Trump Had a Mandate. He Spent It on Himself

He returned with the party, the Court, the cameras and a coalition built on prices and peace. Then he used the presidency to prosecute his past.

Donald Trump won the 2024 election.

He has spent much of the presidency trying to win 2020.

That may be the simplest explanation for why some of his voters are tired. They voted to change their lives. He used their victory to relitigate his.

Walk into a gym before work. Fox is playing on one television. CNN or MSNBC is playing on another. The screens are twenty feet apart and reporting from separate planets.

On one, Trump is restoring America. On the other, he is dismantling it. One finds triumph where the other finds scandal. Stories treated as national emergencies on one screen pass without a caption on the other.

People are noticing. More of them are saying it out loud.

“Those are not even the same news.”

Certainty rarely collapses all at once. Sometimes it develops a hairline crack between sets on the leg press.

I recently heard a Trump supporter say, “I wish he would stop talking about that.”

After more than a decade of Donald Trump making America live inside his grievances, those words are an opening. For one moment, what Trump needed and what his voter needed were no longer the same thing.

We can use that moment to move forward. We can also fuck it up.

Trump returned to Washington with the kind of power presidents spend entire careers trying to acquire. He had Congress. He had a Supreme Court majority he helped build. He had a party frightened of disappointing him, an opposition still learning how to oppose him without making him the center of everything and a broader coalition than his party had assembled in years.

His victory was not the landslide he claims, but he carried every battleground state. The country gave him power for reasons more practical than personal.

Lower prices. Control the border. End the wars. Break systems that had stopped working for ordinary people.

Voters who placed the economy at the center of their decision broke decisively for Trump. They did not elect him curator of the Donald J. Trump Museum of Unresolved Injuries.

A mandate is borrowed attention. Trump had more of it than almost anyone alive, and he could cross lines ordinary politicians could not approach. He could tell pharmaceutical companies no. He could force lawmakers to choose between their voters and their donors. He could make people who despised him support a good policy while he signed it with six black markers and named it after himself.

At the border, crossings fell to historic lows. Some of that decline predated him, and his methods deserve their own moral accounting. The result still mattered to people who elected him to regain control there.

He also pressured major drugmakers and secured pricing agreements with seventeen pharmaceutical companies. Some savings were significant, especially for certain weight loss drugs, insulin and fertility medicines. Some advertised discounts, including Lilly’s insulin price, predated TrumpRx.

TrumpRx was hardly a healthcare revolution. Many prices remained higher than those paid overseas. Much of the program worked like an expensive coupon book for people paying cash, and voluntary agreements left the machinery behind American drug prices largely intact. The results were real and the limitations were serious.

That is what makes the missed opportunity hurt. The leverage was real.

Trump’s own healthcare proposal called on Congress to make the agreements permanent, expose insurance denial rates, publish actual prices and attack pharmacy benefit manager kickbacks. Other parts were thin, risky or potentially harmful to lower income patients. It was an opening, not a finished answer.

He could have made healthcare affordability the consuming domestic project of his presidency. He could have summoned drug executives to the White House every week and forced Congress to explain why Americans should keep paying more for medicine than people in other wealthy countries. He could have stamped TRUMP across every savings card and pill bottle in the nation.

Let him. If the medicine costs less, let him take the picture.

This was never an incapable president. That would be easier to forgive. This was a president with extraordinary leverage who repeatedly chose smaller uses for it.

Presidential attention is finite. Every rally devoted to an old enemy leaves a current problem untouched. Every news cycle spent proving personal dominance consumes capital that could move a bill, break an industry or make a family’s life easier.

Trump spent too much of that capital on vindication, punishment, spectacle and adventure.

Reuters documented at least 470 people, organizations and institutions targeted in his campaign of retribution. Prosecutors. Law firms. Universities. Media organizations. Government workers. Anyone who criticized him, contradicted him or failed to kneel at the correct angle.

When the Supreme Court struck down his emergency-powers tariffs, Trump attacked Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, two justices he appointed, as “an embarrassment to their families.” They had voted with him many times. Then they voted against him on tariffs.

If a judge remains honorable only while ruling in your favor, you do not respect judges. You respect obedience wearing a robe.

Trump sued the IRS, an agency inside the government he controls, for $10 billion. A federal judge found that he had used the case to extract personal benefits from his own government. The executive branch developed a financial dispute with itself. Taxpayers were invited to settle.

