Democrats Betray Democracy to Stop Trump review

 

The Democrats have a new narrative, the Left in general does, that they are saving democracy from President Donald Trump. And that justifies “almost any means” necessary to achieve the end of destroying or preventing Donald Trump from governing effectively.

The problem with all of this is they are destroying democracy to destroy Donald Trump.

What do I mean? One of the issues that they are agitating is the redistricting of congressional districts in Texas and California now. And the general problem the Left has is, if you look at gerrymandering to make these jigsaw puzzle piece-like districts, the Left is way ahead of the Right. In other words, states that have proportions of 30% to 40% to 50% for Donald Trump do not have that level of representation in the Congress.

And there’s been sophisticated studies of gerrymandering. And it boils down to the Republicans are short some six to 10 seats in the House, based on the proportion of the national vote they have received.

The Democrats know that, but they’re angry about the Texas reapportionment and gerrymandering. And their attitude is: “We’ve already gerrymandered our states to the maximum. Don’t dare try to emulate us.”

James Carville said that they have to get tougher. That’s the new mantra: Gotta get tougher. Gotta get meaner. Sen. Cory Booker screams and yells and throws a fit about every three weeks in the Senate. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries picks up his baseball bat. There’s usually a video with “the squad” or representatives using the word “s—” or the F-word, kind of pornographic. Rep. Jasmine Crockett periodically calls Donald Trump names that can’t be repeated on air. But you can see the anger.

And now the new idea is that they haven’t been tough enough. They have been too tough.

There’s been three great scandals in the 21st century. The first was the Russian collusion hoax that was prompted by Hillary Clinton and facilitated by the Obama administration on its way out. That almost destroyed the Trump campaign, sabotaged his transition, and ate up 22 months of his first two years.

The second was the Biden FBI and CIA—but especially the CIA and the intelligence agencies—got 51 people, former intelligence authorities, to lie to the American people on the eve of the second debate to affect the 2020 election, and claim, falsely, that Donald Trump was lying about the laptop of Hunter Biden, that it was “fake,” that it was a “Russian production,” and Donald Trump then was colluding, again, with the Russians.

That was a complete lie. It was Hunter’s laptop. We know because the FBI had it in its possession and authenticated it.

And finally, the great scandal that the Democratic Party and the obsequious media knew that President Joe Biden was non compos mentis, he was not cognitively able to fulfill the office of the presidency. And they kept that from the American people, until they could no longer keep it, when he finally challenged Donald Trump to a debate and melted before our very eyes. Sort of like the Wicked Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.” He melted into a non-entity.

So, my point is, if you look at the Democrats, they have staged three great scandals to try to destroy the Trump administration and by extension, democracy.

They impeached Donald Trump twice. No one’s ever done that. They tried him as a private citizen. Nobody’s ever done that. They raided his home in Mar-a-Lago. That is a terrible precedent for an ex-president. No one’s ever done that. They tried to get him off the ballot in 25 states. No one had ever done that. There were two assassination attempts during the campaign. That had never happened before. They tried to debank him and make it impossible for Donald Trump to write a check, whether from Morgan Stanley or Bank of America, or any bank.

So, my point is this, when James Carville says, “We’re gonna get tough. We’re gonna get really tough. And we’re gonna let in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., to get four senators. Or we might have to pack the court to 13 justices,” I’m thinking, “Well, you always were going to do that.”

You were gonna pack to 15. In fact, if you had not lost the House and Senate during the Biden administration, had you had a normal president that was in control of his mental and physical abilities, then you would have not only packed the court and not only, as you promised, let in two states, but in addition, you would’ve gotten rid of the Electoral College by the hook and crook of the national voter compact. And more importantly, you would’ve abolished the Senate.

So the problem, James Carville and Democrats, is that you have sabotaged democracy. And you’ve done things that no one has ever done before to an oppositional candidate, presidential transition, and president.

And now you’re furious because you’re on the 40% side of every issue that’s dear to you—from the trans issue to the border issue, to the crime issue, to the Green New Deal issue, to foreign policy. And you have no political power. You don’t have the White House, you don’t have the Congress, you don’t have the Supreme Court. And your institutional power—the media, academia, the foundation—they are under assault.

And so, you’re frustrated and you’ve created this completely false narrative that you have to get tough, and you’ve been very Marquess of Queensberry rules-like. In fact, the opposite is true, everybody. You have been the most vicious and the most abject subverts of democracy, all for the short-term gain of destroying Donald Trump. And now that’s boomeranging upon you. And you don’t like to see it happen to you—what you tried to do to Donald Trump.

And there’s a whole vocabulary, cross-culturally, for what is happening to you now. It’s called payback is a “blank,” karma, boomerang, do unto others as you should do unto you, only eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. But this is called retribution. And it’s fully earned for what you’ve done to democracy, as long as it’s legal and it’s necessary.

But you’re angry because you’re impotent, and you’ve created false narratives that Donald Trump is doing what you have actually done. And what is that? Destroying democracy.

