The times they are a-changin'
History is being made. How should we feel?
“May you live in interesting times” - Traditional Chinese Curse
One of the few Dylan songs I like:
Since the election, brilliantly predicted right here in this column by your trusty guide, we have been drinking from a firehose. Even before President Trump took the oath on January 20th, several unprecedented things began happening. Biden pardoned 2,500 people, including violent felons and members of his own family as well as certain members of his administration. The Blinken State Department issued directives and released offensive weapons to the Ukrainians in an effort to stop peace talks that were expected early in the new Administration. President-Elect Trump began to name members of his cabinet, which included names that made permanent Washington shudder.
After January 20th and Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, he got right to work. So many decisions and changes in policy have taken place, any one of them large enough to be a 3 week news cycle in the old days, that the press can’t keep up. The opposition party has been so thoroughly defanged that they are completely irrelevant. The press lies in ruined shambles, not trusted by the American people. They are at best a joke, and at worst ignored.
In fact, so much is happening and so much is changing, nobody has the capacity to digest it all. Even people who cover politics full time are overwhelmed by the sheer pace of things.
Also the richest man in the world and a group of autistic children are inhabiting federal office buildings and the nightmares of bureaucrats everywhere by tunneling deep into the deep state, and shining spotlights on things long designed to stay in shadow.
So, where do we start? How am I supposed to write about all of this? How can I guide you through a landscape that is constantly changing?
I guess the best thing to do is break the whole down into parts. Let’s start with how we got here.
The sorry state of the Democrats
In order to make sense of the new state of play, it’s necessary to understand the current power structure and how we arrived here. The fact is that the Democratic Party and all of their partners in the academy, media, the press, and in government have been completely defanged, and are in full retreat.
Never in my lifetime have I seen one of our political parties in such a dire circumstance. Even in the darkest days in the modern era for the Democratic Party, after the 1984 election when Ronald Reagan won the election with 49 states, the Democrats still held The House and had a party filled to the brim with serious adults and brilliant men. Tip O’Neill was a formidable Democrat and Speaker of the House. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a powerful force in his own right in the Senate. Only 8 years later, the Democrats would usher in a young. saxophone playing Bill Clinton.
Unfortunately for today’s Democrats, the situation is quite different and significantly more serious.
First of all, they are leaderless. They have nobody either capable or willing to deliver a message to the American people that the people can support. Chuck Schumer is a parody of a powerful politician, and the rest continue to beclown themselves as out of touch, stupid, and hysterical… completely overcome with emotion and completely lacking in even a whisper of logic.
Secondly, they have spent years listening to academic radicals who have pushed policy that the vast majority of Americans despise. These radicals pushed their theories through the academy, then in media, and finally in law. It was a simple, yet effective system that worked for decades.
First academics would promote idiotic Marxist theories that would become popular to teach at elite liberal arts colleges. Then the students of those programs would graduate and work themselves into HR positions inside corporations and consultancy groups like McKinsey & Co. Otherwise they would work with NGO activist groups like Amnesty International, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Human Rights Campaign. Eventually they would splinter off into even more radical groups like Black Lives Matter, March for our Lives, and several environmental groups currently screwing up traffic and throwing soup on priceless artworks, ostensibly because the climate hates Van Gogh.
Those NGO’s and activist groups would then pressure corporations and Democrat politicians into supporting their insane issue du jours.
Books have been written about all of this and it was relatively obvious at the time what was happening… unless you are so naive as to believe that Goldman Sachs and Coca-Cola all of a sudden became deeply ashamed of their “whiteness”… organically.
Many of us saw it at the time. Those of us who weren’t destroyed by it were annoyed by it.
What we are witnessing now is the collapse of that system, and the political party that was captured by it. And it is collapsing… and it is collapsing faster and more thoroughly than ever thought possible.
The fact is that the American people flat out hate DEI and race politics and sexual gender politics. They hate it and don’t want to do it. They were bullied into pretending they supported it. It was a social contagion that came to its crescendo in the summer of 2020 while the world was dealing with the lie that was Covid, and the other lie that was the death of George Floyd.
President Trump had been sidelined while people, including in his own party, worked against him, and impeached him over nonsense. He no longer had the political capital to lead. For their part, the Democrats thought the best thing they could do is kneel in kente cloth while socially distanced… and tacitly support the Vandals and Goths sacking cities around the country.
After the January 6th riot at the Capitol in early 2021, the activists finally took full control. They infested themselves at every level of the Executive Branch under Joe Biden, who himself was riddled with disease and dementia from the first day of his Presidency, and the shadow government began making policy.
