Whatever the next four years have in store, they will not be boring

President Trump was as surprised as anyone by his election victory in 2016. He had little background in Washington, D.C., and as a consequence, he came into office after a hastily-put-together transition, unfamiliar with many of those he would be appointing to key positions. Beyond the southern border wall, his priorities in office were unclear.

That is not the case this time. He has been announcing key appointments at a historically rapid pace. Having already spent four years in the White House, he has a much better idea of where the pitfalls lie, after having experienced frustration with many of those he appointed and having been preoccupied by the ongoing Russian collusion investigation in his first two years in office. He has a much clearer vision of what he hopes to achieve and the obstacles that must be removed.

Though never known for his attention to the details of policy, as long ago as December 2022, Trump already detailed a plan to prevent government agencies — e.g., the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security — from colluding with social media companies, as they did in 2020 to stifle the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the ways in which Joe Biden was implicated in Hunter’s influence peddling.

Trump has proposed to rewrite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes social media platforms from suit for material posted on their sites, to require strict rules of transparency and neutrality as a condition for protection. In addition, he has proposed financial penalties for universities involved in identifying disinformation on social media, as did Stanford — one of the world’s leading research institutions — in 2020, in conjunction with government actors and social media platforms.

In a similar manner, he has taken aim at the huge DEI bureaucracies entrenched in almost every university, and proposed to hold universities accountable for the harassment of Jewish students with a loss of government funding. He has posted that on day one of his administration, he will notify every university president that continued anti-Semitic propaganda will result in loss of accreditation and federal funding. (Execution of that threat will no doubt result in numerous First Amendment challenges.)

The woke obsessions and emphasis on DEI will also be uprooted, root and branch, from the armed services. Doing so is at the top of the agenda of Secretary of Defense-designate Peter Hegseth.

THE PRESIDENT-ELECT’S first announced appointments were almost exclusively members of his foreign policy team. And those appointments were repeatedly labeled Israel’s “dream team.” They were not merely “pro-Israel” in the sense of having voted for appropriations bills with aid for Israel. They are ardent supporters of Israel.

Senator Marco Rubio, who will be secretary of state, responded angrily to a question about Gazan casualties by telling the reporter that Hamas is a group of vicious criminals whom Israel must destroy wherever they can. And Trump’s chosen national security advisor, Congressman Mike Waltz, terms Israel the greatest ally the United States has ever known. The new US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, rejects the terminology of the “West Bank” in favor of Judea and Samaria and says that Jews cannot be “settlers” in their historic homeland.

The new UN ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, has been an unrelenting critic of the organization and its anti-Israel bias. She first came to prominence with her congressional questioning of the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT as to whether calling for genocide against Jews violated their university policies. The failure to answer forthrightly resulted in the resignations of two out of the three.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf buddy and fellow real estate magnate, will be the latter’s special envoy to the Middle East, to build upon the Abraham Accords, in which task he will be assisted informally by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was instrumental in the negotiation of the first Accords.

Moreover, each of those appointees supports the “maximum pressure” approach to Iran of Trump’s first term in office. (Brian Hook, who oversaw that campaign, is in charge of the State Department transition team, and is expected to reprise his former role.) The new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, advocates putting one’s foot on the throat of terrorist regimes like Iran, as Israel has been doing. And Peter Hegseth, the secretary of defense-designate, has even gone so far as to say that the United States should be prepared to bomb the Iranian nuclear sites.

That latter comment is especially significant, as it is very much an open question whether Israel alone can destroy those sites buried deeply underground. The urgency of doing so, however, has been lessened by news this week that the most recent Israeli attack on Iran destroyed the site where all its research on creating a nuclear warhead was located.

Even before he takes office, the world has reacted strongly to Trump’s election. The Iranian rial plunged to its lowest rate ever. And the Iranian regime has also announced that its plans to strike Israel again have been shelved pending discussions with Trump. With Supreme Leader Khamenei on his deathbed, and the leadership likely to pass to his inexperienced son, the regime of the mullahs is highly vulnerable. That is especially so with the likely loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenues, if Trump reimposes the sanction regime from his first term in office, as expected. Elsewhere, manufacturers are moving their production from China in anticipation of Trump’s threatened tariffs against China.

BUT LET US not get carried away. Both Israel and the United States may have dodged a bullet with the defeat of Kamala Harris. But that defeat hardly cures all the world’s problems — and may bring others in its wake.

