President Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign by declaring that Donald Trump would be a blip in history. “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time,” Biden said.
Today, Trump is the President-elect, and Biden has a few weeks left as a one-term president.
It turns out Trump understands America better than his critics, who ought to have learned from him instead of demonizing him.
In September 2020, anticipating the possibility that Trump might lose — given the coronavirus pandemic, the left’s summer of riots, the social media censorship, and the Democrats’ successful effort to change the voting rules — I published an ebook, The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. I noted what I thought were the unique attributes Trump brought to the office, in the hope future presidents would emulate them.
I explained, for example, that Trump’s unpredictability was an asset to America’s national security. Trump’s penchant for firing officials who had failed, which was much derided by the media, ensured that his appointees did the best they could to serve the American people.
Trump emphasized economic growth; he turned tariffs into a foreign policy tool; he rejected the media’s effort to run the country; and he restored patriotism to a central place in our popular culture.
Trump also honored faith, even if he himself was an admitted sinner. Far from being an antisemite, Trump adopted a kind of philosemitism, building peace in the Middle East by protecting Israel instead of pressuring it. He modeled, and talked about, the principle of “reciprocity,” returning kindness with kindness, but hostility with fury.
Above all, Trump exemplified tenacity. He never gave up — not on his promises, not on his supporters, and never on America.
Biden kept a few of Trump’s policies in place. He did not reduce Trump’s tariffs, for example, and he kept the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem — though he tried, foolishly, to cancel it out with a Palestinian consulate that Israel, exercising its rights under international law, refused to allow. Belatedly, Biden also tried to enforce border security, realizing that his decision to reverse all of Trump’s immigration policies, and to stop building the wall, had been a disaster.
Overall, however, Biden, and the Barack Obama alumni who staffed his administration, were determined to erase Trump from memory.
Instead of learning from Trump’s success with the Abraham Accords, for example, Biden returned to the old, failed “Palestine first” model, as if Trump had never shown that Arab countries were eager to make peace once Palestinians no longer had a veto. The result: not one country joined the Accords under Biden.
President Joe Biden walks to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Biden also refused to learn from Trump’s magnanimity. Trump had joked, irresponsibly, about locking up Hillary Clinton (for actual crimes) when he was on the campaign trail. Yet when he took office, he relented.
Biden spoke about “unity” in his Inaugural address. But instead of following through on that pledge, he let Democrats impeach Trump a second time and urged the Department of Justice to be more aggressive in pursuing his political opponent.
That, more than anything else, is why Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris, deserved to lose.
The 2024 election was many things, but among them was a victory over “lawfare” — the abuse of the judicial system to target opposition. That abuse is what motivated me to write, The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days. (My suggestions: fix the border, stop the wars, curb inflation — but first, restore public faith in the rule of law.)
Democracy, we tell ourselves, is about rule by the people, which we exert through casting votes and counting them. Both parties have lost faith in that process.
But in a broader sense, democracy is a system of taking turns, allowing different coalitions in our divided society to have the opportunity to carry out their ideas. If their ideas work, their coalitions earn support, and grow, and stay in office longer.
Yet ultimately, everyone has a turn to win — and to lose.
My advice to Democrats would be: learn from Trump this time. So much of what he does is just common sense.
And note, too, something that Trump has learned from his own time in opposition: to listen.
He learned to work the fryer at McDonald’s. He drove a garbage truck. He heard the concerns of the Muslim community and earned their votes by promising peace, which Jews want as well.
We are a great nation, with great people. There are no blips, only lessons.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
