Old Tricks because he is old...

Trump Uses Old Tricks to Sell a New Agenda

Long a provocateur, the president is now presenting himself as an ideologue.

By John F. Harris

When the 2024 election turned an ex-president into the next president, most Americans — no matter their feelings about Donald Trump — must have quite reasonably assumed they knew exactly what they were getting.

It turns out they didn’t know — not exactly.

The 43 days of his second term have revealed a president in the grip of a set of large ideas that were an occasional but far from a paramount feature of his first term. This version of Trump is more serious — determined to dismember large parts of the federal government and upend relations between the United States and the rest of the world on trade and security. He is ready to pursue these ideas in a sustained and pitiless way, all the while asserting vast new powers for himself as president.

This new incarnation of a familiar figure — the improvisationalist back in power as committed ideologue — infused an element of suspense into his address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night. How would he explain the diverse provocations of his first six weeks — from threats to abandon Ukraine to huge tariffs on trading partners to machete swings through federal agencies — to a nationally televised audience?

He did it in ways that show why the presidency is such a powerful platform from which to wage national arguments, even as predecessor Joe Biden was never able to use it to good effect. By contrast, Trump in his showmanship — the boasts and bluster, the indignation and insults, the ability to channel popular frustrations — demonstrated anew why he has vexed opponents of both parties for the past decade.

This version of Trump cherry-picked examples of federal spending that sounded dubious or even inane, like a purported $20 million to subsidize an Arab version of “Sesame Street” in the Middle East. He asserted that Social Security databases supposedly include many millions of people over the age of 120. He waged cultural warfare, promising to stand up to school systems allegedly proselytizing on behalf of gender fluidity for confused young adolescents against parental wishes.

The speech, infused with a MAGA-brand overhaul of conservatism, was as if a classic Ronald Reagan speech were recrafted for late-night delivery at a tavern in Queens. He made a dozen or so references to his immediate predecessor, calling Biden “the worst president in American history.” He accurately noted that attempted border crossings from Mexico have plunged dramatically since he came into office and asserted that Democrats allowed “murderers, drug dealers, gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums … into our country. Who would want to do that?”

This was above all a speech aimed at communicating with Trump’s 2024 coalition. That includes large numbers of voters who share his grievances and are zealously devoted to him, combined with just enough additional voters who might not be crazy about Trump but think the Democrats are too out of touch to be an acceptable alternative.

The speech included almost no language aimed at persuading Democrats that there are some issues on which they could work with him. It’s clear that the only pathway to that would be them admitting they were wrong for all these years and Trump is great after all. His aim, instead, was to use the opposition party as speech props.

“I look at the Democrats in front of me, and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy, or to make them stand or smile or applaud,” Trump taunted. “I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations, or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded. And these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements.”

Trump is so aggressive in his rhetorical style that it can be easy to overlook that he can also be a shrewdly defensive-minded politician. He called out Elon Musk in the House gallery but didn’t offer any extended defense of the most controversial dimensions of the administration’s efforts to use the Department of Government Efficiency to sharply cut the federal workforce, or the White House’s campaign to strip the independence of federal agencies that have been historically insulated from politics. These efforts are already immersed in legal battles, most likely to be settled by the Supreme Court justices who watched Trump’s speech from the front row.

Instead, he offered himself as an evangelist for common sense and kept the argument on examples of foreign aid spending that he knows is unpopular with many Americans, such as “$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.”

He was eager to talk about cultural issues, such as his executive orders making English the country’s official language or that federal policy is that “there are only two genders — male and female.” But he didn’t make a mention of opposition to legal abortion, the cultural issue that sustained the conservative movement for a half-century.

Last week, Trump dominated conversation in Washington and around the world when he and Vice President JD Vance denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before cameras in the Oval Office as an ingrate and threatened to abandon further U.S. support for Ukraine’s effort to fight a Russian invasion. In the speech, however, Trump announced that Zelenskyy wrote him a letter of appreciation and is ready for Trump’s mediation in peace talks.

For as long as Trump has been a national figure — dating to the 1980s, decades before he formally entered politics — he has some enduring political instincts. He has consistently warned that America risks decline by letting other countries take unfair advantage and has rarely hesitated to engage in hot-button cultural debates.

Even in the first term, however, these instincts didn’t always coalesce into a fully developed ideological program. He appointed conservative judges. He started but did not finish a promised wall on the southern border. But his interests could seem episodic, bouncing around with the news.

It is now clear that the four years he spent out of power were devoted — by him and by key lieutenants in his administration — to a detailed plan for what they would do if and when he got back in. And it is clear from Tuesday night’s speech that he is confident in his ability to sell a breathtakingly ambitious and divisive agenda to a majority of Americans.