In many respects, Donald Trump deserved the public’s warm retrospective on his first term. That gauzy hindsight contributed to his restoration to power and a honeymoon quite unlike anything he experienced in 2017, but voters’ faith in Trump wasn’t irrational. The president — or the conventional conservative Republicans who staffed his administration and controlled the 115th Congress — was committed to fixing Barack Obama’s many mistakes. This time, however, the president is doing the opposite. He’s doubling down on his predecessor’s impractical and ideological mismanagement of America’s foreign and domestic concerns. Understandably enough, the trust voters invested in Trump and the honeymoon that trust produced are evaporating at a rapid clip.
In 2017, Republicans put an end to the “uncertainty” over which Barack Obama and his mercurial regulatory regime presided with tax code reform. Negotiations between Trump and congressional Republicans over the plan that eventually became the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act were not without tension, but Paul Ryan and his conservatives got their way. In addition, Republicans helped steer a revised North American free trade agreement away from Trump’s preference for punitive tariffs on America’s allies. And when Trump attempted to impose tariffs on Mexico in a bank-shot pursuit of unrelated geopolitical objectives, Republicans in Congress rediscovered the authority over foreign trade the Constitution vests in the legislature and threatened a humiliating showdown with their party’s president. Trump backed down, much to his own benefit. In the end, he presided over a stable economic environment for which voters longed after the pandemic stole it away.
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