Why trump would be a good president

The Avenue Protesting is as important as voting Andre M. Perry and Carl Romer. Economy U. Clifford Winston. Play Audio. Podcast Episode Industrial decline and the rise of populists in Russia, the U.

Moreover, Mr. He received no pushback on Wednesday from Theresa May, the British prime minister, who simply congratulated Mr. Trump on his win.

By Gil Troy. From coast to coast, half of a divided nation abhorred — and underestimated — the president-elect. The economic dislocation of galloping inflation and the energy crisis produced a nasty campaign.

Despite the Democratic panic, Ronald Reagan left America richer and safer after two terms as president. Reagan defied expectations by turning toward the center. He acted as president of the United States, not president of the Republican Party. Reagan used the transition period to heal wounds while claiming a broad policy mandate, despite winning only But in adjusting, in tempering, Reagan was being Reagan.

History is not destiny. And Reagan had both a lighter touch than Mr. Still, history is full of shifts and surprises. Trump must be a healer and unite America, as he tried doing in his victory speech. If he fails, the checks and balances that sometimes help crusading ideologues become effective leaders can ultimately impose a necessary gridlock. Can the reality-show star turned president-elect mimic the actor turned president? By James R. In , there was a demand among voters for change, especially regarding Vietnam and foreign policy, and there was a backlash against some of the Great Society programs.

Then, as now, the Democratic candidate was tied to the departing administration and hamstrung to differentiate a new set of policies. As a result, the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert H. Humphrey, narrowly lost to the Republican, Richard M.

Nixon, a candidate who was despised by a large percentage of the electorate. One positive outcome of that election was the first organized transition from the departing to incoming governments. President Lyndon B. Right after the results came in, the president put me in charge of organizing a transition process, something that had never been done. Haldeman and John Mitchell. There we mapped out a program in which all of the Johnson cabinet and major White House staff members would brief their incoming counterparts as often as was desired by the new administration.

My charge was to work with Haldeman, who became my successor at the White House, to make sure these briefings occurred across the new administration and in a timely fashion. One surprise was that Nixon told me that Mitchell could speak for him in all matters if he was not available. Johnson would have never delegated such authority, but that was the difference in the management style of the two men.

He was issuing orders and making appointments right up to the morning of the Inauguration. In fact, the day before the Inauguration the president told me to find out how many vacancies existed on commissions and boards and find good people that he could nominate. He kept Nixon waiting in the Blue Room on Inauguration morning while he signed those nominations which required Senate confirmation and had them delivered to the Congress before noon.

It is a positive sign that President Obama invited Donald J. Trump to meet at the White House two days after this most contentious election. Today transitions are much more institutional now than our first one in But this process can heal many wounds and start bringing our country closer together.

We jumped into the car and headed to the Capitol. I hope the ride to the Capitol next January will be more substantive on policy. James R. By Sarah Jaffe. They may conceal white resentment of the perceived advancement past them of black and Latino people. But the past eight years sped all that up and made it impossible to ignore. If Donald J. Trump stood out to voters from the rest of the Republican Party, aside from a willingness to say directly the kinds of things usually carefully dogwhistled, it was in his rants about trade and his lack of interest in dismantling the remnants of the welfare state.

For white Americans anxiously looking at their disappearing stability, Mr. Trump was a bomb they were willing to throw at a system they felt was failing them.

He emotionally echoed their outrage and gave them a place to direct their anger, the age-old right-wing populist trick of refracting it both upward at elites and downward at minorities. The results show that it did not. To be sure, Democrats had an uneasy line to walk, between maintaining continuity with a still-popular, twice-elected Barack Obama — a continuity that won Mrs. Clinton the Democratic primary — and reaching the people who wanted and needed change.

Clinton was a colossal misreading of a moment when rage at the establishment of both parties was simmering everywhere. That rage should have been visible as Mr. Clinton much harder than anyone had expected a gray-haired socialist from Vermont to do.

