The Hopes and Fears for The Next Four Years

Like Opening Day of the baseball season, like the first weekend of the NFL season, the transition period between presidents is where we can embrace our highest hopes. Unlike sports, however, where acknowledgment that our team just doesn’t have the chops to win is merely an expression of disappointment, the advent of a new President also elicits a number of fears.

Trump’s presidency, like so much else about him and the election he just won, offers a very broad hope-fear spectrum. Here are mine.

 

I hope he nominates strict Constitutional constructionists and originalists to the Supreme Court.

I hope he undoes ObamaCare and institutes free market reforms to health insurance.

I hope he cuts taxes, broadly rather than in the “targeted” way that benefits the favored and burdens the out-of-favor, and that he substantially simplifies the tax code to reduce its “playground for the cronyists” status.

I hope he embraces a sane energy policy, where government no longer tips the scales with regulation and subsidy and where an all-of-the-above attitude towards sources of energy, judged by free market forces, will make energy cheaper and thus make our lives better.

I hope he massively cuts regulations and rolls back the intrusiveness and excesses of the regulatory agencies.

I hope he furthers gun rights, and restores them to equal footing with our other inalienable rights.

I hope he pulls off a miracle and imposes term limits on Congress.

I hope he walks back from the pointless and destructive Paris Agreement on climate, whose sole outcome will be to harm the world’s poorest people.

I hope he restores sanity to infrastructure spending, ending the diversion of the money collected for that purpose and refusing to turn it into a gravy train for the well connected.

I hope that he reduces the power of the Presidency by undoing executive orders emplaced by his predecessors and pursuing his changes via actual legislation enacted by Congress.

I hope he recognizes the inevitability of marijuana legalization and pursues it at the national level.

I hope that Salena Zito’s observation, that “his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,” proves correct, and that the words that came out of his mouth on the campaign trail were not indicative of his attitudes while in the White House.

 

I fear he will engage us in tariff and trade wars that will wreck the economy.

I fear he will continue to spend beyond the nation’s means.

I fear he will pursue an anti-immigrant agenda, closing our borders and isolating us from the rest of the world.

I fear he will involve us in more foreign wars and meddle militarily in conflicts where our involvement only makes things worse.

I fear he will impose a thuggish manner to law enforcement, further eroding our Fourth Amendment rights.

I fear he will clamp down on free speech, especially that which criticizes him.

I fear he will further involve the government in the social wars, picking winners and losers instead of defending the individual rights of us all.

I fear he’s going to pour money we don’t have into military spending we don’t need.

I fear he’s going to build that wall, and when that doesn’t stop the flow of illegals, trample on our rights to further the nativist agenda.

I fear the NSA will continue to snoop on Americans.

I fear he will continue the ineffective and destructive War on Drugs.

I fear he will continue to expand the power of the Presidency and the imbalancing of our tricameral system of government.

I fear that the evidence of a thin skin and short fuse prove to be correct.

 

Some have already decided that the season is over, that the Trump presidency will set the nation back fifty years, that they personally are doomed, screwed, and in genuine peril. That’s ridiculously hyperbolic, of course – the republic will survive his presidency. The system and the realities of government inertia assure us of this. It’s also unfair. Trump hasn’t actually done anything yet, nor will he be in a position to do so until he is sworn into office two months hence.

Lets see which of our hopes are fulfilled and which of our fears prove unfounded.