For all those Americans waking up kicking and screaming at the prospect of four more years of Donald Trump, all is not lost.
The world will (almost certainly) keep turning after the 2024 presidential election and The Simpsons will (definitely) still be on the air.
There’s no point running for the hills as the people who already live there more than likely voted for Trump and the nation’s homeless have already headed West to discover you need to be almost as wealthy as Elon Musk to afford a house in the Democratic Republic of California.
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So, you might like to take heart in these five reasons why a second Trump White House might not be so bad, after all.
1. We Survived the First One
Remember how you felt in 2016? Did I really just witness the guy who fake fired people on The Apprentice beat Hillary Clinton to become the most powerful person on the planet? Should we sell our house now and move to Guam? But you didn’t sell your house, and, in fact, it probably went up in value.
Obama would claim he left the economy in good order but then Biden would have to admit the same in 2020, wouldn’t he? We even lived through a pandemic and given that most people probably ignored Trump’s more crackpot cures, the States didn’t fare much better or worse than countries with actual statesmen running them.
Yes, his idea of foreign policy focused more on weird “friendships” with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, but no buttons were pushed. We were still there in 2021.
We may have still been embarrassed that the country of JFK and Barack Obama chose Donald J. Trump as president. But we also voted in Richard Nixon so go figure. And the Cubs won the World Series in 2016 for the first time since 1908. Didn’t see that one coming either.
2. At Least There Won’t be a Civil War
Admit it, you were considering binning those tickets for the Christmas concert downtown you’d been looking forward to for months. There was so much fighting talk from the Trump campaign in the weeks before the election that companies which fit bars over windows must have been cleaning up.
Now our inner cities can go back to gentrifying the poor out of existence. The police can step down security at the Capitol for January. The Democrats aren’t going to stage an insurrection. There won’t be a run on Viking helmets. The people wearing them will already be inside.
3. He May Even Stop a War or Two
Trump is actually good at stopping wars or, at least, not starting them. He’s interested in Making America Great Again, not anywhere else. “I saved a big war. I saved a couple of them,” he said during his first term, referring to Iran and another conflict nobody seems quite sure about.
No doubt he will call his buddy Vladimir Putin and suggest setting aside his squabble with Ukraine, hopefully without making Kyiv a suburb of Belgorod. He promised during the campaign he could do it in 24 hours. His policy is “peace through strength,” although few have much more ideas of what that is about. At least he remembers which one is which between Putin and Zelensky, unlike a certain other president. Zelensky certainly knows who Trump is; he congratulated him via X, saying he is hopeful he will “practically bring just peace in Ukraine closer.”
Trump’s a strong supporter of Israel but is impatient with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in dealing with Hamas. The leaders from both sides will be nervously awaiting his next thoughts on the conflict, with the Palestinians more so.
4. He May Go Where No President Has Gone Before (Lately)
Donald Trump shares a fascination about space travel with Elon Musk and is likely to continue the trend back towards exploration he began in his first term with the establishment of the U.S. Space Force and rebuilding the U.S. Space Command and the National Space Council.
He may well relaunch the NASA program sending astronauts to the moon, framing it as a space race against China rather than Russia. He will take all the credit, naturally, but that may be a small price to pay for making space travel cool again.
5. It’s the Economy, Stupid
James Carville famously used the term to help get Bill Clinton elected and Trump has oft used the sentiment, if not the phrase, to explain why it is necessary for all Americans to put him back as the captain of the country’s industries.
He will point to the soaring share prices and the strengthened dollar on news of his victory as evidence that he is already turning around an economy he says was struggling through a cost-of-living crisis under Biden.
Trump will look to accelerate growth, boost real incomes and jobs. Any stimulus from tax cuts and putting up barriers to trade could boost profits on Wall Street and Trump will argue the trickle-down will boost businesses across the board, although that remains to be seen. Trump’s a good businessman, or so he keeps telling us.
So, there you go. It’s a fresh start. A new beginning. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ve heard a lot of nice things about Puerto Rico in the last week.
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