Donald Trump has done what Ronald Reagan did. He beat back a hostile press, smears by his opponent, outrage by foreign leaders, vast campaign spending by Wall Street and the wealthy one percent, and vows by actors and rock stars to leave the country if he was elected president.
Trump falls short of Reagan in many ways. He’s unlikely to be as consequential a president. But he has an opportunity in his first 100 days in the White House to put Washington on a new and entirely unexpected course. And harness an out-of-control federal bureaucracy—the so-called administrative state.
He has promised to repeal ObamaCare, nullify all of President Obama’s executive orders and memoranda, begin a wall along the border with Mexico and begin deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, cut individual and corporate tax rates, kill the Iran nuclear deal, deregulate energy production, and start negotiations to rewrite trade treaties.
Last but not least, there’s a vacancy to fill on the Supreme Court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Trump has a list of 20 conservative jurists from which he said he will chose Scalia’s successor. Had Clinton won the presidency, she would surely picked someone to create a five-justice liberal majority.
Trump’s victory has many dimensions. Not the least of them is his election was part of a broad Republican triumph. Republicans kept control of the Senate, a feat that once had seemed impossible since they had 24 seats at stake and Democrats only ten. Trump didn’t split the party. He strengthened it.
In the House, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi talked about winning the 30 seats needed for her to become House speaker again. The media took her seriously. Democrats didn’t come close. Republican losses were in the single digits, far less than predicted.
Democrats were so certain that Trump would be poisonous to GOP House members that they ran ad campaign linking them to Trump. The tactic failed miserably. In the Virginia suburbs of Washington, they spent millions on TV spots twinning one-term Republican Barbara Comstock with Trump. Comstock, who hadn’t endorsed Trump and rarely even mentioned his name, won by seven points.
In Colorado, Democrats used the tactic against Mike Coffman, whose district outside Denver had a large bloc of Hispanic voters. He won by eight points.
In his campaign for the presidency, Trump ignored the normal rules of politics. He talked to the press incessantly. He was dramatically outspent by Clinton, but didn’t seem to worry about that. He lost all three debates with Clinton without dragging down his candidacy. He humiliated pollsters by winning in the face of their polls with Clinton in the lead.
From the beginning, Trump saw working-class whites as his chief constituency. Many Republicans complained about his crude talk and lack of conservative views. The Bush family rejected him. But he got 90 percent of Republicans to vote for him.
His flaws were exposed in public. He insulted women. He alienated many Hispanics by criticizing immigrants from Mexico. Yet he wound up winning 29 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to the exit poll. In 2012, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t do as well in attracting Hispanic votes, nor did John McCain, the nominee in 2008.
Trump indulged in loose talk about nuclear weapons and punishing NATO members who don’t pay their assigned share for defense. And most controversially, he said nice things about Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Here’s the point: His supporters voted for him despite all these shortcomings, including the lewd remarks taped on a video from 2005 but leaked a month before yesterday’s election.
Reagan spoke of the three-legged stool of conservatism: strong defense and peace through strength, free markets, and traditional values. Trump differs significantly on foreign policy: He’s basically a non-interventionist who has pledged to rebuild the military. He is not a free trader. His immigration policy is harsh.
The question now is if he can forge a workable alliance with Republican leaders. He had a rocky relationship with House Speaker Paul Ryan and not much of a relationship at all with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
When Reagan took office in 1981, he faced Republican leaders in Congress who were considerably less conservative than he was. Yet he soon built a strong relationship with them. In Trump’s case, Ryan and McConnell are more conservative than he is. Now he must build close ties with them, starting today.
