Morning Glory: Top 10 lessons from the landslide

So many takes on the 2024 election and so little time. Here are my top 10 in reverse order of importance. I’ll skip the obvious one: President-elect Donald Trump, aka "45/47" or "DJT," is the greatest comeback story in American political history. His resilience is like Richard Nixon’s, but not even Nixon got up off the deck after being shot in the head and after being wrongly prosecuted across five jurisdictions. 

The "takes" on this fact of Trump’s historic resilience will roll out for decades and decades.

10. The vast majority of Americans do not care anymore what anyone wrote or said in the past, even if they were once-upon-a-time "widely respected" among media elites and "right" in their past predictions. Trust is earned in ounces and lost in pounds and the failing gatekeepers in legacy media shed pounds and pounds of trust on Tuesday. 

Legacy media had already lost much of the tiny bit of credibility it had hoarded since 2016. Now it’s all gone, squandered by the election results because legacy media misled America on the state of the race while manufacturing issues and a "narrative" for 2024—a "narrative" almost completely disconnected from the reality in the country—and while quite obviously putting hundreds of thumbs on the media scale to try to push VP Harris over President-elect Trump. Many "experts" with long records of pretty good analysis were very wrong in 2016 and again in 2024. Going forward, there are no "experts" on the electorate. "Trust the people" was a commandment of Winston Churchill, and it is still true. 

9. You can be a border hawk and an immigration regularization dove. The President-elect has intuited this with his unwavering support for the border wall and an expanded Border Patrol plus enforcement of existing deportation orders while also talking about an America open to talented foreigners seeking to come or to stay after their educations. He could consolidate and grow his coalition by backing regularization of DREAMers without felony convictions and other distinct groups of unauthorized migrants (e.g. residents in the country for ten years with no criminal records but a history of employment and community service.) More on this Thursday. Both Presidents Obama and Biden blew their opportunities to expand their winning coalition by moving even a bit towards the center, preferring to indulge ideology at the expense of cementing the center on to their majorities. Trump has an opportunity to nail down his broad and diverse coalition in the first few months of 2025.

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8. COVID shut-down policies, especially those that needlessly shuttered the schools, were a disaster driven by unelected elites, dissent from which was censored at the time by collusion between Big Government and Big Tech. Voters have not forgotten. Democrats are the party of big government and big government failed everyone during COVID but especially the children. It will be a long time before anyone trusts public health "authorities" because of this massive display of the willingness to use the power of the administrative state in arbitrary fashion and to the detriment of children. The same parents and families impacted by COVID idiocies do not want biological males playing girls' sports or using girls' spaces, period and end of debate. It’s a 90-10 issue and that does not make the 90% bigots or lacking compassion. It makes them parents and grandparents. 

7. The FBI and DOJ ought never to have acted on the referral from the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) concerning the President-elect’s papers at Mar-a-Lago, and NARA showed it’s true "blue" colors when it set in motion that failed opening episode of "lawfare." There should never have been a search warrant sought or issued on a former president’s home. There ought not to have been any federal prosecutions of the President-elect. All of it was election interference, undertaken by a hyper-politicized Department of Justice at the prompting of hyper-politicized NARA bureaucrats. We have never before seen this sort of use of the law to punish political opponents in America. Trump should nominate not just new leadership for DOJ and the FBI but also a new Archivist and clean house at the National Archives, beginning with a direction to the new Archivist—who works for the president—to fire all involved with that referral. The same direction applies to every other agency remotely involved with the political prosecutions of Trump. The Executive Branch works for the president, and should defer to the privacy of former presidents while securing their protection from nuts and assassins dispatched by our enemies. The entire "permanent government" of more than 1,800,000 civilian employees has to be carved down and shaken up, but Trump and his team should start with DOJ, the FBI, and NARA. 

TRUMP NAMES STEFANIK UN AMBASSADOR

6. Trump’s policy on abortion—that it is an issue for the state legislatures to decide pursuant to the police power which the Constitution left with the sovereign states— is the constitutionally correct one and has been since the disastrous overreach by the Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe and the Court’s botched attempt to repair the breach in Casey in 1992. The GOP needs to defend Trump and the Constitution on this sensitive and controversial topic. A federal statute beyond the existing statute banning partial-birth abortions or the ban on federal funding of abortion is unnecessary and counterproductive. The political impact of Dobbs is now well known and dissipating quickly as Americans see that Dobbs did not substitute a made-up Constitutional standard in the place of Roe/Casey. Pro-life legislators in the states must learn the language of persuasion as abortion policies in most states are debated and sometimes revised, with restrictive legal regimes in some states and extremely permissive laws in others. 

