Donald Trump has felt the boot of the government on his neck.
And he is angry.
The conventional wisdom about Trump’s first term is that for all his bluster, he governed as a fairly standard conservative.
And - as it sometimes is - the conventional wisdom is correct. Whatever Trump’s radical impulses might have been, the bureaucracy and his own limitations kept them in check through 2020.
Trump cut taxes, appointed conservative Supreme Court Justices, and allowed the government to continue to grow. He made noise about NATO but ultimately took no action. He hardened the southern border but remained far from closing it. When Covid arrived, he deferred to public health experts and did not fight lockdowns or mask mandates.
Trump spoke like a populist. But he governed in the post-World War 2, post-New Deal American tradition, which assumed the world is an unruly place, and only a strong America headed by a large federal government can lead it.
So Trump won the Republican nomination, and then he beat Hillary Clinton, the ultimate neo-liberal, even though all the good people who thought all the right thinks - including the entire media - were with her.
