Kerby Anderson

Several people have told me that they think President Trump is moving too fast. My answer is simple: “it’s a feature, not a bug.” To understand this, you need to look at history. In a previous commentary, I talked about the plan by leftists to engage in “the long march through institutions” and quoted Rich Lowry’s commentary about “Trump’s Countermarch Through Institutions.”

Victor Davis Hanson describes a parallel perspective with his “Reflection on the Counter-Revolution in America.” He suggests that previous Republican presidents could have decided to shrink government, shut down the border, and impose tariffs. He concludes that “no Republican president of the past 50 years sought to radically reduce the size of government and balance the budget. None closed the border and began deportations.”

Why didn’t previous presidents do this? He explains that “to have done so would have constituted a veritable cultural counter-revolution that would incur an unacceptable level of hatred and resistance from the entrenched left.” Trump, he argues, has become a “true counterrevolutionary determined not to slow down the progressive trajectory of the last 60 years but to end it and return the U.S. to the center.”

And that brings us back to strategy. President Trump has been willing to “flood the zone” by enacting multiple policies at once and with a speed of action rarely seen by a second-term president. He must also anticipate that this Supreme Court will restore our constitutional government and not let a few minor federal judges stop his progress. All of this must be done with no margin for error, given the thin congressional margins that exist.

Victor Davis Hanson concludes that success hinges on speed and audacity. Moving fast is a feature, not a bug.