The woke fever has broken. The thumping victory for Donald Trump and Republicans on Tuesday is a mandate to bring back common sense. Republicans should act boldly on that mandate, and not waste the moment or get distracted.
It’s time to take control of crime and the border, end racial identity politics, and stop the transgender nonsense. It’s time to stop pandering to radical anti-Semites and spending trillions in inflationary giveaways. It’s time to get ready to throw America a big, patriotic 250th birthday party in 2026.
It was a big win. Trump looks to have won the first popular majority for a Republican since 2004 and the most electoral votes for a Republican since 1988. He swung Hispanic voters and won places that hadn’t voted Republican since the 1890s.
House Republicans may expand their majority, and they appear to have won their first popular majority in a presidential year since 1928. Senate Republicans have at least 53 seats, falling just a few close calls short of 56 – a milestone they also haven’t reached since the 1920s.
Republicans broke unified Democratic control of state legislatures in Michigan and even in Tim Walz’s Minnesota.
The woke fever has broken. The thumping victory for Donald Trump and Republicans on Tuesday is a mandate to bring back common sense.
But it wasn’t because people loved Trump’s personality, or because Trump changed for the better since he was voted out in 2020. Even after amusing stunts like serving fries at McDonald’s and driving a garbage truck, exit polls found that Trump himself is still unpopular.
Nor was it much to do with people loving Republican ideas. After all, some of Trump’s voters still backed Democrats in the Senate, while others endorsed pro-abortion state referenda.
It was because they were sick of the Democrats’ woke nonsense and incompetence.
Even in deep-blue areas where Republicans weren’t on the ballot, the wokesters lost. In California, voters repealed a 10-year-old law barring felony charges for thefts under $950, a law that created a field day for shoplifters who knew how to count to 949.
Californians – tired of rampant crime and squalor – fired the district attorneys of Los Angeles and Oakland, as well as the bleeding-heart liberal mayors of Oakland and San Francisco.
In Chicago, they voted down the school-board candidates backed by uber-progressive mayor Brandon Johnson.
This could mark a real turning point against a decade of identity politics, indoctrination in schools, and government not fulfilling its basic remit.
Voters were also less divided by race than ever. Hispanics have flocked to Trump – and even a sizeable share of black men have finally grown tired of being told that they have to vote one way simply because of their skin color. Barack Obama’s lecture to ‘the brothers’ to vote for Kamala Harris fell flat.
It even turned out that minority voters could take a joke about Puerto Rico. It was a bad joke, but Joe Biden’s presidency was a worse one.
Americans voted for Biden during a pandemic because they were tired of chaos. In return, they got more craziness.
This time, Trump should use his mandate more wisely, or he’ll lose it the way Biden did.
Trump’s first pick for his new White House has been to hire Susie Wiles, his sharp campaign manager, as Chief of Staff. The 67-year-old grandmother has never held a job with real policy influence before. But she does bring political savvy – and succeeded where others had failed in getting Trump to trust her and stay a little more tempered down the stretch. Hopefully, she can keep him focused on doing the things voters want and need.
That means making big changes – but not by repeating Biden’s mistake of using endless executive orders to tell the whole country what to do. Instead, Trump should focus the government on its proper job of public safety and order – not sowing division.
The border is the obvious first target.
Trump can get to work immediately enforcing the law, and Congress can give him more resources. He can start deporting criminals right away.
States and cities are supposed to handle crime, but Trump can appoint strong federal prosecutors in cities that won’t take on gangs, drug cartels and gun violence themselves. There’s plenty of laws already on the books waiting to be enforced.
It’s time to take control of crime and the border, end racial identity politics, and stop the transgender nonsense. It’s time to stop pandering to radical anti-Semites and spending trillions in inflationary giveaways.
It’s time to take control of crime and the border, end racial identity politics, and stop the transgender nonsense.
It’s time to get ready to throw America a big, patriotic 250th birthday party in 2026. (Dramatic photo shows moment migrants cross the Rio Grande river from Piedras Negras, Mexico into Eagle Pass, Texas, in September last year.)
Trump will have a lot of leverage to turn around foreign policy. Qatar seems to sense there’s a new sheriff in town, reportedly ordering Hamas to find a new location for their headquarters – currently in Doha.
Trump can also get tough on trade with China – though he must remember that voters elected him to get prices under control. Going overboard with sky-high tariffs would backfire by driving up prices.
Biden’s inflationary handouts of student debt forgiveness and green-energy boondoggles should be cancelled immediately. There’s no reason to keep wasting money when there’s already too much of it flying around.
The Supreme Court is currently hearing a Biden lawsuit to force states to accept ‘gender identity’ so they can’t protect minors from potentially life-changing treatments. Biden’s lawyers want the Court to find transgenderism in the Constitution. Trump should have the Justice Department tell the Court to rule the other way.
New leadership at the Department of Justice should stop bending the law to go after its political enemies – even if that means Trump giving up on some of his hopes for retribution. The prosecution against the whistleblower who called out lies about transgender treatments at Texas Children’s Hospital should be scrapped. As should the whole biased agenda of the Civil Rights Division (the government’s ‘discrimination’ watchdog).
Trump campaigned on holding a huge celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026, even proposing the creation of a year-long ‘Great American State Fair’ in Iowa. Americans of all stripes celebrating what they love about their country, instead of bashing it and each other, would be an excellent antidote to the past decade.
It just might make America feel great again after all.