He accused Barack Obama of treason without providing evidence. He attacked Joe Biden’s autopen. He returned to Epstein when it served him and tried to outrun Epstein when it did not. He demanded Greenland after Greenland said no. He obsessed over a reflecting pool, a 250 foot arch and a ballroom he priced at $400 million.

A country has problems.

Donald Trump has enemies and architecture.

Reuters counted at least forty public mentions of the ballroom in the first months of 2026. During the same period, families were struggling with gasoline and groceries. Asked about the economic pain created by the Iran war, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

He was explaining that Iran’s nuclear program mattered more in that context. Sometimes the quiet part arrives with a podium and its own lighting.

The Pentagon estimated on July 21 that the Iran war had cost the United States $37.5 billion. It entered a fifth month under a president elected partly by people exhausted with foreign wars. Sixty eight percent of Americans said it was not worth fighting.

Then there is 2020. Always 2020.

Trump won again. He returned to the White House and received the second term he believed had been stolen from him. Victory could have closed the wound. Instead, he made the wound federal policy.

During the first half of this year, Trump claimed more than one hundred times that the 2020 election was rigged. He used a prime time White House address to revive claims that intelligence findings and independent studies do not support.

He won 2024. He is still trying to make the country say he won 2020.

Here is the performance review his most loyal voters have avoided:

> If the man you hired to lower your bills spent his days punishing critics, building monuments to himself, opening another war and prosecuting his past, would you call that strength anywhere else in your life, or has he trained you to mistake the suffering of people you dislike for improvement in your own?

That performance review has finally begun. The people who oppose Trump should try very hard not to interrupt it.

They can listen when someone says, “This is not what I voted for,” or they can demand an apology before allowing them through the door. They can talk about healthcare, housing, wages, energy and peace, or drag the conversation back to impeachment, prosecution and the exquisite satisfaction of finally making the bastards pay.

Imagine watching voters reject a president because he used public power to settle personal grievances, then taking that power and using it to settle ours. It would be the most expensive “hold my beer” in the history of representative government.

Investigating abuse is not revenge. But if our answer to a man who weaponized government is to ask when we get the weapon, we have not rejected his politics. We have applied for the job.

Trump is losing an argument about groceries, gasoline and war. Turning the next election into another national referendum on how much we hate Donald Trump would rescue him from the judgment his own voters are finally beginning to make.

The person at the gym who notices that the two televisions are describing different worlds does not need a lecture, a confession or every conclusion flashing on the other screen. They need room to say, “I wanted lower prices. I wanted peace. I wanted the border controlled. I am tired of hearing about 2020.”

They need to discover that leaving a leader is not the same as surrendering to his enemies.

If we place a humiliation booth at the exit, they will turn around.

Trump will point at us and say, “See?”

He will be right about that.

The hardest question belongs to everyone:

> If Trump had used his power to lower healthcare costs and materially improve millions of lives, could the people who hate him have tolerated his success and let him take the credit? Since he used so much of that power to settle his own accounts, can the people who love him tolerate calling that a failure?

If either answer is no, government is no longer being judged by what it does for people.

It is being used to protect an identity.

Credit when credit is earned.

Accountability when power is abused.

Progress without a loyalty test.

Justice without the erotic thrill of revenge.

Moving forward does not mean forgetting. It means refusing to make the past our only destination.

Hatred can identify an enemy. It cannot build housing, negotiate drug prices, lower power bills or repair a school.

For ten years, America has organized itself around Donald Trump’s wounds and everyone else’s reaction to them. He supplies the grievance. His enemies supply the countergrievance. Each election becomes another demand for vindication. Each victory produces a fresh list of people who must pay.

The country simply gets meaner while the rent comes due.

Tomorrow morning, those televisions will still hang on opposite walls of the gym. They will still describe different countries.

The people sweating beneath them live in one.

They buy groceries from the same shelves. They fill prescriptions at the same counters. They send children into the same future. Their government can serve those lives, or it can keep feeding the grievances of whoever holds the remote.

Enough people need only say, “This is no longer working for me.”

That is the opening.

Donald Trump had a mandate.

He spent too much of it on himself.

If the rest of us inherit the opportunity, we had better spend it on the people.

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EDW: Truth. Curiosity. Conversation.

If this made you uncomfortable, good. Share it with someone who votes differently. Then talk about the country you both still live in.