President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed golden age is over. He ended it himself.
Starting in January, the president will deal with large Democrat majorities in the House and the Senate — featuring Democrat senators from Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, and possibly Mississippi — kicking off two straight years of investigations, impeachment efforts, and brinkmanship government.
The people returned Trump to the White House with a mandate: secure the border and restore the roaring economy of his first administration where Americans didn’t constantly feel like necessities were out of reach.
Initially, the vibes were good. The president fulfilled his promise to secure the border. DEI was on the retreat and sanity was being restored.
Then, “Liberation Day” came and the president launched his unilateral tariff agenda and global war on trade that frustrated businesses, both large and small, and pushed our allies toward our enemies. The job market stagnated, economic uncertainty surged, and prices increased on everyday items. American families faced higher prices and economic anxiety, the very things Trump and Republicans were elected to solve.
While he followed the first administration playbook in extending the tax cuts and cutting regulations, Trump’s tariff tax and failure to properly execute the Iran war, coupled with daily stories of corruption, left voters angry and unforgiving.
By October, 70% of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy and more than a majority disapproved of the tariffs. Exit polls found voters trusted Democrats over Republicans by a similar margin when it came to the economy.
The Trump administration appears obsessed with taking stakes in private companies, racking up holdings in 41 separate private companies, all while calling Democrats the real socialists. Then came the empty promise of a $5,000 Trump dividend if Republicans kept Congress, preceded by proposals to cap credit-card interest rates and expand federal childcare subsidies.
A Vladimir Putin-linked Russian businessman helped finance Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations, while his ex-fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was forced to resign as ambassador to Greece amid accusations of corruption. The president, meanwhile, has become an active day trader, trading more stocks than Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile, his son-in-law simultaneously negotiates Middle East peace policy while managing money for Middle Eastern nations that harbor terrorists.
Voters are wondering how a promise to drain the swamp led to an administration with a deeper and more corrupt swamp.
Crass rhetoric, amplified on taxpayer-funded government social media accounts, also soured voters, leading them to give the other team another chance. Turns out voters will put up with the theater kids if the economy roars. When the economy doesn’t roar, red-hat theater kids are just as annoying as the TikTok influencers that overran the Biden White House.
In the coming days, the White House and its allies will likely argue that the results are not a commentary on his performance, but simply the reality of a historical gravity so powerful that even Trump cannot escape its pull. But historical gravity doesn’t mean losing traditional red states such as South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, and maybe even Mississippi.
The second Trump administration abandoned the successful policies of the first. 2024 voters weren’t voting for speculative populist trade policies or a first family that would sell anything that wasn’t tied down. They weren’t voting for the federal government to take stakes in private companies or mimic Democrats with speculative expansions of entitlements to buy votes.
They were voting for sanity, a secure border, and extending the tax cuts and the economic growth policies of the Trump-Pence years.
Republicans broke their promises and messed with people’s pocketbooks. Now they’ve paid the price, and Democrats have won a generational victory. Trump may have considered 50-year mortgages, but he ended up handing out 6-year leases in the U.S. Senate.
Killed by crassness, corruption, and economic populism, the midterm elections have transformed the “Golden Age” into little more than a two-yearlong soap opera as we await a potentially unified government next time around.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
