How Donald Trump plans to fulfil promise to ‘heal’ America

Donald Trump has vowed to wield new power as president and ‘heal’ the country. Here’s what this monumental promise will involve.

America is a nation in need of healing. When the applause died down at Donald Trump’s victory party long enough for him to speak, he promised he was ready to make it happen.

“We’re going to help our country heal … We’ve made history for a reason tonight,” he said.

Four years earlier, when Joe Biden replaced the man who will now replace him, he made a similar vow and declared it was “time to heal in America.” And four years before that, it was Mr Trump who claimed the presidency and committed to “bind the wounds of division”.

Both of them failed. In the divided United States, will this time be any different?

Those wanting to be optimistic will find positives in the aftermath of this election, compared to the previous two. In 2016, Mr Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was a genuine shock, not only to the Democratic establishment and its progressive supporters who assumed she was certain to win, but to the celebrity billionaire who also believed he was going to lose.

Donald Trump has vowed to ‘heal’ the US. Picture: AFP

Thousands of Americans hit the streets to protest, their anger compounded by the fact that Mr Trump improbably rose to power by securing three million fewer votes. This sense of sheer disbelief fuelled the fierce backlash against the Republican for four wild years.

In 2020, of course, any hope of unity was quashed by Mr Trump’s behaviour in defeat. He never accepted the result, ignoring the fundamental principle of democracy. Instead, he pursued what prosecutors later alleged was an illegal effort to overturn the election, culminating in his supporters invading the US Capitol to prevent the transfer of power.

January 6, 2021, was one of America’s darkest days. Combating the anti-democratic forces to blame inevitably became a driving force for Mr Biden’s presidency, especially because rather than cut ties with Mr Trump, the Republican Party gave itself over to him completely.

That the 78-year-old will return to the White House on January 20 is the most painful of blows for Democrats. What has been telling in the aftermath of his victory over Kamala Harris, however, has been the absence of unrest and violence that many Americans feared.

It helps that unlike Mr Trump, Ms Harris and Mr Biden accepted the will of the people, rather than baselessly claiming it had been distorted by cheating. It also suggests that, nine years after Mr Trump launched his most extraordinary political career, his rivals finally – if numbly – accept that his ascension marks not a bump in the road of American history but a new path.

By winning the national popular vote, all seven battleground states and likely both chambers of Congress, the former and now future president claimed what he called an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” for his second four-year term in the White House.

The core elements of his agenda to be implemented with that mandate are clear: sweeping tariffs, trillions of dollars in tax cuts, the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and a peace-through-strength foreign policy that is supposed to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.

But what about his campaign trail promises that were made as unsanctioned riffs in social media posts or rally rants, rather than in carefully scripted television advertisements?

Did young men and voters of colour and those in rural areas break from the Democrats because they wanted Mr Trump to turn the Justice Department on his enemies, cancel the broadcast licences of TV networks, and pardon those convicted over the January 6 riot?

Did they vote for Mr Trump to be a strongman like his friend Hulk Hogan, or did they vote for him to be a strongman like China’s Xi Jinping, the ruthless dictator he calls “a brilliant guy”?

In the Republican’s victory speech, he extended a hand to all Americans to join the “noble and righteous endeavour” of bringing the country together. It was something of a jarring gesture, given he said during the campaign that any Jewish, Catholic, Black, Hispanic or elderly American who did not vote for him needed to have their “head examined”.

Mr Trump had also referred to his opponents as demonic, evil and sick, repeatedly saying the “enemy from within” represented a greater threat than America’s foreign adversaries, and he spoke darkly of retribution against them. Sometimes, however, he moved to temper those comments by maintaining that his retribution “will be success”.

“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” he said after claiming victory.

“It’s time to unite, and we’re gonna try … It’s gonna happen. Success will bring us together.”

Trump says he will foster the new ‘golden age’ of American. Picture: AFP

J.D. Vance called Trump ‘cultural heroin’. Picture: AFP

That is what ordinary voters want: for him to make America great again. The stunning swing against the Democrats was as much an indictment of the Biden administration as it was an endorsement of Mr Trump. Many simply held their noses and ignored his troubling qualities.

It is difficult to imagine, however, that the 78-year-old will now decide to change his ways.

After he was shot in the ear in July, friends and relatives declared he was a changed man, ready to unify the country. That lasted barely minutes into his next major speech.

The fact that Mr Trump’s mandate is now so comprehensive also means he will face fewer guardrails than he did during his first term. Most of the old-school conservative Republicans who challenged him in Congress are no longer there. And instead of having to rely on similar types to staff his administration, he plans to hire only those fully converted to Trumpism.

Alongside him will be JD Vance, his vice president who once called him “cultural heroin”.

“He makes some feel better for a bit,” Mr Vance wrote before he was elected in 2016, “but he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realise it.”

More Americans than ever are now hooked. They can only hope to avoid the comedown.

Originally published as How Donald Trump plans to fulfil promise to ‘heal’ America