The First 100 Days of the Golden Age

The American Mind ^ | 5/6/25 | Dan McArthy

[EnderWiggin1970]

The first sign of just how revolutionary President Trump’s second term would be actually came two years before his re-election. On June 6, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, delivering pro-life conservatives a victory decades in the making—but which, in the end, was only made possible by Donald Trump.

Before Trump’s first term, Republican presidents had displayed a remarkable knack for preserving a pro-Roe majority on the Court: George H.W. Bush more than offset the conservative jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas by appointing Anthony Kennedy and David Souter. And while both of George W. Bush’s appointees voted to reverse Roe, the younger Bush had tried hard to place a family crony, rather than a judicial conservative like Samuel Alito, on the bench.

Would Alberto Gonzales or Harriet Miers, Bush’s preferred choices, have overturned Roe? Would Chief Justice John Roberts have borne the burden of being the man who ended Roe if his had been the deciding vote, rather than just one of a 6-3 supermajority made possible by Trump’s three anti-Roe justices? Mitt Romney was a staunch supporter of Roe—and a financial contributor to Planned Parenthood—until he started running for the Republican presidential nomination. Would a Republican like Romney, or John McCain, or another Bush have dared do what Trump did?

Trump is the opposite of the Republicans who preceded him. They specialized in telling conservatives what they wanted to hear, but they were afraid to act—on Roe, on racial discrimination against whites and Asians, on immigration, on fulfilling Ronald Reagan’s pledge to dismantle the Department of Education, and on most other priorities for the American Right. The title of a book by Pat Buchanan that was published in 1975—Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories—accurately described the relationship between the Republican base and the leaders it typically...

[Fledermaus]

So true

[Jacquerie]

I will never settle for an Establishment Republican for President ever again.

Trump broke the mold. He flipped over the card table of American politics.

There is no going back.

[MotorCityBuck]

“I will never settle for an Establishment Republican for President ever again.”
BRAVO! +1

[ClearCase_guy]

Yup. No more “Lesser of two evils”. I vote for a real Conservative, or I skip the election. We don’t have to vote for bad people. We should not vote for bad people.

[lightman]

Romney = Øbama-lite.