12/19/2024

Trump wipes the smile off Obama’s face

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Trump wipes the smile off Obama’s face

By
Hugo Gurdon
December 18, 2024 8:00 am
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President-elect Donald Trump’s most striking characteristics today are clarity, confidence, and calm. This is extraordinary in a man renowned for chaos, confusion, and the thin-skinned hurling of demeaning insults. But it is a truth that needs to be acknowledged and accounted for to understand what we are witnessing as Trump prepares to resume the presidency.

His press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 16 revealed a man almost preternaturally at ease with himself, his mission, his domestic support, and his acceptance abroad. His tone was measured, even somewhat humble, despite some bragging. When he dismissed questions, as he justifiably did once or twice, it was not done angrily or in a way that looked petty but with an assurance that widened the gap between himself and his erstwhile adversaries.

The press asked questions almost deferentially, showing respect for his office and a quietude rooted in the magnitude of his political triumph and mandate. The spectacle was a stunning contrast with the media maelstrom of his first term, when the likes of CNN’s Jim Acosta, posing vainly as a modern-Danton or people’s tribune, treated Trump as though he were axiomatically as illegitimate a president as Hillary Clinton and others bitterly claimed.

But as the days and weeks of the current presidential transition pass by, the significance of the stunning electoral outcome on Nov. 5 is settling on Trump, the nation, and the rest of the world.

Van Jones, one of the Left’s level-headed analysts, captured the truth lucidly in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cillizza. When Cillizza asked Jones how such a supposedly unlikely guy as Trump “became the one that cracked the code,” Jones rejected the premise of the question.

“Can we cut it out? … Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all critics. You know how we know? Because he has the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the popular vote, he has a massive media ecosystem bigger than the mainstream built around him and for him, and a religious fervor in a political movement around him, and his best buddy is the richest person in the history of the world, and the most relevant Kennedy is with him. This dude is a phenomenon. He is the most powerful human on Earth in our lifetime. And we’re still saying, ‘How is this guy doing it?’ We look like idiots.”

Jones’s litany would give anyone confidence in their position and their power. Trump is the only president other than Grover Cleveland 130 years ago to win reelection after defeat. Assuming he completes his second term in office, he will have led the Republican Party for as long as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush combined. He was impeached twice, hounded by corrupt officials in a banana-state-style lawfare campaign, convicted on 34 trumped-up felonies, faced two assassination attempts, was shot once, and faced voters who’d been told by what was once the opinion-forming elite that he was manifestly ineligible for election and should be rejected.

In the face of all this, America essentially said, “Stuff that,” and chose him to return to office, sweeping all swing states with a near landslide in the Electoral College and a plurality of the popular vote.

Whereas in 2016, Trump could be seen as an aberration and supported by fewer voters than opposed him, today, no such self-deception is available to his detractors. The change means that he is approaching governing with a more radical reform agenda, which he is articulating with more sober and persuasive rhetoric. Although he pledged in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” he approached that task, if at all, only tentatively despite much braggadocio. Now, he is arriving in office more determined in his goals but more restrained and deliberate in his language. It has produced in him less swagger and more solidity. His opponents and critics have yet to work out how to respond.

In the face of Trump’s popular election victory, the largely silent Left and foreign leaders know that a repudiation of Trump would now be read as a repudiation of America. Naturally, foreign leaders, many of whom are already on thin ice with their own people, will not do that. And here in the United States, many critics will not do it yet.

President Joe Biden has vanished, and Trump is universally treated as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. This was apparent early this month at the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and at his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron.

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In 2016, then-President Barack Obama mocked a tweet in which Trump called him “perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States.” Obama responded, “At least I will go down as a president,” and then dropped his mic to emphasize his smiling contempt.

We cannot know how Trump’s second term will pan out. But his political achievement already outshines that of Obama, who is no longer smiling

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