Franke: Time for Some Presidential Focus

January 13, 2025

by Mark Franke

It’s high time for Donald Trump to focus.

His transition team got off to a good start by readying nominees for federal offices and Trump was active in the foreign policy space. A different Donald Trump was evident late in the campaign and it seemed the new Trump was for real.

Then Donald Trump 2.0 reverted to the 1.0 version.

Where did this nonsense of making Canada a 51st state come from? I’m sure they didn’t ask for it. Recall Canada’s stance in both 1776 and 1812 when Canadians had the opportunity to join the new United States but declined, both passively and actively. Canada has been a staunch ally for more than 100 years and is one of our most valued trade partners. We used to brag about the Canadian-U.S. border being the longest undefended border in the world. Then September 11 happened but that’s another story.

As if Canada wasn’t enough to covet, he then announced we needed Greenland, Denmark’s opinion notwithstanding. True, the GIUK gap (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) was one of the most significant strategic areas during the Cold War, with submarines from both sides playing a dangerous game of chicken below the surface. Russia still is a threat but I’m not aware of any disruption in our NATO relationship with the GIUK nations.

The Panama Canal is another strategic choke point but why Trump thinks he can demand it back escapes my understanding. The United States negotiated a 99-year lease and Panama refused to extend it. Those 99 years must have seemed an eternity to American diplomats at the time; Great Britain demonstrated the same lack of foresight in its lease of Hong Kong. But that was the deal and per our Constitution contracts are inviolable. 

And there is the strangest one of all: renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Who dreams these things up? How much transitional staff time was wasted on this idea? How much of Trump’s personal time? 

Donald Trump’s electoral victory was driven in large part by voters’ disgust with Washington’s apparent disinterest in solving any of the real problems we face, problems that threaten our future. The southern border is in crisis mode. Our budgetary deficit has pushed the national debt past the point of economic danger. Social Security and Medicare are predicted to go bankrupt in the next decade. Crime is rampant in the cities and war continues in Ukraine and the Mideast. That should be enough to focus any leader’s attention.

Every hour President-elect Trump spends on flights of fancy is an hour stolen from the people who elected him. He can’t defer everything important to Elon Musk, as preternaturally brilliant as that young genius may be. He made promises and we should hold him accountable to keep them. 

Anyone who has worked in a large organization understands how the whims of the big boss disrupt normal activity. Frequently this is a good thing when standard operating procedures need to be disrupted. More often though, it just distracts staff at all levels from real work. Been there, done that in my career.

The downside for Trump is that it distracts more than just his own staff. The public and the media also lose their focus. He will need public support if he is to make the needed but unpopular changes in our propensity for profligate spending. 

Social Security benefits and age eligibility criteria can’t be exempted. Past attempts to make reasonable modifications have been to the detriment of the forward-thinking politicians who proposed them. Any sensible idea is immediately attacked by a parade of special interest groups purporting to represent senior citizens.

Every federal program, financial subsidy and entitlement has a lobby standing watch over its preferential treatment hard won by political dealmaking sometime in the past. A pundit whose name I can’t recall once said that “when you start yanking snouts out of the public trough, there’s bound to be a lot of snorting.” 

All of this will require every last ounce of political good will Donald Trump brings with him to the White House. And it will require every last minute of his working day to find support wherever it is to be found. Compromises are the touchstone of democratic governance, compromises which advance the agenda of the elected majority without trampling the rights of the political minority. We just lived through four years of that.

There is a calculus involved here, a need for shrewd and insightful thinking to get the job done. The job needs to be done legislatively, through a childishly dysfunctional Congress that also must step up in this hour of need. 

Will the Republican congressional leadership prove they can lead? Will Donald Trump put all his political energy into those issues that really matter? These are the two salient questions I will keep in mind during the next year.

Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.



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