But Mrs. Clinton opened her arms to disaffected Republicans rather than wooing the disaffected within and around her own party. Most of the television ads she ran were more about painting Trump as a dangerous aberration, an outsider unfit for office, than pitching any plan of her own for change. Democrats failed to realize that for many Trump voters, that was exactly what they liked about him. By Will Wilkinson. It may not be an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump both knows and cares less about the details of public policy than anyone ever elected president of the United States.

Politics is, at bottom, about factions vying and coordinating to choose leaders in whom to invest authority. Throughout the campaign, Mr. In Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump drew a general election opponent pre-weakened by a decades-long Republican campaign of delegitimization. Clinton as a member of an arrogant and corrupt elite that believes it is above the law.

But Mr. Trump seems to have an intuitive understanding that glamour, celebrity and gaudy wealth are key ingredients in majesty — which is inherently authoritative and underwrites its own claim to legitimacy. It was a purple silk, ermine-fringed cape, Air Force One in waiting, and he knew how to use it. Casting those norms aside and banking heavily on the atavistic political appeal of majestic celebrity gave Mr. Because Mr. Trump will actually support in office. Will Wilkinson is the vice president for policy at the Niskanen Center and a columnist at Vox.

By Lindy West. I got up on Election Day and burst into tears — not a genteel twin trickle but a great heaving burst, zero to firehose. Tears spattered the inside of my glasses, dripped from my lips, and left mascara-tinged rosettes blooming black in my cereal milk. The numbers are still good. That would come later.

Clinton just after she voted for herself in Chappaqua, N. She seemed breathless, exhilarated, a little overwhelmed. Over her shoulder, Bill Clinton stared at his wife and beamed. My husband stares at me like that sometimes. Men get to act and excel and climb and aspire and thrive and win and rule and be the audacious, hungry fulcrum of public life.

It is normal for men to have ambition. It is normal for women to stand aside. I thought about Bill Clinton meeting Hillary Rodham at Yale in , and how tenacious and intense she must have been even back then, how undeniable and potent. Clinton describes the moment in his memoir. And then I thought about Mr. Clinton rising steadily through his political career, on the track we have built for charismatic, competent white men.

He must have known, every second, how good his wife was. And he watched her stand next to him and wait, and wait, and wait, underestimated and degraded and excoriated for wanting more out of life than cookies.

He must be so proud of her, I thought. It made me cry. I cried because I want my daughters to feel that blazing pride, that affirmation of their boundless capacity — not from their husbands, but from their world, from the atmosphere, from inviolable wells of certainty inside themselves.

I cried because it does things to you to always come second. Whatever your personal opinion of the Clintons, as politicians or as human beings, that dynamic is real.

We, as a culture, do not take women seriously on a profound level. We do not believe women. We do not trust women. We do not like women. I understand that many men cannot see it, and plenty more do not care. I am used to it. But maybe this election was the beginning of something new, I thought. It is indistinguishable from fresh, close grief.

Those of us who have been left in the cold by this apparent affirmation of a white supremacist patriarchy and sorry, white women who voted for Mr.

Trump, but your shelter is illusory are tough. We have been weathering this hurricane wall of doubt and violence for so long, and now, more crystalline than ever, we have an enemy and a mandate. We have the smirking apotheosis of our oppression sliming, paw-first, toward our genitals.

We have the popular vote. We have proof, in exit polls, that white women will pawn their humanity for the safety of white supremacy. We have abortion pills to stockpile and neighbors to protect and children to teach. We have the right woman to find. We have local elections in a year. By Seth Grossman. All of these shows have one thing in common: While trafficking in rural stereotypes, they celebrate wealth and business success — whether that business is crafting hick-hop music, catching alligators or designing duck calls.

Ostensibly produced for middle America, they offer a population disenfranchised by globalization and the information economy a vision of rural ingenuity rewarded. Trump based his candidacy around this population. He spoke directly to voters raised on reality TV, addressing their fears and aspirations with blunt talk. He became their perfect celebrity champion, a rich white man, his image polished by years in a reality-TV boardroom, who validated their demographic anxiety.

