Trump 2: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by John Podhoretz
https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/trump-2-good-bad-ugly/
The 47th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is a man with a plan. His predecessor, the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, was not. Trump 45 portrayed himself throughout his first campaign as the embodiment of the electorate’s rage. That was effective in getting him elected and may have had the virtue of being true—but the role of rage-embodier provided little guidance when it came to the day-to-day task of being president. How were you to embody rage while at the same time repealing Obamacare, for example?
Trump 45 had no road map and no agenda. He had a vibe, and his first administration was an improvisation. Now, anyone who’s done (or watched) improv knows that moments of inspired brilliance can arise from a few disparate observations mashed together in an entirely new and unexpected way. But those unfortunate performers and audiences also know those indelible moments are usually outnumbered by the ones that go on too long, or are embarrassingly off-key, or just don’t work. The greatest improv of Trump 45 was the Abraham Accords, and a remarkable accomplishment they were. But then there was the bad improv, most notably the inconstant policy pronouncements and nightly briefings on the pandemic in 2020, which were so uncertain and discomfiting that they brought Trump 45 to its end.
Trump 47 ran for president for two years after the 2022 midterms, and the improviser was no more. His was a tight campaign and it had an overarching through line. The first, and most obvious, was that his successor had done a bad job and was so cognitively impaired, he wasn’t even really the president. That was the classic “binary choice” approach that every candidate running against a sitting president has to deploy: Do you want more of him or do you want to try me instead?
But it was more than that, and what we’ve seen in the first month of the Trump campaign is evidence. What Trump did, in every speech and every rally, was vow to take on and destroy two forces imperiling America’s present and condemning it to a dark future. The first was wokeness. The second was the weaponization of the law and the culture as a means of imposing wokeness on America. From the minute Trump took the oath of office on January 20, his determination to fulfill this vow—which unites even those parts of the right that remain skeptical or worse of Trump himself—has released a kind of primal political energy that has hit Washington with the force of one of those 2,000-pound bombs Joe Biden refused to send to Israel.
As I write, Trump has been president for three weeks. He has promulgated executive orders banning biological males from girls’ sports and recognizing two and only two genders. Other executive orders ended the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in government and extended the ban to institutions that receive federal funding. He has set loose the world’s richest man and most brilliant executive to root out waste in government, with no regard for prior political niceties—or niceties at all. He has targeted foreign aid, which collectively constitute the least popular doings of the federal government. He has sent illegal migrants who have committed criminal acts to Guantanamo. He has suspended government grants. He has moved American troops to the Southern border. He has threatened tariffs, then temporarily suspended them.
These are just the things he’s done that have popped into my head as I have been writing these sentences. I’m sure there are a dozen others I could list with a few minutes’ Googling, all of which have turned governance on its head. Trump is seeking to have the federal government do less and use federal power to force the private sector to stop forcing left-liberal ideology down the throats of ordinary Americans. This is no improvisation but a determined, relentless, and remorseless assault on American liberalism that seeks to starve and desiccate it, root and branch.
To understand why this vow has proved so po-tent, and why Trump’s efforts to fulfill it have so unnerved liberals and the Washington establishment, one must understand why and how the two forces became intertwined under the Biden administration. And why they represented a kind of nearly psychopathic overreach whose most important historical effect will have been to help bring Trump back to the White House.
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“Wokeness” is the term that best describes the set of ideas that have revolutionized left-liberal doctrine over the past decade. Weaponization is the enforcement mechanism by which wokeness has been imposed, both in governmental affairs and across the private sector. In a manner intended to intimidate and silence everyone else, punishments were devised and levied on those who openly opposed it.
Democrats and liberals felt empowered by the national panic caused by the pandemic and the national hysteria following the police killing of George Floyd and then by the results of the 2020 election. That election was preceded by the early months of the pandemic, during which state and local officials in the Democratic Party pushed the emergency powers they had granted themselves to prevent the spread of Covid beyond anything we had ever seen before. Remember Mayor Bill de Blasio padlocking playgrounds? Remember people being arrested on beaches in California for the crime of being on beaches in California? Remember New York Governor Andrew Cuomo airily determining with no actual math or science guiding him what percentage of a bar’s square footage could be occupied—or limiting prayer services to 50 people despite the Constitution’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion?
With Biden’s victory and Democratic control of both Houses of Congress in place, the American left was gripped by a pseudo-religious conviction that the arc of justice was bending toward a radical egalitarian future managed through centralized control. And when the arc of justice did not seem to be bending quite fast enough, policymakers and officials simply went and bent it themselves with extraordinarily high-handed legal and extralegal action. That was the weaponization of law and custom. It ran the gamut from the Centers of Disease Control seizing the right to ban real estate evictions nationwide to the firings of soap-opera actors and their subsequent black-balling throughout the entertainment industry for the crime of refusing to take the Covid vaccine.
In political terms, the weaponization took the form of the lawfare assault on Trump himself—the relentless pursuit of the former president in seven different major legal actions in four jurisdictions. Those prosecutions and civil actions were specifically designed to destroy Trump personally, to deny him a political future, to seize his personal fortune, and to consign him to prison. Democrats and liberals weren’t just hoping for one of these results; they thought they could get them all and deliver the political coup de grace of all time (with the emphasis on the word “coup”).