5. Americans know our national security is endangered by the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea axis of dictators and we don’t like the prospect of being #2 or even tied for #1. "Peace through strength" is the best option for the President-elect to follow and to do so with a sweeping set of goals and metrics he should follow like the "critical path" for any of his last major development projects. The rapid expansion of our fleet, especially under the seas, should be a priority along with the on-going development of asymmetrical weapons and systems. I hope Trump’s Secretary of Defense, his Service Secretaries and all senior appointees at DOD commit for the entire four years. 

4. The "metric" that is nowhere to be found is the "minutes spent being interviewed" by President-elect Trump vs. those by the Vice President from the moment President Biden stepped aside. Americans want to hear their elected leaders be asked questions and answer them —at length. Trump loves the long interview format and the format loves him. Skip the fireside chats, the weekly radio messages, the "Sunday shows" and legacy media generally. If Trump and Vance do an interview a week with very different hosts, none of them from legacy media, they will cement their majorities. 

3. Legacy media ought never to ask one question in a GOP presidential primary debate ever again. Legacy media has become a big "blue" ball full of left-wing ideologues who are neither very informed about basic facts of American law and society nor curious about the center-right much less conservative views on any subject. Truth serum would reveal that 95% of the reporters, editors, writers, producers and "talent" at the dinosaur media voted for Harris. The outrageous attempt by legacy media to spin the entire electorate to any issue or passing controversy other than the economy, the border and national security was repudiated by citizens, and legacy media should starve for subscriptions and advertisements as a result. All that said, the two most consequential moments in the cycle after Trump declared were Joe Biden’s disastrous "challenge" to Trump to debate, and Sonny Hostin’s question to Harris on The View about what the Vice President would do differently over the past four years. Both Democratic candidates imploded their campaigns because they lacked the confidence and/or ability to make any arguments clearly and coherently. 

2. 2026 will be a very difficult election cycle for the GOP (just as 1982 was for President Reagan and 2010 was for President Obama) unless the Congressional GOP moves quickly to pass reforms that are easily understood and which deliver results for citizens that citizens see and feel. The budget and reconciliation process should be complete by the end of March. (The budget should be hammered out between now and January 20th so take-off on the reconciliation bills that follow in its wake is close to immediate.) The process should result in sweeping changes, and not just the extension and revision of the first Trump tax cuts which matter greatly for the growth we need but also the building of the wall, the shrinking of the federal bureaucracy, the conditioning of federal funds for states for education on the adaptation by the states of robust school choice programs as well as defunding of many ridiculous features of the federal government beginning with National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Reconciliation should authorize massive cost savings by mandating deep cuts in the size of the workforce in every agency. The money is desperately needed at the Pentagon. 

1. President-elect Trump’s selection of Vice President-elect Vance was brilliant. I did not think so at the time, and was so wrong. The state of origin of a Veep nominee doesn’t matter. Identity politics don’t matter. What matters are the arguments that the Veep can make for the presidential candidate’s policies and Vance proved brilliant, eloquent, self-effacing, and funny. Trump should consider doing for his young vice president what Ike did for his young Vice President, Richard Nixon, in 1953. 

Ike dispatched Nixon on the trip to end all trips. Vice President and Mrs. Nixon toured Asia throughout October and November 1953. They visited 19 countries in 72 days as Eisenhower’s representatives. Countries visited: New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Libya. The New York Times, then "the paper of record," called it "the most extensive and most important journey ever undertaken by any vice president of the United States" and "a journey without known example." Such travel impacts and shapes younger elected officials and begins to make them into statesmen or women. 

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That’s 10 takes. There are dozens more. There is so much to do to repair the damage of the past four years, but President-elect Trump is liberated from the need to run again and experienced now in the Beltway, especially with regard to the administrative state which worked around the clock to destroy his first term. Trump’s place in American political history is secure. Now he should be thinking about "history" with a capital "H," and it is not and will not be written by the discredited legatees of a once great American legacy media.

Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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