Donald Trump Has Provided Air Cover: Now We Must Fight

This week has been described accurately as a week of shock and awe. The second Trump administration has launched a flurry of Executive Orders, pardons, and other actions, leaving Democrats struggling to determine where to focus their attacks. They’ve been reduced to screaming that they saw Elon Musk make a Nazi salute (he didn’t) and obsessing over whether the price of eggs has dropped yet.

The totality of what we’ve seen so far is a good sign that Trump himself and his team are going to have a very different second term. This time, instead of being slowed down by the flurries of actions by the “resistance,” Donald Trump has flown over the opposition and bombed them so heavily with immediate executive action that there is now the possibility of positive change.

The Trump administration’s early actions are very important. But it is also important to remember that the American presidency, powerful as it is, cannot and ought not do everything. The GOP must operate differently in this second term, working to make permanent the changes Trump has inaugurated through executive action. The American people are counting on legislators to buttress and advance the “proud, prosperous, and free” nation Trump proclaimed as his goal in his Second Inaugural.

While the first Trump administration produced tangible results, it was hobbled from the beginning by a coalition of forces. It was hobbled by opposition from Democrats and the Deep State, certainly. It was hobbled also by some Republican politicians who were willing to take losses as long as Trump himself lost. It was hobbled by members of Trump’s staff who chose to work for themselves rather than a duly elected president. And it was hobbled by the press.

Though many Republican politicians came around either during Trump’s first term or in the interim period of 2020-2024, the rest of that anti-Trump coalition stayed fairly tight. As recently as last April, the scale of this opposition appeared insurmountable. Roger Kimball described it as a “shock and awe” strategy, highlighting “the extensive co-ordination between the Biden White House and the myriad prosecutors, attorneys general, FBI agents, and other official factota to formulate a strategy to indict, intimidate, and neutralize Trump as a political actor.” The goal was to get Trump imprisoned—or at least convicted of a crime and hamstrung financially.

Alas, for Trump’s opponents, the nation’s “mainstream” media had long since been revealed as untrustworthy thanks to the reporting of lots of scrappy people on the right. The revelations about government censorship, the lies about Trump’s purported “Russian Collusion,” the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and myriad aspects of the COVID-19 panic had weakened the power of the press and much of our administrative state to convince Americans they weren’t being manipulated.

The Trump “conviction” did not convince anybody who was not already convinced that “Orange Man Bad” was a matter of dogma. Nor did the other verdicts. “Convicted felon” and “adjudicated sex offender” and all the rest of these designations probably did more harm to Democrats than help. What Americans saw was that if somebody with Trump’s money, name, and power could be framed in the way he was, how could any ordinary American hope to fare any better against the same lawfare machine?

Indeed, as reporters such as American Greatness’s Julie Kelly had been showing us for the last four years, the ordinary Americans who had been at the Capitol on January 6, whether they had done something truly wrong or not, had been denied any real justice. Pro-lifers were similarly targeted in American courts.

Meanwhile, Americans had grown accustomed to headlines such as 2018’s “Government drops charges against all inauguration protesters” or 2021’s “Charges against hundreds of NYC rioters/looters have been dropped” reinforcing the perception that the American justice system operates on a double standard. Riot at Trump’s inauguration? Riot and loot in the name of George Floyd? You get out of jail free.

Walk through the Capitol on January 6 when the doors are open? Protest at an abortion clinic? You get the book thrown at you.

In short, Trump’s electoral victory was itself a victory over the media hobblers of his first term as much as it was over the Democratic politicians. That’s why both are now panicking. Susan Glasser at The New Yorker is writing about journalists and others being “exhausted.” And Democratic senators are telling Semafor that they “are obviously in a bit of disarray.”

They are in disarray. And it is glorious. This time around, Trump came in with a plan to immediately push back against all the distortions to American life pushed by the Biden administration and the Democrats. His first day featured around 200 distinct executive actions, many of them immediately rescinding previous Biden executive actions—especially the ones that opened up our border and made our nation so unsafe. But he also went on offense against our unwieldy administrative state, demanding that federal workers operating remotely return to their offices, getting rid of all DEI operations in the federal government, and making clear that trying to disguise such operations with new designations would be punished.

What needs to happen now, however, is for the rest of the GOP to take advantage of this massive executive action bombing attack and the resulting disarray and exhaustion to get something done. Trump has given some air cover; now we can advance.

By “we” is meant particularly Republicans in Congress. The Republican opposition to Trump from 2017-2019, when Republicans held both houses of Congress and essentially passed nothing but the tax cuts (nice as they were) was a wake-up call for many on the right. It became glaringly clear that too many in the Republican Party were more interested in remaining junior members of the Ruling Class than in pursuing the conservative agenda they claimed to champion.

For years, Republicans had promised to replace Obamacare with something better. Trump said he was ready to sign something. Trump was ready to sign meaningful reforms, but Congress produced… nothing. The same went for every other issue—especially border security. Despite these setbacks, Trump’s accomplished a great deal during his first term, but much of it was reliant on executive power, leaving those gains vulnerable to reversal.

This time has to be different. Americans want results. Republican lawmakers need to focus relentlessly on delivering them. Far from being fatigued or demoralized, ordinary Americans are happy to see that dangerous criminals are being deported and destructive ideologies of race and “gender” are being excised from the halls of power. What can be done by executive power, however, can be undone by future executive power. Our representatives in Congress should move quickly and decisively to ensure stable and far-reaching reforms.

We should celebrate the victories so far and let it be known that we support this bold, shock-and-awe approach. But now is the time for Congress to step up and ensure these gains are secured on a permanent footing. The war to preserve and protect what makes America great is far from over.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.