A lot more than that happened, and perhaps I will explore it more in a future article, but we need to move on.
In November of 2024 Donald Trump was elected President again. They tried calling him Hitler (again). The press and everyone in traditional media from talk shows, to entertainment shows, to news went on a full court press against Trump and his supporters. No lie was too obvious to tell, no narrative too ridiculous to credulously report.
In the end, a Rubicon had been crossed, and there was no going back. Enough Americans actively didn’t believe what they were being told by the established holders of the truth that Trump was relatively easily re-elected.
I believe that history will look at that election as an earthquake. Not because Trump won… it wasn’t that huge of a win. The Republicans won the White House with 312 electorals and picked up a few seats in The Senate. The GOP even lost seats in The House, leaving them with the smallest majority in American history. The reason it was an earthquake was that the press and the people who held the narrative for well more than a century, were ignored by enough people to elect a President. That coalition has only gotten larger and stronger since.
That is why things are so dire for the Democratic Party. Where once they had Adam Schiff holding court on CNN accusing the President of all kinds of crimes, and people were paying very close attention, now he’s a silly, impotent, little Senator from California and a bit of a joke. Where they once had hundreds of thousands of American women in pink hats all over Washington DC, they now have small groups of mental midgets led by Maxine Waters yelling at a security guard at the Department of Education.
Where once they could fill the streets in protest and outrage, they now have a few dozen weird, childless, 65 year old white women chanting strange communist incantations into the ether.
Yes, my friends… they are in a rough spot. Let’s hope they can get it together a little better than this, because without a major course correction, I’m not sure they’ll be able to rebuild. At least for now, they don’t have a vote. They are irrelevant, as is the entire legacy press corps. Sorry AP… it’s the Gulf of America now.
The bottom line is this. There is no effective opposition to Donald Trump in either government or culture.
Trump
For those who haven’t yet accepted it, it’s time to admit it. Donald Trump is a great man of history. As in all eras, the history of this one won’t be written until it is passed, so we don’t know if Donald Trump will be remembered as a good great man, or a bad great man, but he will be remembered as a great man. Of that, there is no doubt.
He is not a gameshow host / rich kid that accidentally became President. If he ever was that, he’s not that anymore. He is a brilliant tactician and incredibly strong negotiator. He understands the power that he has, and is able to wield it in ways previously thought impossible. He is all about action and has no time for blue ribbon commissions and studies. He is a genius of media and messaging. Finally, he has full control of the United States government. He is the most powerful President in modern history, and there isn’t a close second.
If that makes you uncomfortable, you are not alone. As Mark Halperin might say, tens of millions of Americans agree with you. If you are excited by Trump, tens of millions of Americans agree with you too.
One thing is certain though, the times they are a-changin’.
What is MAGA 2.0?
MAGA 1.0 was a slogan. It was simple. It meant “Make America Great Again”. In short, it was a rejection of the Obama / H. Clinton agenda and a desire to move back to traditional American values and simply stop neoconservative and leftist policies that most conservative Americans felt were ruining the country.
MAGA 2.0 is still “Make America Great Again”, but this time it has real policy attached to it and an effective leader behind it who can enact real change. Cynics and detractors will say that MAGA is a call to return to a fictionalized version of the 1950’s where you were allowed to slap the secretary on the ass, and be racist in public. They will also claim that it’s a cult of personality around Donald Trump.
Trump supporters will tell you that modern MAGA is a series of protectionist policies, both foreign and domestic, that put America first, and the concerns of working Americans above the concerns of domestic elites and international cabals. The founder and leader of the movement is Donald Trump. They don’t worship him, they support him. The difference is important.
As with most things, the truth is likely somewhere else. The fact is that inside the MAGA movement there are regressive quarters. There is actually a racist, sexist, homophobic, and antisemitic wing of the movement. All you have to do is get in a right leaning algorithm on X and you can’t miss them.
That said, the regressive wing of the movement, while loud, is small and powerless. There are no Republican Congressmen or Senators claiming the Jews secretly control the world, and we have yet to hear any politician on the national stage call for rolling back things like gay marriage.
Unlike with the Democrats, the Republicans don’t actually control their social media influencers. The GOP doesn’t have paid actors like Harry Sisson on social media parroting focus grouped talking points. Instead it’s a true grass roots movement, and like all grass roots movements, while the cream does rise to the top, so does the shit.
If Donald Trump wants his movement to live longer than him, he and his fellow MAGA leaders are going to have to get more comfortable filtering out the shit.
