President Trump has an opportunity to deliver on his promises that he didn’t have in 2016. The world is watching and more people than ever, from average Americans to world leaders and business tycoons, are rooting for him.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The old expression appears to capture a willingness to embrace once and future President Donald Trump after he achieved the impossible and won a second non-consecutive term last month. For the first time ever, his personal approval rating has crossed the 50% threshold in the Real Clear Politics average with 52% approving and only 41% disapproving. Last week, a CNN poll found that 55% of Americans approve of President Trump’s transition effort and 54% expect him to do a good job once he returns to the White House. If anything, the numbers are even better on the issues. 66% have a lot of confidence or some confidence that he will be able to deal with economy, 63% believe he is ready to handle Russia and Ukraine, 61% immigration policy, 59% think he can provide real leadership, 55% foreign affairs, and even 54% believe he can use the powers of the office responsibly after being called the second coming of Adolf Hitler for almost a decade. Further, the “country’s mood appears to have lifted somewhat following Trump’s win” and the number of people who believe things are going “very badly” is down to the lowest level since May 2018. Ironically, this has been achieved despite the media’s obvious and concerted efforts to derail President-elect Trump’s Cabinet picks while regrouping for more resistance ahead even as the political ground has shifted dramatically. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson opined last month, “Donald Trump’s increasingly provocative Cabinet picks have left some Republican senators aghast and Washington in shock. But they really shouldn’t. Because the outrage is the point,” Mr. Collinson, however, was tame compared to Paul Waldman, who has referred to the selections collectively as “without an iota of doubt the most appalling collection of choices any president has made to lead federal government departments.” Alicia Menendez and Evan Brechtel of “The Weekend” similarly claimed, “There are still 45 days until Donald Trump takes the oath of office, but the steady stream of unqualified and audacious picks for key roles in his administration has already given the American people an insight into how he will govern in his second term…’ This is not normal’ was a familiar refrain during Trump’s first term. It was repeated by former President Barack Obama. It was splashed in big bold letters across headlines for The New York Times, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post, to name a few. It became a defining mantra for protests against the first Trump administration. But normalcy is only defined by what a society is willing to accept, and the Senate’s decisions in the coming months will play a key role in how far that window is allowed to shift.”
At the same time, even progressive commentators have been forced to admit that there’s a “bizarre normalcy” this time around whatever they may wish. As Jonathan Chait put it, writing for The Atlantic, “A very strange disjuncture has opened up in Washington between the serene mood and the alarming developments that are underway. The surface is calm because the Republican presidential candidate won the election, and Democrats, the only one of the two major parties committed on principle to upholding the legitimacy of election results, conceded defeat and are cooperating in the peaceful transition of power. Whatever energy the chastened Democrats can muster at the moment is aimed inward, at factional struggles over their future direction.” The result: “we are in the midst of an uneasy transfer of legitimate democratic power to a party whose leader, at least for the moment, does not need to seize it by force.” This is a far cry from what everyone is saying on November 4th and earlier. In January, The Intercept described a potential Trumpian return to the presidency. While arguing, “Don’t normalize Trump,” James Risen began by hyperventilating, “Donald Trump is a psychopathic criminal. He is a racist, fascist cult leader determined to destroy American democracy. Those facts must be repeated over and over this year, because so many Americans appear willing to re-elect him president. In the wake of his sweeping victory in the Iowa caucuses, Trump stands astride the ruins of the Republican Party, which he has transformed into a cult of MAGA zombies who believe every lie and conspiracy theory he spouts.” Shortly before the election, The Bulwark was arguing that biology is to blame for potentially normalizing Donald Trump, “Republicans and Conservatism Inc. normalized Trump because they wanted to. The rest of us normalized Trump because we had to. Human beings can’t live in a state of emergency indefinitely. Our nervous systems can’t handle it. Which is why we’re wired to re-anchor our norms. Re-anchoring is usually a gradual process that takes place imperceptibly. In this election, we’ve been able to track it in real time.” Shortly after the election, however, George Conway told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle that “We normalized a sociopath. We normalized a criminal. We became used to a person who has no belief in the rule of law, no belief in democracy … unless he wins, no belief in anything other than himself.” Though he’d previously advocated removing the President Trump from the ballot, he also claimed, “At the end of the day, it can’t tell a free people not to vote for someone who might take away their freedoms, or someone who might take away their democracy, or … who lead misleads them and demagogues their way to high office,” adding “It’s something that unfortunately has happened in democracies before in human history, and it’s not good.”
