The interruptor

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 3rd of June. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. 

First up: Washington Wednesday.

President Trump is nearing the midpoint of his second term. Voters are already preparing their report cards as midterm elections approach, and so we are clearly far enough along to begin asking the larger question: What has the Trump presidency actually accomplished?

BROWN: A provocative new paper was presented to a Washington think tank this week. Its conclusion may surprise both Trump's critics and his supporters.

The author argues that Trump's most important achievement was not a tax cut, a trade policy, or even a Supreme Court appointment. It was winning—twice. Winning in a way that interrupted what many conservatives saw as an accelerating progressive project in the courts, the bureaucracy, and the culture.

EICHER: But alongside praise, it does raise sharp questions about persistent budget deficits, the Iran war, and what Trump has done to America's political culture.

Joining us now is the author of that paper, political scientist and WORLD Opinions commentator, Hunter Baker.

Hunter, good morning.

BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well Hunter, as we mentioned, you argue that President Trump's greatest accomplishment was winning—and winning against long odds. But Republicans have won presidential elections before; Ronald Reagan won, George W. Bush won...

What was uniquely Trump about his victories? What did they interrupt that a more conventional Republican presidency probably would not have interrupted?

BAKER: In my view, things stood in a different kind of a place with Barack Obama as president for eight years. He was sort of the ideal secular progressive president, very gifted, skilled speaker. And he accomplished the goal that Democrats had had for a very long time, which was sort of a massive overhaul of the of the health care system.

Now, whether or not that was effective or helpful is a separate question, but he did it. And that's what Democrats had wanted. 

But there were other things, right? So there was he got rid of “Don't ask, don't tell” with gays in the military. We had the Obergefell decision occur during his presidency, of which he was supportive. We had sort of the tacit approval of the legalization of marijuana across the country. And maybe on this podcast, I think I've said that the the scent of marijuana in our cities is the scent of American decline. And, you know, sort of that early approval of the sort of things that we saw with transgenderism.

So we saw, what I would argue, was sort of a progressive juggernaut politically and culturally building, and had Hillary Clinton won the presidency, I think that she probably would have won two more terms, and the number of sort of policy victories and cultural changes that would have racked up over that time would have been considerable. 

So I think that the biggest thing that we could say about Trump is that he put an obstacle in the way of that progressive juggernaut and really probably protected a lot of institutions, including Christian institutions, from potential fallout over Obergefell.

EICHER: Hunter, for many conservatives, the defining argument for Trump—especially in the first administration—was the courts. I mean to the point that critics would mock Trump supporters with the phrase, you've heard this before, "But Gorsuch"—a shorthand way of saying conservatives were willing to overlook almost anything because of the courts.

And you argue that Trump's judicial appointments were enormously consequential, helping to produce the Dobbs decision to return abortion to the people, to the states, and a more constitutionally minded court.

But you also argue that it's a virtue—not a defect—that the court has refused to become a rubber stamp for Trump, something that he's quite complained about. 

So why is that a virtue to you? If the Court was the bargain, why is it good that the Court sometimes goes against him?

BAKER: Because we need a Court that is a court. The last thing that we need is another legislature, like a smaller legislature that operates in conjunction with the Congress and the presidency. 

In fact, I would argue that's part of what Democrats are seeking as they talk about packing the court, expanding the number. I mean, once we go down that road, expanding from nine, then we're going to have 29. We're going to have 39. You know, there's no end to it, as each side would seek advantage.

We need an independent court that interprets the law and that does not make law. 

People act like Dobbs was some sort of activist decision. It was not. It absolutely was not. What Dobbs did was to return us to Constitutionalism. It did not take us away from Constitutionalism. And I think that this court's other decisions have been in keeping with the Constitution.

BROWN: Well Hunter, the DOGE project was sold as a fundamentally different approach to shrinking government. Yet you conclude it largely ran into the same realities that have frustrated reform efforts for decades. 

Why are those things so difficult to overcome?

BAKER: So there have been many of these kinds of commissions. There was a Hoover commission in the past, trying to take advantage of sort of his vast expertise of engineering things and making things happen. There was a Grace commission during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Bill Clinton and Al Gore had had their own commission of this type. 

And DOGE was simply the most exciting of these commissions because it was led by the most interesting entrepreneur in the world, who is Elon Musk. You know, sometimes I say he's the closest thing we have to Tony Stark. So, you know, he wanted this to happen and people got very excited. 

