The only difficulty with winning an election by a large margin, as President-elect Donald Trump did last week, is accurately reading the message that voters were trying to send you.
Focus on the fundamentals, and you could be the next generational leader. But overreach and aim wrong, and you and your party will be right back out of power.
The message of the November elections was clear. By far the biggest concerns I heard from voters across the country in 2024 were anxieties over the economy and the soaring cost of living. Prices for houses, cars, even breakfast cereal and milk soared during the COVID-19 pandemic and never came back down to Earth. Since President Joe Biden didn’t fix it, voters hope Trump will.
In Indianola, Iowa, a truck driver told me the cost of diesel gas was eating so much into her take-home pay that she considered stopping driving altogether. She needed the income, so she kept going, but Trump’s promises to “drill, baby drill,” convinced her it will be better once he’s back in office.
“When he was in, he proved that he could lower interest rates and that we as a nation were fuel independent,” she said of Trump.
In New Hampshire, retirees were worried about their retirement savings.
College students in Atlanta liked that Trump has been a businessman and they believed he could make the economy more business friendly for when it’s time for them to look for jobs. An entrepreneur from Florida told me his businesses flourished under the first Trump administration, but not under Biden, so he voted early for Trump.
But even with all of that voter anxiety, the first cabinet picks Trump has put forward have had nothing to do with the economy.
Along with a well received nomination of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state, on Wednesday Trump picked former Congressman Matt Gaetz to be U.S. attorney general. Gaetz’s main experience with the Department of Justice to this point has been a now-dismissed DOJ investigation into accusations that he participated in the sex trafficking of a minor. If confirmed, he would soon oversee the same FBI and DOJ that investigated not just him, but Trump as well. He would also oversee all U.S. attorneys around the country, domestic counterterrorism efforts and the office of Violence Against Women.
Gaetz is not only broadly disliked by his GOP House colleagues for leading a botched challenge to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he has also been under a House Ethics Committee investigation for sex trafficking, illegal drug use and other serious misconduct. By resigning from the House immediately, as he did Wednesday night, he ended the investigation against him. Gaetz has denied the allegations against him, but the controversy only underscores the absurdity of his nomination.
After picking Gaetz, Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Along with recently saying no vaccines are safe and effective, Kennedy also proclaimed on social media that, “On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” Um, what?
RFK is such an off-the-wall pick that the New York Post editorial board, hardly a liberal crew, said that after spending time with him last year, they came away impressed by his charisma, but deeply concerned by his views on public health, which they called “a head-scratching spaghetti of … warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.”
Kennedy also told them “neocons” are responsible for a host of America’s policy ills and that pesticides, cellphones and ultrasound technology could be driving an upswing in Tourette syndrome and peanut allergies. Now, with Trump’s support, he’ll have the power to decide not just American policy on pesticides, vaccines and fluoride, but also oversee Medicare, Medicaid and women’s health.
Moving down the list, the president-elect nominated “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth has a blue-chip education from Princeton and Harvard, along with significant military experience as a former major in the Minnesota National Guard.
But he also said recently that women should not be in combat, where they have served for years, that “lots of people need to be fired” from Pentagon leadership and that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, may only have gotten the role because he is Black.
“Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt, which on its face seems unfair to CQ,” Hegseth wrote in his new book “The War on Warriors.” “But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter.”
Is all of this what 76 million Americans just voted for?
I can tell you after covering the election for the last year that not one person told me they were voting for Trump to keep women out of combat, fluoride out of water or Matt Gaetz out of jail. Most just want to keep more money in their pockets and be able to afford the lives they’re working toward.
With control of the House, Senate and White House, Republicans are perfectly positioned to deliver that for Americans. But misread the mandate, and Republicans may find themselves in two or four years where Democrats are today — out of power and wondering why.
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