Thiessen: Trump is my president – and yours

When Donald Trump was first elected to the White House in 2016, violent protests broke out across the country and a cry went up on the left: “Not my president!” I was disgusted by that response. The American people had elected Trump, and he deserved a chance to succeed.

So, when Joe Biden won in 2020, I declared on this page: “Joe Biden is my president.” I didn’t vote for him and expected that I would oppose much of what he did in office (and I was right). But starting at noon on Jan. 20, he would become president of the United States, and that made him “my president.”

Well, now Trump has made history as the first president since 1892 to lose the White House and then win it back four years later. The American people have spoken, so I’m here to say: Donald Trump is my president – and he’s your president, too.

Democrats say Trump’s election is a blow to democracy. In fact, the opposite is true. Trump faced serious, credible opposition in a Republican primary – including two sitting Republican governors, three former Republican governors, a former congressman, a sitting U.S. senator and even his own former vice president. He won the GOP nomination in a landslide.

He then faced a general election opponent, Kamala Harris, who never got a single Democratic primary vote and was chosen by party leaders in vape-filled back rooms. Voters listened as she warned that Trump was a “fascist,” a “wannabe dictator” and a “petty tyrant” who is “unstable,” “obsessed with revenge,” “consumed with grievance” and “out for unchecked power.” They were apparently unpersuaded. Millions of Americans voted to return Trump to the Oval Office four years after they removed him.

That’s not a threat to democracy. That is democracy.

Now he deserves a chance to succeed. It seems funny today, but when Trump was elected in 2016, the biggest concern I – and many on the right – had was that he would not be conservative enough. Because, incendiary rhetoric aside, he actually agreed with Democrats on a host of issues. My worst fear was that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer would go to the Senate floor and say: “Donald Trump was one of my biggest donors. We agree on a lot – from trade to infrastructure, health care, foreign policy, entitlements, the minimum wage, and even immigration. Where we agree, I will work with him, and where we disagree, I’ll try to change his mind. But we will work together to get things done for the American people.” Trump would almost certainly have invited Schumer to the Oval Office and accepted his outstretched hand.

Instead, Democrats shunned Trump, accused him of being a Russian agent and tried to delegitimize his presidency before it had even begun. That was a big mistake. They drove him into the arms of the right, and he became one of the most effective and transformative conservative presidents in my lifetime.

Aided by a team of outstanding advisers (who ignored the criticism from Never Trump Republicans to join his administration), he racked up an unprecedented litany of conservative accomplishments: He signed the first comprehensive tax reform in three decades, brokered new trade deals with Mexico, Canada, Japan and South Korea, and made America an energy superpower – supplanting Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. He secured our southern border and forced Mexico to crack down on illegal immigration. And he was the only Republican president in six decades to have a perfect record in Supreme Court appointments.

He launched Operation Warp Speed, one of the greatest public health achievements in human history. He got NATO allies to spend hundreds of billions more on our common defense, became the first president to give Ukraine lethal military aid, bombed Syria twice for using chemical weapons on its people, and drove the Islamic State from its caliphate and then killed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, imposed crippling sanctions that forced Tehran to cut funding for its terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, killed Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani, and then brokered three Arab-Israeli peace accords — the first in more than a quarter-century — a diplomatic achievement that would have earned anyone else the Nobel Prize.

Each year of his presidency, I published columns detailing the 10 best and 10 worst things he had done that year (a practice I continued under Biden). Looking back, many of the items on my “worst” lists were things Trump said, while my “best” lists were filled with great things he had done. As troubling as some of Trump’s words were, his actions mattered more. And by that standard the Trump presidency was among the best of my lifetime — with the mute button on.

If Trump’s next four years in office are a continuation of those first four years, I will have a lot to praise and defend. But as the second Trump presidency begins, I have reservations again — different ones this time. One of the reasons Trump was so successful in his first term was that he surrounded himself with a true “team of rivals” — including many Reagan Republicans — who gave him a range of perspectives on which to base decisions. This time around, I worry that those around Trump plan to impose a purity test focused on weeding out “RINOs,” and that he will be surrounded by an echo chamber. He deserves people who will serve him loyally and execute his decisions faithfully — but who are willing to give him a wide range of advice.

And for Democrats, Trump has once again campaigned on a heterodox platform that includes many things liberals agree with — from tariffs to entitlements to spending and industrial policy. Will they work with him on these, or go into instant resistance mode again?

At the start of his first term, I vowed to treat him fairly by calling balls and strikes. I will do so again. I will applaud when he does the right thing, criticize him if he does the wrong thing, and root for him to succeed. Because he was elected by the American people and survived two assassination attempts to get here. Trump is our president, and we should all want him to succeed.