Three Good Things About Trump's Win

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I have never been a fan of Donald Trump and I do not share my countrymen's evident trust in him to make America great again, but here we are: He is about to become the 47th President of the United States.

If he does not completely undercut any of the following by hiking tariffs to the moon, enabling RFK, Jr. to destroy biotech and agriculture, intemperately plunging the United States into a war with China, or making any number of huge, stupid moves he will soon be able to make, there is potential for some good to come of a second term.

I'll list three things off the top of my head:

• There will at least not be active opposition to much-needed education reform. Trump is no laissez-faire capitalist. He will not bring principled opposition to government control of education to the table. There will be no carefully thought-out plan to get government out of education.
  
  But there is grassroots movement in favor of measures that attach tax money to children, rather than government schools, allowing parents more say in their education. This will improve some lives now and could lead to better things.
  
  Trump's past appointment of Betsy DeVos as head of the Department of Education augurs well for this movement to gain momentum undisturbed, and potentially grow into a real push for separation of academy and state.
  
  I doubt as favorable conditions would exist under Harris, beholden as she would have been to public sector unions.
• Energy policy should improve. Although he did not conceptualize them as such, Trump was hostile to leftist anti-energy freedom policies in his first term, and there is reason to think that some of his new advisors will have been influenced by the thinking of energy freedom advocate Alex Epstein. Since all industries depend on energy, any movement towards freedom in that sector will benefit our economy as a whole.
• There will be less far left 'woke'-type influence in government. "Reparations," for slavery, or at least any push for them from the federal level, should be dead in the water for a while.
  
  If the oxygen isn't cut outright from DEI, that far-left fad will at least get less encouragement from the federal level.
  
  If there is a move to, say codify gender reassignment surgeries on minors as child abuse (or at least make them much harder to get), Trump would probably sign it into law.

Please do note: These are off the top of my head and based on my fallible memory, so they're vague and devoid of substantiating hyperlinks.

But they'd be vague anyway. Trump is not principled or organized, as we saw when he rightly backed out of the nuclear deal with Iran -- but then did essentially nothing to prevent the theocracy from continuing to develop nuclear weapons.

He could likewise in this term hobble our economy so much from tariffs that he more than cancels out whatever good a freer energy sector could bring.

Much will depend on the quality of his advisors, so while he may well, for example, get 'woke' out of our government educational institutions, he won't work to privatize them unless pushed to, and could well simply replace that quasi religion with traditional religion, as our courts are already paving the way to do.

I do not wish to minimize what I think is overall a bad development for freedom in America, but a second Trump presidency is the hand we have been dealt. We should learn it and play it as best we can.

-- CAV