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Weekly Standard Online

Here Comes President Trump

Vice President Elect Mike Pence (L), President-Elect Donald Trump (CR), wife Melania Trump (R) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, (CL) in the U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC, November, 10, 2016. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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Vice President Elect Mike Pence (L), President-Elect Donald Trump (CR), wife Melania Trump (R) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, (CL) in the U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC, November, 10, 2016. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Apocalypse now. “Dear God. What have you done? After Brexit and this election … a world is collapsing before our eyes. Dizziness," was the cri de coeur of Gerard Araud, France's ambassador to the U.S., apparently unaware that anything that discomfits the French pleases a vast number of Americans. "I am homeless in America," writes Tom Friedman, a leading New York Times columnist and paid-up member of the media-Washington-establishment complex that could not imagine the decline in its relevance or the demise of the Clinton dynasty. Unaware that shouts of bon voyage would be ringing in their ears, 27 percent of U.S. federal government bureaucrats say they will emigrate, perhaps contributing to Wednesday's crash of Canada's immigration department website. "The horror, the horror," cries a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, home of the industries Barack Obama admired and cossetted. All because the worst possible candidate the Democrats could have put in the field was bested by the worst possible candidate the Republicans could find to oppose her, both getting fewer votes than their counterparts did four years earlier, both regarded by about two-out-of-three voters as dishonest and untrustworthy.

In our American way, this most heated of recent campaigns ended with all players—Obama, Clinton, Republicans who opposed Trump—wishing the president-elect success, or saying they do. And turning to the job of reshaping their parties to the new realities revealed by the election results. The most important chore will be to figure out how to respond to the uprising of "The Forgotten Man," a phrase made famous by Franklin Roosevelt to describe those hardest hit by the Great Depression, and used by Trump supporters to describe those hardest hit by globalization. The Democratic party's left is set to rally 'round socialist Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, and take the party back to its roots: support of trade unions, protectionism, Keynesian spending programs, an expanded welfare state. The pro-business, welfare -reform, centrist politics of Bill Clinton are to be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with the corruption of every institution with which the Clintons have come into contact, from state troopers in Arkansas, to "Travelgate" and more at the White House, to the Department of Justice on the tarmac in Phoenix, and on to the merger of the Department of State with the Clinton Foundation to form a new pay-for-play game with a surer payoff for the Clintons than Trump's casinos proved to have for him.

Republican intraparty differences are more complicated than the left-right split in the Democratic party. There is, of course, Trump. His eclectic mixture of protectionism, quasi-isolationism, and a relaxed or unknowing attitude towards budget deficits disqualifies him from membership in the traditional Republican establishment. But his anti-regulation and tax-lowering proclivities qualify him for praise from House Speaker Paul Ryan and other practitioners of the old-fashioned Republican religion of free trade, balanced budgets, and smaller government.

The importance of the differences between the president-elect and his putative congressional allies will not for long be obscured by the post-election haze of good fellowship. Both Trump and Ryan want to cut personal and corporate taxes, and seem to be hoping that the Forgotten Man largely responsible for Trump's victory will not notice that the bulk of the benefit will go to the already-rich. But in addition to tax cuts, favored by Ryan, Trump in his acceptance speech set as his highest priority a massive infrastructure programme, one that will dwarf Obama's stimulus programme, which most traditional Republicans believe wasted $830 billion in a failed effort to stimulate economic growth.

Ryan has to figure out how to combine the agreed tax cuts with stepped-up infrastructure spending while producing a fiscally responsible budget. My guess is that it will be damn the deficits, full speed ahead, both on tax cuts and on infrastructure spending, in the hope that the resultant more rapid economic growth will produce higher tax revenues and lower deficits.

Trump will also have to redeem his promise to "repeal and replace" Obamacare, a health care system that is collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions, and that even its supporters concede needs major revision. The left's plan to offer an NHS-style government-operated system had a trial run on the ballot in Colorado, and was rejected by voters, a state sufficiently liberal to have ended up in Hillary Clinton's column. Republican proposals for a fix will have to include some method that does not leave millions uninsured during the transition. That will be more complicated than the "repeal and replace" crowd have so far realized, since Obamacare is a Heath Robinson construct designed to be difficult to dismantle.

Trump will have an easier time renegotiating trade agreements, which he will use to showcase his deal-making prowess. America is Mexico's largest market, more than ten times the size of number two, Canada. Article 2205 of the NAFTA trade agreement permits any party to withdraw on the provision of six-months' notice, a bargaining tool that Mexico will have to take seriously in the hands of Trump, and the power of which Canada has already recognized: "If the Americans want to talk about NAFTA, I'm more than happy to talk about it," announced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Trump can also make life difficult for our Chinese trading partners by imposing tariffs on goods they might be "dumping" here. Indeed, several such complaints are already wending their way through the World Trade Organization legal process. If Republican free traders object, which is highly unlikely, Trump can count on support from congressional Democrats. The new minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has long complained about the Chinese regime's currency manipulation, and the Democrats' trade-union supporters agree with the president-elect that imported goods as job-destroyers.

Fortunately for us Anglophiles, our incoming president has a soft spot in his heart for Britain. The business interests he has promised to turn over to his children—repeal of the inheritance tax is on his and Ryan's list of "reforms"—include his beloved golf course in Scotland. And he identifies his victory with Britain's Brexit decision, as do many Europhiles who fear it portends a rise of anti-immigrant, anti-eurocracy voting on the continent next year. Trump's invitation to Britain's Prime Minister, Theresa May, to visit him at her earliest convenience was designed to signal that he believes the special relationship remains special, and that Britain will be exempt from his anti-trade policies.

Trump has also promised a bonfire of thousands of the regulations with which Obama lumbered the American economy, and executive orders, the latter created by the "presidential pen", Obama's weapon of choice when the checks and balances of the Constitution proved inconvenient. Now, Trump wields the presidential white-out, if that old-fashioned ink-erasing material can be found in government warehouses in this day of the computer. It will most likely be applied to orders and regulations restricting drilling and the burning of coal, designed to limit carbon emissions and underpin the commitments Obama made to some 200 nations in Paris. That climate deal is also for the chop, although environmentalists will undoubtedly contest such a move in the courts.

Democrats have always found a scapegoat when they failed to deliver on promises. Woodrow Wilson blames the Founding Founders for placing unreasonable limits on executive power. Franklin Roosevelt blamed an ageing, sclerotic Supreme Court. Harry Truman fingered a "do-nothing" Republican congress. Obama says he often couldn't do the nation's business because of "obstruction" by Republicans in congress. Trump has no such luxury: one party, his party as it now is, controls the White House, the senate, and the House of Representatives. He will own the wins, and the losses.