More Than a Vibe Shift: The Winning is Real… and Spectacular

The electoral victory of Donald J. Trump in November 2024 caused a kind of snap in the American social consciousness that most people called a “vibe shift.” It was quite dramatic from the get-go. The question many had, however, was whether it would last. Would things go from vibes to real victories in policy, diplomacy, and politics? While the future is still open, this week’s series of victories has shown that, with just five months in the White House, the Trump administration is really winning – “bigly,” as the President himself would say.

The Middle East

Was it only last weekend that we learned of the daring Operation Midnight Hammer, in which American pilots flew B-2 planes from Missouri to Iran and dropped 30,000 pound bombs into underground nuclear facilities? While some critics from both left and right immediately claimed that America would be drawn into another “forever war” or perhaps that Trump had started World War III, the reality was quite different.

Iran made a desultory show of missiles launched at an American base in Qatar (with no success) in retaliation, and then agreed to a ceasefire with Israel that has held. While Iran has not gotten back to the table yet, the Europeans are all pushing Iran to negotiate, and it is likely that they will do so rather than face more punishment.

Seizing the momentum, Qatar, which worked with the U.S. to broker the Iran-Israel ceasefire, has begun to push Hamas to work with mediators there. President Trump on Friday sounded a note of optimism about the possibility of a fresh truce in that conflict next week as well.

Contrary to the skeptics of left and right, President Trump’s decision has led to a temporary peace with Iran and may lead to a more lasting peace in the region as well.   

Africa

As if this were not enough positive diplomatic news, the Trump administration also secured a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo this week. It was a remarkable accomplishment, considering the long history of bloodshed in the two nations.

One can’t help but love Vice President Vance’s taking to his new Bluesky account to tout the accomplishment of stopping a war that “has killed more than any since World War 2, almost all of them black.” He challenged “the leaders and supporters of the black lives matter movement” to “join me in celebrating President Trump today, who has done more to save black lives than any leader in our country.”

The U.S. Economy

The wins weren’t just on the world stage, either. They happened here at home. Contrary to the pessimism about the economy after large market drops following Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, some worried that Trump would really tank the economy. What has happened since, however, has been far from that. This week, the S&P 500 hit a record high, Bitcoin did as well, and the Dow Jones average got close.

The performance of the economy was impressive enough that Torsten Sløk, a vocal Trump critic and chief economist at Apollo Global Management who earlier predicted that the Trump tariff policy would bring a summer recession, admitted that the President may have “outsmarted all of us.” He now believes that Trump’s strategy has the possibility of both reducing uncertainty and bringing in large amounts of federal revenue.

Trump has already sealed a trade agreement with the U.K. and has a tentative agreement with the Chinese. If more countries come to the table, the economic outlook of the United States could continue to improve.

Winning in the Courts

While many on the right have been unhappy with the Roberts Court, even at times with Trump’s own Justices Gorsuch, Kavanagh, and Barrett, the reality is that it has come through with some big decisions. One can feel the pain in NPR’s headline, “The Supreme Court gives Trump a wave of victories in a blockbuster final week.”

SCOTUS defended South Carolina’s right to refuse the use of Medicaid funds for abortions, upheld Texas’s law demanding that pornographic sites verify the age of those accessing them, and defended the rights of parents to opt their children out of course material that clash with the parents’ beliefs (this includes stories with LGBTQ characters).

As if these victories were not enough, however, the Court delivered the most important decision for the country going forward last week. As most Americans have been made painfully aware this spring, Democrats have been finding sympathetic federal district court judges willing to issue nationwide injunctions against executive orders and other decisions made by the Trump administration. While Democrats like to talk about every Trump decision as a constitutional crisis, these district judges claiming the power to stop the chief executive were indeed brewing up a real crisis.

Thankfully, in Trump v. CASA, concerning the Trump Executive Order challenging birthright citizenship, Justice Barrett, writing for the majority, wrote that “federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them.” She concluded, “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” Though SCOTUS itself issued a 30-day stay on the enforcement of the Executive Order as the litigation continues, this is quite different from a district court judge doing so on his own authority. 

In other words, district court judges do not outrank the President, and they are not the same as the Supreme Court.

This ruling was a huge win not only for the Trump administration, but also for the courts in general, which were burning their own reputation and legitimacy quickly with these nationwide injunctions. Of course, Justice Kagan burned quite a bit of her reputation by dissenting in the present case after clearly speaking out against nationwide injunctions in 2022. Donald Trump has a strange way of causing people in public life to reveal themselves.

The vibe shift has been real. That is certain. But we can thank God that the changes have gone beyond vibes and into international peace, a strong economy, and some solid steps toward restoration of the rights of parents, states, and the President to do their duty as the Constitution and the electorate would have them do.    

The winning has been real—and it’s spectacular.

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.