In an election season driven more by hatred of political opponents than enthusiasm for two deeply unpopular candidates, President-Elect Donald J. Trump hated best, and won. That, too, was designed as a lighthearted comedy. Seth Grossman is a filmmaker and reality television producer. By Roberto Suro. They favored Hillary Clinton by better than two to one, according to the exit polls. They did not turn out in big numbers to protest Donald J.

Trump, but it probably would not have mattered. Trump won the presidency after a long campaign of slinging threats and insults at them. The bitterest loss was dealt by the That was a rejection by their own countrymen. According to the exit polls — a rough measure of turnout at best — Latinos accounted for 11 percent of the votes cast Tuesday the same as If those numbers hold, there was little or no Trump effect, and however much the number of Latino votes increased was just a result of demography.

You may have been convinced that it would be otherwise. Years of reckless commentary, news stories and advocacy insisted that Latinos would be the great demographic firewall that would safeguard progressive politics with surging population numbers. But, the firewall only stands in a few states, and the biggest of them, California, New York and Texas, are already decided.

Trump concentrated instead on the old industrial states where Latinos are a sparse presence. When he demonized Mexico and unauthorized immigrants, he gained more in the Electoral College by mobilizing white voters than he lost by alienating Latinos.

The national exit polls show that Mrs. Clinton drew 65 percent of the Latino vote compared with 29 percent for Mr. That is a landslide by any measure, and it is about the same margin in the exit polls for 67 percent vs.

The disappointment sets in when you compare the outcome to President Barack Obama took 71 percent of the Latino vote in the exit polls that year compared with 27 percent for Mitt Romney. Trump was supposed to be the bucket of cold water that aroused the sleeping giant, producing not only a stronger preference for the Democratic candidate but also, more important, a spike in turnout.

In , with immigration reform on the line, more than 12 million Latino voters stayed home, producing a turnout rate of 48 percent compared with 64 percent for whites and 67 percent for blacks. While more time and data is needed to get a full picture of Latino turnout this year, at first glance it appears Latino numbers were up, and perhaps significantly in some places, but that in fact the giant was barely stirred. For instance, he will be happy with NATO because member countries have committed to paying more for their own defense.

The responsible-nationalist theory has very little evidence to support it, though. Trump has never personally endorsed the key argument of his National Security Strategy , about great-power competition—not even in his December remarks introducing the plan.

He is currently very hawkish on China, but that is possibly because he sees his rhetoric as a way to deflect attention from his failures on the coronavirus.

He is still more motivated by narrow trade and economic concerns than by broader geopolitical interests in the Indo-Pacific. This theory also leaves out Trump and highlights policy documents that he played little role in creating. It has always been his psychological profile and disposition—his paranoia, how he sees himself, his desperate need to be at the center of the news cycle, his susceptibility to flattery, his fury at perceived slights, and his deeply seated visceral instincts.

Given who the president is, another theory—Trump unbound—seems more likely. In this scenario, his appetite will grow with the eating. Substantively, he will double down on his instincts, leaning into ideas he had before he became president. He could pull the plug on NATO entirely by refusing to defend Germany, France, and other selected countries under the mutual-defense clause. He could make this decision unilaterally, without authorization from Congress, as it simply entails altering a presidential interpretation of the purposefully vague NATO founding treaty.

But he could make it happen in his second by entering into a peace treaty with North Korea. His first comments on foreign policy in the s were criticisms of Japan, but earlier in his first term he modified his long-standing hostility because of his friendship with Shinzo Abe, which the then—prime minister carefully cultivated. Now, with Abe out of the picture, Trump could revert to Japan-bashing and questioning the alliance with Japan itself.

Both of these steps could weaken U. China is the big unknown in a second Trump term. The Republican foreign-policy establishment hopes that rivalry with China will be the organizing principle of U. He is neither a conservative nor a liberal; he is a pragmatist. We need leaders who know how to put a deal together, how to build something, and how to get others to help with the building.

Who today believes the future for our children is bright? The world is rapidly approaching chaos, the liberal Democratic policies of Obama, U. Nancy Pelosi, U. Harry Reid and their ilk created this mess, and we must reverse course right now. That is why I am voting for Trump. Traffic Alert.