Trump’s Counterrevolution Is Succeeding Beyond Expectations

 

We’re watching the greatest counterrevolution in some 90 years. We have not seen any president try to radically change the political calculus and the nature of government since Franklin D. Roosevelt did it, from the Left, during the New Deal of the mid-1930s.

And what do I mean by that? President Donald Trump closed the border. Nobody thought he could. He closed it. He has now deported over 100,000 criminal illegal aliens and 1 million have self-deported, of all statuses, who were here illegally.

He’s basically declared war on DEI. And he’s winning that argument. He has barred biological males from competing in women’s sports. He has full public support for doing that and he’s making enormous inroads.

The universities are rushing and competing with each other to cut a deal with Donald Trump, and to agree to not gouge the federal government on federal grants through their surcharges of way over 40% or 50%; to follow civil rights legislation, the Supreme Court, and not discriminate by race or gender, as they do in admissions, hiring, promotion, tenure; and to be disinterested and be fair and follow, as I said, free speech canons in the Bill of Rights on campus.

What am I getting at? Donald Trump is winning on all of these social and cultural issues.

Abroad, we see that Iran no longer poses a nuclear threat for the immediate future; that Israel’s enemies—whether Hezbollah or Hamas or Houthis—are in disarray or severely attrited; Iran is no longer a threat to the Gulf states or Israel, at least for the immediate future; and we see some progress with Ukrainian war.

People are angry about this counterrevolution for two reasons: It’s succeeding and it’s succeeding beyond anybody’s wild expectation.

Naysayers, The Wall Street Journal news page said we would be in a recession now, the tariffs would cause a trade war, and we would see the stock market collapse. The opposite has happened: $15 trillion of foreign investment promised and $300 billion in tariff revenue anticipated.

We don’t know the eventual effects of these new tariffs, but for now, all of our economists who predicted gloom and doom were wrong. All of our cultural critics who said the universities would be destroyed by Donald Trump, that he would arrest innocent people who just happened to forget to get a visa, and he wouldn’t go after criminals—they are wrong too.

So, people are angry about this counterrevolution because it’s working. But there’s another reason why they’re angry. He’s not addressing the symptoms, as he did in the first administration.

He doesn’t have people around him, as he did in the first administration—a Rex Tillerson; a Bill Barr, a good man, but Bill Barr was not on the MAGA agenda; Jim Mattis; people like “anonymous” Omarosa Manigault Newman—all of these people who thought that they knew better than Donald Trump and they would either stop what he was trying to do or reinterpret what he was trying to do.

In other words, he has a team that is devoted to his counterrevolution, and more importantly, to the symptoms of the progressive project.

The symptoms of the progressive project are not just the Democrats exercising power in Congress or holding the White House, it’s how they get that power.

And they get that power through PBS and NPR, now defunded; cable news and slanted network news, now under assault when they lie and defame and face court ramifications; the universities that indoctrinate people, now facing large fines, tax on their endowments, a renewed way of a new government attention toward student loans, $1.7 trillion program surcharges, as I said, and segregation on campus in dorms, graduation ceremonies. The universities are now under scrutiny. We’re seeing the Department of Education itself being questioned.

And I mentioned before, in addition to education and the media, Donald Trump is attacking the very idea that residency is synonymous with citizenship. That if you came here illegally, if you reside illegally, then you are eventually going to face a deportation—even if you have not been a violent criminal, and even if you haven’t been served with deportation papers.

So, what he is trying to do is tell the American people that the Left exercises power, even when they do not control government, any branch of government. And they exercise power, even though on most of the issues, if not all of them, their constituency is only 40%. The majority of the American people oppose their agenda.

And they do this through the bureaucracies, through the media, through the universities, through the popular culture. And these are the very sources that Donald Trump is asking them to reform. And the government is going to shrink. The government’s gonna get out of the media business. The government’s gonna take a hard look at universities who want and obtain federal funds.

And we’re going to see the counterrevolution, I think, succeed, with one caveat. We’re going to see in the next year a frenzy, a frantic, almost out-of-mind reaction from the Left because they know that if this counterrevolution succeeds, it’ll be very difficult for them to push down an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.

So, brace yourself. We’re looking at the resistance coming up to the counterrevolution, and it’s going to be fierce and unhinged.

The Real Issue With a University President’s Comments on Eliminating Whiteness

 

Recently, we discussed Dr. Luke Wood, the president of California State University of Sacramento, and a video that has been recently circulating in which he says he plans to “eliminate whiteness.” And there was a discussion whether whiteness is separate from or synonymous with being white.

And I suggested to you that this was a very deleterious and stupid thing to say, and it was divisive in a multiracial democracy. In other words, it’s like saying that your image in the mirror, you can destroy that. But it has nothing to do with you, the real person who is projecting that image. In other words, that’s just a reflection of who you are.

Whiteness, according to his logic, would be a reflection of people who are white. And he couldn’t explain that when asked to.

But he and his university were upset that there were things that I said to you that he thought were factually incorrect—three or four of them. I’d like to go through them. And because I talk to you without notes and I don’t read a script, I want to make sure that everything I say is accurate and factual.

So, let’s review what California State University of Sacramento has sent to The Daily Signal and me to ask for a correction.

