POLICY
The Complicated, Consequential Legacy of President Donald Trump By: Michael McKenna
Legacy At dinner recently, a friend from France asked about the legacy of President Trump and what the 2024 election might look like. Those are good questions, and there is enough distance between January 2021 and now to give us some perspective. Let’s start with Mr. Trump’s legacy, which will endure irrespective of what happens in 2024. Nationalism Mr. Trump benefited from and promoted a recrudescent sense of nationalism (with a tinge of isolationism) in the United States. Most clearly seen in the emphasis on securing the southern border, rewriting trade agreements and seeking to exit wars that appeared to have no end. This sentiment is in line with longstanding and often ignored voter sentiments about immigration and military adventurism. Team Biden seems to grasp this only dimly. Their emphatically disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the crisis at the border and their inability or unwillingness to address Chinese communist aggressions, both micro (flyovers of Taiwan) or macro (widespread spying in the United States), indicate they have yet to fully embrace the surging sense of nationalism. Judges Mr. Trump’s most durable domestic legacy is the appointment of more than 250 federal judges, including three Supreme Court Justices. Those appointments will affect the United States and its federal government for at least a generation. Foreign Policy Mr. Trump reoriented American foreign policy towards the 21st century. Most importantly, he pivoted the United States towards the challenge posed by China. As part of that, the rejuvenation of the Quad — the alliance of India, Japan, Australia and the United States — was essential, and it is likely that the Quad (and the additional nations that will no doubt be added) will be to the next 75 years what NATO has been to the last 75 years.
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Part of the foreign policy reorientation included a more realpolitik view of the postwar order, including NATO. Mr. Trump is not alone in that reexamination. Brexit, NordStream 2, and even President Biden’s intentional failure to notify allies of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and to alert France that we had undercut them with respect to selling submarines to Australia are all parts of the same mosaic. European leaders now see what Mr. Trump saw first: the relationship between Europe and America has changed in fundamental ways. The institutional arrangements and treaty commitments need to change as well. Is it likely that Russia will invade Germany? Is it likely that Europe will help the United States in the event of a war in the Pacific? The most immediately successful part of that reorientation is the Middle East and the Abraham Accord. The Accord, signed in September 2020, ratified the validity of Israel, severed the Palestinian question from the larger and more urgent matter of Arab-Israeli relations, and laid the foundation for greater commercial and social cohesion within the region. It was also a rebuke to the American foreign policy establishment’s bipartisan cluelessness with respect to the Middle East. For 60 years, that establishment has pretended that the right answer was to force the Israelis and the Palestinians into ever more meaningless “talks” while ignoring the fact that the Arab world has interests that go well beyond the question of Israel. Mr. Trump and Secretary Pompeo wisely ignored all that and treated Israel as a sovereign nation with rights, including determining the location of its capital and defending its borders. They also recognized that the real threats to the Arab world originate, now as then, primarily from the Turks and the Persians. The Arabs also, obviously, understand that the real challenge in the Middle East is not Israel but rather the immediate threat posed by Iran, the scavenger states of China and Russia and the slightly longer-dated threat posed by Turkey. In those contexts, Israel is an ally, in large part because of its ties to the United States and also because Israel has an endur-
ing interest in ensuring that the Middle East remains peaceful. When confronted with the civic and institutional deterioration of the last four decades in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya and the challenges posed by Iran and Turkey, it was natural for the Arabs to turn towards collective defense and include in that collective sentiment their neighbor Israel. Secretary Pompeo, especially, knew that Iran — not Israel or the House of Saud — is the immediate problem child in the Middle East. The difference is that he and the president acted decisively on that knowledge, imposing steady downward pressure on the regime and, ultimately, killing the mastermind of its expansionist agenda. Compare that with the dithering approach of the Biden administration on Israel, on Iran, on OPEC and on American energy independence (which is, of course, materially and immediately relevant to the economics and politics of the Middle East). Political realignment Finally, Mr. Trump accelerated the migration of the Republican Party away from business interests and towards a multi-ethnic, multiracial populist coalition. White, college-educated suburban voters have been slowly but steadily moving away from the Republicans for the last two decades. Mr. Trump created a new path forward for the Republicans built on populism, nationalism and religiosity that resonates with working-class Whites, Hispanics, and AfricanAmericans. In the wake of the 2020 elections, Democrats put out a post-mortem on why they didn’t do as well as expected. Unreasonable expectations, a failure to message beyond “President Trump is bad,” and an assumption that minority communities are unthinking adherents of all of the tenets of White progressivism served to minimize the scope and scale of Democratic victory. In short, as Democrats pick up disaffected college-educated voters from Republicans,
