The 2024 election sent a clear signal: Americans are demanding a decisive shift away from the policies of the Biden-Harris administration. With Donald Trump returning to the White House for a second term, the path forward is clear, but it’s fraught with challenges.
“Look, for the first part of the transition, Donald Trump looked like a colossus. He seemed to have a lot of momentum. The Democratic incumbent president seemed to be either a negative for his party or a zero,” Mark Halperin said on Newsmax this week. “I think the caution for team Trump is what happened in the last few days, which is Donald Trump said, ‘Kill one bill, give me another bill, including raising the debt ceiling.’ And 30 Republicans said no.”
“Now, if they go for policy and they can convince Democrats that they’re on the wrong side of history on things like immigration, I think they could gain some momentum. This is not just a one-off. What policy? One by one. Momentum matters a lot at the beginning of an administration,” Halperin continued. “And if they can get some Democrats on board, all Republicans on board, I think unity could be the word of the day going into the fall. If they can’t, I think he’ll retreat back, as presidents do, to the base.”
Persuading Democrats that they are on the wrong side of critical issues is no small task, but I think Halperin is wrong that the onus is on Trump to convince them. The voters sent them the message on Election Day, and if Democrats didn’t get the message, then it’s not Trump’s job to save the Democrats from further electoral humiliation — which is exactly where Democrats are headed if they don’t reassess their radical agenda.
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Trump’s transition has been marked so far by what Halperin called an “extraordinarily successful” effort. Trump has the momentum, not the Democrats. And they can either get on board or not.
I don’t doubt that sustaining the momentum of Trump’s transition will require bipartisan cooperation on key policy matters upon taking office, but Trump has majorities in the House and Senate, and if we can get Republicans to be unified, Democrats risk becoming completely irrelevant unless they decide they want to help make America great again or just be part of the resistance.
Of course, Trump’s momentum isn’t assured just because he has those majorities. The recent kerfuffle over the continuing resolution showed that the slim Republican majority in the House isn’t going to be a rubber stamp for him.
While it may be practical for Trump to try to convince Democrats to get on board, I think that’s not Trump’s job. But Halperin did get something right.
“What hangs in the balance is whether Donald Trump succeeds in focusing on the things he ran on: Immigration, cutting taxes, cutting regulation, ending the forever wars,” he said. “Those aren’t partisan issues if they’re handled right. Let’s see if he keeps the focus there or moves on to other things.”
If Trump stays on message about the issues that Americans voted for him to fix, he won’t have to worry about Republican defections, and Democrats can oppose those efforts all they want at their own peril as far as I’m concerned.
In 2020, Joe Biden ran for president pretending to be a moderate, and upon getting he and the Democrats went all in on the radical agenda in history. The results were catastrophic. So why should Trump have to be the one to extend an olive branch to the party that made a mess of the country they inherited from him?
