As hard as it might be for some, especially the political left, to see reality, the fact can’t be ignored: 10 months of Trump have been extremely good for consensus. The end of the shutdown proves it, even Democratic opponents in Congress almost entirely conceded to the president’s voter-mandated agenda.
Since he came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, Trump has been painted by the political left as the most divisive leader in American history. This assertion peddled by legacy media fails to see the truth as of late. The record of the past year tells a fundamentally different story than left-leaning mainstream media would have you believe. Trump has delivered on years of campaign promises with de facto cooperation from nominal opponents, the very meaning of consensus.
On the left, this represents a categorical shift from just one year ago. Think back to summer and autumn 2024. Kamala Harris labeled him a fascist, and President Biden called for a bullseye on Trump shortly before his first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. That lack of consensus extended into Congress and the courts, where GOP leaders and conservative-leaning judges had effectively stalled Biden’s agenda on voting protections for illegal aliens and student loan forgiveness. Consensus would have been a pipe dream going into November 2024.
We’ve since seen a massive paradigm shift. The 75-million-strong voter wave in the November elections sent a clear signal: Biden-era division and hateful rhetoric toward the other sidewere no longer politically viable. In Congress, where Biden faced steep opposition even when his party controlled both houses in his first two years in office, Trump has seen a string of major legislative victories. The passage of numerous Trump priorities, namely the Laken Riley Act on illegal immigrant deportations, H.R.1, referred to as the Big Beautiful Bill, the subsequent rescissions package and the recent surrender by Democrat holdouts during the shutdown all paint the same picture. The lack of consensus that paralyzed Biden has vaporized now, and the initiative taken by the administration since Jan. 20 is evidence clear as day that momentum has translated into legislative success.
The courts have also formed ideological policy consensus relating to the Trump administration. SCOTUS’ decision in Trump v. CASA limited the ability of lower courts to hamstring the federal government. Appeals courts greenlit national guard policing in Los Angeles in June. Trump has won scores of other victories in the nation’s highest court in cases over government downsizing, transgender people in the military, mass deportations and more. The Biden years never saw this kind of successful legal consensus around policy, which makes the attribution of Trump as divisive from the left all the more humorous.
This consensus goes beyond our own borders. Foreign leaders and corporations pledged to invest a massive sum into the United States during Trump’s term, exceeding $21 trillion, a number Trump revealed in his Tuesday meeting with Mohammed bin Salman.Wars ending in the Congo, Gaza, Pakistan, Cambodia and Azerbaijan clearly show that the world at large took that same signal from the American electorate, that they want consensus and that division isn’t an option any longer.
While the political left has cast Trump as the incarnation of division and hate, that division does not functionally exist in policy, and indeed the opposite is true. Polling cements this fact strongly, showing that Americans support Trump’s agenda on both immigration and the economy compared to Biden by almost a double-digit margin. While Democratic voters remain opposed to Trump, the Democratic Party in Congress has all but conceded to the consensus demanded by the electorate. Voters sent a message in November 2024, and that message was clearly received by the political establishment. Americans want consensus, and that consensus is Trump.