It’s amazing how little Donald Trump has changed since he became president, even though his victory was a squeaker in which he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes.
Any other president would have seen a need to soften his blunt and bullying style and make his agenda more likable. Not Trump. A small minority of Republicans finds him annoying or offensive, but he’s done nothing to mollify their concerns. They’re an important bloc: women, suburbanites, squishy Republicans, independents, Never Trump diehards. They appeared to be more hostile to Trump in the 2018 midterm elections when he wasn’t on the ballot than in the 2016 election when he was.
Trump specializes in tactics that alienate his targets, such as the media. Wooing them to get favorable coverage is the furthest thing from his mind. He refers to them as enemies of the people that produce “fake news,” a term Trump has popularized. They specialize in criticizing him relentlessly.
For Trump, the tweet is a tool of attack. He refuses to stop, though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has advised him to, and actor Clint Eastwood told the Wall Street Journal that Trump should act “in a more genteel way, without tweeting and calling people names.”
He refuses to recognize sacred cows. And politicians are supposed to be diplomatic in picking their prey. Trump isn’t. He tweeted that liberal Supreme Court judges Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor are biased and should recuse themselves from cases involving him and his administration. Practically nothing is off-limits to Trump.
His harsh personal attacks have a political cost. “What he misses are opportunities to enlarge his base,” says Fox News commentator Brit Hume. He pushes away irritated voters.
It’s not that Trump is indifferent to his political base. On the contrary, it’s his No. 1 priority. He’s continued the rallies that were the heart of the 2016 campaign. They were a love affair between a candidate and his most ardent supporters. Journalists have likened this relationship to that between Democrat Bernie Sanders and his fans. But it’s not. There’s a difference between a binding tie and an ideological attachment.
Rallies are a regular feature of his presidency. “He feeds his base once a week,” says Scott Reed, the political director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “He knows this is part of his thing.” At the rallies, he renews his vow to disrupt Washington and tells his audience how the shake-up is going.
Republicans became the Trump party in two steps. First came his identification with their hopes and ideas. The second was his follow-through: confirmation of conservative Supreme Court justices and appeals court judges, moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and the environmental treaty of Paris. The list is long.
Two Trump decisions were surprises. He ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian terrorist chief. Iran retaliated by rocketing an American base in Iraq without killing anyone. Iran had blinked. More significant, Reed says, was Trump’s signal he would “not get us in a war.”
Back in Washington, the 47th annual anti-abortion march had a new participant, the president. “It is my profound honor to be the first president in history to attend the March for Life,” he said in a 13-minute speech. We’re here for a very simple reason: to defend the right of every child, born and unborn, to fulfill their God-given potential.” Trump is the most pro-life president in history.
Does all this make Trump likely to win reelection in November? Probably. But the coronavirus looms, and we don’t know its impact on the country. Things in America may change, but Trump won’t.
“Hell, no, he’s never going to change,” says Steve Moore, who, along with Larry Kudlow, put together Trump’s 2017 tax cut. Moore points out that he’s not going to renege on his promises either. “I call him the check-the-box president,” Moore says. “He’s done all the things he said he would.”
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
