Trump can be a great president. Here’s how he needs to govern.

If Donald Trump is to be an effective president, he fundamentally needs to work to bring this country together.

He has a governing majority in the Senate and in the House, which means he has the power, and indeed the mandate, to effect the kind of change he was elected to bring about.

{mosads}But that doesn’t mean Trump can govern with the agenda he has set out.

In fact, he needs to adopt inclusive policies that seek to underscore peoples’ desire for compromise. This includes efforts to expand healthcare, create jobs and be responsive to the need to empower minority neighborhoods, much in the way he set out in the campaign.

Indeed, this will be central to Trump’s success (if Trump is to be successful). There’s a long history in the Republican Party, starting with President Nixon — yes, President Nixon — and the late former Congressman Jack Kemp of promoting capitalism and job expansion in minority areas. Donald Trump has to follow through and do that to make good on his campaign pledges.  

He also has to work tirelessly to improve our failing system of education. We are not competitive in the world because our schools very simply aren’t up to par — only those who have the privilege of being in affluent suburban neighborhoods or private schools have the benefit of a great education. That means the president-elect needs to promote choice in education for all Americans, in both private and public schools as well as parochial schools.

I’ve known Donald Trump for 25 years and I know him to be a man who, despite some of his appearances on the campaign trail, seeks to build consensus and is by no means a racist. In fact, no presidential candidate in this country has employed more minorities than Donald Trump.

But this nation needs to be healed and brought together, and Trump needs to realize that this is as important as any goal he can have, including building a wall on the Mexican border.

There is also a challenge incumbent on the Democratic Party, and that is working similarly to bring the country together. Democrats must recognize that at a time when President Obama enjoyed near record approval ratings and the party had a vast advantage in terms of money and organization, they were handed what clearly is a resounding defeat.

The answer is not to move, as Bernie Sanders suggested, to the left, but to embrace Trump if he does in fact extend the olive branch, as I believe he needs to do. This means that Democrats have to put restricting illegal immigration at the top of their agenda whether or not they go along with his proposal to build a wall.

Democrats have to embrace school choice, as Trump has proposed, recognizing that to kowtow to the teachers union is a failure politically and substantively. They must recognize that we need commonsense tax reform, not just increasing taxes on the wealthy. This means a plan to repatriate cash from overseas corporations and to go along and support Trump’s plan to revise and simplify the current tax system.

There’s another issue that both sides agree on: infrastructure. If we don’t get an infrastructure program quickly, with bipartisan cooperation facilitated and promoted by the president with active Democratic support, we will fail.

There’s also a larger issue, bigger than all of this.

Unless the political parties — including the GOP establishment and the Democratic leadership in Congress — cooperate with the president, we will weaken America as a nation and our ability to influence world events.

We need bipartisan support to develop new and innovative strategies to go after ISIS, to project American leadership around the world and most of all to reassure our allies that the fundamental American values that have informed all American presidents’ policies will continue to reign supreme.

I couldn’t underscore this more strongly: Unless we systematically work to project American leadership around the world, get rid of sequestration to have a competitive defense budget and an increased spending on conventional and nuclear weapons, our status will continue to weaken.

The whole world has been looking with surprise, and indeed horror, at the results.

They shouldn’t.

The best of the American people represents commonsense consensus to achieve our goals. The goals may be different than when Election Day began with an expected Clinton presidency, but we can offer an America that works together.

This surely begins with President-elect Donald Trump — Democrats and Republicans alike need to meet him in the middle.

Douglas E. Schoen served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton. A longtime political consultant and pollster, he is also a Fox News contributor and the author of 11 books. His latest book is Putin’s Master Plan: To Destroy Europe, Divide NATO, and Restore Russian Power and Global Influence (Encounter, 2016). Available at Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @DouglasESchoen.

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