President Donald Trump during a White House press conference on February 4, 2025 (Noamgalai/Shutterstock.com)
President Donald Trump is now three months into his second presidency, which shows how polarizing a figure he continues to be.
Many right-wing media outlets are praising his "record of accomplishment," while Trump's detractors — from liberals, progressives and centrists to Never Trump conservatives and libertarians — are inundating him with scathing criticism. And how swing voters who supported former President Joe Biden in 2020 but went for Trump in 2024 feel about him in the months ahead could sway the outcome of the 2026 midterms.
In an op-ed published on April 21, the Wall Street Journal's Gerard Baker agrees with some of Trump's goals but expresses doubts about his "blitzkrieg approach."
"Mr. Trump's immediate principal goals were laudable and commanded widespread approval: close the porous border, downsize a bloated government, end the woke lunacy that has had most of our establishment in its thrall, restore American strength in the world," Baker argues. "But identifying goals is the easy part. Achieving them is a different matter. This exercise requires successful fights with entrenched, powerful interests in a diverse and pluralist country — and world."
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The conservative Baker goes on to argue that Trump, at times, is creating an "impression…. of escalating failure alongside escalating overreach."
"The theory behind the blitzkrieg approach is that its boldness is its principal guarantee of success: that by flooding the zone, you keep enemies off balance and disoriented by the sheer energy, demoralized by the sheer ambition," Baker explains. "But you do have to execute. The evidence is accumulating that this war is less Blitzkrieg than Blunderland…. The effort to revive American manufacturing is harming American manufacturing."
Baker continues, "Changing the rules of the international economy has proved hard: We still await even one of those vaunted trade deals from supplicant foreigners…. The problem I have is that even as they overstep their limits, they seem to blunder deeper into the mire. Their biggest risk may be that voters will start to ask: What’s the use of a strong man who can’t do anything right?"
Gerard Baker's full op-ed for The Wall Street Journal is available at this link (subscription required).