What Trump’s astonishing comeback means

Before Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in June of 2015, a bipartisan governing consensus in Washington was that unlimited amounts of both immigration and trade were unalloyed benefits to the country. Democrats, who guided or bullied this consensus into being, suggested America has a duty to take in any migrant from anywhere in the world, no matter their culture or educational background. Many Republicans believed migrants were essential for economic growth and did not care that their influx depressed the wages of blue-collar Americans. Nor did either side pay much mind to the ways this frayed the cultural fabric of the nation.

Some of this thinking guided the amnesty for illegal immigrants agreed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, although Democrats prevented the increased border security that was supposed to be the other side of the deal. President George W. Bush tried to pass another amnesty in 2007, although that effort failed.

Trump exploded that governing consensus. It was a condemned building ready for demolition. A huge underserved market of Americans who had been shafted by the mass immigration policy was ready for Trump’s message of regeneration and “America First.” No one in the Republican Party could compete. The Democratic Party severely underestimated Trump’s appeal, banking that his undeniable character flaws would sink him. But the electorate was in no mood for a morality lecture from the deeply corrupt Clinton clan.

Trump governed as he campaigned. He delivered the lowest levels of immigration this century and deported record numbers of illegal immigrants. American wages rose, with those at the bottom rising the fastest. Trump also used tariffs to pursue American workers’ interests abroad, notably against China and Mexico. The results of his tariffs are highly debatable, and this publication opposed and still opposes them. But it cannot be denied that Trump delivered a strong economy where wages were growing faster than prices for all Americans.

Prosperity and improved public morale were reversed when COVID-19 struck and riots erupted in the wake of the death at police hands of a black drug abuser called George Floyd. Even though these riots were promoted by Democrats, a chaos-averse public turned to a familiar and seemingly less divisive figure, Joe Biden, whom voters judged more likely to bring back order and stability. Trump’s refusal to accept that he lost helped Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia and led to a riot by Trump supporters at the nation’s Capitol. In January 2021, it seemed a good bet that he was a spent political force.

But then Biden enthusiastically smashed his promises of centrist government and normalcy and pushed an agenda of unregenerate leftism. He threw open the southern border, flooding communities across the country with unvetted migrants from around the world. He stoked historically high inflation with massive debt-financed spending, which eroded everyone’s paychecks, especially those at the bottom of the income scale. In addition to the greater costs of their own groceries, housing, and transportation, voters had to pay for all those items being showered by Democrats on to Biden’s illegal immigrants.

Instead of changing policy, Democrats decided to hold the course and try to avoid being ousted in the 2024 election by both building up Trump and making him, they hoped, unelectable, by depicting him incessantly as a fascist and racist, and bending the legal system to persecute him again and again, in some cases for invented and previously unknown crimes. In March 2023, before his first indictment, Trump lacked support in the Republican Party and trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). But after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s unprecedented use of a state business record-keeping law to hound Trump, the former president’s popularity took off. After that, every transparently political and abusive indictment of Trump prompted Republican primary voters to back him more staunchly.

Both before Trump and during the Biden presidency, voters believed their country was headed in the wrong direction. They saw leaders in Washington acting in their own interests, the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the lower classes, and in the interests of migrants from around the world whose arrival was never agreed to by voters.

Trump saw this, too.

Voters want their government run for the citizens of this country, not for foreigners and not for ideologies unconnected to their needs and concerns. Every attack on Trump from Democratic prosecutors proved to voters that the former governing class was frightened of Trump, less for the damage they claimed he could do than for his promised readjustment of priorities that would move power out of central government and back to the people.

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Trump is not a changed man. He is neither wiser nor more disciplined than he was during his last time in office. But he is more experienced in the ways of Washington and will come in with a more organized and unified team and a plan to implement his agenda. How serious he is about not taxing on tips or eliminating the income tax entirely remains to be seen. Several of his policies were popular on the campaign trail but would be damaging to implement. And that runs the risk of enraging citizens who might see promises broken.

But our country survived four years of Trump before, even during the ravages of COVID-19, and it will do so again. As long as China does not start another pandemic, we will probably be better off four years from now than we are today. The Republican Party has been wrenched from its globalist mindset and is now firmly committed to putting American interests first. Even the Democratic Party was forced to make rhetorical moves in this direction. Whether these changes stick depends on the unknown success or failure of Trump’s second term.