Trump’s resilience
President at his best when he sticks to issues
Perhaps no American politician of the last 100 years has been pronounced politically dead as often as Donald Trump. And every time his critics have made the declaration, they have turned out to be wrong.
Some day the president’s political career will be over. Presidents get a maximum of two terms and most political lives end in failure.
But the day of the State of the Union address was not that day.
The president gave a sober but upbeat speech calling for bipartisan cooperation to get things done — a message the country, as a whole, wants to hear.
He was presidential. He was gracious. He stuck to his convictions, but indicated a willingness to compromise.
One of the reasons the president is resilient the issue configuration he ran on and has never deviated from: Grow the economy; protect American jobs; pull back from military adventures that yield the country nothing and put America first instead; and secure the borders.
These positions resonated with the American people in 2016 and they still resonate. Mr. Trump figured that out and his opponents in 2016 did not. It is not clear that many of his prospective opponents for 2020 have either. Mr. Trump has a platform — a powerful message. His personality often gets in the way, but he still has his issues.
If what the Democrats offer is not their own set of issues and approaches but, mostly, the assertion that Mr. Trump and his supporters are evil and stupid, they will be at a disadvantage, as they were on State of the Union night.
All of Mr. Trump’s issues are more complicated than he would like them to be, but until the Democrats engage him on substance, their fear mongering about Mr. Trump and their identity politics is likely to be inadequate.
The thing is, Mr. Trump has the ability to be presidential when he chooses to be. When sticks to issues instead of tweeting and firing people and calling former associates and employees names, he takes the political high ground. He should stay there, and he almost certainly won’t.
some degree of bipartisan cooperation possible between this president and this Congress?
Very little, if any. It is way too late, for many reasons. But in any instance in which the president looks like a man with a plan and a willingness to deal and the Democrats merely look like obstructionists, he wins the day, as he did with the State of the Union.