In that mission he has largely succeeded, although it hasn’t always been pretty. Most politicians go to great lengths to conceal character flaws. Donald Trump wears them on his sleeve. Most presidents try to appear dignified and restrained in response to criticism. When a former cabinet secretary questioned the president’s competence, Trump called him “dumb as a rock.”
Speaking of former administration officials, Trump is setting records for acrimonious partings with senior staff. And America’s forty-fifth president is often no more diplomatic in the way he conducts foreign relations. He called the leader of one of America’s closest allies “very dishonest and weak”15—but also managed to strike a new trade deal with him.
Trump’s impolite and unconventional style partly explains how he could manage to get impeached without being accused of any crime in either of the two impeachment articles passed in the U.S. House. And even people who find the Biden family’s mining of overseas wealth appalling may not like the president’s handling of relations with Ukraine.
But Trump’s odd manners and methods also obscure the substance of a highly consequential presidency with significant achievements. Much of the press corps may now be dedicated to cataloging the inaccuracies in the president’s rhetoric. Yet it’s hard to name an elected official who has more faithfully pursued his campaign agenda—or has disclosed more of his thoughts and opinions. And his well-documented faults appear smaller the more we learn about the surveillance abuses conducted by his detractors within the federal government beginning in 2016. If such abuses of power can target even a successful presidential campaign and White House through wiretaps, informants, and a media leak strategy, then there is little hope of fairness for the rest of us.
Three years into his term, Donald Trump is neither the dignified statesman that some Americans hoped he might become nor the abusive authoritarian that media critics claimed he would be. But Trump can—and often does—boast of impressive results when it comes to the central promise of his 2016 campaign: restoring economic opportunity for the average worker. As we’ll describe, in the years before Covid the U.S. job market set a series of records.
Trump has accused many members of the media—including Maria and the Journal editorial page where James serves as assistant editor—of spreading “fake news.” Yet media organizations are thriving in the Trump era. The question is no longer whether they will remain free to criticize him but how they will continue to generate such robust ratings and revenues after he leaves the Oval Office.
Now it’s time for Americans to review the record and decide how long he should stay there.
1
Morality and Prosperity
Judging the presidency of Donald Trump naturally involves a question of style versus substance. It’s not surprising that the boorish billionaire who crashed the Republican presidential debate party in 2015 is still tweeting disrespectful comments about his political adversaries. Most people don’t change all that much after the age of seventy. But what is remarkable is that the political novice is now concluding one of the most consequential first terms in recent history.
After Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, one might have expected the former star of reality television to preside over an entertaining but ineffectual administration. One might even have had fun imagining Trump’s celebrity pals lining up for nominations to the federal bench. But who would have guessed that, four years later, legal analysts of both parties would be acknowledging the exceptional quality and quantity of Trump judicial appointments?
The cost of supporting Donald Trump is enduring awkward moments when he says things that presidents shouldn’t say. The benefit is that he champions American liberty and prosperity, and a free and prosperous America is a benefit to people all over the world.
In 2016, U.S. voters decided to take a chance on Trump because they figured that, for all his rough edges, he seemed willing and able to confront the bullying Washington bureaucracy—and bully it right back. In Trump’s favored metaphor, Americans decided he was the guy to wade into a Beltway swamp that needed draining. The voters had no idea how right they were. As we’ll discuss in chapter two, the culture of Washington turned out to be much more corrupt and rotten than almost anyone could have imagined.
Since moving into the White House, Trump hasn’t become highly popular. He never was. But he has surpassed any reasonable expectation for his performance in office. In important ways Trump has reduced the federal footprint on the daily lives of U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, his adversaries are promising that when he departs the White House that footprint is going to get much larger.
In 2016, many of Trump’s adversaries in politics and the press were saying that his various ill-advised comments portended a dark night of authoritarianism in America. They were wrong. Trump’s regulatory and tax reforms and his appointment of judges committed to the rule of law have resulted in a federal government that exercises less power than the day he was inaugurated. And, unlike an actual authoritarian, he accepts the decisions of judges even when they rule against him, just as he accepted the decision of voters to hand the U.S. House of Representatives to Democrats in 2018.
A few journalists, like Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, have been honest enough to acknowledge that the 2016 hyperventilating over a potential dictatorship was overdone. “Not long ago, the ‘Never Trump’ half of the nation was gripped by fear of an authoritarian takeover,” wrote McManus in 2019. “But the specter of an autocratic president running roughshod over democratic institutions has ebbed,” he
