2025 New Year’s political resolutions are easy to make, hard to sustain
I don’t know about you, but I found it especially difficult to make meaningful resolutions for the brand new year of 2025. It’s not because I’d suddenly realized perfection and happiness
beyond compare, either. No, new resolutions going into another twelve-month period are very much in order, but the amount of uncertainty we face makes them tricky to articulate.
While most people settle for low hanging fruit in terms of vows to do things differently now the 2024 has been relegated to the archives in our memories, simply promising to exercise more, tighten up the waistline, reconnect with old friends or accept every social opportunity won’t cut it.
Americans were front row spectators to a political earthquake in 2024, and 2025 will reveal – slowly and possibly all at once – the reverberations of the new order. People the world over took a bit of a break over the holidays to reflect and contemplate. Not everyone is excited by Donald J. Trump becoming leader of the free world again in 18 days’ time, but chances are they’ll experience some sort of adjustments one way or another.
Personal vows to improve aren’t enough. What should our leaders resolve to do? In no particular order:
Donald Trump – The president-elect isn’t exactly regarded as a private man. He wears his thoughts on his sleeve, which hasn’t always turned out to be a good thing for him, but even his closest advisors would likely concede that Trump occasionally surprises them.
Ask Trump a question and he’ll answer it; but the response is difficult to anticipate and sometimes causes more public relations damage and controversy than not saying anything at all.
Therefore, Trump should resolve to be more careful in who he grants interviews to. Trump has seemingly taken a “all publicity is good” attitude towards the establishment media throughout his professional career. This position may have benefitted him in business and celebrity circles, but politics is a different game entirely.
Donald Trump has ridden a wave of (mostly) goodwill since his election two months ago, but experience and history suggests the good feelings will not endure forever. Popularity ebbs and flows with everyone in political office. Ronald Reagan, for example, was reelected with a huge 49-state landslide in 1984, yet his second term was not a smooth one. Iran Contra was only one of Reagan’s hitches in his second four years. He gave in to political pressure and signed an immigration amnesty bill precedent that continues to fester today.
For Trump in 2025, it cannot be overstated how important it will be to maintain voter support for his MAGA agenda. Portions of the public will peel away from him as time and events transpire and the Democrats work their black magic in a mission to ruin his presidency. It’s as predictable as the tides. Managing the PR game will be one of Trump’s salient duties. His presidency’s success depends on it.
Trump should not give in to his instincts regarding the supposed beneficial nature of all publicity. That’s one resolution he must keep.
Speaker Mike Johnson – Assuming the current Speaker wins reelection to the House leadership top spot – which is not a given by any means, considering his lukewarm record at the helm in recent times – Johnson should resolve to reject the blubbering of his GOP establishment members and follow a principled track that eventually might achieve real results in the lower chamber.
Only a fool would insinuate Johnson doesn’t have a monumentally challenging job – herding cats might be simpler to master – but there’s nothing that demands Republicans prevail in every legislative battle to be deemed successful in conservatives’ eyes. Johnson can essentially win by losing in some respects. Etching votes into the record may be good enough for conservatives to isolate those representatives who are holding up Trump’s drive to implement the MAGA agenda.
Conservatives will only make progress on government accountability by culling the fat, so to speak, and electing more principled, limited government conservatives to bolster numbers.
Johnson needs a backbone. Will he locate one if he makes a resolution?
Trump’s cabinet members – Though New Year’s resolutions are usually considered personal endeavors, there’s one new goal every Trump cabinet member should vow to uphold.
Namely, Trump’s cabinet can individually resolve to place the aims of the administration above their own career ambitions and seek to do what’s right regardless of what it might cost them in reputation and elite prestige. In other words, put MAGA above themselves.
There aren’t many certainties other than death and taxes, but a third such guarantee would be intense opposition to everything they try to do to drain the proverbial swamp. Trump’s cabinet secretaries will be taking flak from all directions and most of them can’t hide in shadow to stay out of the glare.
None of them have been confirmed, yet, so the arduous part won’t end with simple senate confirmation. They must have thick skins. They also must have a willingness to take orders themselves and always maintain an attitude that the ends are bigger than petty slights and antagonistic inferiors with vendettas.
Change of this magnitude is never easy. None of Trump’s appointees should go into the next four years with rose colored glasses on. They won’t be heroes to anyone in official Washington, but they have to regularly remind themselves that the “little folk” out in the hinterlands have got their backs. Trump will gladly absorb the balance of the negativity, but he’ll also assume most of the credit for successes.
Trump’s cabinet will win as a team – or they’ll fail on their own. How did Ben Franklin put it? “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Hanging together is preferable.
MAGA voters – There’s little doubt Trump’s MAGA voters are an ideologically diverse lot. Ask a hundred people why they voted for Donald Trump and you’d likely get just about as many responses, ranging from, “He was the lesser of two evils”, to “I chose heads in the coin flip” to “Donald Trump will go down in history as the best president ever. The choice was easy.”
What the voters lack in similarity of purpose they share in one way – they’ll all need to resolve to be patient. Trump has promised to achieve a lot very quickly – halt illegal immigration, ramp up energy production, slap punitive tariffs on certain countries to motivate them to cooperate with the United States and to end the war in Ukraine – but it will take time, a lot of time, to realize most of what Trump offered to the electorate.
Sure, Kamala Harris was a once-in-a-generation awful opposition candidate, but most Americans voted for Trump rather than against Harris. And they’ve got high expectations for the new administration.
Trump welcomes the pressure and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Donald Trump is one of those unique individuals who thrives under duress. Having observed him over these nine-plus years at the pinnacle of politics, there doesn’t appear to be much that phases him. Trump hasn’t always handled tight situations well – the first debate in 2020 and last September’s matchup with Kamala Harris in Philadelphia came to mind – but he has rarely been flustered by adversity.
Simply stated, Trump the political superman hasn’t yet uncovered his version of kryptonite.
Now that it’s 2025, Americans are more anxious than ever for a political changing of the guard in Washington. 2025 isn’t going to be much like 2017 – and it’s definitely not close to 2021 – but Inauguration Day is creeping closer with each passing sunset. Trump is on his way, and he couldn’t get here fast enough for the country.
Joe Biden economy
inflation
Biden cognitive decline
gas prices,
Nancy Pelosi
Biden senile
Kamala Harris candidacy
Donald Trump campaign
Harris Trump debates
J.D. Vance
Kamala vice president
Speaker Mike Johnson
Donald Trump assassination
Donald Trump
2024 presidential election
Tim Walz
コメント