Is Donald Trump the overcorrection America needs?

With his approval ratings slipping, the economy creaking, and relations between America and just about every other country in the world rapidly deteriorating (Aside from Russia or course), Donald Trump's first few months in office have been nothing if not eventful.

But sometimes burning everything to the ground and starting again is the only way to fix underlying problems!

At least that's the rationale the remaining trump supporters are clinging to. That he's acting as a deliberate disruptor of some sort in order to affect eventual positive outcomes through his own obscure Machiavellian manipulations.

The problem is that it doesn't appear to most that Trump is doing this consciously, more that he's blindly thrashing around, throwing out a grab bag of ideas ranging from potentially useful and reasonable all the way through to downright odd or unhinged.

Pressurizing Europe to start to increase military spending so that they become more equal partners to the United States in NATO, perfectly reasonable and probably overdue. However, occupying Gaza to turn it into some sort of giant holiday resort, completely bonkers.

For the moderates, particularly the swing voters whose votes decide every American election, Trump's chaotic few months in power have been both an exercise in patience, and in realizing populist policies often come with a price.

Well… I'd like to remove biological males from women's sport and bathrooms, and governmental waste is a pain, but I don't really want to abandon Ukraine to the Russians or pay more for eggs. Oh, I see, they come as a package you say?

Similarly executive orders such as the removal of all DEI policies, cutting funding to USAID and mass firings of federal employees deemed to be superfluous may remove the negative aspects they intended to target, but they also do a lot of collateral damage.

USAID for example certainly funded a lot of special interest projects and things that most people would consider to be a waste of money, as per White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt:

"$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru."

But those generally pale in comparison to the unquestionably good work that USAID was doing in areas such as scientific advancement, medical aid and the like.

For a full list of terminated USAID contracts see here

But if Trump is the cartoon villain the left tends to paint him out to be, just how did he manage to win a landslide victory in the first place?

Part of the fault of course lies at the door of the Democrats themselves.

When it became clear that Biden was not medically capable of running they should have moved to a more slightly more centrist position and run a candidate capable to taking some of the popular vote away from Trump. At least somewhat distancing themselves with divisive policies on things like gender identity, DEI and so forth.

Instead they went for Kamala Harris, seemingly incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together and very much seen as a 'more of the same' choice after Biden. A view supported by recent allegations that suggest she was not allowed to break with policies Biden supported when she was declared as candidate.

That of course backfired spectacularly, and lead to a catastrophic defeat for the democrats. A defeat so thorough in fact that it should force the party to start asking some hard questions of itself. Not least of which will be avoiding the polarizing policies that appease very vocal, but very small, groups of supporters.

The republicans will likewise need to examine their own identity after Trump's term ends. The party in recent times has moved away from nearly all the traditional republican bases of support, leaving both parties free to reform exactly who they are trying to appeal to, and what they stand for.

As good or bad as Trumps second term turns out to be then, he might just be the hard-reset American politics needs.