While there remain random voices on X and elsewhere that continue to fight the good fight against President Trump’s self-evident normalization after sweeping all seven swing states and winning more adherents to his cause across the entire country except the state of Washington, the effort seems performative rather than substantive. Unlike they might have in 2016, they seem to be swimming upstream rather than with the current because the general public isn’t alone in its new found approval of the incoming Chief Executive. From the titans of sport to the titans of industry, the culture itself seems to have undergone a seismic change, both to the right and dramatically in favor of President Trump. Even before the election, Vice President Kamala Harris’ Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty claimed she was having trouble garnering support from leading athletes. “Sports and culture have sort of merged together,” he said, “and as sports and culture become more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor for us. It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’” Taken on its own, the statement shouldn’t be surprising consider sports is supposed to be separate from politics, a shared love independent of party or philosophy, but when you consider it was only a few years ago that President Trump himself was railing against the NFL for their sudden infatuation with kneeling during the national anthem, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired!” he said in September 2017, and it was even more recently that Major League Baseball chose to move it’s annual All Star Game from Georgia to Colorado following passage of an insufficiently progressive election law, the difference is remarkable. Following the election, this difference was made even more plain when NFL players began performing President Trump’s YMCA dance in the end zone along with MMA fighters in the octagon. Likewise in the business community, several fervently anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical leaders have come forward to meet with the President elect at Mar-a-Lago and/or donate to his upcoming inauguration. As MSNBC described it, “Tech tycoons are lining up to donate big sums of cash to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund ahead of his next stint in the White House. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon has pitched in a million bucks. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has tossed in another million. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman scrounged up a million of his own.”
Though business moguls have donated to previous inaugurals, including President Barack Obama in 2013 and President Joe Biden in 2021, MSNBC, perhaps needless to say, found the practice disconcerting this time around, claiming “the donations hit different [with Trump]. Since Trump exhibits a personalist style of governance, corporate donations take on the gloss of not just a conventional effort to purchase influence but also a gesture of deference to a leader who can be at turns vindictive or lenient based on a whim.” CNN similarly reported some on the left are saying much the same following ABC News’ $16 million settlement with the President-elect over a defamation lawsuit related to anchor and former Clinton-crony George Stephanopoulos referring to President Trump as a “rapist” several times, a settlement complete with an apology. While it seems unlikely they would have done so unless their undoubtedly high powered legal team believed they were going to lose the case, CNN described the reaction this way, “Some Trump critics…are also certain that they know what’s going on: They say ABC and parent company Disney are bowing to Trump for craven political purposes.” Likewise, some in the media including CNN have suddenly rediscovered the phrase “conflict of interest” after lying dormant for the past four years. Mr. Collinson, for example, recently remarked on Elon Musk’s attendance at the Army-Navy game last weekend by noting, “Musk hovered just over Trump’s shoulder, personifying the extraordinary entry into the president-elect’s inner circle of the world’s richest man and one of its most influential sources of non-state power. The SpaceX pioneer’s presence is a reminder of the massive conflicts of interests likely to permeate the new administration.” Here, we can see the outlines of how a chastened media, to use their term, will reorganize and regroup as former President Trump retakes office. Regardless, it’s hard not to see the short term result as a direct effect of the shifting political and cultural ground, domestically and globally. Putting this another way, one of the most remarkable things about President Trump’s return to power after years in the political wilderness is how little he’s changed. For better or worse, Trump isn’t a man chastened, to use the word of the paragraph, by defeat who either rebranded or repositioned himself. If anything, he did the exact opposite, doubling down on what his supporters adore and what his detractors despise, prompting them to double down themselves with even more hyperbolic claims up to and including the insistence that he was an aspiring Adolf Hitler.
Why then are many of his detractors behaving differently this time around? We cannot say for sure, but to me at least, there is a sense that people are finally ready to move on from the battles and some of the vitriol that have defined our politics for almost a decade. The establishment fever that reached a pitch on November 5th broke once President Trump prevailed in the face of both political and legal entanglements everyone was certain would doom his candidacy, or at least pretended to be certain. Like many have before him in politics and otherwise, the President emerged from his trial stronger than when he entered, the victory greater because of the odds he faced. As George S. Patton so perfectly put it, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost, and laughed.” As President Trump himself put it yesterday, “First term, everyone was fighting me. This term, everyone wants to be my friend.” Whatever the case, two things are certain. First, the resistance might be at an ebb, but that won’t last forever. The media is already putting together the makings of their next round of attack and though the hyperventilation has subsided somewhat, the criticism certainly hasn’t. The question, at this point, is whether anyone listens to them anymore and whether it can be reignited in business and the government. Second, and far more importantly, President Trump has an opportunity to deliver on his promises that he didn’t have in 2016. He can not only solve some of our challenges, but also bring some of the most pressing political and cultural battles of our time to a close, from the size and scope of the government to the founding and purpose of the United States of America. While he certainly will not and should not change the things that have made him such a singular politician, among the most influential of our time or any time, he should follow his own advice: Nothing unites like success. If he’s even half as successful as he’s promised, President Trump will go down in history as one of the all time greats. The world is watching and more people than ever are rooting for him.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 