https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-can-trump-reset
https://newcriterion.com/article/maga-agonistes/\
The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and 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. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated 12 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.
