Wall Street Journal Editor-at-Large Gerard Baker said Donald Trump may get in his own way during his next four years as president.
Gerard Baker, who formerly served as the organization’s editor-in-chief, spoke at University Chapel on Jan. 27 to an audience of about 200. His talk, “Donald Trump and the New American Revolution,” focused on major political changes the United States is undergoing and was hosted by The Spectator.
Like many journalists, Baker has taken a stab at understanding the political forces that got Trump elected in 2016. In his talk, he described the era as a revolution in resistance to the recurring patterns of American institutions.
Baker broke down this old order into three fundamental pillars: globalism, “green extremism” and “woke cultural authoritarianism.”
Globalism is a rejection of American exceptionalism, Baker said. It is the idea that we no longer believe in nation-states, borders or national sovereignty.
Green extremism is an “incredibly destructive theology of environmentalism,” Baker said.
“I’m not a climate change skeptic,” he said. But some policies “destroy our ability to produce the energy that we need to have,” he added. “We don’t have to destroy ourselves in order to save the planet,” he said.
“Woke cultural authoritarianism,” which the university would be most familiar with, Baker said, is an unnecessary emphasis on identity politics.
What Trump offered in 2016, and continued to offer this election cycle, is a revolution against this progressive domination, Baker said.
Many of Trump’s decisions in the first week of his new term have reflected that revolution, Baker said.
Trump issued a slew of executive actions during his first week in office, according to Axios. He declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and attempted to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, an international treaty committed to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, and is rolling back several Biden-era environmental policies. He also ordered an end to governmental diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
But while Trump has taken swift action against all three institutional pillars in his first several days, Baker said that it won’t be easy for Trump to keep the momentum of his revolution.
“[Trump’s victory] is not on the scale of historic landslides of the past,” Baker said.
While Trump won the popular vote in the 2024 election, his margin was still within two percentage points, according to the New York Times. Republicans lost seats in the House of Representatives and only hold a slim majority in the House and Senate. Other challenges also threaten the progress of the Trump agenda, Baker said.
The key question is “whether or not [Trump] has the character to focus on what needs to be done […] as opposed to the things that he wants to do to promote himself,” Baker said.
Trump’s decisions, like pardoning hundreds of Jan. 6 protesters and launching his own meme coin for personal profit, may impair his administration’s ability to make changes to the country, Baker said. The biggest constraint on Trump’s ability to affect this revolution is not any political or economic condition, Baker said, but rather the extent to which he is able to forgo his own personal interests.
“I was impressed by [Baker’s] fairness in citing both the strengths and weaknesses of Trump in his political position,” said Ben Bankston, ’25, who attended the speech.
Bankston said that Baker acknowledged the Republican party’s weaknesses better than any other Spectator speakers he has seen in his four years on campus. The organization has faced petitions and complaints surrounding several speakers it has brought in years past, including Matt Walsh, according to previous reporting by the Phi.
Baker took questions from the audience for 20 minutes after his lecture. One student asked about his reaction to Trump’s comments on legacy media and fake news.
“Trump’s basically right about the media,” Baker said. “I have seen so many instances where the media just don’t care what the truth is.”
What Baker calls the left-leaning bias of news outlets is a main cause of American distrust of legacy media, he said. His book, “American Breakdown,” focuses on that lack of trust, and how it helped Trump win.
“America has done more to lift people out of oppression and poverty than any other country in the history of the world,” Baker said, “and I hope and believe that restoring those values, virtues and principles that achieved that will define us over the next few years.”