ANALYSIS — Donald Trump’s 2016 transition was slowed because, as he admitted at a pre-Christmas rally that year, he didn’t think he would win. Eight tumultuous years later, the president-elect sounded Wednesday like he’s ready to get to work planning his second improbable term.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate,” a raspy-voiced Trump said at his victory party in West Palm Beach, Fla., in the early morning hours.
To the dismay of Democrats from sea to shining sea, Trump’s “mandate” declaration will be hard to rebut, particularly after he won the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin for the second time in three elections, made headway in Democratic-heavy states and is on track toward being the first GOP presidential nominee in 20 years to win the popular vote.
Trump’s national and battleground-state margins were shaping up to be so large that Giles Alston, an analyst for Oxford Analytica, also owned by CQ Roll Call’s parent company FiscalNote, posited in a written brief that Democrats appeared “unlikely” to legally challenge his victory.
In the end, voters appeared unimpressed by the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, who tried selling an upbeat picture of the country’s future, and were undeterred by her warnings that Trump was a threat to the Constitution and America’s democratic system.
Enough voters who pulled the lever for him were undeterred by his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when he urged the mob that stormed the Capitol to go there and “fight like hell,” nor his actions to try overturning the 2020 election, nor him being convicted on felony fraud charges, nor a New York civil jury finding him liable of sexual abuse. Nor his harsh rhetoric and hardline policy ideas.
Trump looked and sounded tired early Wednesday morning, following a Monday that featured four campaign rallies, culminating in a nearly two-hour rally in Grand Rapids, Mich. But he made clear there likely would be no sluggish effort to build his second-term administration.
“We’re gonna have to seal up those borders,” he said, pivoting to immigration, an issue that again helped propel him to the White House. “We want people to come back in. But we have to, we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally.”
Trump ran on a mash-up of populist and hardline conservative policy proposals. He promised to be a “dictator on day one” by ramping up domestic oil and gas extraction — even though the Biden-Harris administration did so to record levels — and “close” the Southern border. Trump did not, despite his claims, do so during his first term.
He promised to slap tariffs on an array of foreign-made goods, even though economists warned doing so would further drive up prices for consumers. During his rallies he would do what he started calling “the weave,” jumping wildly among topics in the same minute.
In one breath, he would vow to cut regulations; in the next he was promising to end taxes on tips and expand the tax cut law he signed during his first term. He might then float a national sovereign wealth fund before musing on capping credit card debt. Before a crowd could stop applauding, he was pitching his “mass deportation program” then saying his ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would end all diseases while also, somehow, paring vaccines.
Trump ran on plenty of policy ideas, but he never explained how he would implement them, nor how he might get things like tax changes through Congress. Throwing another heaping dose of uncertainty into many of his promises: The Supreme Court earlier this year handed the occupant of the Office of the President sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution.
“We’re going to do it in every way with so many ways, but we’re going to do it in every way,” Trump said in his second victory speech. “This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”
But the more than 70 million Americans who voted for Trump “regained” power through a president-elect whom his opponent and her allies warned for months was after “unchecked power.”
One of those allies, former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, the former vice chair of the special House committee that probed the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and heaped ample blame on Trump, said in a statement that “all Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections.”
“We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years,” she added. “Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.”
But with the high court’s immunity ruling, only time will tell how strong those guardrails will be.
One Trump congressional ally, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, said Wednesday that the lopsided election results showed voters were not worried about constitutional safeguards.
“The American people support him. That’s why he won a mandate last night,” Donalds told MSNBC. “Hopefully, the politicians in Washington, D.C., they realize what the American people have said is that they want a secure border, they want a sound economy and they want leadership that is focused on them first — not their power circles in Washington, D.C.”
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