The first thing they said is, “California State University, Sacramento, also known as Sacramento State, is the only public university in the world’s fourth-largest economy. It is not in the same city as UC Davis.”

Two problems with that. I never said it was in the same city as UC Davis. I am a fifth-generation Californian. I can assure you, I know that UC Davis is in Davis, and Sacramento State, if I could use that term for CSU Sacramento, is in Sacramento. What I said was that it is “near” UC Davis. I think the adverb and adjective “near” is pretty accurate for UC Davis’ relationship with California State University of Sacramento. They’re only 20 miles apart.

But this is even more disturbing, when he said, “California State University of Sacramento, also known as Sacramento State, is the only public university in the world’s fourth-largest economy.”

There are 23 CSU universities. In other words, there’s 22 state colleges other than Sacramento State. And there’s nine Universities of California that are public universities. Sacramento State, in other words, is not “the only public university in the world’s fourth-largest economy.”

Maybe he meant it’s the only public university in Sacramento, that is the capital of the fourth-largest economy. But that’s not what he wrote. And that is not a correction of what I said.

He said, “Dr. Luke Wood has been president of Sacramento State since July 2023.”

I said, in fact, “about a year.” I’m not sure that “about a year” is that off from two years. It could be about a year. It could mean over a year. But I don’t think that’s a serious mistake.

The third is, he said, “Dr. Hanson said that Wood was at UC San Diego, when in fact he was at San Diego State.”

I confess that I confused San Diego State University and the University of California at San Diego. And I want to make that correction.

And finally, “Wood coined the term ‘racelighting,’ not ‘blacklighting.'”

I used the term “blacklighting.”

“The interview referenced in your video is several years old as well. Wood has since addressed the heavily edited clip on his X account. You can read his comment here.”

Two things. That’s a distinction without a difference. If you label something he is saying, when he’s talking about getting rid of whiteness and he says that he has developed or has embraced a theory called “racelighting” and I term that “blacklighting,” I’m sorry I didn’t use the specific term, but essentially, it’s the same.

He’s suggesting that people adopt a particular vocabulary, syntax, and messaging tailored only to black people, so that they don’t feel harmed or second-guessed. Or, in other words, they deserve a special discourse that’s not accorded to other minority groups or white people.

And he’s upset that he said that he co-founded racelighting and not founded it, as I said. Again, another distinction without a difference.

He seems to be upset that he gave an interview, he says, in 2017, and then it has been reposted, to which I replied on July 29, 2025. I didn’t say that this was dated in 2017. I was replying to a recently appearing video. And that’s exactly what it was.

Apparently, Dr. Luke Wood—I think his full name is Jonathan Wood. Jonathan Luke Wood is upset because he gave an interview in which—and it was not sliced and diced. There’s a long segment of 30 seconds or so. And you can see it, that segment has not been edited, when he says he wants to “eliminate whiteness.”

The problem is that he’s on record saying it. It resurfaced. People saw it. And it spread like wildfire over the internet. Hence, my attention to it and my discourse to you about it.

But I can’t help it if Dr. Wood has said things in his past that seem to be racialist and divisive, and that now he is a president of a major California State University campus that’s multiracial, and he has a responsibility to all different groups to be disinterested and treat people as people, in which race is incidental, not essential to whom they are.

And yet, nevertheless, he suggests that he’s not responsible, I guess, for saying what he did because he said it in 2017 and it’s been reappearing, most recently, in clips. He hasn’t challenged that he didn’t say it. He’s addressed that he thinks he could have added context to it. But nevertheless, he said it.

And nevertheless, I think that it’s really dangerous to have a president of a major public university in California—in which, again, we are a multiracial society—to engage in such racially divisive language, whether he said it in 2017 or he said it today, or whether he said it on July 29.

What he needs to say is, “I don’t believe that I’m going to eliminate whiteness. I don’t have any particular grievance about white people or the projection of their culture, if I think that is what it is.”

In other words, Dr. Wood, I suggest you just calm down and instead of trying to attack people who represent your views fairly—and by the way, the corrections here had mistakes as well. So, it is hard to offer a correction for a correction that’s false.

But I think it would be far wiser of you to just say, “I spoke out of turn. I do not want to eliminate whiteness. Whiteness is a vague term that I will not use anymore. It’s polarizing and it has no place on a campus in California, much less coming from a president of that campus.”

MAGA agonistes

 

The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and his eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.

Although only partially implemented during Trump’s first term, maga policies nevertheless marked a break from many past Republican orthodoxies, especially in their signature skepticism concerning the goal of nation-building abroad and the so-called endless wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, that tended to follow. But like all counterrevolutions, there were intrinsic challenges in the transition from simply opposing the status quo to actually ending it.

There was a promising start during Trump’s first administration. Corporate interest in a porous border to ensure inexpensive labor was ignored; immigration was deterred or restricted to legal channels, and the border was largely secured. Deregulation and tax cuts, rather than deficit reduction, were prioritized. Selective tariffs were no longer deemed apostasies from the free market, but acceptable and indeed useful levers to enforce reciprocity in foreign trade. Costly middle-class entitlements were pronounced sacrosanct. Social Security and Medicare were declared immune from cost-cutting and privatization.

