“It is not enough in life that one succeed,” the droll economist John Kenneth Galbraith is supposed to have said. “Others must fail.”
We’re at a moment, in this week before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, when the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president is succeeding at just about every enterprise he undertakes while his political and ideological opponents are failing in spectacularly visible fashion.
This time, Trump won the popular and electoral votes, with a percentage that, rounded off, is identical to those of former Presidents Jimmy Carter, John Kennedy, and Harry Truman. National polls show him with majority approval, something he never achieved before. This year, in contrast to 2017, there are no plans for a counter-inaugural parade or moves by journalists or politicians to style themselves “The Resistance.”
Trump secured the reelection of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in the narrowly divided House by limiting Republicans’ dissenting votes to exactly one. His controversial appointees, at this moment, appear headed for confirmation in the 53-47 Republican Senate.
The lawsuits that Democrats hoped would disqualify him from running or prevent him from winning have crashed and burned. No one takes seriously the Manhattan kangaroo court verdicts against him. Former special counsel Jack Smith’s assertions that he could have convicted him are undercut by the Supreme Court’s unanimous overturning of Smith’s prosecution of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
Shunned eight years ago by his presidential predecessors, by Wall Street, and by incumbent leaders in just about every establishment institution, Trump will be inaugurated this time with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg on the podium. Leaders of the past, meet the wave of the future.
In the meantime, outgoing President Joe Biden is tarred by his pardon, contrary to repeated promises, of his son Hunter Biden. His heavy spending policies, hailed as a second New Deal, and his open-door immigration policies, hailed as humanitarian, produced inflation and a flood of illegal immigrants, which would have doomed his candidacy even if he had been at full strength and which ended up dooming Vice President Kamala Harris’s.
His botched withdrawal from Afghanistan plunged his job approval below 50%, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 obscured his constructive initiatives with allies in Asia and the Pacific.
Biden was elected in 2020 as an experienced insider who would respect experts’ consensus over Trump’s maverick impulses. But the experts have had a bad decade.
They insisted on masking schoolchildren on playgrounds and closed schools too long, setting back learning, especially for disadvantaged children. They suppressed evidence that COVID-19 resulted from a Chinese lab leak because it would have embarrassed the man who proclaimed, “I represent science.”
Enlightened experts called for defunding the police and lenient prosecutors, as violent crime spiked and repeated shoplifting became routine in cities including New York and San Francisco. Misleadingly named “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs proliferated on campuses and in corporations until their iatrogenic effects were documented in the New York Times magazine.
Most spectacularly, the horrifying fires raging in California seem likely to discredit the liberal Democrats who have a political monopoly there. It’s too early to say exactly the extent to which official negligence is responsible. But even if you blame climate change, California’s concentration on green policies, such as banning gasoline-powered vehicles, have little effect on climate, while failure at mitigation, such as keeping reservoirs filled and clearing combustible brush, have proved disastrous.
This moment will not last forever. Trump’s unorthodox appointees, including Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kristi Noem, even if confirmed could crash and burn within months. The macroeconomy may yield unpleasant surprises. So could foreign crises. Trump will enter the White House, as Democrats note, five months older than Biden was four years ago, and his astonishing robustness and resilience on the campaign trail may not last.
But the possibility also exists that Trump’s leadership may seem successful and generate more support for what is now a Trump Republican Party. Behind the narrowness of his 49.9%-48.4% popular vote margin is polling evidence that 2024 nonvoters, especially among young Hispanic and black people, have soured on Democrats and trended halfway toward Trump Republicans — and could go the full way if Trump seems successful.
It’s a truism that presidents’ parties suffer reverses in off-year elections, but it’s not inevitable. Presidents’ parties’ losses were zero or limited in 1934, 1954, 1962, 1970, 1978, and 2002 and were mostly due to redistricting in 1982. And the schedule of upcoming contests looks mildly favorable to Trump and Republicans.
Virginia and New Jersey elect governors this fall, with incumbents term-limited. In 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin won with 51% in Virginia, and Republican Jack Ciattarelli almost won with 48% in New Jersey. In retrospect, both results look like a premonition of 2024. In November 2024, Trump won 46% in these supposedly safe Democratic states, similar to what Harris won in the target state of Arizona. He made double-digit gains in suburbs with many Hispanic and Asian voters.
In the 2026 Senate elections, Democrats are defending three incumbents in target states that Trump carried and two more in closer-than-expected Virginia and New Hampshire. Only one Republican is up in a Biden-Harris state, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who won handily in 2020 after trailing in polls all fall.
In the excruciatingly closely divided House of Representatives, only three Republican incumbents represent districts carried by Harris, while 13 Democrats represent districts carried by Trump. Redistricting, which was based on 2012-20 results, no longer favors Republicans, but they have new targets in heavily Hispanic and Asian districts that trended heavily toward Trump in 2024.
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These details matter, but less than the basic question of whether the president and his party are perceived as in sync with how the world works. Voters in 2024, faced with a choice between the two immediately preceding presidencies, opted for the supposedly eccentric Trump over the supposedly expert-guided Biden-Harris. There is no guarantee that the verdict is permanent, and one must remember the British politician Enoch Powell’s maxim that all political careers end in failure.
But for the moment, Trump is succeeding, and his opponents are failing. If that success continues, a big if, Trump could establish an enduring political template as, I have argued, former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton did before him. We’ll see.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