Enemies, foreign and…
On the international stage, we are about to see ‘yuge’ changes. President Trump and his administration have less than zero interest in or respect for the way things have always been done. They simply don’t care about international norms. They are America First and will do whatever they think is needed to further American influence and interest.
One other thing to keep in mind is that when looking at Trump and his foreign policy, the term “Trump likes” should never enter your vernacular. I have no idea if Trump “likes” Putin or Xi. It’s completely immaterial and whenever you hear someone talk about Trump “liking” dictators, you should discount them completely. Trump does not operate in a world of liking and not liking people or governments… he operates in a world of respecting or not respecting them… and being respected by them. This is an important distinction and helps determine his policy.
NATO, Europe, and Russia
Speaking of respect, Donald Trump has none for the current class of Western European leadership. He believes them to be weak, silly, feckless, out of touch elites who have abdicated their responsibility toward their own cultures and citizens in order to toast each other, and be toasted by globalist NGO’s as paragons of modern liberalism.
Like everyone else, Trump has watched as Europe has been invaded by hordes of Middle Eastern and North African “refugees” who make no effort at assimilation. He has watched terror attack after terror attack by these invaders. He has watched as roaming rape gangs destroy young native European girls.
He has watched as the response to this has been silence… or in some cases tacit support from the people charged with governing European countries. Citizens in EU countries are routinely arrested or otherwise cancelled in society if they dare to speak out about it. The leaders of Western Europe, as Donald Trump sees it, are enemies of the citizens of Western Europe.
Further, it is becoming more and more clear to the Trump Administration that Western Europe is no longer a contributing ally to the United States. They have become burdensome. They are constantly wagging their finger at Americans and American companies. They tariff our goods and treat our citizens poorly. Beyond all of it, they do it with a sense of arrogance and superiority that cuts to the bone for Americans who are also not embraced by the elite.
As far as the Trump administration is concerned, they take everything, contribute almost nothing, and curse us for the effort.
On the other side of the equation, he sees Vladimir Putin. He does respect Putin. Putin is a man who has fiercely defended his country’s culture from the people who have invaded Western Europe. He is a proud Russian and Russians are incredibly strong people who understand sacrifice in ways westerners do not.
He wants the war in Ukraine to end on the same terms that would have kept it from starting in the first place… No NATO membership and Russia to go back to the post 2014 borders, keeping Donbas and Crimea and everyone going back to work.
In his best case scenario, Russia and the United States would cease hostilities toward each other. Perhaps even enter a mutual disarmament agreement and begin to wind down some of the remnants of the Cold War that still hang over all of our heads like an executioner’s axe. Trump doesn’t understand why we should be enemies with the Russians. As long as Putin really doesn’t want to invade Europe (and there is zero evidence that he does), why can’t we normalize relations with them?
The Ukraine negotiations could be a first step toward pushing back the nuclear clock. We should all be in favor of that, and that is how the Trump Administration looks at NATO, Europe, and Russia.
North and South America
As far as Canada is concerned, the Trump Administration feels about them the same way he feels about Western Europe. He thinks Trudeau is a weak, effeminate, little tyrant who is likely the son of Fidel Castro. He has hurt the Canadian people terribly with his utopian dreams of world socialist neoglobalism. The little guy annoys Trump to no end and he considers him a non-entity.
As for Mexico, the cartels have officially grown to a point where they are a problem for the United States, and the Trump administration is taking action. He will put whatever pressure he has to on the Mexican government to take control of these criminal gangs that are killing Americans with fentanyl, and trafficking women and girls across our border.
He has declared the Cartels to be “foreign terrorist organizations” which opens them up to military destruction by the United States and… if you are the betting kind… you should bet that we are going to kill them and anyone else standing in our way.
The President of Mexico is welcome to stomp her foot and make all the threats she wants, but at the end of the day she will fall in line or she will find herself out of a job. The Mexican people also hate the Cartels… and they don’t want an adversarial relationship with the United States. They like the jobs we bring and the dollars we spend… they can see Venezuela and aren’t interested in becoming that.
As for the rest of Central and South America, they can do what they want… as long as they don’t align too closely with the Chinese, and don’t send their untouchable underclass up to our border and into our country.
Asia and Africa
Dealing with China and Xi, Trump is taking a parallel path to how he deals with Putin and Russia. Like with Russia, Trump laments that we are adversaries, but unlike with Russia, Trump sees China as a true economic threat.
Like with Putin, Trump respects President Xi and considers him to be a strong and effective leader for China. Unlike with Putin though, Xi is capable of causing much more disruption in the US (shy of going to war of course) than Putin… therefore he must be dealt with differently. There are different pressure points and different considerations.
