President-elect Trump hasn’t even taken office yet and he is already laying the groundwork for a re-election bid.
Sound premature? Trump’s first “thank you” rally Thursday night showed how he will continue to fire up his base and grab earned media at crucial points in his administration, taking his message directly to the public.
Both Trump and the audiences clearly enjoy these rallies, even if the “dishonest media” (Trump’s words) covering them don’t. Trump loves them almost as much as he loves winning.
The president-elect engaged in outreach. “We condemn bigotry and prejudice in all of its forms,” he said. “We seek a future where every American child is fully included in the American dream, and we’re going to bring back the American dream.”
Trump mostly hit familiar themes that appeal to the working-class whites who turned out in droves for him in the Rust Belt battleground states that propelled him to an electoral majority.
“The era of economic surrender is over,” Trump declared. “We’re going to fight for every last American job.”
These words carried additional meaning Thursday because Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence had just been to Indiana to announce a deal with Carrier to keep 1,000 jobs from leaving the state for Mexico.
“Today America won and we have Donald Trump to thank,” Pence said.
The deal won’t necessarily be easy to replicate across the country. White House press secretary Josh Earnest snarked that Trump would need 804 Carrier deals to match President Obama’s record on manufacturing jobs.
But it does provide tangible benefits for the working Americans who voted Republican in November, something the party has been struggling to do in recent years. And if the reports about what Trump was prepared to offer Ohio Gov. John Kasich to join the ticket are anywhere close to accurate, Pence could have a broad policy portfolio while Trump focuses on these kinds of deals under the rubric of “Making America Great Again.”
Pence’s fingerprints are all over many of the early Cabinet appointments, which suggest an administration willing to govern within the conservative mainstream. James Mattis, a widely respected military leader who was once courted to be an anti-Trump independent conservative candidate for president, is now joining this team as nominee for secretary of defense.
The vice president-elect’s track record might have encouraged Trump to look beyond his loyalists and reach out to rivals like Mitt Romney, a source who worked for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee suggested. “I think they are happy with how [the Pence pick] turned out,” the source said.
As it happened, Pence was a key player in the Carrier deal too. A president-elect can only make future promises. As the sitting governor of Indiana, Pence could help secure $7 million in state incentives to prevent relocation.
Is this crony capitalism, pro-business but not genuinely pro-market? Conservative arguments about moral hazard largely fell on deaf ears during the Obama stimulus and General Motors bailout. It will be even harder for them to break through under a Republican president.
Any workers who end up keeping their jobs as a result of Trump’s initiatives are unlikely to forget it at the ballot box.
Trump’s unorthodox approach to trade and the business community’s obligations to workers are balanced with more conventionally conservative views on taxes and regulations. Transition team sources say that Trump may be prepared to go further than any previous Republican president in combating Environmental Protection Agency regulations, for example.
It is reminiscent of Pat Buchanan’s 1996 advice to the Republican Party: “Marry the growth agenda of Ronald Reagan to the America First philosophy of the four men whose faces are carved on Mount Rushmore — and the future is ours.”
It is too soon to know what the future holds for Trump, but his sales pitch for the next four years and beyond is already taking shape.
