Trump Is on a Roll, but He Shouldn’t Get Overconfident
He beat the Democrats with common sense on cultural issues. He has to deliver on the economy.
By Jason L. Riley
President Donald Trump in the White House, July 7. Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated PressSix months into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, he continues to notch important victories while his opponents wait for the MAGA right to self-destruct.
Any day now, Democrats tell themselves, the president’s base will abandon him, his poll numbers will nosedive, and the left will be dancing on his political grave.
That’s possible, insofar as most anything is possible, but it’s also a strategy that elevates hope over experience.
The problem for Democrats isn’t simply that Mr. Trump has seen through so many of his campaign promises.
It’s also that swaths of voters believe him to be on the common-sensical side of so many controversies.
The University of Pennsylvania realized only recently that male athletes shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women, and that female athletes shouldn’t be forced to share locker rooms with the opposite sex.
Mr. Trump understood that a long time ago, as did your average American, even while left-wing Democrats and “activist-scholars” spent years defending the school’s cockamamie position.
Similarly, Mr. Trump doesn’t buy the specious argument that police officers are a bigger threat than criminals to public safety, and he rejects the notion that immigration enforcement is rooted in xenophobia that endangers our democracy.
He opposes electric-vehicle mandates and fossil-fuel bans, and he maintains that much of the left’s green agenda would harm economic growth and national security, as it has in Western Europe.
Unlike President Biden, who openly embraced DEI policies that emphasized ethnic background over merit, Mr. Trump supported the Supreme Court decision in 2023 that held racial preferences in college admission unconstitutional.
So did nearly 70% of the country—including most whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics—according to a Gallup survey taken after the ruling.
Democrats have been trying to delegitimize a president whose policy positions tend to fall well within the political mainstream.
Mr. Trump and his party aren’t the ones claiming that math is racist, or that we need to redefine the difference between males and females.
Much of what Mr. Trump has done thus far has been through executive orders that can be undone in the same manner by the next president.
Last week’s passage of the Republican tax and budget bill, however, is the president’s biggest win to date, and it was accomplished the old-fashioned way.
Notwithstanding tiny majorities in the House and Senate, the GOP leadership overcame internal disagreements and muscled the measure across the finish line, where it was signed by the president on schedule.
News reports insist that the legislation’s welfare provisions are unpopular, and given how much time the media has spent repeating the Democrats’ apocalyptic talking points—“People will die!”—that isn’t too surprising.
A June Kaiser Family Foundation poll, however, found that 68% of all respondents, including 51% of Democrats, support work requirements for Medicaid.
Most voters don’t believe illegal immigrants should qualify for welfare meant to target impoverished Americans, or that healthy young men who refuse to get a job should receive free healthcare for life.
The measure’s tax provisions might be where the real danger lies for the White House and Republicans going forward.
Mr. Trump was re-elected mainly because voters wanted a revival of the pre-pandemic economy, which featured low inflation, full employment and rising wages for the working class.
What propelled that prosperity was the 2017 tax cuts.
Lower levies on corporate and personal income led to more capital investment, more business expansion and more hiring.
Democrats insist that only the rich benefited, but reducing the top marginal rate resulted in the highest earners paying a larger share of taxes.
This year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was essential, if only to prevent a $4.5 trillion tax increase had the old rates been allowed to expire, but it’s unlikely to produce the results we saw in Mr. Trump’s first term.
Rates have been extended and made permanent in some cases, which is good.
But rate reductions are what drive economic growth.
The supply-siders were sidelined by other GOP lawmakers, who care less about rising deficits and more about using the tax code to buy off this or that interest group.
What is the no-tax-on-overtime carve-out, for example, if not a play for unionized workers?
Another potential problem for Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s tariff madness continues.
Businesses don’t know whether their operating costs are headed up or down, and the uncertainty is a drag on risk-taking.
Republicans in Congress might be hoping that culture-war issues will save the party next year regardless, but that’s far from certain.
Mr. Trump was elected primarily to improve living standards that deteriorated under his predecessor.
If voters sense that happening over the next year, Republicans will see it reflected in the midterm elections.
If the Big Beautiful Bill doesn’t deliver, those Democratic criticisms are more likely to stick.
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