Editors at the Washington Examiner assess Donald Trump’s electoral victory.
President Donald Trump is not the first president to return to the White House after losing a previous reelection bid, but he is the first to do it after being impeached twice and facing mass resignations of Cabinet secretaries at the close of his first term. The depths from which Trump has risen to regain the most powerful office in the world is a testament to his determination and skill as a communicator. But it is also a searing indictment of a political establishment that has ignored and condemned voters’ legitimate concerns about the direction of the country.
Before Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in June of 2015, a bipartisan governing consensus in Washington was that unlimited amounts of both immigration and trade were unalloyed benefits to the country. Democrats, who guided or bullied this consensus into being, suggested America has a duty to take in any migrant from anywhere in the world, no matter their culture or educational background. Many Republicans believed migrants were essential for economic growth and did not care that their influx depressed the wages of blue-collar Americans. Nor did either side pay much mind to the ways this frayed the cultural fabric of the nation.
Some of this thinking guided the amnesty for illegal immigrants agreed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, although Democrats prevented the increased border security that was supposed to be the other side of the deal. President George W. Bush tried to pass another amnesty in 2007, although that effort failed.
Trump exploded that governing consensus. It was a condemned building ready for demolition. A huge underserved market of Americans who had been shafted by the mass immigration policy was ready for Trump’s message of regeneration and “America First.” No one in the Republican Party could compete.
