Trump must restore ‘smart populism’ — and rescue his presidency

Tuesday’s election wasn’t a blue wave or even a blue tsunami: It was a blue apocalypse.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who leads the one notable Republican bright spot on the map, referred to the wipeout as “close to an extinction-level event” for the GOP.

It was the worst midterm defeat for one party in over a half-century.

Much of the postmortem conversation has focused on why this massacre happened.

Was it the Iran war?

Was it the tariffs?

Corruption? The “Epstein files” mess?

The answer is both simpler and more sweeping: The MAGA movement, which has defined the GOP during the Trump era, forgot what populism means in practice — and requires in governance.

When Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he launched a populist revolution.

His message was simple: An elite ruling class has sold out the country, and the MAGA movement is here to finally listen to the people.

Trump largely delivered during his first term.

He cut taxes, tamed inflation and oversaw a booming job market and a surging stock market.

He became the first president since Richard Nixon to begin to reset our relationship with Communist China.

In exile during the Joe Biden interregnum, Trump promised to close the border, get inflation under control and bring back general sanity and stability if he returned to the White House.

To be sure, Trump’s second term has had its successes.

The southern border is airtight.

Violent crime has fallen to the lowest rate in 125 years.

Prescription drug prices are the lowest since the 1960s.

The Justice Department’s fights with the Ivy League yielded real concessions.

The raid to extract Nicolás Maduro from Caracas was bold and masterful.

But somewhere along the way, the MAGA movement forgot what it was.

Some in and around the administration have engaged in the most brazen corruption — pardons, access, illicit cryptocurrency enrichment, real-estate side deals — Washington has seen in a century or more.

When Americans see “special envoys” Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner negotiate with wealthy Arab states while padding their bank accounts from those same states, they understand what’s going on.

There’s nothing more anti-populist than such elite self-dealing.

On economic policy, the administration dramatically expanded its tariffs, including its “universal tariff” policy.

Strategic, focused tariffs can work — but this was something else entirely: Fact is, Joe and Jane in flyover country didn’t vote for a trade war with Canada.

Even more to the point: Why did Trump’s economists assume tariffing everything that moves is “populist” in the first place?

Reshoring supply chains is important, but the tradeoff between production and lowering prices is real.

Higher tariffs and more supply-chain reshoring means higher prices.

Maybe that tradeoff is worth it; maybe it isn’t.

But the American people have spoken, and they want lower prices over anything else.

So populism means winding the tariffs down.

The story on the Iran war is similar.

Isolationists complain that Trump reneged on his promise not to start any new Middle East wars.

That’s not quite fair: Trump already proved himself an Iran hawk when he withdrew from Barack Obama’s calamitous nuclear deal, and the United States and Iran have technically been at war since 1979.

Yet the administration never actually made the case for the war to the American people.

At times, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth alluded to war aims, but we never heard the case from the commander-in-chief himself.

Populism means governing of, by and for the people: How could a purportedly populist president not even bother to try to sell a war to the public?

It was astonishing political malpractice.

Finally, a true populist movement needs to focus on real-world concerns, not the conspiratorial rabbit holes of social media.

The obsession with the “Epstein files” was always bogus and lame.

And when White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles reportedly told the terminally online Vice President JD Vance to take a break from the internet, she was on to something.

Real populism means boosting wages and lowering inflation — not staying up to the wee hours of the night trying to crack the Charlie Kirk murder case (news flash: it was Tyler Robinson) or blaming the Jews for stabbing the GOP in the back.

The good news is that most of the necessary changes are easy.

End the corruption.

Wind down the global tariffs.

Save face in Iran.

Stop indulging brain-rotted conspiracists.

Cut it out with the asinine lake-name-change gimmicks.

And get working quickly to lower gas and food prices.

Above all, make life easier, not harder, for ordinary Americans.

If this happens, the GOP will have a chance in 2028.

The MAGA movement died on Tuesday — but Trump’s final two White House years should still reflect the original MAGA spirit: governance for the people.

Josh Hammer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.”

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