A variety of hopes, wishes for the Trump administration

WITH his brief (about 15 minutes) and populist-tinged inauguration speech, President Donald Trump signaled a distinct change from the status quo. Will that continue to be the case, and if so will Trump succeed?

The answer to the former seems to be “yes.” Trump kept his Twitter account busy throughout the weekend (his first posts as president were lines from his speech) and that seems unlikely to change. What remains to be seen is how well Trump governs. “We will confront hardships,” he said, “but we will get the job done.”

What might that job look like? On Inauguration Day, The Wall Street Journal asked several prominent Americans what they expected from Trump. Their views are worth noting.

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said his hope is that Trump “succeeds in putting serious constitutionalists on the Supreme Court,” adding that “I believe that Mr. Trump will nominate a qualified, conservative justice for the court” to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died 11 months ago.

Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at the Weekly Standard, said the candidate “who campaigned as a sociopath shows signs he may yet govern as one,” but also said that based on what has transpired in the past 18 months, “only an idiot would bet against Donald Trump.”

“If, over the next few years, parents begin to feel they’ve regained control of their children’s schools,” Ferguson said, “if wages start to rise and business owners feel liberated from the dead hand of overregulation, if the military recovers its strength and selfconfidence —then Mr. Trump’s ignorance and vulgarity won’t matter.”

Businessman Charles Koch suggested the president eliminate cronyism for the politically well-connected, embrace common-sense solutions to such things as the criminal justice system, encourage innovation in areas such as education and health care, and “always listen, especially to those who disagree.”

Former Democratic U.S. Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia encouraged Trump to “break the damaging ‘turnstile’ that has given an unelected elite far too much power,” and to reset the national conversation on race, which he said is “mired in the biracial dialogue of the 1960s, while our challenges have become multiracial and mixed with reverse discrimination.”

The Journal also asked former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Muskogee, for his thoughts. Coburn said he hopes for a restoration of a constitutionally limited government and for the administration to look closely at government waste — he put the total at $400 billion per year — and take that case to the people. He also hopes Trump will endorse a convention of the states to limit the reach of government.

And, Coburn said he’d like to see Trump be a real outsider in one other regard.

“Fixing what is broken in Washington is not hard if your own political future is not your primary concern,” he said. “If Mr. Trump is committed to the big changes America needs, we will never see him worry about the next election.”

We’ll see in the next four years whether that proves to be the case.