I'm afraid that I agree with cash_tx and Red Leg above.
Trump may have some good policy proposals. Better than Biden at the very least. But that simply does not matter if he has no ability to implement them. If he can't, they're just words.
For those words to matter, for them to become actual policy, to enact real change, Trump needs support. Support from his party, support from the Senate, from the House, support from his presidential appointments and supreme court picks, heck, maybe even a little bit of engagement across the aisle. That's a simple fact.
Any Presidents' authority comes primarily from soft influence over the wider political system, the checks and balances of the 3 branches that must be navigated. That's the whole point of the US political system and getting people to align with you and support your policy goals is literally the Presidential job description. The President is not a power unto himself, no leader is, and this is a relatively large party democracy which makes that even more true.
That by necessity means the use of carrot and stick. Negotiation, persuasion and compromise with just a tiny smattering of direct executive power. I know those are dirty words for many of Trump's base, but that's the facts of the position. That's what you're there for, those are the tools you have at your disposal. If you can only implement policy through executive order, you've failed at your one job, no matter what your policies were, and you will achieve very little.
As we all know, this is a tall order for Trump. Many in the Republican party and in wider government don't like him. That's true. But then that's hardly new. Roughly half of the people you need to work with in
any administration are from the other party, a lot of the administrative branches are
always filled with people appointed under previous administrations and who may have no real alignment with your goals. You get to appoint a couple department heads and maybe some judges, but even they are their own people with their own goals and their own ideas which inevitably will differ from your own. The facts of life.
Even when 'your' party holds the house and the senate, parties aren't monolithic. They're made up of people. All with their own thoughts, their own opinions and their own perspectives, loosely tied together into 'left' and 'right' by a couple of pieces of common ideology and a letter after their name. That's true of both the Ds and the Rs. As a result, no leader will ever have 100% alignment within their own party, let alone within the entire government. In this instance Trump has the same problem that Ocasio-Cortez would have if she ended up as President on a D ticket. If you're on the fringes of your party in terms of policy and personal reputation, you'll struggle. What a surprise.
But your job, your only job as President, is to work with these disparate people in the house and the senate to make just enough of them agree with your vision, just enough of the time, in order to execute your policy. To find common ground, make an acceptable compromise, find leverage, or offer a quid pro quo with enough people to get stuff passed into law. To
make them like you, or at least respect you enough to be willing to work with you and support your goals.
You could point out that last time he had a bad hand in that regard. Honestly, I'd agree with you. Lots of resistance and animosity there right from the get go. But realistically it's as good a hand as he'll ever have. He's not going to get a better one if he carries 2024, not having spent most of his last term and the time since making
more enemies
, generating
more scandal. So the point is moot.
In fact, during his last term he enjoyed the privilege of an R house and an R senate for several years. They might not have been universally aligned with Trump, not even close, but they certainly weren't fans of the D's either and were ideologically aligned at least somewhat with many of the policies that Trump was pushing. Immigration control, free enterprise, low taxes, strong foreign policy, COVID response, etc. I doubt that'll be the case at any point in his next term (if he gets one) so if anything he'll be even more hamstrung.
Either way, all he had to do was
do his job and work with these people. Act like a mature adult, accept that some compromise is always inevitable in any negotiation and that achieving some of what you want is better than not getting alignment and achieving nothing. The sort of skills that most people develop long before their teens. Yet skills that Trump demonstrably either doesn't have, or doesn't know how to utilize. Even a few of his own departmental picks quickly stopped supporting him or gave him poor advice. That's his fault. His failure. Harsh, maybe. But that was the job he was elected to do. To deliver his campaign promises. To deliver policy. Not to fail and then complain about how hard done by he was, how he was the victim.
It just astonishes me that anyone can look at what Trump did and didn't do the first time around, and yet still think that he's a good choice. Once again, it's not necessarily his policies that I object to. It's his ability to implement them.
Looking forwards, he probably isn't electable based on his loss to Biden last round (as incumbent with all the advantages that offers no less). But even if he does get elected, he'll once again have to try and navigate all the same problems with his lack of support that he so impressively cocked up in his last term. Considering the almost guaranteed loss of the House and possibly Senate that his election would provide he'd be trying to do that with an even weaker hand this time around.
So that's my thoughts. I guess it'd be one thing if Trump showed even the slightest suggestion that he'd learned from his mistakes in his last term and was making moves to address them, but honestly, I don't think he even realizes that he's made mistakes in the first place. Lots of throwing blame around sure, lots of playing the victim card, but not a lot of evidence for self awareness or any humility whatsoever, at least in my opinion.
Overall, nothing he's done since 2020 fills me with the impression that he's more capable of drawing wide ranging support across the electorate, in the House or in the Senate now than he was three years ago, and if anything he's probably even worse off now than he was in 2020. Certainly no clear, actionable, plan has been communicated to my knowledge as to how he'd actually solve that problem, and considering how much Trump likes to post all over social media on every other topic, I suspect that's because he simply hasn't got one.
On that basis why would I expect that him doing all the same things will yield different results in 2024? Isn't that the definition of insanity?
Now I don't know if DeSantis can do any better. He's an unknown quantity in that role, so I can't be sure. But in every respect I'd rather take a chance on a relative unknown with some decent experience in other roles than another chance on a guy with a history of failure in this one. He has a whole lot less baggage to fight through as well, so at least he's not starting from a position of animosity, scandal and weakness before his ass even touches an oval office chair. So he gets my pick (well, he would, but I don't get a vote!)
I should also point out to
@sestoppelman and a few others on this thread that not wanting Trump is not the same as wanting Biden. I see that a lot on this topic and it's both a false equivalency and frequently used as a straw man. You can quite easily be thoroughly unhappy with Biden
and dislike Trump. Disliking Trump doesn't equal Democrat. The two are not correlated and in fact, you may not like Trump
because you want Biden gone and don't think that Trump is the best vehicle to achieve that.
www.americanthinker.com
