OPINION:
Losing the 2020 election may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Donald Trump — and the country. Running a focused and disciplined campaign helped him win a second term, and he is now implementing a well-thought-out transition plan.
This is not the same Donald Trump who decided to run for president in June 2015.
Naive to the ways of Washington then, the New York icon wanted to “make America great again” without really expecting to find himself in the Oval Office. But his message of building a border wall to stem the tide of illegal immigration resonated. Americans wanted hope and change after eight years of Barack Obama yanking the Overton window to the left.
Hillary Clinton, 2016’s losing Democratic candidate, paid to assemble a dossier filled with tall tales sourced to a Brookings Institution staffer that would smear Mr. Trump during the campaign. After his unexpected win, insubordinate FBI officials used the dossier as a pretext to cripple the new chief executive with a series of investigations — even though they knew it to be fraudulent.
Mr. Trump was unprepared for the lengths to which the federal bureaucracy, the media and even members of his own party would conspire to prevent him from governing. Congress, for example, used a must-pass spending bill to block the border wall that had been the centerpiece of the newly elected president’s campaign.
Still, Mr. Trump eventually found a way to complete portions of the wall. When he lowered tax and regulatory burdens, the economy prospered. But then he allowed Dr. Anthony Fauci to promote lockdowns in a massive overreaction to the COVID-19 virus. This provided cover to Democrats who set up the massive mail-in voting and ballot harvesting schemes that ultimately doomed Mr. Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.
That left him watching from the sidelines as President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris set about undoing everything he had done in the previous four years. They opened the borders and imported foreigners at an unprecedented rate. They stoked wars in the Middle East and with Russia.
The more the corporate-owned media said the economy was great when it wasn’t, the more Americans noticed. They began to see the lies for what they were. Many who once detested Mr. Trump grew to become his biggest advocates.
For Mr. Trump, the 2024 victory was a matter of survival. Failure would have meant imprisonment under the grotesque charges brought by the Biden-Harris administration.
Knowing this, he assembled an excellent team that kept him on message. This time, he wouldn’t be suckered by the bureaucracy. He came ready to fight. Little did he know in the final months of the election that he would come within a fraction of an inch of losing it all as a deranged young man took a shot at him from a rooftop the Secret Service left wide open.
This was the turning point in Mr. Trump’s resolve. He knew his life had been spared for a reason, and he is determined to make the most of the next four years. Already he has assembled a team of outsiders with a mission to bring Washington’s waste and inefficiency under control.
The rest of the story has yet to be told.
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