While Putin understands that it would benefit Russia to be welcomed at some level into the family of Western nations, Xi and China have no such incentive. They don’t want to be part of our club… they want to dominate it.
Beyond that, China has international ambitions in a way that the Trump Administration does not believe Russia has. We don’t just have to deal with China in China and around its neighbors, but in Africa, the near east, and elsewhere too.
If Trump gets his way, we will see treaty and trade agreements with China and there will be real consequences for either side if those agreements are breached.
Taiwan will eventually become Chinese. It will happen the same way Hong Kong became Chinese. No tanks. No bombers. No war. Just one day everyone will wake up and it will be Chinese. Trump understands this and is drawing semiconductor business away from Taiwan for that reason.
Like it or not, that’s just the way it is.
Israel and the Middle East
Ironically, this is the simplest problem to solve for Trump. He wants to weaken Iran to a point that it’s no longer a threat. He wants Israel to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah and work with Jordan and Egypt to govern the Palestinians (something previously thought impossible… until Trump started applying pressure). He wants Israel and Saudi Arabia to enter into the Abraham Accords and normalize trade and diplomatic relations and feels that all of this can happen if enough pressure from the US is applied in the right places.
While all of this might have been incredibly ambitious for previous administrations, Trump is comfortable using US power to get his way. If you bet… you might consider betting that Trump gets everything he wants here. If Europe decides not to come along, it won’t be because they weren’t invited.
Domestic
President Trump’s domestic policy is relatively simple. So far, he has kept to hugely popular policies with super-majority support among Americans. He is killing DEI and woke agenda’s wherever they may be found. He is pushing protectionist policies meant to protect American jobs at home. He is enforcing the border and deporting illegals. Finally, he is auditing the federal government and cutting pork, fraud, waste, and abuse in a more aggressive way than has ever been seen before.
Let’s look at it in detail.
Immigration
There is no better evidence for the fact that Biden was never really in charge of the Executive Branch of the government than his immigration policy, if one can honestly call it a policy at all.
From Biden’s first day in office, until his last, his administration seemingly opened America’s borders to whomever wanted to come. Instead of following well established and bipartisanly supported federal law, they were given “asylum” status, effectively shielding them from deportation and entitling them to certain benefits including housing, food allowances, and eventually work visas. This was all on the tax payers’ dime, and out in the open.
To say that this situation was unpopular with American citizens is a serious understatement. Even with the press running full cover for the administration calling any pushback “racist” or “xenophobic” or simply cruel, the American people… both Democrat and Republican, were horrified by it.
Trump’s answer to this has been the most obvious and simple thing anyone could think of. He hired Tom Homan (who I lovingly call “The Mook”) to close the border, round up illegals already here, and send them away.
Since Trump took office, illegal border crossings are down 95% and illegals are being rounded up as fast as ‘The Mook’ and his plucky band of ICE agents can catch them.
This is a super-majority favorable issue in the US, despite the frowning irrelevants and their caterwauling over at cable news.
Dewokification and the death of DEI
Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the short sighted idiocy of the Democratic Party better than woke policies and DEI.
It’s important to understand something here… Public opinion did not change on wokeness or DEI. People always hated that crap. Nobody likes being lectured by a 20 year old black lesbian, going to school for free, about how she is held down by you and your whiteness and slavery and blah blah blah…
Everyone always hated that stuff, and because the press dutifully pushed it, a certain number of Americans felt compelled to go along with it. Perhaps it was fear of being cancelled, perhaps it was an incorrect perception of where the majority of people stood on the subject of race and gender, but they went along with it.
It is now over. The Emperor has been exposed in his nakedness, and there is no going back. Hallelujah!
Donald Trump knows this and is capitalizing on it. If you are one of the few mental cases and morons who is still buying that crap, I have bad news for you. Nobody is ever going to listen to you again. Grow up.
The politicization of the Department of Justice
President Trump’s detractors will say that he is politicizing the Justice Department to go after his political enemies. This, as much as anything the left says these days, confuses and annoys Trump and his allies.
It was the Biden Justice Department that raided Trump’s home over documents that nobody actually cares about. It was the Biden Justice Department that indicted a political rival multiple times for reasons no human can explain. It was the Biden Justice Department that coordinated with the NY Attorney General’s office as well as the Manhattan DA’s office to attempt to bankrupt and imprison their political rival. It was the Biden Justice Department that dispatched a highly placed federal attorney in the Attorney General’s office to join the doomed Georgia prosecution of Trump, and then deny they were ever coordinating.
