As happens every time a new president is elected, Donald Trump is experiencing a sudden role reversal. His campaign to earn support from voters has ended abruptly and a new one has begun among donors and activists to earn his support for their priorities. The election was about tax cuts, or maybe cryptocurrency, the arguments go. What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net.
This is the first moment when presidencies go wrong. Rather than prepare to govern on behalf of the electorate that put them in power — especially the independent swing voters who by definition provide the margin of victory in a two-party system — new presidents, themselves typically members of the donor and activist communities, convince themselves that their personal preferences are the people’s as well. Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.
As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes, huddle with his supporters at Mar-a-Lago and then see how much of their agenda he can advance before his popularity falls too far to effect further change. That is the formula that has left a nation seemingly resigned to the loss of both common purpose and institutional competence. It is not a formula for a successful presidency, let alone for making America great again.
He has another option. He is an iconoclastic leader with a uniquely unfiltered relationship to the American people and a disdain for the chattering class of consultants. He is also the first president since Grover Cleveland to get a second shot at a first term. He has already experienced the bruising tax fight that helped bring his approval rating down to 36 percent a year after his inauguration, the failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the loss of more than 40 House seats and control of the chamber in a midterm election. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he made a promise to “every citizen” that he would “fight for you, for your family and your future” and that “this will truly be the golden age of America.” Achieving that will require focusing on the challenges and respecting the values broadly shared by not only his voters, but also many others who might come to support him.
Take immigration. A promise to secure the border has long been a central aspect of Mr. Trump’s appeal, and Democrats are now clambering to get on his side of the issue. A Trump administration serving American voters would stanch the flow of migrants with tough border enforcement and asylum restrictions, reverse the Biden administration’s lawlessness by removing recent arrivals and protect American workers and businesses by mandating that employers use the E-Verify program to confirm the legal status of the people who work for them. That program, which strikes at the harm that illegal immigration does to American workers, is wildly popular. A recent survey of 2,000 adults conducted by my organization, American Compass, in partnership with YouGov, found 78 percent support overall and 68 percent support even among Democrats. Law-abiding businesses tend to like it, too — they’re tired of getting undercut by competitors that get away with breaking the rules.
That’s the path to solving the problem. Mr. Trump will hear a lot of counterarguments from the affluent and influential class that builds its business model on underpaid, undocumented labor, especially in industries such as construction and hospitality, where he has personal experience, as well as in agriculture. Those voices are likely to suggest that instead he condescend to the masses with border theater and hostile rhetoric, while expanding temporary worker programs. To this end, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes the E-Verify program on libertarian grounds, has already been mentioned as a potential candidate for secretary of agriculture. Moves like that will keep the guests at Mr. Trump’s golf clubs happy but ensure growing frustration and disillusion elsewhere.
Rebuilding the American industrial base is another issue that Mr. Trump has elevated to the top of the national agenda, but about which his instincts are sometimes torn. Policies including tariffs are one vital tool to encourage domestic investment. But so is giving a targeted boost to technologies or sectors that are of particular importance. The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act has done just that for the manufacture of cutting-edge semiconductors ; since its passage in 2022, all five of the leading global chipmakers have committed to building advanced U.S. plants.
The Republican Party’s old-guard free marketeers hate the idea of subsidizing any industry and appear to have Mr. Trump’s ear on the issue. “That chip deal is so bad,” Mr. Trump told the podcaster Joe Rogan, prompting the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to say he would pursue repeal. Many of Mr. Trump’s advisers will tell him to dispense with industrial policy and cut taxes instead.
But CHIPS is overwhelmingly popular, so much so that Mr. Johnson quickly walked back his comment. In the American Compass survey, “a national investment bank that helps fund activities like manufacturing computer chips and mining critical minerals” got 74 percent support. Perhaps most important, these policies work and are already spurring huge investments and the creation of high-quality jobs. When the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced last month that its first plant in Arizona is already achieving production yields better than those of factories in Taiwan, the free-market message began shifting from decrying the policy to denying that it deserved credit for the success.
Real investment in factories has more than doubled since President Biden took office; for the electronics industry, it has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2022. By comparison, Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers tried to show that his 2017 tax cut spurred investment but instead found an effect of zero, though other research has since suggested some limited gains. What the tax cut did produce was lower corporate tax bills, and C.E.O.s will push for a repeat. A golden age for America does not depend upon high stock prices and C.E.O. bonuses. It depends upon real investment. If Mr. Trump wants to deliver for the average American, his policies must focus on the latter — including effective policies that were initiated by his political opponents.
The White House will face such trade-offs wherever it looks. Government efficiency became a major hobbyhorse of Mr. Trump’s campaign, but he will need to distinguish between making government work better and trying to get rid of it. Another American Compass poll conducted this year with YouGov casts the distinction in sharp relief. Republicans as well as independents express overwhelmingly negative views of the federal government. But ask what they want the government to do, and the answer by huge margins is always more or the same — even when it comes to “support for the poor, disabled, needy” and “medical care for those who need help affording insurance.”
Likewise, while many Americans complain about overregulation, their idea of a “free market” is not the laissez-faire model so often promoted by Republican leaders. For instance, 65 percent of Republicans prefer a vision of free markets where “workers have protections ensuring fair wages and working conditions” to one where “workers have the freedom to leave if they don’t like their treatment.” If Mr. Trump brings business executives into the government to improve customer service and create greater space for private-sector innovation, he will earn well-deserved praise. If he unleashes them, as they are asking, to shut down agencies, eliminate programs on which people rely and role-play scenes from Ayn Rand novels, even his own party’s savvier politicians will turn on him quickly.
Focus on making it easier to speculate in cryptocurrency or on providing non-college pathways to building a decent life? Focus on whatever harebrained scheme Robert Kennedy Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy might mention over lunch or on creating a more generous benefit for working families raising kids, as JD Vance and others have proposed? Any president finds himself surrounded by advisers pushing their personal and ideological agendas. There is a reason most lose sight of what matters to the people outside that bubble. But Mr. Trump has built his political career on taking the road less traveled. Returning to office, he has a last best first chance to get it right.
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