This “action plan to Make America Great Again” went hand in hand with an effort to transform the Republican Party. What had once been routinely caricatured as a wealthy club of elites was reinvented by Trump as a working-class populist movement. Racial chauvinism and tribalism were rejected. Race was to be seen as incidental to shared class concerns—notably, reining in the excesses of a progressive, identity-politics-obsessed bicoastal elite. Athletes who in 2020 had bent a knee to express outrage at “systemic” racism were in 2024 celebrating their scores by emulating Trump’s signature dance moves.

Despite intense resistance from the media, the Democratic Party, and the cultural Left, the first Trump term enjoyed success in implementing many of these agendas. After losing the 2020 election—in which nearly 70 percent of voters in key swing states voted by mail-in ballot—Trump left office without a major war on his watch. He had overseen a period with 1.9 percent annualized inflation, low interest rates, steady economic growth, and, finally, after constant battles and controversy, a secure border with little illegal immigration.

Yet during the succeeding four-year Biden interregnum, the world became far more chaotic and dangerous, both at home and abroad. Biden’s general agenda was to reverse by executive order almost every policy that Trump had implemented. And while Trump was successfully reelected in 2024 after reminding voters that they had been far better off under the maga agenda than during Biden’s subsequent shambolic tenure, the changed conditions in 2024 will also make implementing that agenda even more difficult than after Trump’s first victory.

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

Second, in the 2024 election, Trump won a record number of Hispanic voters (somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, depending on how the term “Hispanic” is defined) in one of the most dramatic political defections from the Democratic Party in history. While voters’ switch to Trump can be largely attributed to the deleterious effects of the Biden-Harris open border on Hispanic communities, schools, and social services, no one knows what, if any, might be the paradoxical political effects of the mass deportation of many within these same Hispanic communities.

Will Hispanic voters continue to resent the ecumenical nature of illegal immigration across the southern border, which now draws millions from outside Latin America? Will they wish to focus primarily on violent criminals while exempting on a case-by-case basis Mexican nationals, many of whom have kinship ties to Hispanic U.S. citizens? In sum, no one yet knows the political consequences of deporting all—or even 5 to 10 percent—of the Biden-era illegal aliens, given their unprecedented numbers. Even if polls tell us that 52 percent of Americans support “massive” deportations, will that number still hold true if they eventually include friends and relatives or entail five or six million deportations?

Trump’s fiscal policies pose similar known unknowns. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised a number of large tax cuts to various groups. For example, eliminating taxes on service workers’ tips might cost the treasury in excess of $10 billion a year. Trump’s call to make tax-free the incomes of police officers, firefighters, veterans, and active-duty military personnel would translate into at minimum a shortfall of $200 billion a year in federal tax revenue. Another $200 billion in annual revenue would be lost if, as promised, Trump once again allowed state and local taxes to be deducted from federal income taxes. Some $300 billion per annum would also vanish under Trump’s proposals to cease taxing hourly overtime pay. Other promises to eliminate taxes on Social Security income, cut corporate taxes to 15 percent, or reextend his 2017 tax cuts could in toto reach $1 trillion in lost federal revenue per year.

The 2024 yearly deficit was projected at about $1.83 trillion. So how would Trump reach his goal of moving toward a balanced budget if all the promised tax reductions were realized, with a yearly loss of at least $1 trillion in revenue added to the nearly $2 trillion currently borrowed each year? No one knows the precise increase in annual revenues that will accrue from greater productivity and economic growth due to Trump’s deregulatory and tax-reduction agendas. Furthermore, how much income can be expected from proposed reciprocal tariffs on foreign imports? And how much will realistically be gained in savings from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency and their promise to cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget?

So far, Trump’s proposed radical tax cuts are quite popular, mostly transparent, and often detailed, while the commensurate massive reductions in federal spending are as yet none of the above. The political success of Trump’s tax and spending reductions will hinge on the degree to which he can eliminate massive unpopular waste, slash useless programs, increase federal revenue from targeted foreign tariffs, and through incentives grow the size and incomes of the taxpaying public and corporations—without touching sacrosanct big-ticket items like defense, Social Security, and Medicare. It bears noting that no prior administration has been able to cut the annual defecit while also massively reducing federal income taxes.

Trump has also promised a radically new and different cohort to run his cabinet posts and large agencies. In his first term, Trump’s agenda was stymied by both his own political appointees and the high-ranking officials of the administrative state. Starting in 2017, they saw their new jobs as either warping maga directives into their own preferred policies or colluding to block a supposedly unqualified and indeed “dangerous” Trump. Almost monthly, his cabinet heads or agency directors—John Bolton, James Comey, John Kelly, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Christopher Wray—were at odds with their politically inexperienced president.

Anonymous lower-ranking officials routinely claimed to the media that they were internally frustrating Trump initiatives and leaked embarrassing (and possibly fabricated) anecdotes about their president. One supposedly high-ranking Trump official known as “Anonymous” —later revealed to be a rather low-ranking bureaucrat named Miles Taylor—began a New York Times hit piece, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” He further boasted of how appointees deliberately tried to sabotage Trump policies and executive orders.

