Five days into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, Republicans are feeling exhilarated — telling The Post that they are more organized to carry out the commander in chief’s agenda and are seeing signs that the MAGA movement is in the cultural ascendency.
While Trump’s 2017 inauguration was preceded by celebrity-studded, left-wing Women’s Marches in cities across America, Monday’s pre-inauguration prayer service at St. John’s Church saw the 47th president worshipping alongside comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan and tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
In the evening, country stars Rascal Flatts and disco icons The Village People performed at the three inaugural balls, while Carrie Underwood sang “America The Beautiful” at the swearing-in itself.
“I honestly never thought I would live to see the day when it was this culturally uncool to be a Democrat,” former “The View” host Meghan McCain remarked on X Thursday about the dynamic. “As someone who has been socially ostracized for being a Republican my entire life, let me tell you, this is a brave new world out here…”
“I heard the horror stories of some of the folks that were being chased down the street by protesters [in 2017],” freshman Rep. Mark Harris (R-NC) told The Post this week.
“We just didn’t see much of any of that this time. And I realize the weather may have [been] a bit of a factor,” he added,” [but] I honestly think it is a bigger picture of the American people.”
To critics, Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton could have easily been brushed aside as an aberration, with the Republican losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.
The most devoted Trump opponents could take comfort in allegations of unlawful collusion with Russia, or Clinton’s own unpopularity with wide swathes of the American people.
This time, the scope of the GOP’s win was undeniable. Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years, sweeping all seven battleground states and improving on his Electoral College margin from 2016.
“Just in the general public, it’s totally different,” another freshman, Rep. Jeff Crank (R-Colo.) told The Post about the contrast. “There was that resistance, and part of it was probably because the 2016 election was so close.
“One of the great gifts of the 2024 election is that it wasn’t as close as everybody kind of had feared.”
With Trump closing in on a decade as the undisputed Republican political leader, Democrats are facing a void at the top of their hierarchy — and abandonment by their onetime allies.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who had once been a darling among progressive environmentalists, has gone all in on the Make America Great Again movement to the point of running the new Department of Government Efficiency.
Corporations like Zuckerberg’s Meta have begun ditching diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and other liberal endeavors, much to the shock and delight of conservatives. Zuckerberg even vowed to end Facebook’s controversial fact-checking program.
“You got a taste of the liberal-left agenda where they went far left, let’s face it — where you can’t call a man a man, you can’t call a woman a woman,” second-term Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) told The Post.
“We forget how much has been unwound, how much we’ve lost our position of authority.”
Meanwhile, a handful of early polls have given Trump higher marks from voters than he enjoyed at any point in his first term.
It’s enough to make even the most realistic conservative feel giddy.
“Everybody feels this. Everybody feels the excitement of the moment, the excitement of being in a great country. The atmosphere in Washington has changed. I think the whole press corps probably notices that as well,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) beamed earlier this week.
“I think in 2016, they weren’t prepared. I think a lot of people didn’t think Trump was going to win. And I don’t think that Paul Ryan, who was the speaker, had the kind of relationship with Trump that would be conducive to planning and getting stuff ready to go,” Crank reflected.
Back in 2017, Republican leadership eyed ambitious legislation to repeal and replace ObamaCare, build and reinforce infrastructure and cut taxes — only the last of which became law.
This time around, Republicans have a much slimmer majority in the House, but insist they can do more with less room for error.
“You certainly can learn from past experience,” Rep. Tracey Mann (R-Kan.), entering his third term, told The Post. “Because he’s done it before, he knows exactly what we need to fix these problems.”
Trump himself has claimed that he feels more prepared as well, telling a voter during a September town hall that “I know the good ones, the bad ones, the smart ones, the dumb ones — I know them all now.”
Still, some Republicans caution that if they overplay their hand, the cultural gains they’ve made will soon evaporate.
“Republicans seem to keep maybe a better check on themselves and not overplaying their hand because as independent thinkers, it’s almost like herding cats to get all the Republicans on the same page, whereas the Democrats always seem to move in tandem,” Harris mused.
“By moving in tandem, I think they created a mess for themselves. And I think the American people spoke clearly.”
Other say they hope Democrats see the Trumpian light rather than persist in their former ways.
“We’re at a magical time right now,” said Rep. Michael Rulli (R-Ohio). “It’s the golden age. We would love Democrats to be part of that. We don’t want to isolate them. We don’t want to change them. We want them to be part of our movement.”
