Trump has changed his nation, party in many ways

With Donald Trump nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered his party is on display.

Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced budget.

Trump signed on this spring to $3 trillion in deficit spending to rescue the economy from a depression into which the government had shoved it to control the spread of the coronavirus. He is prepared to spend a trillion dollars more.

By opening new lands and seas to exploration, building pipelines, permitting fracking and slashing regulations, Trump has brought the U.S. to an energy independence that other presidents only promised. The Trump GOP has abandoned an ideological commitment to free trade that dates back to the Kennedy administration and reembraced the economic nationalism of the 19th-century Republicans who built the world’s greatest industrial and manufacturing power.

Globalism has been relegated to the ash heap of history as our populist president began to impose tariffs on countries that have looted America’s manufacturing base.

Though Trump has been prevented by the Russophobia of our Beltway elites from seeking a detente with Vladimir Putin, he has managed to avoid a military collision.

Trump has also ended the decades-long free-riding of NATO allies on the U.S. defense budget, convincing many of them to contribute more.

Though Trump has not extracted this country from the forever wars of the Middle East — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — he routed ISIS and kept us out of Libya’s civil war.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump has tabled the issue of immigration, especially mass illegal migration across the Southern border, and made progress on the border wall he made a feature of his 2016 campaign.

A discredited NAFTA has been replaced by a new trade deal, and a leftist government in Mexico City is helping prevent migrants from entering southern Mexico on their way to the United States.

Trump has done as much as Reagan to deregulate the U.S. economy and reduce taxes on workers, producers and investors. Before COVID-19 hit in force in March, stock markets were hitting all-time highs and unemployment rates alltime lows.

He has nominated and elevated two Supreme Court justices and hundreds of federal judges.

The horizon, however, does not appear to be without perils.

Though his outreach to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un failed to persuade Kim to surrender his nuclear arsenal in return for recognition, trade and aid, even some of Trump’s enemies applauded his effort.

If Trump loses in November, however, much of what he has done will be undone.

The U.S. will agree anew to abide by the Paris climate accords, and the Iran nuclear deal of John Kerry and Barack Obama will be revived.

Joe Biden says that only those making above $400,000 will pay higher taxes. Yet the Democrats’ economic plan envisions higher payroll and personal income tax rates, higher capital gains and corporate tax rates, and even higher death taxes on estates.

Trump has also changed the character and composition of the GOP, making it more of a working- and middle-class party.

Trump sees himself not as a moral crusader for human rights but as a defender of American interests in the world.