But paradoxes also arise from Trump’s 2024 remedies for this earlier internal obstruction. Given this past experience, only genuine outsiders appear immune to the compromises and careerism endemic among veterans of the administrative state. And yet such would-be reformers often lack the insider knowledge, expertise, and familiarity with the government blob needed to reduce or eliminate it.

The radical growth in the federal government, the surge in entitlements, the increases in regulations and taxes, and the soaring deficit and national debt were overseen by so-called experts in the bureaucracy as well as by traditional politicians on both sides of the aisle. In response, would-be reformers have talked grandly about the dangers of unsustainable national debt, the interest payments that now exceed $1 trillion per year, and the need to rein in nearly $2 trillion in annual budget deficits. But few, especially in Congress, may be willing to cancel the sacred-cow programs that have enriched their constituents, provided jobs for millions of Americans, and offered high-paying revolving-door billets for retired politicians and their staffers.

For example, the general public, liberal and conservative alike, acknowledges vast waste and wrongheaded procurement at the Pentagon. Auditors quietly grant that massive subsidies and corporate welfare to pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, and crony-capitalist wind- and solar-energy companies are near scandalous. An increasing number of voters now believe that the government needs to get out of the business of guaranteeing student loans that are nonperforming, stop funding boondoggles like high-speed rail, and dismantle the vast dei-commissar system at government agencies.

Yet those most familiar with these programs are their beneficiaries. And those who could most effectively discontinue them are precisely those who perhaps could least be trusted to do so. Therefore, outsiders are needed, even or especially those without the degrees and résumés customarily required to run these huge government entities.

Trump’s cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth, for example, a decorated combat veteran who wrote a book on the Pentagon’s pathologies, is by conventional standards unqualified to be the defense secretary. He is not a four-star officer, former Fortune 500 ceo, or prior cabinet official. Unlike his two predecessors, however, he would not revolve into the office from a post at a defense corporation with huge Pentagon contracts.

The fbi nominee Kash Patel has a lengthy record of government service in Congress, the executive branch, and legal circles. But he also is a fierce critic of the fbi and was once himself a target of agency monitoring. Indeed, Patel wrote a book about fbi misadventures, incompetence, and political weaponization. He promises to move the agency outside of Washington, D.C., and to end its political contamination—which has earned him fierce opposition from within the bureau and its congressional and media supporters.

In rejection of the Republican establishment that obstructed him in his first administration, Trump has often opted for anti-big-government picks who were once Democrats or who otherwise emphatically reflect the populist nature of the new Republican Party, such as Tulsi Gabbard (National Intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services), Dr. Marty Makary (Food and Drug Administration), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (National Institutes of Health), or Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Labor).

In sum, while it is not impossible for reformers to emerge from the status quo, it is precisely those “unqualified,” “firebrand,” or “dangerous” outsiders without “proper” experience in government, without prestigious degrees and credentials, and without sober and judicious reputations within the bureaucracies (indeed, they are sometimes the very targets of the agencies that they are tasked to reform or end) who are most immune to being compromised by those bureaucracies.

But it is abroad where the implementation of the maga agenda will be most severely stress-tested, particularly regarding China, Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East. Trump’s first term was neither isolationist nor interventionist. He loathed nation-building, but he also ridiculed the appeasement strategies of prior administrations. Recalling the Roman military commentator Vegetius’s famous aphorism si vis pacem, para bellum (If you desire peace, prepare for war), Trump’s strategy in building up the nation’s defenses and reforming the Pentagon was not to fight elective ground wars or to democratize foreign nations, but to avoid future conflicts through demonstrable deterrence.

A good example is his first-term experience with radical Islamists in the Middle East. On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration killed by drone the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani near the Baghdad airport. Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath. After the Trump cancellation of the Iran deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases in Iraq and Syria—most of which, ironically, Trump himself wished to remove.

A few days after Soleimani’s death, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike of twelve missiles against two U.S. airbases in Iraq, assuming that Trump had no desire for a wider Middle Eastern war. Tehran had supposedly warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks, which killed no Americans. Later reports, however, did suggest that some Americans suffered concussions and that more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed. Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East, while restoring deterrence that prevented, rather than prompted, full-scale conflicts.

Yet in a second Trump administration, such threading of the deterrence needle may become far more challenging. The world today is far more dangerous than it was when Trump left office in 2021. The U.S. military is far weaker, suffering from munitions shortages, massive recruitment shortfalls, dei mandates, and dwindling public confidence. The State Department is far less credible, and America’s enemies have been long nursed on Biden-era appeasement. Four years ago, for example, no one would have dreamed that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians would become casualties in a full-scale war on Europe’s doorstep.

Indeed, an inept Biden administration crippled U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters. In March 2021, Chinese diplomats brazenly dressed down newly appointed Biden-administration diplomats in Anchorage without rebuke. The debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the greatest abandonment of U.S. arms and facilities in American military history. Six months later, an observant Vladimir Putin correctly surmised that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would likely face few countermeasures from a now humiliated and unsteady United States.

