What’s old is new once. Former President Joe Biden struggled for the majority of his uninteresting term as president because of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Never since Grover Cleveland, in a drastically different political and media surroundings than that which prevails now, have we seen a president and his team reach in Washington, D. C., with first-term power but second-term knowledge.  ,
Holding Trump’s opening inside the Capitol Rotunda enhanced the picture of him sweeping Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, his true failed general-election opposition, out of business. Biden and Harris frequently appeared in the audience as Trump criticized their president’s poor performance and the different depravities of the republican Washington political class during his inaugural address.
Despite occasionally making a wry look at Trump, Biden largely maintained a stiff lower lip throughout the proceedings. We can’t say for certain whether he would have been defeated if he had continued to compete. Biden is retire knowing that he is the only legislator in either party to have ever defeated Trump in more than one primary. Harris, on the other hand, usually looked as if she wanted to get teleported out of the room.
WHAT TRUMP DID IN THE OVAL OFFICE ON DAY 1
If in 2017, Trump was essentially telling the swamp to get drain itself, this time, he came never to praise his opponents — , eight years ago, he set off some words of praise for his departing predecessor, cheerful President Barack Obama, but there was no such annual flattery of Biden or Harris — , but to bury them. ( His only mention of Biden and Harris was made in the introduction at the top, despite his repeated denigration of their policies. )
While there is a lot of familiarity with Trump in his second term — Biden greeted the Trumps at the White House by saying,” Welcome home,” Trump “buzzly won the popular vote,” according to the headline of an article by Ezra Klein, a liberal New York Times columnist. ” Why doesn’t it feel that way”?
Of course, the entire Harris campaign was premised on the idea that Trump could not win a national plurality, barring some catastrophic occurrence like Biden’s dismal debate performance. Because he too believed there was a bigger anti-Trump electoral coalition than a pro-Trump one, Biden himself stayed in the race as long as he did. This presumption proved to be accurate in 2020, when the COVID-19 voting protocols and the pandemic helped to elect Biden as president. And it was successful enough for Democrats to win two midterm elections, one in 2018 and the other in 2022, in which they overcame their House defeat.
In 20 years, there hasn’t been a more conventional Republican winner. The Republican leader’s 50.7 % at the height of the fight against terrorism was his first accomplishment since his father did so in 1988.
Trump’s electoral performance is also improved virtually everywhere, even in California and New York, the two massive blue states where Democrats can win nationally. However, if they can’t defend the blue wall in the Rust Belt, it only helps them so much in the Electoral College. Democrats are yet to feel the full impact of the excesses of left-wing governance in both California and New York, though they have yet to see the full impact at the ballot box.
Between the coasts, Trump won an absolute majority. That, too, contributes to the feeling that Trump won a great victory because, in vast swathes of the country, he did. By the time most people had processed the election results, he had not yet fallen below 50 % nationally ( the final tally was only a tick below ). California took forever to count its votes. In 2020, Harris received about 6.8 million fewer votes than Biden and more than 2 million fewer votes than Trump did.
The majority who voted for Trump’s election-defining policies, which have dominated the new president’s early executive actions, are larger than the majority who voted for his re-election to the White House, according to Klein’s question. Most voters reject gender ideology and racial discrimination dressed up as diversity, equity, and inclusion schemes. They were deeply uneasy about the effects of a poorly guarded border and the effects of inflation.
Polls have even revealed a higher level of transparency regarding Trump initiatives like mass deportations than they did during the first term. Why? Considering that undocumented immigrants are seen far beyond border communities, with undocumented immigrants holing up in hotels in Massachusetts and New York City, is a record-breaking illegal immigration. Springfield, Ohio, is not a border town. In the face of hostile media coverage and extensive footage of weeping migrants, which undoubtedly includes some real hard cases, will this heightened resolve to control immigration hold up. Border czar Tom Homan, who has a slightly different theory of the “root causes” of widespread illegal immigration than Harris, is the only current sheriff in town.
Most importantly, even if the voters ‘ choice wasn’t overwhelming — , every presidential election since the hanging chads year of 2000 has been competitive — , it was deliberate. The records of two administrations were compared. Trump’s many flaws and foibles were acutely identified by the electorate, but they were much more decisively so than in 2016.
How bad must your second wife be in order for you to divorce her and return to your first wife? a fitting analogy to what voters had done with Trump and Biden-Harris, said conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Pretty bad, as it turned out. This month, a CNN poll found that Biden had a 36 % job approval rating and 61 % thought his administration had been a failure. Biden’s approval rating on the economy, crime, immigration, inflation, and foreign policy was underwater by 20 to 30 points, according to the RealClearPolitics averages.
Overall, Biden’s numbers were as bad or worse than Trump’s in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — , perhaps why the Democrats ‘ focus on the nadir of Trump’s first term did not resonate with the voters as much as they had hoped.  ,
While the majority of Democrats were hypocritical about democracy and norms ( Biden left office, issuing preemptive pardons, and trying to enact a new constitutional amendment ), Trump’s popular vote victory did seem to have stifled their desire to protest his victory. For the first time since George H. W. Bush in 1989, there wasn’t a single congressional protest of a winning Republican presidential candidate’s Electoral College certification. After four years of railing against the” Big Lie” , , it was too much even for congressional Democrats.  ,
The leaderless Democratic Party is struggling to find its footing and a coherent anti-Trump messaging strategy, unlike in 2017. Businesses and international leaders have also been more sympathetic to Trump a second time around, acknowledging both his victory and his nearly two-decade dominance in national politics. At the second Trump inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg won more seats than Republican governors or cabinet nominees.  ,
In turn, the Trump administration has acted more purposefully than it has in eight years. Federal vacancies were created much more quickly and with sweeping executive orders, which gave a much more frequent appearance for Trump in the public eye than what had been expected from Biden’s recent years. Vice President JD Vance also possesses youthful energy, as can be seen frequently with his young family.
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According to conservative commentator Saagar Enjeti,” I increasingly believe that Trump’s four years of rule may have been an unintended blessing for him.” The party has had four years to prepare, and the party is now completely united with him, the Left’s theory of democracy is broken, and the vanguard of talent has been preparing.
There are still many potential pitfalls in store, and Trump still has his self-deprecating propensity to harbor resentment. Even his rivals are aware that there is nothing obscene or accidental about his return to the Oval Office.
W. James Antle III is the magazine’s executive editor, Washington Examiner.  ,
