It is not yet two weeks since the election, but the change of atmosphere is profound and in some respects hilarious. Where eight years ago, the idea of Trump winning a presidential election was so preposterous that with broad immediate approval and vivid anticipation, and the complicity of the FBI, other Justice Department officials, and the intelligence agencies, and the knowledge of the outgoing president and vice president, the Hillary Clinton campaign financed a fraudulent and defamatory lie that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin to win the election.

There must be, lingering in the minds of President Trump’s enemies, a recognition that they ultimately did themselves no favors with the febrile and profoundly dishonest efforts that they launched to prevent and destabilize his first presidential term. In 2016, Trump won in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. This had happened before (1824, 1876, 1888, 1960-when the third party votes in Alabama are not attributed to John F. Kennedy, and 2000), but in all of those years, those who took office with fewer votes than their chief opponents were familiar and well-regarded officeholders who had given the political establishment no cause to worry that an upheaval might be imminent.

This was not the case in 2016 and the bipartisan political establishment locked arms to sand-bag Trump while his government departments and the White House itself proved to be infestations of anti-Trump leakers and saboteurs. Apart from gaining approval of popular and highly successful tax reductions that increased in percentage in the less prosperous tax brackets, and Senator Tim Scott’s bill to use the tax system to incentivize job creation in economically disadvantaged areas, Trump was really only able to effect the changes he sought in areas where the president’s executive authority is not subject to frustration by the Congress. 

This means mainly deregulation, control of the borders, and foreign-policy. And at mid-term, the Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats and the egregious and almost operatic obstructionist and schemer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. After forcing Biden to retire by threatening him with removal for mental incompetence, she po-facedly declared that Mr. Biden belonged on Mount Rushmore.

Trump had minimal support from Republicans in Congress and was badly let down by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and Speaker Paul Ryan on repeal of Obamacare and other issues. He elevated his only Senate supporter, Jeff Sessions, to be attorney general, in which post Mr. Sessions emasculated himself and left Trump a sitting duck for the Democratic Russian collusion witch-hunters.

Trump did a little better with his second attorney general, William Barr, who shut down the Trump-Russian collusion nonsense but whose Durham Commission to look into the origins of the Russian hoax and other anomalies in the 2020 election, started from the premise that the FBI was above reproach and it was essentially a whitewash. (The abuse of unverifiable harvested ballots is indicated by the decline of approximately five million votes ostensibly cast between 2020 and 2024.                                                                                                                                          

The Democrats succeeded in shackling Trump for much of his first term but his performance in eliminating unemployment and oil imports and almost eliminating illegal border crossings while calming relations with North Korea, strangling Iran to the point that promotion of terrorism was unaffordable, and substantially enhancing the almost intractable cause of Middle East peace, the 45th president made it impossible for his enemies to frighten the country with the prospect of his return to office.

The Republicans felt that he had been robbed and mistreated and that the spurious mobilization of the Biden Justice Department to persecute him with criminal prosecutions made him the almost unassailable nominee of their party for 2024. The fact that he had been a competent president despite the merciless harassment he endured made the anti-Trump scare tactics unsalable in 2024, and the disaster of the Biden-Harris administration in every major policy area made Trump the likely winner coming up to the recent election, despite the continued unprofessional partisanship of the anti-Trump media and polling organizations.

The last pitiful echo of the Democratic resistance is now coming from their flabbiest and generally most unsuccessful governors. The superannuated beach-boy and Pelosi nephew, Governor Gavin Newsom, is trying to make his state “Trump-proof.” The Obama-groupie Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey is imitating him, but the most fatuous of these state resistors is Illinois’ bloated inheritor, Governor J.B. Pritzker, who histrionically announced: “if they come for my people they will have to come through me.” Balloons should not provoke dart-throwers.   

Trump knows as few other Americans do how corrupt and decayed much of the American government is. He is more qualified than anyone else in the country to judge what level of commitment will be required to produce comprehensive reform of the most rotten departments. If there were one scintilla of serious evidence on any of the matters being investigated about former Congressman Gaetz, the whole world would know about it. 

Trump’s enemies sought to mortally assault him. It is not for any outsider to say with confidence that any more presentable nominee than Mr. Gaetz could be relied upon to do what has to be done to repair the Justice Department, or that anyone less determined and in some respects knowledgeable than Robert Kennedy Junior could be counted upon to try seriously to improve standards of healthcare and affordability in the United States.

It will be recalled that Trump’s HHS Secretaries were not overly successful in his first term, and that his defense secretaries were not reformers, though General Mattis was a distinguished soldier, but Secretary Esper was an ingrate. The returning president has a mandate for radical change.

There is room for some concern about some of his nominees, but he has the duty as well as the right to select people that he believes will be sufficiently motivated to carry out his hard-won mandate. If the Democrats had won as they arrogantly expected they would, Trump would be fighting, probably successfully, to avoid imprisonment and bankruptcy. That is not how politics should be conducted in America, and the returning president should be supported in his choice of collaborators in executing his mandate to clean up the vast quagmire of the federal government.