Is America Ready For A Return To Greatness?

In the aftermath of yesterday’s assassination attempt, I find myself asking: Why all the visceral hatred of Donald Trump? It manifests itself everywhere but is most visible among Hollywood elites and members of the Fourth Estate (the press and most of the mainstream media) and especially on social media.

What did this man with the orange hairdo do to these people?

First, I want to say that I am not a raving MAGA Trump supporter, not that there is anything wrong with being one. Some of my best friends are MAGA proponents. Despite what some of my friends and professional colleagues think, I’m pretty centrist in my political philosophies: conservative on some issues (staying out of needless foreign wars, putting reasonable limits on abortion), liberal on others (maintaining individual rights, being a staunch supporter of the First Amendment). I’m pretty much a “live and let live” kind of guy.

I think that as a nation, that’s where most Americans lie, from slightly left of center to somewhat right of center. Most of us lack a sense of ideological purity.

But I think Trump’s victory in 2016 was a reaction - to years of often invisible far-left control of the institutional levers of power - rather than any sort of revolution, January 6th notwithstanding. Trump was the vessel through which many centrist Americans vented their long-simmering frustrations.

But I digress…

Getting back to Trump, I believe his real troubles began in 2016 when this political upstart—who had previously been a liberal-leaning New York City real estate developer and popular reality TV host—defeated the anointed one, Hillary Clinton, the candidate destiny had chosen to be the first female president (funny how it seems that title has unofficially fallen to “Dr.” Jill Biden).

That triggered a reaction that has been unprecedented in our almost 250 years as a nation. It was best manifested in the fake news, a pre-printed Newsweek special edition proclaiming Clinton as Madam President. 125,000 copies were printed and had to be recalled. (It should be noted that there was no pre-printed President Trump special edition; it was rushed into print after the election because Clinton’s election was a foregone conclusion up until about 11 p.m. on Election Night.) Why waste ink and paper when it was going to be Clinton’s hand on the Bible on January 20, 2017?

From the minute that Donald and Melania came down the escalator, Democrats and the far-left tried to destroy Trump. It started with the Clinton- and DNC-funded Steele Dossier that was at the heart of the three-year-long RussiaGate scandal that was repudiated by the embarrassing Mueller Report. It continued right after the election when Deep State activists illegally surveilled Trump appointees, especially Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign as Trump’s National Security Advisor, hobbling the Trump administration during the transition period and beyond until Trump left office in 2021.

Working in conjunction with its handmaidens in the media, it was non-stop Orange-man-bad throughout Trump’s administration that accelerated after Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections that allowed for two politically motivated impeachments where Democrats, especially in the House led by partisan clowns like Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, flexed their political muscle in ways not previously seen.

These activities culminated in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, when any reference to the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was blacked out by the mainstream media. It spread to social media, where Trump was banned while intelligence community stooges were able to peddle the narrative that the story was a Russian disinformation operation. We, on the right, call them the 51 Spies Who Lied.

Then we have the unprecedented lawfare deployed against Trump during the Biden information, carefully coordinated by Biden’s completely corrupt Department of Justice led by Merrick Garland, the forum-shopped Alvin Bragg prosecution, and two Jack Smith prosecutions—the Florida documents case and the other in Washington, DC—and you wonder how Trump was able to respond. Throw in two more completely politically motivated trials—the outrageous Letitia James fraud prosecution back in New York City and the apparently compromised Fani Willis election interference case in Georgia—and you have a legal onslaught that would have destroyed a lesser man.

On Saturday, after failing to remove Trump from the 2024 race that polls now say he’s winning handily, a 20-year-old assassin took the election into his own hands. But this is not surprising when you watch this post-assassination-attempt compilation video posted on TikToK.

When I saw the cover of the June issue of the New Republic, the one with the AI-generated composite image with the faces of Hitler and Trump merged, it disgusted me. Trump is many things (not always ethical in his business affairs, bombastic, subject to exaggeration, a serial philanderer), but he is not a fascist. Far from it. His first administration proved that. He didn’t lock up Hillary Clinton or send Rachel Maddow to a reeducation camp (although, in the eyes of many, he should have done both).

