When President-elect Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for what then seemed likely to be the last time on Jan. 20, 2021, he was a pariah. He had failed to secure reelection to a second consecutive term the previous November, and a riot at the Capitol by some of his supporters had prompted new impeachment charges against him.
Republicans up and down the ranks of Congress were eager to condemn him and turn the page on one of the most revolutionary political figures in modern political history. But now, four years later, Trump has secured the greatest political comeback in American history and will take the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 20, 2025, with a mandate to change the federal government fundamentally.
In his bid to recapture the job he lost four years ago, Trump secured more votes than he did in that election, winning the popular vote for the first time in his three campaigns alongside the largest Electoral College victory for a Republican candidate since George H.W. Bush in 1988. His coattails brought Republicans a majority in the Senate for the first time since he left office, and a slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives was maintained. It is the most robust Republican mandate in decades and has left the Democratic Party in the wilderness.
This historic result and its accompanying mandate would not have come about had Trump not fallen short in his bid for a second consecutive term four years ago. Indeed, the lowest moment of his political career proved to be a necessary step toward achieving his 2024 comeback and, with it, the ability to govern in ways that eluded him in his first term.
Remaking the Republican Party
When Trump won the 2016 election, it was a shock to everyone, not least to Republican leaders in Congress, whose principal hope was that Hillary Clinton’s expected victory would not also sweep their party out of power in the House and the Senate. A number of GOP lawmakers had condemned Trump just weeks before Election Day following the release of the Access Hollywood tape and wanted him to step down in favor of Mike Pence, his running mate.
When he won, Republicans in Congress were, from the outset, not eager to enact his agenda. A planned repeal of Obamacare fell apart, and a much-heralded overhaul of the tax code took nearly a year to be enacted. At the same time, lawmakers validated the Russia collusion investigation by Robert Mueller, blocked efforts to build a border wall, and generally viewed Trump as a grievous annoyance who had to be overcome so establishment Republicans could lead the party again in the future.
But Trump’s resilience as a political figure meant the Republican establishment could not outlast him. It changed the makeup of the party in both chambers.
Many critics of Trump and his populist agenda have been pushed out of office by losing either primaries or general elections. Former Rep. Liz Cheney no longer occupies a seat in the House of Representatives or in GOP leadership, and the House GOP is now led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a staunch ally of the president-elect. Trump-resistant Republican senators such as Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Richard Burr, and Ben Sasse are no longer in Congress, replaced by Republicans eager to back Trump’s agenda and political project.
In some ways, this overhaul of the Republican Party’s elected membership came because of, not in spite of, Trump reaching his lowest moment following the 2020 election. His refusal to concede that he lost, and the fallout from this, created an opening for Trump-skeptical Republicans who wanted to protect the party’s establishment to break publicly with him, believing that he was too toxic to maintain his influence. It proved to be a bad gamble. Now that he is more popular than ever, the few Trump skeptics left in the party are on an island alone. As he forms his administration, the president-elect has made it clear that establishment voices will be few and far between. He declared that former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, favorites of the GOP old guard, would not be invited back for the new term. With his massively replenished political capital, Trump will be able to use the threat of endorsing a primary challenge against any lawmaker who opposes him.
A new look administration
If Trump had won reelection in 2020, the team that would have filled his second administration would have looked similar to the one that finished his first. No one exemplified this more than Pence, his first vice president, who embodied the era of Republican politics that Trump was explicitly elected to reject. With the vice president as its standard-bearer, the old establishment of the Republican Party would have been in a strong position to lead the party into the 2024 election with Pence as its leader.
But now, Trump is joined by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, who is the polar opposite of Pence. Where the former vice president championed Reaganite market economics and free trade, the vice president-elect touts protectionism and skepticism of Big Business. Where Pence supported a robust role for the United States abroad, repeatedly deploying the phrase “arsenal of democracy,” Vance articulates a measure of skeptical isolation and seeks to limit the nation’s involvement in foreign affairs. If that sounds like a more Trumpy approach to policy, that’s because it is. Trump’s second vice president is much more his ideological heir than his first.
The elevation of Vance to the vice presidency signals that the policy agenda of the Trump era and its repudiation of decades of Republican policy orthodoxy is here to stay and will outlive the Trump presidency. Simply by virtue of his new position, Vance is all but guaranteed to be among the front-runners for the 2028 Republican nomination and will have a powerful voice in steering the party’s direction for years to come. It is the biggest difference between the Trump who ran in 2020 and the Trump who will ascend to the presidency in January 2025.
Turning a loss into a win
The personnel and policy agenda of a second Trump administration that would have begun in January 2021 versus the second Trump administration that will begin next January year are substantially different. But there is another aspect of Trump’s 2020 defeat that has made him so much more powerful as he heads into a new term, and that is the incompetent governance of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
In his first term, Trump gave the public a secure border and a prosperous economy. If he had been reelected in 2020, it would probably have been with another loss in the popular vote and with a Democratic House. Instead, in 2020, Biden narrowly won the Electoral College, and Democrats held razor-thin majorities in Congress.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Democrats abused the authority that had been given them in their narrow victory to pass two bills on party-line votes that spent trillions of dollars. The Biden administration additionally opened the southern border and enacted a regulatory agenda that appealed to the furthest fringe elements of the progressive base on culture war issues. The results were clear. Inflation reached heights not seen in decades, schools were forced to allow biological boys and men to compete in women’s sports, and cities were overrun with millions of illegal immigrants they could not handle with any degree of competence. It was a sharp contrast to the four years of the Trump administration, and it destroyed the Democratic Party’s standing with voters. It helped the public see what had been lost, or abandoned, in the 2020 election, and as Trump ran to regain his job, it provided a clear picture of what might be restored.
On Election Day 2024, voters remembered that graphic contrast and delivered a stinging rebuke of Democratic governance. They handed Trump the popular mandate he had lacked in his first term. It is an outcome that required a four-year exile to be achieved. In being so, it wrote the story of the greatest political comeback anyone in America has ever seen.