As with any national election, there are winners and losers. There are celebrations and there are postmortems. There is recrimination and there are congratulations. After their shellacking at the polls Nov. 5, Democrats unsurprisingly are pointing fingers, casting blame and channeling their anger; some already scheming for 2026 and 2028.
Meanwhile, the one person most responsible for what still is unfolding as a historically significant election is doing exactly what he should be doing. Donald J. Trump is laying the groundwork to begin dismantling a federal government that has been allowed to grow into a morbidly obese and regulatory oppressive behemoth under successive Democrat and Republican administrations. Not since Ronald Reagan took on Uncle Sam in his first term has the left faced such a serious threat.
What makes this go ‘round far different from Reagan’s 1980 drubbing of Jimmy Carter is the magnitude and multitude of attacks leveled at Trump before the election – a barrage no presidential candidate before him had endured. Sure, Reagan was attacked by the Democrat Party throughout the 1980 campaign, even as he had to fight off efforts by the GOP establishment that never really warmed to his anti-Washington rhetoric. But the campaign against Trump, which began even before Joe Biden was sworn into office Jan. 20, 2021, is something our country never previously had witnessed.
To the horror and dismay of Democrats and many moderate Republicans, and against all odds, Trump still prevailed.
Also unlike Reagan’s 1980 win (with his coattails ushering in a GOP majority in the Senate) — after which politics settled down into a “normal” transition — Trump’s opponents largely have refused to accept Harris’ loss or to acknowledge that his victory at the polls represents a rejection of the liberal agenda pressed by Biden and his Democrat predecessor, Barack Obama. This situation mirrors that in 2016 when Democrats refused to accept Trump’s first win, and instead declared open cultural, political and legal warfare against his administration.
Even facing strong headwinds from Democrats in Congress and those entrenched in the massive federal bureaucracy for the entirety of his first term in office, Trump was able to enact much of his conservative agenda; most notably in judicial appointments, strengthening America’s energy sector, focusing the nation’s attention on illegal immigration that had grown during the Obama years (and then exploded during Biden’s) and reinvigorating our free-market economy.
While Biden immediately after being sworn in set about to dismantle much of Trump’s signature accomplishments by opening our southern border to virtually all comers, and by massive infusions of inflationary dollars into the economy, the policy issues for which Trump as President had fought remained front and center up to and including the 2024 election cycle.
For the entirety of Biden’s four years as president, the political domestic landscape was defined not by him or even by congressional Democrats who enjoyed a majority in the Senate. This was a severe handicap for Biden, even before he bowed out in July.
Trump’s master stroke of declaring early in 2022 that he would be a candidate in 2024 guaranteed that he, and not the incumbent Democrat president, would define the parameters for the remainder of Biden’s presidency. This gamble also played to Trump’s advantage by forcing the Democrats to do what they do best – overreach.
Led by the U.S. Justice Department and its highly partisan Attorney General Merrick Garland (who never could let go of his peeve at being denied a Supreme Court appointment in 2016 at the hands of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), Biden unleashed a series of what never were able to be seen as other than partisan legal attacks against Trump.
These politically-founded federal prosecutions in turn green-lit charges against Trump by state prosecutors in New York and Atlanta. This prosecutorial pile-on further solidified Trump’s status as a target of the Democrat Party’s abuse of the country’s legal system, and kept him and his policies at the center of virtually every public policy issue up to and including Nov. 5, 2024.
The Trump-orchestrated trifecta of Biden’s blunder-filled term, a four-year long presidential campaign and exaggerated abuses of our legal system by Democrats, converged not by chance on Election Day 2024 to give Trump and the GOP a historic and well-earned victory. The Deep State is now in deep trouble. Thank heavens!
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and currently serves as President of the National Rifle Association.