Lowry: Trump's strong start

It's not 2016 again.

President-elect Donald Trump is off to a strong start with markedly fewer obstructions than the last time he won.

In football terms, he has a lot of green space ahead of him. In nautical terms, it's plain sailing. In political terms, it might not be a honeymoon, but no one is throwing any furniture, either.

Naturally, there are all sorts of potential pitfalls. Some of Trump's more controversial cabinet picks could, if confirmed, blow up once they are in place. (Does anyone believe that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services will be smooth and uneventful?) Republicans only have two votes to spare in the House. Events will take a hand, and so will Trump's mercurial nature.

We are in a much different place than eight years ago, though. When Trump won in 2016, the shock to the system was so great that the body politic reacted fiercely and reflexively. Trump was treated as a virus and every antibody attacked him, from activists in the street to the director of the FBI.

This time, the reaction is much more muted. Despite all the fevered warnings of an existential threat to democracy, when former top Kamala Harris advisers did an election post-mortem on the podcast "Pod Save America," they talked about how they could do better next time – in other words, there will be a next time.

Despite the insistence of his enemies that Trump can't be "normalized," he's been an inescapable fixture of American politics for about a decade now, with at least another four years ahead (he could well continue to dominate the Republican Party even after his second term ends).

Like it or not, Trump is mainstream. He shows up at those most American events – football games and MMA fights – and gets applause. He eats McDonald's. He himself is part of the pop culture.

This time, unlike in 2016, there were no protests after he won the election, or any effort to get so-called faithless electors to keep him from assuming office.

There is no cloud of illegitimacy over his victory. He won more convincingly than in 2016, carrying the popular vote and denying his opponents the opportunity to say he only won via the technicality and anachronism of the Electoral College.

There has been no widely believed conspiracy theory – spun out of vaporous nonsense and hysteria – that his victory was the result of collusion with a hostile foreign power.

Relatedly, this time Trump doesn't have a bogus investigation hanging over his head. The Russiagate probe blighted the initial years of his first term. Now, the legal decks are clearing. Whereas Special Counsel Robert Mueller was about to enter the stage after Trump won in 2016, Special Counsel Jack Smith is exiting it. As Trump heads into the White House a second time, he is going to be less legally encumbered than he's been in years.

In 2016, Trump got elected despite a catastrophic unfavorable rating in the polling. This time, he was closer to a break-even favorable/unfavorable rating in some pre-election surveys, and he's ticked upward since. In a recent CBS poll, 59% of people said they approve of his transition. If in 2016 it felt like Trump faced a stiff headwind at the outset, this time he has the wind – or at least a pleasant breeze – at his back.

Trump is already looming much larger than the incumbent president who, with the exception of the pardon of his son, has nearly disappeared. When Biden shuffles into retirement, he won't, like Hillary Clinton, be complaining that Trump stole the election from him. If Biden is going to be bitter about anything, it will be about the machinations that denied him a Democratic nomination that he had already won.

None of this means that Trump is guaranteed success in the crucial first two years of his presidency. But the conditions favor him in a way they decidedly didn't eight years ago.

Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry.