One nice thing about America re-electing a convicted felon who tried to overturn the government the last time the voters said no to him: We know exactly what happens next.
Not like last time, when electing a frequently bankrupt, D-list reality show host to the nation’s highest office was something new and I was your Washington correspondent.
Trump burst into the Beltway like an orange balloon, showering the nation in a confetti of red hats, pink hats and CAPSLOCKED TWEETS. There was no road map. There was no Project 2017. A conga line of advisers and Cabinet secretaries and “adults in the room” came and went. He fired the national security adviser in a tweet. He fired the secretary of defense in a tweet. The secretary of state found out he’d been fired in a tweet.
Candidate Trump made a lot of promises and called a lot of people names, but pundits assured us that Trump was meant to be taken seriously but not literally.
Some promises he kept. He cut taxes for corporations and the rich and increased the national debt by $7.8 trillion. He shut down the government for a month, trying to wring $5.7 billion out of a Republican-controlled Congress to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He never got the money, never built the wall, and his shutdown cost the nation $11 billion.
He didn’t keep his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Some promises might just have to wait for his second term.
Nearly every week during Trump’s first term, the White House seemed to send out news releases, announcing that Infrastructure Week was nigh. The president had pledged to invest $1 trillion in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and, by golly, this week, or next week, or the week after, was going to be the week he delivered. Infrastructure Week didn’t arrive until 2021, when the Biden administration and Congress hammered out the $553 billion bipartisan infrastructure law.
This time around, there is a plan. If you didn’t read it before the election, it’s a bit late now.
