Donald Trump, meet Grover Cleveland, the only other President in U.S. history to win a second term after losing his first bid for re-election. It’s a remarkable accomplishment and a political comeback for the ages. How he’ll use it to achieve a legacy larger than the divisiveness of the last eight years is the question for the next four.
***
To say the former President has been a portrait in resilience is the political understatement of the 21st century. He was all but written off as a future candidate after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, including by us. But Democrats helped to revive him with their one-sided Jan. 6 investigation and their partisan use of lawfare. The Bragg indictment in New York on jerry-rigged charges may have sealed Mr. Trump’s path to the nomination. The courage he showed after the first assassination attempt was also a defining campaign moment.
His victory on Tuesday in the end wasn’t as close as the polls suggested. He won back states he lost in 2020, and he did so with a coalition that included more young voters, and more black and Hispanic men. He reduced his margin of defeat in states he lost by enough that he may even win the national popular vote. It’s a bigger win than in 2016.
Yet Mr. Trump’s comeback wouldn’t have been possible without the policy failures of the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats. He won again because President Biden failed to deliver the unity and prosperity he promised, and because over four years voters have soured on the results of his progressive policies.
Mr. Biden veered left to unite Democrats, rather than unite the country, and he believed the historians (that means you, Jon Meacham) who told him he could be another FDR. He put Elizabeth Warren in charge of his regulators, and Nancy Pelosi in charge of his agenda for the first two years on Capitol Hill.
The result was a decline in real wages as inflation soared, a divisive cultural agenda driven by identity politics, chaos at the southern border, and the collapse of American deterrence abroad. The exit polls show the economy in particular was Mr. Trump’s best issue. No matter the media lectures that the economy is great, voters who depend on wages and salaries (not assets) felt differently.
Democrats tried a late course correction by pushing Mr. Biden out of the race when it became clear he would lose, and it almost worked. Kamala Harris tried to pitch herself as a “new way forward,” but she couldn’t escape her four-year association with Mr. Biden. In the end she also failed to persuade enough people she was up to the job as President in a world of growing geopolitical danger.
Given these fundamentals, Republicans had the political advantage, and perhaps a younger GOP nominee without the baggage of Jan. 6 might have won a bigger victory. Exit polls show the threat to democracy and Mr. Trump’s character were big Democratic advantages. But Democrats overplayed their hand even here, as their comparisons to fascism and Hitler weren’t believable.
***
Can Mr. Trump govern in a second term more successfully than he did in the first? The House majority was too close to call as we went to press. But he’ll have a working GOP majority in the Senate, with at least 51 seats and perhaps more as we write this. That will help with the confirmation of his cabinet nominees and judges.
But he will have to choose carefully because his nominees will have to pass muster with what we will call the McConnell Caucus. That’s McConnell, as in Mitch, the Kentucky Senator who will no longer be GOP leader and probably won’t run for re-election in 2026. He will be liberated to act without worrying about his backbenchers. He will have allies in Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and perhaps others.
Nominating the likes of Jeffrey Clark or Ken Paxton as Attorney General won’t fly. His successful first-term nominees knew how to navigate Washington, pursuing policies with care to defeat opponents in the bureaucracy and press. He needs more Mike Pompeos and Gene Scalias.
If Mr. Trump makes a priority of seeking revenge against his opponents, he will squander political capital and quickly lose whatever goodwill his victory earns him. Ditto if he focuses on responding to every critic who insults him. We realize that asking Mr. Trump to act with self-restraint and political grace is the triumph of hope over hard experience. But he could set the right tone by promising to pardon Hunter Biden after he takes office and vowing not to prosecute Joe Biden.
The overriding policy message from the exit polls is that Mr. Trump needs to keep his eye focused clearly on economic growth. He has a mandate to repeal electric-vehicle mandates and the climate commands of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Above all he needs growth with low inflation that raises incomes, especially for American households who don’t have stocks or own a home. Extending the pro-growth planks of his 2017 tax reform and deregulation to unleash business investment will be crucial. He won’t get that result by adopting the income redistribution or union feather-bedding favored by the big-government right.
Most second terms fail, but then Mr. Trump’s second term is unlike any other in more than a century. To adapt Democrat Rahm Emanuel’s famous political dictum, a second chance would be a terrible thing to waste.
