The Golden Age of America: Donald Trump’s Second-Term Presidency and the Challenges It Takes to Throw You Off the Podesta
He has another option. He is an iconoclastic leader with a disdain for the chattering class of consultants and a unique relationship with the Americans. He is also the first president since Grover Cleveland to get a second shot at a first term. He has already experienced the bruising tax fight that helped bring his approval rating down to 36 percent a year after his inauguration, the failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the loss of more than 40 House seats and control of the chamber in a midterm election. In the early hours of Wednesday, he promised to fight for every citizen and that this would be the golden age of America. Achieving that will require focusing on the challenges and respecting the values broadly shared by not only his voters, but also many others who might come to support him.
This is the first time that presidencies go wrong. Rather than prepare to govern on behalf of the electorate that put them in power — especially the independent swing voters who by definition provide the margin of victory in a two-party system — new presidents, themselves typically members of the donor and activist communities, convince themselves that their personal preferences are the people’s as well. Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.
Every time a new president is elected, Donald Trump is in a situation where he loses his role. His campaign to earn support from voters has ended abruptly, and a new one has begun among donors and activists to earn his support for their priorities The election was about tax cuts, or maybe cryptocurrency, the arguments go. Americans would like fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net.
Nonetheless, the lessons of history, and specifically the cautionary tales of second-term presidents and second-term Republicans in particular, are not just the stuff of textbooks or seminars. They can offer guidance and perhaps even temper expectations. It’s not welcome in the Trump world, but it might be helpful if events lead to frustration down the road.
Trump differs from other presidents who have contemplated second terms in that he does not carry a functioning administration into office with him as he would have as the incumbent in 2020. He will need to start over, but not completely. his allies have been hard at work finding new staff for the executive branch of government. Potential federal judges can expect to be confirmed in the new Senate majority.
Imagine how much more will be the case if the president is not in office, because the voters have already rejected him. Adding to that are criminal prosecution and even felony convictions. Now imagine the degree to which everything would be true for a person such as the current president-elect.
(The only other president to return to office after an interruption was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, defeated in 1888 but returned to office four years later.)
The Democratic voting base that had been Republican in the past was brought back together by Obama. He won states such as North Carolina and Indiana in the past. He was able to pass a health insurance reform which his party had long been pushing for. The popularity of “lame duck” presidents has made it hard for them to influence the news or sway the electorate after their second term.
By 2008, the military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq had lost much of their avenging angel energy. Wall Street was panicked and the federal government was criticized for bailing out investors in mortgage backed securities. Many voters turned to the Democrats and Barack Obama because they were angry and frightened.
The Ambivalence of Two-Term President George W. Bush and the 1976 Midterm Elections Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Eisenhower
In the 2000 presidential election, the nation seemed to view Clinton in a way that was ambivalence. George W. Bush was the president after the electoral college vote of Florida came down to 537 votes.
The biggest problem for Clinton was the 1994 midterm elections where Democrats lost their majority in both chambers, an exception to the pattern of two-term presidents. It was also that election that installed the GOP in the majority of House and Senate seats and governorships in the South for the first time since Reconstruction – a dominance the party has held ever since.
Reagan in 1988 was the only two-term president to hand over the keys to the White House to a member of his own party since Ulysses Grant in the 1870s. But his successor, George H.W. Bush, lasted only one term. He was defeated by Democrat Bill Clinton, who would pass major trade and crime bills but fail in his effort to reform the health insurance system.
Reagan had a hard act to follow in his second term. Reagan had to compromise with congressional Democrats to move parts of his legislative program due to the deep tax and spending cuts that he passed in 1981. His tax reform in 1986 was largely written by Democratic and moderate Republican committee chairs, and his foreign policy hard line softened considerably as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
After Nixon won the presidency in 1968, he carried 49 states in his reelection year. It was Nixon who came to symbolize the idea of a second term curse on presidents, when he stepped down after only two years in office. Nixon’s reelection campaign had been guilty of a variety of “dirty tricks,” including burglarizing the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office complex. Nixon was brought out on the fringes of impeachment due to months of nationally televised hearings in the Senate.
Labor unions helped Democrats gain control of both chambers of Congress in the mid-’60s, when the postwar economic boom was losing steam. The Senate majority that would pass the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s was largely a product of that midterm. Nixon was unable to succeed him in the Oval Office, which left a mark on Eisenhower’s legacy. Nixon narrowly lost to Kennedy.
Reelected in a landslide in 1956, Eisenhower found fewer dragons available for slaying in his second term. The Supreme Court order against segregation in public schools had spawned “massive resistance” in the South and the president was caught in the conflict when he sent an elite force of airborne troops to Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 to protect children integrating a high school in the face of angry crowds.
Eisenhower’s first-term mandate was to end U.S. involvement in the Korean War and hold the fort against Soviet incursions and influence in Europe. He had been the supreme commander of NATO (the North American Treaty Organization), which grew out of the World War II alliance whose combined forces he had commanded in winning that war. For most Americans he symbolized both war and a return to peace, a commitment to resisting Communism but also to domestic economic prosperity and traditional social and family life.
That didn’t make a second term any less good for those who haven’t been granted one. In good health, presidents all but automatically seek reelection. It is the most obvious Explanation of why democracy is a success.
It is better for the President’s party to remain the standard bearer to the end of his first term in Congress. It should minimize the divisions within the party that can be deadly due to the battle for the nomination, like the Jimmy Carter and Edward Kennedy fight in 1980. There isn’t a clear continuity that clouds the reelection chances of a party’s candidates.
The president who served two terms typically found their trophy term harder to manage than their first. It is rare for the second term of a president to be remembered more than the first.
Source: The story of White House ‘trophy terms’ offers a cautionary tale
The tale of White House ‘trophy terms’ offers a cautionary tale: Donald Trump’s second-term presidency lived and prospered
There will still be roles for the congress and federal judiciary after that. Both may be more compliant this time around than they were when Trump first took office; but both can be expected to defend the share of decision-making power granted them by the Constitution.
As a candidate, Trump has often suggested he could accomplish these things by fiat. He will be able to take away the executive orders issued by Biden after he leaves office.
Trump in this campaign has promised many grandiose proposals for his second term. These include sweeping new tariffs, the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, new loyalty requirements for federal employees, altered military alliances abroad and deep cuts in federal regulations as well as federal spending and taxes.
It can mean anything the winning candidate wants it to mean when a vote is cast. That means Trump is living a second-term president’s dream. He has democracy’s seal of approval. So he and those feeding his thoughts can live their dream, hearing a flourish of trumpets and imagining overwhelming popular support for their agenda across the board.
These voters’ focus was and is on the most recent conditions they have to deal with. Their viewpoint on the government is the current government and how it relates to them. That’s why voters talk more about the price of eggs than about the fate of Ukraine or threats to democracy.
But for a crucial slice of the electorate, the comparison was not between Trump and Harris but between memories of the last four years and memories of the pre-COVID years that preceded them. For these voters, the hardship of being in a working class family was a constant reminder of the inflation that came about after the COVID year and drove up prices on everyday goods. The economy that Trump offered sounded good compared to the one before it.
The former president, Donald Trump, who was defeated in 2020 was on the 2024 ballot. He was the first former president to seek a new term in over a century. The current vice president was also in the race.
Source: The story of White House ‘trophy terms’ offers a cautionary tale
How do Swing Voters See Theirself? What Do They Say About Their Self-Calibrated Families? A Critical Look at the State of the Art
In reality, swing voters in key states tend to tell a different story — one that spotlights the voters’ own personal circumstances, including whether they see themselves as “better off” or not.