slash government spending. Historically, cuts to spending never come from Social Security (an institution Trump has already said he won’t touch) or the Defense Budget (hard to see how Trump can cut that when he has vowed to make America stronger than ever). And so they come from social safety net programs. Programs that millions of Trump voters rely upon. How Trump can reconcile these competing interests within his party, let alone the other half of the country that voted for Kamala Harris, will be key in determining how successful the president’s agenda will end up being for the nation.
The Blowtorch
System versus non-system is how we could describe the 2024 election. Or as Nate Silver puts it, the River versus the Villiage. Kamala Harris represented the system. She was the Villiage consisting of New York Times endorsements, Washington status quo, globalization, and nations without borders. Conservative and safe. Donald Trump was the River, the anti-establishment, the new counterculture. He represented a risk, a breaking from the Global Rules-Based Order that has enriched the Western elite while making the lives of the people they rule increasingly dystopian. Trump is a figurative, and perhaps literal, blowtorch that promises to burn it all down.
Americans have become resentful of institutions. Health officials took away their freedoms in the name of “science”. A DOJ that goes after political opposition. An FBI that spends most of its time harassing American citizens now looking for the boogie man of “white supremacy” while hounding parents who don’t want their kids transitioned at schools.
Trump is surrounding himself with a cabinet whose qualifications aren’t degrees from Sarah Lawrence and a CV that lists board appointments with Raytheon or a department head at Goldman Sachs. His people are Jacobites. They are coming in to wreck the system that has become onerous and intrusive. The system has become unnecessary and it is time for it to go.
Breaking the system would end up as Trump’s greatest achievement. His toolbox is uniquely qualified to carry out this directive. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could change the way America views health for decades to come. He could make America Healthy Again. Matt Gaetz could demolish the decadent DOJ. Tulsi Gabbard will turn the intelligence community, consistently wrong about everything and whose only goal seems to be maintaining the status quo of forever war, into something completely different. An entity that puts the interest of Americans first instead of catering to dictators in Ukraine.
Hoovering over all of this is Elon Musk. Musk, the greatest engineer of our era, is going to look at America with a start-up philosophy. If given the chance, he is going to cut, cut, cut, and bring efficiencies to the government. Elon will have a unique chance to apply his genius to the apparatus of the US bureaucracy and institutional overreach.
Both Musk and Trump are gigantic personalities. Two Titan-sized moons orbiting the Jupiter of the United States. How they will coexist within each other’s gravitational pull is anyone’s guess. Can they work together long enough to end the politicization of the DOJ and FBI, enact Mass Deportation, stop American involvement in Ukraine, make America healthy, and navigate a tariff trade war with China? Lofty goals. And that is the point. Trump Part 2 isn’t coming to Washington for the Lincoln Bedroom this time. It’s coming in with grand, world-changing ideas, and what could be more American than that?
