Trump: Mr. Status Quo
He will soon face the most powerful force in U.S. politics: Voters demanding unifying, positive change in an age of acrimony.
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In an inaugural address that unfurled a long list of poxes on America — some real, many manufactured — President Donald Trump made a promise he can’t possibly keep: "All of this will change starting today,” he said, “and it will change very quickly."
With that single sentence, the nation’s 45th and 47th president set himself up to own every problem and perceived problem facing the nation. Unchecked immigration. Forever wars. Liberal wokeism. Heinous crimes. Transgenerism. Vaccines. Canada. Greenland. Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. And on and on.
Trump seems to have forgotten — as MAGA Republicans did in 2020 and Biden Democrats did in 2024 — that the one constant in national elections since 1992 has been the public’s demand for change.
Extreme economic, technological and demographic shifts have disrupted the lives and livelihoods of Americans in ways that we have not seen since the final decades of the 19th century, when vast income inequality, unsettling new technologies, and surging immigration angered the electorate. With their grievances, early 20th-century Americans forced change through what we now call the Progressive Era.
As their descendants, we the people of the early 21st century have witnessed no such progress. Presidents Clinton (1993-2001), Bush (2001-2009), Obama (2009-2017), and Trump (2017-2021) failed to deliver the change they had us hoping for. Which is why Clinton, Bush, and Obama had to delegitimize their re-election opponents to earn their second terms; why voters kept throwing the bums out in midterm elections; why Trump failed to win re-election against a chronically weak challenger named Joe Biden; and why Biden faced an uphill battle for re-election, even if he wasn’t hampered by his frailty and age.
In a Substack chat during Trump’s speech, Democratic activist Mark Mansour said voters are going to have little patience with the new president. “He won’t get four years,” Mansour said. “If he hasn’t delivered anything positive in a year, he is a lame duck with three years left.”
While the constitutional limit on presidential terms technically makes Trump a lame duck from Day One, I believe his biggest problem is that as president — as the leader of an institution that Americans don’t trust, the U.S. political system — Trump needs to enact positive change for all Americans, quickly and with national unity, or he and his party will become avatars for the status quo.
In times like these, there is not a more damning label than the one that choked the political life out of Biden Democrats: More of the same.
That likely is MAGA’s fate now.
I wanted more; your post started so well. Exactly what status quo were you talking about? Thank you for doing this.