It’s hard to believe, but we’re finally here. Four years after all the Sturm und Drang that followed Donald Trump’s 2020 electoral loss to Joe Biden, the maestro of Mar-a-Lago is set to be inaugurated once more on Monday as president of the United States.

And what an absolutely wild ride it has been. In the interim four years, Trump has completed nothing less than the single most remarkable comeback — political or otherwise — in American history.
Trump has been prosecuted — four separate times, by three different prosecutors. He was “convicted” of a “crime” — the precise legal theory of which we actually still do not know — in a quintessential show trial in bright-blue New York City. One would-be assassin nicked his ear, coming within millimeters of murdering him on national television. A second would-be assassin was nearly able to fire a clear shot at him on his own Florida golf course. Two opposition party presidential candidates, working in tandem with an ever-supine propaganda media, tarred and feathered him as a historical threat to the Constitution — as a crypto-Nazi who, if once again given the reins of power, might really burn it all down.
Yet the American people saw right through it all. Trump prevailed — and not exactly in a squeaker either. Trump swept every single swing state, crushing Kamala Harris in the Electoral College tally and becoming the first Republican to win the national popular vote in two decades.
Trump, as many have observed, earned a “mandate” from the American electorate. And now, with his sundry foes all vanquished, Trump is once again set to place his hand on the Bible and take that solemn oath of office. America has been spared four more years of a prolonged Biden–Harris-induced national nightmare. Hallelujah!
But despite all the revelry in the nation’s capital this Monday, it is important to be clear-eyed about the task ahead.
In making history as the first man in over 130 years to earn a second nonconsecutive presidential term, Trum...