In all but one of the seven cases, the prosecutors and judges alike were either elected Democratic officials or Democratic appointees in hot pursuit of the man who was unambiguously the most popular politician in the opposing party. In other words, one party was relentlessly trying to use its power to deny the other the leader it wanted. The criminalization of policy differences has been an issue in American public life for the past four decades, and we had gotten kind of used to it. But this took things to another level.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg secured 34 convictions in New York State for misdemeanor offenses relating to a perfectly legal if creepy reimbursement scheme without ever revealing the supposed underlying crime that made it possible for him to elevate those charges to felony status—and was allowed to do so through convenient rulings by an undistinguished judge whose daughter literally makes her living as a Democratic political consultant. Trump was found liable for sexual assault in a nearly 30-year-old case as the result of an account in a memoir by a sex columnist of an encounter in a department store that said sex columnist seemed to have been bragging about. And the Trump Organization was fined $350 million by a judge known by everybody in New York as a Democratic hack for fraud supposedly committed in the act of applying for and receiving bank loans that it had paid back in full.
No verdicts or findings were reached in the other cases against him. But all in all, Trump’s constant presence in and around courtrooms for two years as he was successfully pursuing his comeback in the GOP made the point for him: The legal system, both civil and criminal, both local and federal, was being weaponized against him personally to secure the larger political aim of excising him from public life.
Trump said during the interregnum that people should sympathize with him because if they could get him, they could get you, too. This was superficially an absurd point; a middle manager at a company in Ohio would never be pursued in this way by the legal system. But that middle manager worked in a company where the HR department might have made him take a test to evaluate the degree to which he was motivated by unconscious bias against women, minorities, queer, or transgender people. He might have been compelled to attend a briefing at which it was made clear to him he would endanger his career prospects if he expressed an opinion that ran afoul of the ideas represented by those briefings and those computer tests.
The woke and weaponization overreach provided Trump and his people with the road map and agenda they did not have the first time around. They were clear and unambiguous and had extraordinarily broad support across the right. One of the reasons the Trump campaign in 2024 was so annoyed by the Heritage Foundation’s “2025 Project” is that it didn’t need any outside 2025 Project. Everyone on the right, from COMMENTARY to Charlie Kirk, was already all-in on the broad outlines. We all knew who the enemy was, what the policies that needed to be overturned were, and spelling it out for the liberals to study and plan against in a big fat book was counterproductive—an act of counter-woke arrogance by Heritage, you might say.
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The Trump 47 maelstrom featured other vows fulfilled as well. As promised, he pardoned more than 1,200 people convicted for crimes committed in the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. He said that they, too, had been the victims of weaponization and was effectively extending to them the grace he thought he deserved. This was a grave offense against common sense, since everyone he pardoned had either acknowledged guilt in the form of a plea deal or was found guilty by a jury of his peers.
At best, if Trump believed they had been treated too harshly or that the punishment they had received had been sufficient, he could have commuted their sentences or granted them clemency, neither of which would have retroactively stricken their crimes from the record, as pardons do. That he did not do it in this way except for a tiny number of cases is a foul stain on his record he will never be able to remove, not even if his presidency turns out to be a wild success. It will be, for him, what the internment of the Japanese during World War II was for Franklin Delano Roosevelt; it will never go unmentioned as a black mark when there are serious discussions of his time in office.
At this moment, serious discussions of Trump 47 are in hilariously short supply because his critics have mostly descended into a state of near madness. They are declaring everything he does and says and thinks and believes the act of a psychotic, delusional, wild, crazy Hitler wannabe—that is, when they are not assigning these adjectives to Elon Musk rather than to Trump himself. He has come into office as an energetic executive who is seeking to limit government power and government reach, so one might think they should support his efforts to some degree since, in the long run, they will restrain him and the government he leads.
But they cannot bear to think about it in this way, and so they are making the same mistakes they have made for a decade now—overreaching in their attacks rather than honing and refining them to a sharp point, spraying inaccurate fire rather than taking careful aim.
Trump’s presidency will stand or fall based on the condition of the country as he governs—and what he leaves his successor in four years. If the economy is healthier, the planet more pacific, the position of the United States in world affairs more dominant, and the American people more generally content, he will have had a successful presidency. It’s possible he has made achieving those aims more difficult with some of his bizarre cabinet choices and with the frenetic activity of this first month, which has opened up dozens of different fronts in the political war between right and left. He will win some of them and lose some of them, and we don’t know how he will react to the losses or whether he will be able to build on the successes. He has an agenda now, but he is no less mercurial than he has been his entire life. He’s in a good mood now; what happens when he gets into a bad mood?
His first presidency was unlike any other; the pursuit of him during his post-presidency was unlike anything else in American history; and his return to power has no real parallel. As has been the case since he came down the escalator in 2015, we are in uncharted territory when it comes to Trump himself and how he reacts to the way others react to him. But the territory he will attempt to command in this second go-round is charted. Yes, there will be tariffs involved, and fights picked with allies and friends, and broad pronouncements about how to resolve wars and fix the world’s problems, and the all-consuming effort to keep the world’s focus on him personally.
But what is new and innovative here, and what will change America unambiguously for the better if Trump wins it, is the war on woke.
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