It should be noted that the campaign just completed was one of the least substantive in American history. Much of the discussion was over things that should not be issues at all — biological men in women’s sports, for instance, or the use of proper pronouns. Meanwhile, the doom star waiting America in the form of ever-growing debt went unaddressed. Kamala Harris’s only contribution was to accuse Republicans of planning to cut Social Security benefits. To which Republicans responded by denying any such intent and airily pronouncing trillion-dollar deficits curable by cutting government waste. Indeed, they even proposed large new tax cuts, like exempting income from tips (a Trump proposal immediately endorsed by Harris).

Charles Cooke of the National Review noted accurately, “Trump has no plan for our endless deficits, he has no interest in reducing the debt, and he is allergic to discussing the entitlement reform that will be necessary to fix both problems. Worst of all, when he is pushed on any of these questions, he asserts that everything will be magically magnificent or that he will fix each and every problem the country faces by collecting large across-the-board import tariffs.”

It is possible to roughly calculate the depletion of the Social Security fund at current rates; present recipients, like me, have little more than a decade to go, while younger workers now paying into the fund may never receive their benefits. Yet every politician in America would prefer to ignore the inevitable and the threat to our currency posed by galloping debt service.

At the same time, we devote enormous energy to worrying about climate change, about which all predictions have proven wrong. The ruinous policies proposed by Western governments to combat climate change have caused enormous increases in manufacturing and food costs, and yet will have, at best, little impact in the absence of buy-in from the world’s two most populated countries — India and China. Here, at least, the Trump administration has a clear plan to ramp up production of oil and natural gas, and to revive the nuclear power industry, source of the only truly clean energy.

Trump speaks about tariffs as if they were King Arthur’s magical sword Excalibur — the answer to all problems. At times, he gives the appearance of thinking tariffs are checks written by importers to the American taxpayer and could even obviate the need for income taxes. Nor does he appreciate that it is difficult to reconcile large tariffs with bringing down consumer prices, which was one of his winning issues on November 5. While it is true that not all tariffs will be passed on in full to the consumer, to some extent they will be. And they may not help American manufacturers as much as hoped, since they inevitably invite retaliation from nations whose products have been slapped with tariffs.

Another issue the candidates barely touched upon was how they would respond to a Chinese effort to conquer Taiwan, which could trigger a full-scale war between the world’s two most powerful militaries. Their thinking on the issue — if indeed they have thought about it at all — remains unknown.

FINALLY, DONALD TRUMP remains very much Donald Trump: transgressive, impulsive, narcissistic, and grudge-bearing. One would have to go back over a century to President Warren Harding’s appointment of his poker-playing buddy Harry Daugherty as attorney general to find someone as ill-suited for the task as Congressman Matt Gaetz. For one thing, he is as likely to be the subject of a criminal investigation as he is to head one. Indeed, Gaetz quickly resigned from the House, in the wake of the announcement of his pending appointment, to avoid the issuance of a House Ethics Committee report on him, believed to be highly unflattering. (The contents of that report, however, will no doubt see the light of day, and may even push mainstream news outlets to once again engage in investigative reporting.)

Gaetz is as reviled by Republicans as Democrats for his lead role in bringing down Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and four Republican votes will likely be found in the Senate to deny him confirmation. Even in the unlikely event that he is confirmed or receives a recess appointment, he will surely not be able to muster the required Senate support for the massive restructuring of the Justice Department in general, and the FBI, in particular, that Trump envisions. Moreover, he is almost completely lacking in the legal experience required for the sweeping reorganization of Justice Department.

Trump’s choice of Gaetz is best seen as a deliberate thumbing of his nose at his various opponents, along the lines of the apocryphal appointment by the Roman emperor Caligula of his horse Invictus to serve as a consul, as an expression of his contempt for the Roman Senate.

But here the president-elect would be well-advised to remember that as surprising as the magnitude of his victory was, it was not exactly a total rout, comparable to Lyndon Johnson’s defeat of Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon’s defeat of George McGovern, and there is still room for building on the coalition he assembled rather than reviving the doubts of all those who voted for him with extreme reluctance. Nor was it wise to taint all his excellent foreign policy picks with a choice for attorney general that signals that Tucker Carlson and Donald Jr. still have his ear.

True, Trump’s willingness to ignore conventional wisdom has, on occasion, been his greatest strength. That is what made it possible for him to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, in the face of decades of warnings that doing so would ignite the Arab street. The so-called two-state solution was the North Star of American Middle East policymaking for decades, and it was argued that solving the Palestinian problem was the key to all regional peacemaking. The Abraham Accords provided a conclusive refutation of that conventional wisdom. Another example of Trump’s rejection of the conventional wisdom was his cutting off of funding to UNRWA. Who knows, he may one day decide that the United Nations, as currently constituted, serves little function, and should be sent packing from Manhattan.

Whatever the next four years have in store, they will not be boring, though hopefully not in fulfillment of the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in exciting times.”  

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1037. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)