As with all administrations, Trump’s first period in office had many upsides and a few significant downsides (the COVID responses under his watch were very damaging, he tolerated too many Obama holdovers for far too long, and he did not reform our armed forces as promised).

I would, however, highlight five significant Trump achievements that should make a rock-solid case for his second term in office:

1. Energy independence was arguably Trump’s greatest accomplishment. In under three years, our unleashing of oil exploration made America a net energy exporter, bringing the world into our bounty. Affordable energy is key to a higher quality of life, and you can thank Donald Trump for standing firm against environmental extremists and radicals in the Democrat Party who work hard to keep energy costs high. During Biden’s first week in office, bowing to environmental extremists based on the far left, the Keystone pipeline was scuttled, and exploration, especially in Alaska, was curtailed. The net result is that we now import rather than export petroleum.

2. Securing our borders was always going to be difficult, given the multi-generational push from the left to provide sanctuary for non-citizens. Trump’s DHS ensured that immigration laws were followed, the flow of immigrants was managed, and those who did not meet the criteria were kept in Mexico until their asylum cases could be heard. Humane, practical, and effective. Unlike today, under the leadership of Biden and his incompetent Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, immigration is a catastrophe. We have no idea exactly how many aliens have illegally entered the United States during the Biden administration. At a minimum, the number is eight million, but it could be as high as 12 million or more.

3. The creation of the Abraham Accords of 2020 was a miracle. Imagine having a host of Arab countries sign a normalization agreement with Israel, thus putting aside generations of aggression in the name of Abraham of biblical descent. By mismanaging the response to the October 7, 2023, Gaza attacks, Biden has thrown this away and alienated both Israel and the Palestinians, as well as much of the Arab world that was considering stronger ties with Israel.

4. Supreme Court appointments tend to define a presidency in perpetuity. Trump’s three appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) allowed for a moderate balance within the Court. It provided an opportunity to shield America from the left, using the Court as a way to push agendas that would not have withstood the legislative process. If re-elected, Trump will almost surely appoint two more justices to replace Justices Thomas and Alito, and conceivably two more to replace Sotomayor and Roberts, who will both be in their seventies if Trump serves to the end of a second term. Trump’s impact will last long after he is out of office.

5. Politicians, particularly Democrats, love to start wars. Not Donald Trump. Under his leadership, there were no new interventions, no new foreign invasions, and no new threats to our homeland. Due to the crisis on the southern border that has been boiling over for over three years, we have no idea how many terrorists have slipped across the border to do us harm. His America First agenda served as a warning to bad actors around the world: Don’t mess with the Orange Man.

Compare these accomplishments to those of the current inhabitants of the White House. There is nothing there to warrant giving the Biden administration more opportunities to, in the words of Barack Obama, “f*ck things up.”

Trump, like all of us, is a flawed man. Yet despite Saturday’s assassination attempt, he is on the cusp of being formally nominated to run for reelection by his party. If re-elected, as polls and Biden’s debate self-immolation would seem to indicate, he will be only the second president in US history to serve two non-contiguous terms. If he gets to that point, Trump will have surmounted unprecedented obstacles.

What can we expect from a second Trump term? Everything that the Biden administration is not: an America First governing policy (not the Project 2025 manifesto endlessly parroted by Democrat shills in lockstep with their stenographers in the compliant mainstream media), enforcement of federal law (imagine that!), and a renewed accountability of government to its citizens. It’s morning in America once again.

Only the most rabid partisans would claim that Trump is an authoritarian, a dictator, or a fascist. Those voices are sounding tired now, after three-plus years of one of the most authoritarian administrations in our history that has censored our speech, imprisoned its enemies, ignored the law, embraced non-citizens, enabled our enemies abroad, and created chaos in our cities. Those voices are fading into irrelevance. They are fading into a history we will remember as one of the most challenging times for the American experiment, and lucky for us, we have a way out.

America is ready for a better quality of life. America is ready for justice. America is ready for a return to greatness.

America is ready for the return of Trump.