The Full Trump
Trump is duplicating Biden's mistake of misreading election results.
Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal offers a useful political Rorschach test.
Trump said that the United States would “own” Gaza. Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants would be relocated to Jordan and Egypt. The United States would clear the war debris and rebuild a “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Administration officials sought to modify Trump’s comments. According to officials who are not Trump, the relocation of Gazans would be temporary, no U.S. troops would be involved, nor any U.S. tax money.
This rendered the proposal not only infeasible but also incoherent. Gazans won’t want to leave and Jordan and Egypt don’t want to host them, temporarily or permanently. So, who is going to force the Gazans to move and Jordan and Egypt to absorb them, if not U.S. troops?
Somehow without using a dime of tax money, the U.S. government is nevertheless going to facilitate the clearing and transformation of a devastated war landscape into a Riviera of the Middle East. And then poverty-stricken Gazans are going to be invited to move back in?
In recent comments, Trump appears to be rejecting these attempted modifications. He seems to mean what he said about the United States “owning” Gaza.
Here’s the Rorschach test question: Who can possibly look at this, modified or not, and see an America First agenda? The last thing that would be on a true America First agenda would be for the United States to “own”, literally or metaphorically, some real estate in the Middle East’s geopolitical snakepit. Or assume responsibility for the fate and relocation of 2 million Palestinians devastated by war.
Yet nearly everyone in the supposedly America First MAGAverse and GOP members of Congress are treading lightly. Virtually none of them are saying what is blindingly obvious: This is nuts.
In the second term, we are getting the Full Trump, including parts that never got aired during the campaign. The American people weren’t presented an agenda of buying Greenland, annexing Canada and perhaps Gaza, and taking back the Panama Canal by force if necessary.
And that is only a small fraction of the Full Trump the electorate didn’t really vote for.
In his own way, Trump is duplicating the mistake Joe Biden made in misreading the election results that made him president. Biden was elected to be a return to politics as normal after the soap opera of Trump’s first term. Biden represented himself as a transitional figure.
When Biden was elected, the federal government was already a pretty liberal enterprise. If Biden had competently managed the status quo, then stepped aside as a transitional figure is supposed to do, whoever the Democratic nominee turned out to be in 2024 would have probably defeated a return to the Trump soap opera decisively. Instead, Biden embarked upon a transformational binge, including excessive fiscal stimulus which helped trigger the inflation that doomed Democratic prospects in 2024.
In the 2024 election, there was a playbook, created by the Heritage Foundation called Project 2025, that called for taking a wrecking ball to parts of the federal government through an extreme interpretation of Article II authority. Trump vigorously disavowed the playbook. Yet he has unleashed Elon Musk and his squadron of over-caffeinated graduate students on federal agencies without adult supervision.
Trump was elected principally because swing voters didn’t want four more years of the Biden status quo. To the extent Trump had a mandate greater than that, it was to better manage the domestic economy and restore some semblance of order to the border. It wasn’t to buy Greenland, annex Canada, and build a resort in Gaza.
A fair argument could be made that tariffs and protectionism were part of that sort of mandate. They were a central feature of Trump’s public platform. He clearly believes in them, but to what end is a shifting target.
However, there is a right way to do the right thing. Or, as I would have it, a right way to do the wrong thing.
I think a general policy of protectionism is an economic mistake. But if we are to enter into a neo-protectionist era, the right way to do it would be to develop a comprehensive tariff plan and implement it in a transparent and predictable way.
Uncertainty chills investment, entrepreneurship, and business activity. Trump seems to threaten tariffs of some sort, on various countries, for varying purposes, nearly every day. There is an ongoing tea-leaf reading exercise as to whether Trump intends to actually enact the tariffs he threatens or is just using them as leverage. Right now, few American businesses can have confidence in the costs or reliability of their supply chains.
There are also conservative ways of achieving conservative ends, and true conservatism values and honors the means as well as the ends.
I have no doubt that much of the senior management in the federal government is liberal and support extending the power of presidential appointment deeper into the bureaucracy. I’m skeptical about U.S. foreign aid. I opposed the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
However, Article II says that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. There are laws governing the sacking and discipline of federal employees. The United States Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, both largely shut down, are established by law.
Musk and his squadron of over-caffeinated graduate students (indeed, some undergraduates) are not helping to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. They are riding roughshod over the laws, with little in the way of oversight, transparency, or accountability. That’s not conservative governance.
Overreading election results is a bipartisan affliction. In the 17 election cycles beginning in 1992, Americans have voted for divided government 10 times, with the party not occupying the presidency controlling at least one of the houses of Congress. Of the six times prior to 2024 that voters gave one party control of the presidency and both houses, five times it only lasted two years, with voters giving the opposition party control of at least one chamber in the very next election. The longest period of unified government was four years under George W. Bush. But, after that, voters gave Bush a Democratic Senate and House.
This endless toggling by swing voters between the parties reflects a lot of problems with the current condition of our two-party system. Overreading election results is certainly one of them.
The body politic didn’t vote for the Full Trump. However, it shouldn’t be a shock, or even much of a surprise, that is what they are getting.
Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.