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OPINION

Trump Must Make America the 80s Again

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

The Trump 2.0 administration is coming in like gangbusters with a bunch of good appointments, plus Kristi Noem – I only hope she treats the ridiculous Department of Homeland Security like she treated her uppity puppy – but 47 needs to focus on one key thing. It’s the one thing that makes everything else work. It’s the centerpiece, the keystone if you will – and why he won the Keystone State.

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He must fix the economy. He must make it work for the members of the unprecedented coalition that came together to elect him. Yeah, they were tired of woke nonsense, tired of being abused, and tired of seeing America pushed around, but mostly, they were tired of seven-dollar butter. Everything else depends on him fixing the economy. If President Trump doesn’t get that right, he fails.

We basically need to reboot the 1980s.

That’s not to say that other issues aren’t important. He must keep those promises, too. But fixing the other problems is necessary, not sufficient. If Trump comes and fixes the border but allows the economy to tank, he’s going lose the midterms and then the 2028 election and, pretty soon, the people who want to chop your kids’ genitals off to conform to the delusions of local wine women are going to be in charge again.

If Trump fixes our military and restores our standing in the world but lets the economy tank, we’re going to lose the coming elections, and everything is going to go to hell around the world. China will get Taiwan. Iran will get the bomb. Israel will get shafted.

If Trump uses a firehose to clean out the DOJ and wipe away the fascists who weaponized our government against normal people and their right to speak but allows the economy to tank, we’re going to lose the next elections, and Elon Musk will be only the first of many sent to the camps.

Everything hinges on the economy. Everything.

His goal must be achieving the kind of economy we had under Ronald Reagan. And yeah, the first two years of Ronald Reagan’s reign were rough. It was difficult and painful repairing the damage of Joe Biden 1.0 – a.k.a. Jimmy Carter – and a lot of people got upset. But then America got back to work. America started kicking tail. America got out of the doldrums. When people feel prosperous, they feel good. It’s morning in America. The American 80s Golden Era wasn’t just because we were standing up to the Russians or because our music was so amazingly awesome. It was because we knew the future was bright and we were powerful and prosperous. That’s why Ronald Reagan won every state in 1984 – I still refuse to count Minnesota as an actual state.

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What does President Trump need to do? He needs to make the tax cuts permanent and expand them. He needs to end taxes on tips – promises made must be promises kept. He needs to unleash the energy sector. He needs to slash regulations to allow companies to grow. And he needs to cut the deficit to help lower interest rates.

We haven’t seen or heard much yet about the economy during the transition. As of this writing, he hasn’t appointed any of his economic team. The other stuff is getting all the attention. The regime media wants to talk about innocent abuelas being tossed into the back of trucks and shipped to Ciudad Juarez. And sure, that’s awesome – I don’t care if you’re a grandmother; if you’re an illegal alien, you need to be deported. But that’s not the biggest thing. That’s not the central, essential task for the president. It will just get all the press. You’ll see all the pictures of crying illegals being sent back to their homelands, but that’s not the show.

The show is the economy. The show is making American citizens able to support themselves and their families. If President Trump fails to do that, nothing else matters. All the great stuff we’re going to see, from purging wokeness to school choice to banning mutilation to closing the border to making the military deadly again, can all be undone in a wave of a pen should the Democrats take power. If we don’t keep the House and Senate in 2026, it doesn’t quite neuter Trump, but it sure limits his possibilities. And in 2028, when Trump is not on the ticket, these lunatics are going to try to elect somebody who makes AOC look like Stephen Miller. You’ve seen them. They’ve not only learned nothing from their humiliating defeat, they’ve learned all the wrong lessons. They think the answer is to double and triple down with their petty fascism and their leftist insanity. All the stuff that Trump is going to fix will be unfixed on Day One of the Newsom presidency if he doesn’t make the economy great again.

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Now, the good news is that President Trump has made the economy hum before. We had the greatest economy in 40 years before the COVID thing and the bureaucracy’s idiotic reaction to it. Trump’s a businessman, and business is important to him. He won’t set the economy on the back burner and hope it gets better while playing at foreign policy like some presidents named Bush did. Both Bushes tanked on economic issues. But Trump is good on this. He understands that the economy is central to everything. It’s a lot of us who look at the bright shiny things like transsexuals in camouflage and border jumpers flooding our city streets who forget that these things, while critical, are not the central thing.

And remember, fixing immigration, the military, and the administrative state all support a better economy. When we get immigration right, wages go up, but we also have a manageable and sensible system that brings in necessary immigrants who actually contribute to America and American prosperity. Plus, we won’t be spending hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing people who shouldn’t be here in the first place through leftist NGOs that shouldn’t exist in the first place. For the military, we need to rebuild our arsenal, particularly by building ships. These create great jobs that don’t require a degree in gender studies, the kind of jobs that kind of people who supported Donald Trump would love to do and would be paid well to do. And for the administrative state, when we cut the power of the bureaucrats, we also cut the red tape that holds our economy and our entrepreneurs back. Trump is already making a smart move by appointing Elon and Vivek to run DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, to figure out what doesn’t work in government and to slash it ruthlessly. Of course, we need a Congress that’s not going to be business as usual – and Trump won’t accept business as usual. We need fundamental change, and that fundamental change is changing America back to the kind of America those of us who are Gen Xers or late-Boomers grew up in. We need a return to the 1980s. We demand a return to the 1980s. And we can have that again. We can have that energy. We can have that feeling. We can have that economy. We can have that America. And if Donald Trump wants to succeed, he’s got to give it to us.

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