The Age of Trump, like the Jacksonian Era long ago, will only be fully understood decades after its conclusion — if ever.
The present era will be dated as beginning when then-candidate Donald Trump came down the escalator on June 16, 2015. No one can predict its end, as Trump will have an outsize role in the GOP even when he leaves office in 2029, and his nominees to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts will be decisive in restoring the originalist understanding of the Constitution for decades thereafter.
Even now, however, it is an excellent guess to say that the Trump Era will primarily be about his impact on the court at home and on the Middle East and the Pacific abroad. In Trump’s first term, his decisive accomplishment on the world stage was the Abraham Accords. His three appointees to the court were his major accomplishment at home.
With 30 months left in his presidency, Trump’s reputation in history will depend on his success in bringing the radical regime atop the Islamic Republic of Iran to heel. That end state could be anything from regime collapse to an agreement that effectively forecloses the path to nuclear weapons and a forest of missiles and increasing freedom for the Iranian people. We are a long way away from knowing how the battle with Iran is scored.
We must also watch to see if the Abraham Accords expand. The transition to a stable regime in Venezuela is also a major accomplishment. And if Cuba finally is forced to free its people from effective enslavement by the Castro regime and its legatees, Trump’s record on matters of national security will be excellent. His investment in defense spending in both terms will set a standard for at least future GOP presidents.
History compresses every president’s record into a paragraph or three or four sentences. That paragraph may mention the lawfare he survived, or the ballroom, or “Russia, Russia, Russia,” but that is doubtful. Scandals of any era are not the big takeaways unless they topple a president, as they did with Richard Nixon. The resilience of Trump will probably make the paragraph, but the big things are returning the Supreme Court to its originalist design and making the country safe from the equal of the most evil regime on the planet, while positioning us to deal with China for decades.
It will be a genuine surprise to see what former President Barack Obama’s museum in Chicago will feature. Obamacare is a mess — perhaps it will end up an utter disaster — and only the Pod Save America boys hold up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as anything other than national self-medication in the face of the threat posed by the fanatics running Iran. Obama tried to bribe them. Trump has killed many of them and shattered their military. It’s not over yet. Far from it. But I’d rather be the designer of Trump’s exhibits than the poor souls stuck with making something out of nothing for Obama.
While Obama’s election was an enormous achievement for the nation — it proved America as a whole had put its racist ghosts to rest — it is not a testament to what he and his administration actually accomplished. The war in Ukraine began on Obama’s watch and expanded on that of Biden. No, you wouldn’t want to be Obama’s Robert Caro.
Trump will, by contrast, feed writers and researchers for years. His tapping into populism was an unexpected and lasting shift in one of the two parties, which in turn drove the other one into a collective nervous breakdown, which will yield a nominee from the far Left in 2028. The “Age of Trump” will include the cratering of the Democratic Party into the ditch on the far left side of the American political road.
Trump accelerated the transformation of American politics begun by former President Bill Clinton. The impeachment of Clinton dusted off the tool used against Nixon and Trump, one almost certainly to be pulled out again if Democrats win the majority of the House.
TO END THE IRAN THREAT, AMERICA MUST DISMANTLE THE REGIME’S FOUNDATIONS
But he won’t be forced out because the ability to fight back against legacy media has arisen in the years between 1974 and now. The pursuit of Trump will continue to lead Democrats into more irrelevant and indeed wild-eyed pursuits such as the Steele dossier. The first round was tragic as it polarized the country. The second time will be a farce. At the end of his presidency, Democratic talking points and narratives won’t matter at all.
Defeating the Islamic Republic of Iran will matter most of all.