Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.
That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.
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It would be a blinding statement of the obvious to say Donald Trump just suffered a stunning political defeat. Democrats took both houses of Congress, voters delivered a sharp rebuke to the administration, and Republicans are already fighting over who, or what, to blame.
Dany Pletka’s word for it was “craptacular.”
But does a weakened Trump mean a more restrained American foreign policy? Or could the next two years be even more unpredictable than the first two?
That was the question at the center of the latest Hot Takes Happy Hour. Dany called the results a massive repudiation of the president and his party. Voters were promised lower prices and got higher ones. They were promised a secure border and got ICE roughing up Americans. They were promised the end of the swamp and got what Dany summed up in three words: corruption, corruption, corruption.
Republicans can’t even agree on why they lost. Vice President JD Vance blames the Iran war. The president told Fox News the war may have pushed up energy prices but was still the right call. When the president and vice president disagree on the reason for the defeat, the party isn’t conducting a post-mortem. It’s holding an auction.
The more important question is what Trump does next.
Presidents who lose at home tend to look abroad, where Congress can’t easily follow. Trump may be a lame duck domestically, but he is still commander in chief, and that title comes with a lot of runway.
Days after the election, he gave an early hint of where he’s headed. He replaced Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller as White House chief of staff. Miller is the architect of the administration’s hard-line immigration agenda and its most vocal champion of raw American power, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. Advisers say his promotion is meant to win back populist voters who stayed home or defected. Those voters were turned off, in part, by a costly war and harsh immigration enforcement. The remedy, apparently, is to promote the man most associated with both. Cuba should take note.
Iran is the most immediate flashpoint. Dany and I agree Tehran can’t be allowed a nuclear weapon. We disagree about what went wrong. For Dany, the war wasn’t the problem. The diplomacy was, and she’d like Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner kept far away from it. My question is simpler: after a strong first few weeks, what exactly is the strategy now? A third aircraft carrier is heading to the region. A clear definition of success hasn’t yet set sail.
We also looked at whether Trump goes hunting for a legacy elsewhere: Cuba, Greenland again, or a grand bargain with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. With APEC and the G20 coming up, we’ll know soon how much he wants to play on the world stage.
Then there’s the new Congress. Democrats will have real tools to investigate, to squeeze spending and to rein in some of the administration’s foreign policy. Whether they use them to legislate or to settle scores is another matter. Dany offered one idea with rare bipartisan potential: a constitutional amendment barring presidents from issuing pardons once they’ve lost an election, closing the “on the way out the door” loophole that both Biden and Trump have found so convenient.
Regular viewers know Dany and I don’t always agree. But we share a concern about the erosion of political norms, the growing pull of the extremes in both parties, and a Congress that has spent years forgetting it has a constitutional job.
Here’s the irony. Voters returned Trump to office on a promise to keep America out of new wars, then punished his party amid one. Yet by tying his hands at home, they may have given him every incentive to look for his next big win abroad.
Trump may be a lame duck in Washington. That doesn’t mean he’s lost the power to reshape the world.
Thank you Susan Heinrich, Kat Vav, Barry Gardner, Melissa Ebel, and many others for tuning into my live video with Danielle Pletka! Join me for my next live video in the app.
