He is the one tossing concepts on the whiteboard, storyboarding strong possibilities, and forcing the political system to grapple with problems it has ignored for decades. He understands something most career politicians never grasp: not every idea survives first contact with reality. But no progress happens without someone willing to propose ideas in the first place.
That is why the latest round of criticism of Trump’s proposal to cap credit card interest rates misses the point entirely.
Much of the conservative movement has bristled at the idea, and the concerns are serious.
Sure, only bought and paid for shills like banks or credit card companies, and no serious politician is losing sleep over doing these bloodsuckers any favors. However, economists across the ideological spectrum, including former Trump advisors, have been clear on one point: hard interest rate caps are price controls. And price controls, no matter how noble the intention, tend to reduce access to credit for the very people they are meant to help. When lenders can’t price for risk, they don’t absorb losses out of goodwill. Instead, they stop lending to higher-risk borrowers altogether.
That’s a fair concern, but Trump’s critics are not engaging in this debate in good faith. Instead, they are trying to portray him as erratic, out of touch, or economically illiterate — as if the man who reshaped global trade, restructured the Republican Party, and rewrote the terms of American political debate suddenly forgot how markets work.
That caricature collapses after even just skimming recent facts.
Speaker Mike Johnson put it plainly, saying, “The president is the ideas guy.” Johnson added, “I wouldn’t get too spun up about ideas that are out of the box, that are proposed or suggested.”
Exactly right.
Trump isn’t some rigid ideologue who confuses abstract theory with real-world governance. He is a pragmatic dealmaker who treats ideas as hypotheses to be tested, debated, refined, or discarded based on whether they produce results. He isn’t loyal to any specific policy framework. His only real loyalty is to results.
That is how effective leadership works.
Trump uses his platform to highlight problems the political class would rather ignore and then forces the system to respond. Congress, regulators, economists, and industry leaders then push back.
From there, evidence is weighed, and alternatives emerge. When the dust settles, what’s actually implemented rarely resembles the original provocation, and it’s stronger for it.
We’ve all seen this movie before.
Take trade. For decades, bipartisan elites claimed America’s trade system was optimal and immutable, dismissed permanent trade deficits as theoretical non-issues, and accepted the hollowing out of manufacturing as fate. Then Trump asked a once-forbidden question: what if the rules were rigged against American workers?
He proposed tariffs. Economists panicked, and pundits screamed about trade wars, yet the pressure worked.
Trading partners came to the table to renegotiate agreements en masse. Even China was forced to make concessions that no prior administration had ever successfully extracted. Supply chains strengthened, and American industrial policy, once dismissed as heresy, became mainstream.
Not every tariff was perfect, but the idea worked because it shattered complacency.
Or consider foreign policy.
Trump was relentlessly mocked for questioning long-standing diplomatic assumptions. Yet it was his willingness to discard stale frameworks that produced the Abraham Accords, the most significant Middle East peace agreements in a generation. Experts said it couldn’t be done, but Trump tried anyway. The result reshaped regional dynamics without a single American casualty.
This is why the current pile-on over credit card interest rates feels so hollow.
Trump is highlighting a real problem: millions of Americans are trapped in revolving debt at punishing interest rates, while wages struggle to keep up with inflation. We can’t pretend this problem doesn’t exist, yet many on both sides of the aisle seem intent on doing so.
Are conservatives right to say that blunt price controls are not the solution? Yes. Market-based reforms, competition, transparency, and targeted consumer protections are far more effective tools for this job. But that debate is happening now precisely because Trump forced it into the open.
That is the point!
Leadership is not about pretending every first idea is perfect. It is about creating a system that lets good ideas survive scrutiny and filters out bad ones without losing sight of the underlying goal.
Trump invites that process. He expects pushback and listens to it. Then he adjusts.
Those calling him “crazy” or “out of touch” are not serious analysts. They mistake the president’s flexibility for weakness and his curiosity for incompetence. History suggests the opposite.
Trump’s genius has never been that every idea works. His ideas start conversations that others were too timid to begin, and those conversations often lead to outcomes that actually work for the American people.
That is results-driven leadership, and it is exactly why his critics keep being proven wrong.
Haley Kennington (@LadyKennington) is a conservative commentator who served as the Research Director & Story Editor for “2020:The Plot Against the President” and Research/Archive Editor for “What Is a Woman?“
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