In late January 2023, the meandering and uninterrupted week-long flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the American homeland seemed to exemplify the general disdain enemies now held for the Biden administration. Indeed, foreign foes assumed that there would be few Western consequences for their aggression, at least during a window of opportunity never before seen—nor likely to be repeated.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists, followed eagerly by a ragtag mob of Gazans, stormed into Israel. They murdered, tortured, raped, or took hostage some 1,200 Israeli victims, sparking a theater-wide war against Israel instigated by Iran and its surrogates.

The serial Houthi attacks on international shipping intensified to such a degree that the Red Sea joined the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean as virtual no-go zones for Western shipping, given the absence of visible American and nato deterrents. By autumn 2024, Iran had launched five hundred missiles, rockets, and drones at the Israeli homeland, with the United States loudly enjoining de-escalation and restraint on our Israeli ally.

By year’s end, tens of thousands of North Korean combat troops were fighting with Russians on the Ukrainian border. And by late 2024, the combined Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, and missing had passed one million, in the greatest European charnel house since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.

All these foreign wars and quagmires pose dilemmas for maga reformers. Again, Trump was not elected to be a nation-builder, globalist, or neoconservative interventionist. Conversely, he is no isolationist or appeaser, on whose watch the world would continue to descend into the chaos of the past four years. Yet Trump in 2024 is much more emphatic about the need to avoid such dead-end overseas entanglements, or even the gratuitous use of force that can lead to tit-for-tat entanglements. That caution may obscure his Jacksonian foreign policy and wrongly convince opportunists to test his frequent braggadocio and purported deterrence credentials.

In this regard, Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as vice president and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, along with Tucker Carlson and the once-Democratic pacifist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as close advisors—
coupled with his announcements that the hawkish former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley would not be in the administration—may be misinterpreted by scheming foreign adversaries as proof of a new Trumpian unilateral restraint.

The Republican Party is now the party of peace, and Trump the most reluctant president to spend American blood and treasure abroad in memory. Trump broke with previous Republican interventionism largely because he damned past American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars while they distracted from an unsustainable national debt, a nonexistent southern border, and a floundering lower-middle class. Similarly, it is no wonder that the public often sees the use of force abroad as coming at the zero-sum expense of unaddressed American needs at home. Moreover, a woke, manpower-short military has disparaged and alienated the working-class recruits who disproportionately sought out combat units and fought and died in far-off Afghanistan and Iraq.

Recently, however, even as President Trump’s inner circle emphasized a stop to endless conflicts, Trump himself in November 2024 warned Vladimir Putin not to escalate his attacks against Ukraine. Yet that warning was followed by massive Russian air onslaughts against largely civilian Ukrainian targets—and further threats of tactical nuclear weapons deployed against Ukraine. Trump also instructed Hamas and Hezbollah to cease their wars against Israel, and advised the former to release the hostages, Americans particularly—or else.

Vladimir Putin no doubt took note, but he also may have wished to encourage America’s enemies to test Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric against his campaign’s domestic promises to mind America’s own business at home. So, is there a way to square the circle of neither appeasing nor unwisely intervening?

Trump will have to speak softly yet clearly while carrying a club. For the first few months of his tenure, his administration will be tested as never before to make it clear to Iran and its terrorist surrogates, as well as China, North Korea, and Russia, that aggression against U.S. interests will swiftly incur disproportionate and overwhelming repercussions—in order to prevent wider wars that eventually might require the use of much larger forces.

Ukraine is, paradoxically, a case study of both the dangers of American intervention in distant foreign wars and the consequences of being regarded as weak, timid, and unable or unwilling to protect friends and deter enemies. The cauldron on the Ukrainian border, as already noted, has likely already caused between 1 and 1.5 million Ukrainian and Russian casualties, soldiers and civilians alike. There is no end in sight after three years of escalating violence. And there are increasing worries that strategically logical and morally defensible—but geopolitically dangerous—Ukrainian strikes on the Russian interior could escalate and lead to wider wars among the world’s nuclear powers. Joe Biden’s post-election decision to allow Ukraine to launch sophisticated American missiles deep into the Russian homeland was met by further Russian warnings of escalation to the use of
nuclear weapons.

Many on the right wish for Trump immediately to cut off all aid to Ukraine for what they feel is an unwinnable war, even if that cessation would end any leverage to force Putin to negotiate. They feel the conflict was egged on by a globalist Left, as a proxy conflict waged to ruin Russia to the last Ukrainian soldier. These critics see the war as conducted by a now undemocratic Ukrainian government, without elections, habeas corpus, a free press, or opposition parties, led by an ungracious and corrupt Zelensky cadre that has intrigued with the American Left in an election year. Preferring negotiations that might cede Ukrainian territories already occupied by Russia for guarantees of peace, they point to polls revealing that less than half of the Ukrainian people are confident of a full military “victory” that would restore the country’s 1991 borders.

