By foto.katarinka @Adobe Stock
Stopping the Madness
No Republican president of the past 50 years has sought to radically reduce the size of government and balance the budget. No other Republican president closed the border and began deportations. What Republican president avoided optional ground wars while hitting aggressors from the air? What president has tried to stop a cultural counter-revolution to reverse the Left’s long march through America’s institutions?
Today, in America, we are witnessing the greatest effort to reinvent or, rather, as Victor Davis Hanson notes, restore the U.S. since the first 100 days of FDR’s radical New Deal revolution. Today’s effort can succeed even against the street theater nihilism, mainstreamed vulgarity, neo-terrorism, lawfare, and the congressional circus arrayed against it.
President Trump’s success hinges on speed and audacity, the rapid reassertion of its constitutional duties by the Supreme Court, constant discipline to prevent needless errors and leaks, calm and tragic explication and messaging rather than boastful high-fiving, and a constant reminder that their desperate opposition wishes to destroy this last effort to stop what had become sheer madness.
In American Greatness, VDH explains what will make or break Donald Trump’s successes/failures. Read how VDH explains Trump’s latest effort to undo the last 20 years of the most recent manifestation of the leftist cultural revolution inaugurated by Barack Obama.
Flooding the Zone: Can Trump achieve enough massive cuts to the federal workforce and federal spending to realistically project a balanced budget in 2-3 years? Can he use tariffs to adjudicate rough trade parity without panicking Wall Street and reduce our huge trade deficit, while stimulating the economy through increased energy production, some tariff income, massive foreign capital inflows, private-sector jobs, deregulation, and tax cuts? Can he end the war in Ukraine while denuclearizing Iran without blowing up the Middle East?
The answers remain uncertain. No one has really attempted these measures simultaneously.
Speed: Speed is of the essence. Trump must see most of his major counterrevolutionary steps enacted this year. At the same time, he needs to avoid a recession before the midterms. Otherwise, he may see a new Democratic majority House in 2026 that will do nothing but issue subpoenas, conduct investigations, and impeach him.
Democrats seem to have little desire to offer a comprehensive counter-agenda that would reflect their own ideas on how to achieve balanced budgets, a secure border, a deterrent foreign policy, fair trade, and energy dynamism. For now, bizarrely, these new Jacobins are de facto Trump’s allies by becoming so unhinged, often so repugnant in their smutty rhetoric and street violence, and so angry without constructive alternatives that the counter-revolutionary Trump seems centrist in comparison.
Trump’s agenda of cutting the size of government, balancing the budget, deregulating, achieving trade parity, expanding gas, oil, nuclear, and hydroelectric energy, and leveraging massive foreign investment in the U.S. will soon result in a booming economy. But the question is, how long will the bitter medicine of cutting spending, federal jobs, and the size of government, forcing trade symmetry, and shocking voters with layoffs and deregulation last? Or to put it another way, will the new oncologist be allowed to apply sufficient harsh radiation and chemotherapy to a near-terminal patient to see him recover?
The Supreme Court: The Supreme Court must restore our constitutional tripartite government. The court must stop allowing the brazen lower-court judiciary’s hijacking of U.S. foreign policy and national security—and do it within the next month or so. Otherwise, a group of minor federal judges, some 300-400 unelected but cherry-picked liberal appointees, will essentially be running the country. Power has gone to their narcissistic heads, and they grow ever more emboldened as special activist lawyers—funded by foundations and political action committees—send them an endless stream of marching orders and writs. Currently, Judge Boasberg, previously unknown, is now a megalomaniac. Boasberg believes he is a more powerful adjudicator of U.S. foreign policy and national security than the combined power of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and the President. And he may be right.
No Margin of Error: Trump has no margin of error, given thin congressional margins and the left-wing cultural juggernaut. So far, his nascent counter-revolution has been largely disciplined and well-managed. But he can afford no more avoidable psychodramas like the still inexplicable Signal leak to the likes of a hyper-partisan Jeffrey Goldberg.
Cabinet officials grow more silent, but carry even bigger sticks. The entire messaging of Team Trump must be sober, even tragic, without braggadocio. The latest Fox interview by Brett Baier of a reflective, soft-spoken Elon Musk and his DOGE team did more to win the public over to their thankless but critical task than all the grandstanding on social media or chainsaw theatrics.
Who Opened the Border: The Trump team needs to remind Americans that Trump did not open the border, but now his administration is forced to close it if the country is to exist. The public needs to recall that it is recklessly easy to allow entry to 12 million illegal aliens but almost impossible to find them all in a country of 345 million.
Righting Wrongs
Borrowing and spending is not hard, but cutting and saving is unenviable and unpopular.
It is much less trouble in Washington to dine with and leak to media celebrities, become a power couple on the A list, and play tit-for-tat and don’t-rock-the-boat than to become a despised disrupter on behalf of far-away people in rural Kansas, along the southern border, or in the inner-city without lobbyists, national audiences, or a fat checkbook.
It is easy to smile, pal around, and hand out money and commitments abroad at summits while foreign leaders welch on their military commitments and run up unsustainable trade surpluses with the US. Quite different is to demand from our allies and neutrals trade parity, reciprocity, and keeping defense commitments as prime ministers and their state media damn you as either crazy or sinister.
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