There is no serious person anywhere who can claim with a straight face that any of the charges or lawsuits brought against President Trump between 2021 and 2024 would have been brought against anyone else with the same facts. I can prove that, because to this day none have.
And it wasn’t just Trump. Starting all the way back in 2015, the DOJ was operating against Trump… spying on his original campaign, making up the Russia collusion hoax, jailing his staff, and sending more than one to prison.
The Democrats lost the plot when Trump got elected, and behaved badly. They used the force and credibility of our justice system to attempt to destroy a political rival… and they didn’t even do it competently. In the end, they lost… and only made him more powerful.
Now, he has the reigns of power back and the knowledge that he needs to root out those who would work against him. All of this, and they have the tenacity to complain?
Hilarious.
Listen, I don’t believe that Trump has any plans to use the Presidency to go after his rivals on a large scale. I think he wants to depoliticize the DOJ and get it back to its core values. That said, along the way, he may very well take a swipe at some of the worst actors in all of this.
If I were Tish James and Alvin Bragg, I’d lawyer up. The same for Fani Willis.
Good policy or not… constitutional or not… if you go for the king, you best not miss… and they missed. They have made a very powerful enemy in Donald Trump, and some of them don’t even seem to know it yet. If I were them, I’d worry.
The rest
There are a litany of other domestic policies and issues that are being worked through. Congress and the Senate need to extend the Trump tax cuts and make them permanent, they need to deal with the SALT deduction and other campaign promises as well as protect DOGE and reform the DOD spending process. They need to draft and pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open and operating and ultimately prepare for the 2026 primaries.
Trump’s agenda is larger than anything we’ve seen in modern politics, and so far it’s going well for him.
The Future
Ultimately, anyone who tells you they know what is going to happen is lying. We are in a time of change, and with that change will come discomfort and the destruction of old systems on which we used to rely. Also, there will be new systems and new institutions which will grow.
I don’t know what tomorrow may bring, I only know that tomorrow is coming and we need competent, effective people in important positions to help guide our way through. I hope the Democratic Party and the press get their act together. I hope they begin to rebuild, because we are going to need them in the coming years. Single party rule is not good for our country, and everyone is made better by effective competition. Trump, even if you love him, isn’t perfect and needs to be checked just like everyone else.
As it stands and if nothing changes for our friends on the left, the Democrats are set to lose at least two more Senate seats and perhaps 10 or more house seats in 2026.
Partisan bias aside, for the first time in quite a while, I am optimistic about our country. I feel like the forces that have been engaged for decades in managing the decline of our society have been defeated, and that we now have the chance to grow again and get our swagger back. For the first time in a long time I can dream of what our great country might one day be…
Just imagine the things we can do if we put our minds to it and our force behind it. World peace is possible. American growth and leadership is not just possible, but probable. We are on the verge of something huge… and it will either destroy us or propel us into the next phase of the Pax Americana we all remember before that fateful Tuesday in September all those years ago.
Understanding Donald Trump
In the end, if you want to understand Donald Trump, you must recognize what created him. From a young age, Trump has felt the tug of destiny. He has always considered himself destined to make an impact… and for the last 50 years, he has.
Trump has always believed himself to be destined for greatness. He has been famous for longer than most of us have been alive. He built great things and made a lot of money. He founded companies and left his mark in real estate all over the world. He conquered the entertainment industry and made his mark there. Then against all odds, he became the President of the United States… the first person ever to do so having never served in Government.
Then, as if written by The Bard himself, the hero fell. He was stymied and sidelined by the leviathan he couldn’t control. He was beaten and thrown from office. He was arrested and sued and cursed.
But he found his footing and rose again. This time far stronger and far more effective than before.
In a field in Pennsylvania, he was shot and nearly killed. In the aftermath of that, I honestly believe that Donald Trump finally found himself. He accepted the destiny that he always knew he had. He believes now that God has chosen him to turn this country around.
Obviously his detractors will discount all that… but he did stand up after everything he’s been through… and he is now the most formidable politician we’ve ever seen. The good news is that his legacy is intricately intertwined with the success of our country. If we win, he wins, and if we lose, so does he.
For my part, I’m choosing to be optimistic. I’m choosing to have faith that we weren’t too far gone before we decided to make the change. I’m choosing to believe that perhaps, just maybe, we really can make America great again.
—Virgil
P.S. If you like this… send it to a friend. —V
Always your happy reader. Great piece. Thanks V.
Well written and a fair presentation