Name: Donald Trump’s Lost Pragmatism
Uploaded: 2026-05-04T23:09:00Z
Duration: 5 min 44 s
Description: An Editor at Large: It’s bad enough that the President got serious about tariffs, says columnist Gerard Baker, but how in the world did he end up embracing regime change?

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An Editor at Large: It’s bad enough that the President got serious about tariffs, says columnist Gerard Baker, but how in the world did he end up embracing regime change? Photo: Matt Rourke/Associated Press

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260504/73e81bab-d0d7-4538-8217-4efc99e19895/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

An Editor at Large: It’s bad enough that the President got serious about tariffs, says columnist Gerard Baker, but how in the world did he end up embracing regime change?

Donald Trump’s Lost Pragmatism

I think we had the greatest economy in history in my first administration. And in the second, I think we're blowing it away, but we had to make a detour. I'm sorry, we had to make a detour to Iran.

One factor that explains what's gone wrong with Donald Trump's second term is his abandonment of pragmatism as a governing principle. ♪ I see a woman in the night ♪

His unique status as a businessman president equipped him for a pragmatic approach to governing. On the economy, for example, in his first term, Mr. Trump's approach was highly practical.

I had Jeff Bezos and was on a call-

As demonstrated in that first meeting at Trump Tower with the leaders of America's biggest tech companies.

Well, I just wanna thank everybody. This is a truly amazing group of people.

Instead of lecturing them, which some thought was the approach taken by President Barack Obama, President Trump's approach was that of a businessman.

I'm here to help you folks do well. And you're doing well right now, and I'm very honored by the bounce.

It was a pragmatism that was on display during the COVID-19 crisis too. Mr. Trump initially endorsed lockdowns, but when the cost-benefit calculus suggested they did more harm than good, he pushed for a reopening.

Thank you very much.

And Operation Warp Speed must rank as one of the best examples of effective, practical government intervention in economic history.

You said there can be no political interference in your work and no bureaucracy to slow you down. Were both conditions met during this process for you?

Yes, I have to say, they were 100% met. I've had no interference. Bureaucracy was out the door.

That same pragmatism underlaid President Trump's first-term foreign policy. It was never accurate to say Mr. Trump was an isolationist. Instead he chose a practical approach that could serve as a model for prudent strategy that matched American objectives with its resources and exigencies.

The ISIS caliphate has been decimated.

At the same time, he followed a practical diplomacy, one that worked by abandoning the foreign policy orthodoxes of previous presidencies, whether confronting the strategic challenge of China or securing the Abraham Accords. But perhaps John Maynard Keynes was right when he said that, "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

So help me, God.

Congratulations, Mr. President.

Second-term Trump seems to represent the triumph of defunct ideas over practical policies.

My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Been waiting for a long time.

Tariffs can work if they're measured and targeted, but when you enslave yourself to them and insist against all practical evidence that they're the cornerstone of good economics, the effects are predictably ruinous. More surprising has been Mr. Trump's belated conversion to the foreign policy dogma of America as global regime change agent. Previously, he, better than anyone, seemed to have understood the lessons of this hubristic idea after two decades of failure.

We will stop racing to topple foreign, and you understand this, foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with.

The current Iran misadventure is precisely the kind of faith-based exercise Mr. Trump had so studiously avoided. Mr. President, you are on with about 5,000 Hungarian patriots and I think they love you even more than they love Viktor Orban.

Pragmatism's also been supplanted by the president's increasingly fanatical devotion to personal causes and vendettas.

You didn't allow people to storm your country and invade your country like other people have.

His unorthodox approach to America's allies was once effective, getting them, for example, to contribute more to collective defense. Now it seems to be divorced from practical motivation and driven almost entirely by personal pique and sentiment.

And we're gonna cut way down, and we're cutting a lot further than 5,000.

At home, the dogged pursuit of his political enemies is not only harming America's constitutional norms, it's actually undermining his policy objectives. It's one thing to launch ridiculous prosecutions against James Comey, another entirely to bully the chairman of the Federal Reserve to the point that monetary policy is affected.

This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions or whether, instead, monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.

The best mindset for a political leader is a commitment to core beliefs and ideas, allied to a flexible pragmatism in pursuing them. Even the best ideas need to be executed in ways that acknowledge the constraints of reality.

Cuba, which we will be taking over almost immediately.

And if the ideas turn out to be bad, a pragmatic approach means the damaging effects they may have can be vitiated by a wise submission to the facts.

On the way back from Iran, we'll have one of our big, maybe the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the biggest in the world, we'll have that come in, stop about 100 yards offshore, and they'll say, "Thank you very much, we give up."

What we have now is what happens when the pragmatism is gone and the ideas are just awful.

WSJ Opinion: Donald Trump’s Lost Pragmatism

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