But it ran into the realities of Washington, D.C., which is you cannot go into the federal government and make the kind of changes that you can with an IBM or a Microsoft, where you know, suddenly you make some drastic changes and you get a lot of shareholder value and you save a lot of money. You can't do that with a government. 

When you want to really make changes in the government, you've got to have Congress on your side and you've got to be willing to go through the hard work of legislation and budget.

BROWN: In your paper, Hunter, you write that Iran presents a challenge unlike China or NATO because the regime isn't operating according to the assumptions behind “the art of the deal.” 

What does that reveal about the limits of Trump’s approach to foreign policy?

BAKER: Donald Trump is an extremely shrewd man. 

And, you know, people want to, they don't want to take him seriously, and you know, they make a caricature like he's some sort of idiot. But the reality is this is a man who has built massive buildings; which is a huge undertaking. I mean, what it takes to build a skyscraper is just amazing, the kind of structures that he has built in his past as a real estate developer. So this is a guy who knows how to get things done. When he talks about the art of the deal, he knows how to make a deal. He knows how to work with private agencies and with governments and with unions to get things done. And so when he released The Art of the Deal, people were interested and with good reason.

But with Iran, I think that we've seen maybe a blind spot for Donald Trump. I think that in his life, he's used to working with people who we might call rational maximizers, or people who just like money and are always willing to find a way to get it. 

I don't think that's who he's dealing with in Iran. I think he's dealing with fundamentalist Islam. And I think that a lot of this stuff, they don't care. They don't care about the kind of things that he cares about. And it's going to take a while, I think, for him to accept that and to move this negotiation in a different direction.

BROWN: You describe border security as one of Trump's clearest policy victories. Why was he able to make progress on immigration where several previous presidents struggled? And then, Hunter, what do make of all that progress reversing because of Minnesota?

BAKER: So Al Gore used to say that political will is a renewable resource. And what he meant by that was that we have all the political will we need to kind of reverse the climate or something like that. 

But I'll tell you who really has political will, and that's Donald Trump, and with regard to the border. He was serious about that. He was serious about policing the border, about controlling it in a way that other presidents have simply not been willing to grapple with. And why that is? I mean, whether or not an open border served certain people or certain policy interests, I can't exactly say, but other presidents simply were not willing to do what it took.

But here's the thing; we talked about with DOGE, how you would need, you need Congress, you need to legislate. Managing the border is something a president can do. It's basically a law enforcement activity, and he's the chief law enforcer. And so he's able to mobilize those resources and make it happen. And that's what he's done. And I mean, you know, so whatever else Donald Trump has done, I think that that's his key policy accomplishment. He has effectively managed the border.

Now, how did that, how did that all fall apart, or you know, falling apart is too extreme, but we've seen the progress reversed because of what happened in Minnesota, and that's because we became ambitious, right? So after you control the border, the next question is, what do we do about the people who are already here? 

Well, so first of all, voters are more sympathetic in many cases to people who are already here and kind of have established a life, and so disrupting them is a bigger question. But second, when you have those agents out on the streets and then you have kind of a mob form and then violence results, that's when a lot of people start to get worried. 

And that's what happened here. People were repulsed by the idea of citizens being killed in a protest of that sort, and it really hurt his program.

EICHER: Hunter, we're tight on time, but I do want to get this last question in about your paper. You argue that President Trump delivered some genuinely consequential conservative victories, yet you also write that he helped to condition Americans to expect politics as spectacle. 

So, looking ahead—again, quickly—which of those legacies do you think will prove more durable?

BAKER: So first of all, getting in the way of the secular progressive juggernaut, especially in the immediate wake of Obergefell, was huge. It was huge. So I hope I've made that clear.

But second, I think that there is part of Donald Trump, people know he was involved with WWF or WWE, you know, kind of participating in the entertainment. I think that sometimes he thinks that that's good for politics. And so, you know, he doesn't always want to be a serious guy. He wants to do almost a pro wrestling monologue type approach. 

And I think it hurts our political culture. I think people need to see our president as a sober and serious person. And he gives in too often to not maintaining that standard.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University, he's a WORLD Opinions commentator, and our resident scholar of the American political scene. 

Hunter, thanks so much.

BAKER: Thank you.

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