Trump’s Big Wagers
The president is moving with far more purpose than in his first term. Will it pay off?
It’s a well known fact of President Donald Trump’s political career that he drives his opponents insane, or at least fills them with great anxiety and dread. The phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” has been coined to describe the most extreme manifestations of this phenomenon, and one can waste endless hours “doom scrolling” on the internet to find examples.
But it is less often remarked upon what an emotional roller-coaster ride the Trump administration can be for its supporters and well-wishers. Yes, Trump has enthusiastic backers who cheer for whatever he does and see five-dimensional chess where everyone else sees only chaos. This is true of all important political figures, but it is truer for Trump than most.
It doesn’t describe everyone who would like to see Trump succeed in his second term, however. Certainly, Trump has moved with more of a purpose than in his first term. He and his staff came to the White House better prepared. The people serving in his administration are by and large trying to implement his policies and directives rather than block, alter, or slow them down.
The rest of the Republican Party as a whole is more unified around Trump than it was in 2017, even if some important elements in Congress are only reluctantly so. But few doubt Trump is the reason for their majorities, one of several factors that has kept even the more skittish GOP lawmakers on board until they have to start thinking about their own seats closer to next year’s midterm elections.
Conservative media enthusiasm for Trump remains a mixed bag, with those who have to be most responsive to the preferences of mass center-right audiences most supportive and outlets that can be more insulated from their readers, viewers, or listeners less so. But there is a much bigger and more sophisticated constellation of MAGA-adjacent media forces in existence than there was eight years ago, compensating for the lack of unanimity in the older conservative world.
Finally, both Democrats and Trump’s intraparty foes are much weaker than they were really at any point during the president’s first term. #NeverTrump is more of a niche slice of the GOP than ever before, with the movement’s exponents mostly flourishing as ex-Republicans and even ex-conservatives who appeal to predominantly liberal audiences. Aside from a vague sense that voters will eventually hold Trump responsible if certain national conditions don’t materially improve, Democrats don’t really seem to have any coherent strategy for dealing with the second term of a man they have now spent a decade organizing against.
Yet a Trump supporter could go to bed feeling as if we were on the cusp of a peaceful, if controversial, settlement of the war in Ukraine and wake up to bombings in Yemen. Trump’s competing foreign-policy instincts are on display especially on Iran, where he is drawn both to bellicosity and a desire for diplomacy.
Trump 2.0 has done more than the original to advance the cause of realism and restraint within the GOP through personnel and priorities, not least through the selection of Vice President J.D. Vance. Trump’s own views, the debates within the conservative movement at large, and the current global conditions are more complicated. And many hotspots around the world, such as Gaza, defy any easy diplomatic solution, much less outside-the-box ones.
Then there is the economy, where the price of eggs and gasoline are down and there was positive inflation news in February. There is also much volatility in the stock markets, coinciding with the unsteady implementation of the Trump tariffs and Democratic backlash against the DOGE cuts.
As in the first term, the Trump administration has a story to tell on the border, even as its deportations come under fire from the left and, to a much lesser extent, corners of the right who would like to see the removal numbers spike higher. Vance makes the case well: “Last month, migrant crossings were down 94 percent, to their lowest number all time, and that happened just in two months of serious border enforcement…. Last month, for the first time in over a year, the majority of job gains went to American citizens born on U.S. soil.”
If this continues, it would represent a major departure from the Biden administration’s record.
Rarely considered a theoretical man, Trump is betting his second administration and his presidential legacy on two theories: that he can simultaneously deter and do effective diplomacy with hostile foreign governments in a Trumpian twist on peace through strength, and that he can boost domestic production, raising employment and counterintuitively lowering prices, through tariffs targeted at foreign manufacturers.
Success on either front would be a game-changer, but the price of failure could be a lot more expensive than eggs.
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