In contrast, many on the left see Putin’s invasion and the Right’s weariness with the costs of Ukraine as the long-awaited proof of the Trump–Russia “collusion” unicorn and generally perfidious Trumpian Russophilia. They judge Putin, not China’s imperialist juggernaut, as the real enemy. And they discount the dangers of a new Russia–China–Iran–North Korea axis. To see Ukraine at last defeat Russia, recover all of the Donbas and Crimea, and destroy the Putin dictatorship, they are willing to feed the war with American cash and weapons—again, to the last Ukrainian.

Trump vowed to end the catastrophe within a day by doing what is now taboo—namely, calling up Vladimir Putin and making a deal that would do the seemingly impossible and entice Russia back inside its pre-invasion borders of February 24, 2022, thus preserving a reduced but still autonomous, and even secure, Ukraine. How could Trump pull this off?

Ostensibly, Trump would be following the advice of a growing number of Western diplomats, generals, scholars, and pundits who have reluctantly outlined a general plan to stop the slaughter. But how would the dictator Putin face the Russian people with anything short of an absolute annexation of Ukraine, after wasting a million Russian casualties?

Perhaps, after the deal, Putin could brag to Russians that he institutionalized forever his 2014 annexations of the majority-Russian Donbas and Crimea; that he prevented Ukraine from joining nato on the doorstep of Mother Russia; and that he achieved a strategic coup in uniting Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea in a grand new alliance against the West and particularly the United States, with the acquiescence if not support of the nato member Turkey and an ever more sympathetic India.

And what would Ukraine and the West gain from such an example of the Trumpian “art of the deal”? Kyiv might boast that, as the bulwark of Europe, Ukraine heroically saved itself from Russian annexation, as was envisioned by Putin in the 2022 attempt to decapitate Kyiv and absorb the entire country. Ukraine was subsequently armed by the West and fought effectively enough to stymie the Russian juggernaut and humiliate and severely weaken the Russian military—to the benefit of nato and EU nations. Trump might then pull off the agreement if he could further establish a demilitarized zone between the Russian and Ukrainian borders and ensure EU economic help for a Ukraine fully armed to deter an endlessly restless Russian neighbor.

What would be the incentives for such a deal, and would they be contrary to the interests of the American people or antithetical to the views of the new Republican populist-nationalist coalition? First, consider that if Trump were to cut all support for Ukraine, it would likely soon be absorbed by Russia. The maga Right would then be blamed for a humiliation comparable to the Kabul catastrophe. Indeed, the fallout would likely be worse, since the situation in Ukraine, unlike the Afghanistan mess, required only American arms, rather than lives. In contrast, if the conflict grinds on and on, at some point the purportedly humanitarian yet pro-war Left will be permanently stamped as the callous party of unending conflict, and seen as utterly indifferent to the Ukrainian youth consumed to further its endless vendetta against a Russian people who also are worn out by the war.

Both Russia and Ukraine are running out of soldiers, with escalating casualties that will haunt them for years. Russia yearns to be free of sanctions and to sell oil and gas to Europe. The West, and the United States in particular, would like to triangulate with Russia against China and vice versa, in Kissingerian style, and thus avoid any multi-power nuclear standoff.

Trump wants global quiet in order to increase and stockpile American munitions with an emboldened China on the horizon. He will inherit a U.S. military budget dangerously exhausted by wasteful procurement of overpriced systems like the F-22 aircraft and the littoral combat ship, by cuts in training for troops and maintenance of ships, and by massive aid to Ukraine and Israel. Accordingly, Trump prefers allies like Israel that can win with a few billion, rather than those that continue to struggle after receiving $200 billion, as Ukraine has done.

Last, Europe is mentally worn out by the war, and increasingly reneging on its once-boastful unqualified support for Ukraine, as it hopes the demonic Trump can both end the hated war and be hated for ending it.

The same challenge of forcefully dissuading bullies while avoiding exhausting wars will confront Trump in the Middle East. To restore deterrence, Trump will have to put the Houthis on notice that their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea will earn them something more deleterious than the Biden administration’s passive deflections of shore-to-ship missile attacks. That passivity has so far cost the Unites States about $2 billion in munitions without achieving tangible results.

Iran, of course, is at the nexus of Middle Eastern tensions. Both fear of Tehran’s missiles and the Biden administration’s opposition paralyzed the Abraham Accords. Iran supplies all the terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—that have attacked Israel since Trump’s departure. Accordingly, Trump will likely lift American restraints on Israel, supply the necessary heavy-duty ordnance should it wish to retaliate against Iranian attacks by taking out Iran’s nuclear program and oil-export facilities, and deter Russia and China from intervening to help their client Iran.

In sum, to ensure that there are no theater-wide conflicts in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe and beyond, Trump will have to use disproportionate force to dispel the image of the United States as indifferent to aggression due to fears of costly intervention.

The maga revolution that will now ensue in the four years of Trump’s second and last presidential term promises to remake America in ways only haphazardly realized four years ago. In Trump’s favor this time around are his past years of governance and his knowledge of the sort of opposition he will now face—after two impeachments, five weaponized civil and criminal court cases, repeated efforts to remove his candidacy from state ballots, two assassination attempts, and three brutal presidential campaigns.

