The annals of American political history are littered with the remains of once-great presidential mandates.ps88
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s smashing 1936 re-election did not, to give a famous example, give him the leverage he needed to expand the Supreme Court, handing his White House a painful defeat. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society generated immense conservative opposition, and his momentum could not survive the 1966 Republican wave. Ronald Reagan was stymied by Democratic gains in the first midterm elections of his presidency. Bill Clinton was famously cut down to size by the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994. And Barack Obama was shellacked by Tea Party extremists in 2010.
“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” George W. Bush declared in 2004 after he became the first Republican to win re-election with a majority of the popular vote since Reagan. By the summer of 2005, Bush’s approval had crashed on the shoals of a failed effort to privatize Social Security. In the next year’s elections, Republicans lost control of Congress.
Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.
But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.
There is no evidence that Donald Trump is immune to this dynamic. Just the opposite: His first term was a case study in the perils of presidential ambition. Not only were his most expansive plans met with swift opposition, but also it is fair to say that he failed, flailed and faltered through the first two years of his administration, culminating in a disastrous midterm defeat.
Trump has even bigger plans for his second term: mass deportations, across-the-board tariffs and a campaign of terror and intimidation directed at his political enemies. To win election, however, he promised something a bit more modest: that he would substantially lower the cost of living. According to Sam Woodward in USA Today:
“Prices will come down,” Trump also told rallygoers during a speech in August. “You just watch. They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”
Now Trump says this might not be possible. Asked by Time magazine if he thinks his presidency would be a failure if the price of groceries did not come down, he said: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
At the same time that Trump won’t commit to a key promise of his campaign, he is gearing up to deliver on mass deportations, a policy position that many voters seem to treat as just blather.
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