The failed Biden years—the entrance of twelve million illegal aliens through a deliberately opened border, wars abroad, inflation, and soaring crime—helped propel the most spectacular political resurrection in American political history. The backroom Biden removal from the Democratic nomination, the subsequent listless Harris campaign, and the ever more radical trajectory of the increasingly unpopular Democratic Party have all put Trump in a far more powerful position than when he entered the presidency in 2017 or when he left office in 2021.

Trump’s success in resetting the United States will hinge not merely on outwitting the desperation of his enemies, but also on navigating the paradoxes of implementing his own maga agenda.

DEI has long been corrupted

 

President Donald Trump’s executive orders banning Diversity, Equity, Inclusion-related racial and gender preferencing have ostensibly doomed the DEI industry.

But DEI was already on its last legs. Half of all Americans no longer approve of racial, ethnic or gender preferences.

DEI had enjoyed a surge following the death of George Floyd and the subsequent 120 days of nonstop rioting, arson, assaults, killings and attacks on law enforcement during the summer of 2020.

In those chaotic years, DEI was seen as the answer to racial tensions.

DEI had insidiously replaced the old notion of affirmative action — a 1960s-era government remedy for historical prejudices against black Americans, from the legacy of slavery to Jim Crow segregation.

But during the Obama era, “diversity” superseded affirmative action by offering preferences to many groups well beyond black Americans.

Quite abruptly, Americans began talking in Marxist binaries.

On one side were the supposed 65-70 percent white majority “oppressors” and “victimizers” — often stereotyped as exuding “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” or even “white rage.”

They were juxtaposed to the 25-30% of “diverse” Americans, the so-called “oppressed” and “victimized.”

Yet almost immediately, contradictions and hypocrisies undermined DEI.

First, how does one define “diverse” in an increasingly multiracial, intermarried, assimilated and integrated society?

DNA badges?

The old one-drop rule of the antebellum South?

Superficial appearance?

To establish racial or ethnic proof of being one-sixteenth, one-fourth, or one-half “nonwhite,” employers, corporations and universities would have to become racially obsessed genealogists.

Yet refusing to become racial auditors also would allow racial and ethnic fraudsters — like Sen.Elizabeth Warren and would-be new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani — to go unchecked.

Warren falsely claimed Native American heritage to leverage a Harvard professorship. Mamdani, an immigrant son of wealthy Indian immigrants from Uganda, tried to game his way into college by claiming he was an African-American.

Second, in 21st-century America, class became increasingly divergent from race.

Mamdani, who promised to tax “affluent” and “whiter” neighborhoods at higher rates, is himself the child of Indian immigrants, the most affluent ethnic group in America.

Why would the children of Barack Obama, Joy Reid or LeBron James need any special preferences, given the multimillionaire status of their parents?

In other words, one’s superficial appearance no longer necessarily determines one’s income or wealth, nor defines their “privilege” or lack thereof.

Third, DEI is often tied to questions of “reparations.” The current white majority supposedly owes other particular groups financial or entitlement compensation for the sins of the past.

Yet in today’s multiracial and multiethnic society, in which over 50 million residents were not born in the U.S. and many have only recently arrived, what are the particular historical or past grievances that would earn anyone special treatment?

What injustices can recent arrivals from southern Mexico, South Korea or Chad claim, as they would know little about, and have experienced firsthand nothing prior from Americans, the United States, or its history?

Is the DEI logic that when a Guatemalan steps one foot across the southern border, she is suddenly classified as a victim of white oppression and therefore entitled to preferences in hiring or employment as someone diverse or victimized?

Fourth, does the word “minority” still carry any currency?

In today’s California, the demography breaks down as 40% Latino, 34% white, 16% Asian American or Pacific Islander, 6% black, and 3% Other — with no significant majority and whites fewer than the Latino “minority.”

Are Latinos the new de facto “majority” and “whites” just one of the four other “minorities?”

Do the other minorities, then, have grievances against Latinos, given that they are the dominant population in the state?

Fifth, when does DEI “proportional representation” apply, and when does it not?

Are whites “overrepresented” among the nation’s university faculties that are reportedly 75% white, when they comprise only about 70% of the population?

Or, are whites “underrepresented” as making up only 55% of all college students and thus in need of DEI action to bump up their numbers?

Black athletes are vastly overrepresented in lucrative and prestigious professional sports. To correct such asymmetries, should Asians and Hispanics be given mandated quotas for quarterback or point guard positions to ensure proper athletic “diversity, equity, and inclusion?”

Sixth, DEI determines good and bad prejudices, as well as correct and incorrect biases. “Affinity” segregationist graduations — black, Hispanic, Asian, and gay — are considered “affirming.”

But would a similar affinity graduation ceremony for European-Americans or Jews be considered “racist?”

Is a Latino-themed house on a California campus — that is de facto segregated — considered “enlightened,” while a European American dorm would be condemned as incendiary?

In truth, DEI had long ago become corrupt.

It is falling apart under the weight of its own paradoxes and hypocrisies.

It is a perniciously divisive idea — unable to define who qualifies for preference or why, who is overrepresented or not, or when bias is acceptable or unjust.

And it is past time that it goes away.