Trump Is off to a Great Start Trump’s bold actions on immigration, DEI, and fairness signal a high-energy, focused vision for America’s future, turning the tide and putting conservatives back on offense. By Christopher Roach
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/28/trump-is-off-to-a-great-start/
Like most Trump supporters, I consider his first term a mixed bag, with the capstone being the rigged election of 2020. This was not all his fault, obviously, but there were failures of execution along the way. Things were often disorganized; disloyal people were put in positions of power, while quality outsiders were not invited into the fold. Trump faced relentless opposition from the Democrats within the Deep State and had to have eyes on the back of his head because of turncoat Republicans like Paul Ryan.
As I wrote in an earlier piece, “Trump’s presidency will have little permanent effect if he does not devote himself to the task of reform. The first order of business . . . will be to take full charge of the bureaucracy.”
He seems to have taken the criticism to heart that he was great on the big picture but poor in execution. This time around, everything is different. The last week has been a whirlwind of activity, including many executive orders, each one more impressive and revolutionary than the last.
This has been a week of wins, and Trump’s policy focus and high energy are good omens for future success.
Trump Takes on the Border Disaster
One of his more visible achievements has been executive action to halt the immigration crisis after Joe Biden’s disastrous policies allowed millions of unvetted and unskilled immigrants into our country. On day one, Trump shut down the ridiculous app that allowed otherwise illegal aliens to make an appointment to obtain long-term parole, during which they will wait years for hearings on fraudulent asylum claims.
There have also been high-visibility workplace raids. ICE says it is now working seven days a week, and the military is already getting involved in shoring up the border.
The executive order on birthright citizenship is also a step in the right direction. While I admit I am not fully versed on the law on this matter, there is a defensible case to be made that birthright citizenship is simply an artifact of a persistent misunderstanding of the Fourteenth Amendment that fails to account for important limiting language. Whether the Supreme Court approves this executive order is a coin flip at best, but it is worth a shot, and perhaps a statutory fix would pass constitutional muster if this path runs into trouble.
Certainly, as a matter of policy, it does our country no good to encourage birth tourism and to reward illegal immigrants with “anchor babies,” who in turn can legalize their relatives under ill-considered “family reunification” policies.
Ending the birthright citizenship loophole will remove one of the main incentives for illegal immigration and signal something foundational: this is our country, and Americans alone decide who is allowed to benefit from what we and our ancestors built.
DEI Is On the Chopping Block
Trump has also undertaken a full-scale assault on DEI and affirmative action. While these practices have become unquestionable pillars of managerial class authority, they have always been unpopular with most Americans because they are unfair, demeaning, and built on a million small lies that everyone is trained to ignore.
Affirmative action is the lynchpin of the entire deep state system. It creates a loyal class of mediocrities and distorts every decision with politics. The damage from these practices is not limited to letting in a few slightly less-qualified affirmative action hires. It ends up reducing quality across the board and creating a culture focused on everything but the organization’s ostensible goals. Under affirmative action and DEI, standards and achievement become secondary to the quixotic goals of representation and equity.
Equality before the law is a good thing and an achievable goal. Equality before the law is part of justice and an essential part of the American mythos. But neutral rules applied neutrally are a world away from factual equality.
Equality before the law means some rise and some fall, because people aren’t the same and never have been. Differences in wealth and success arise from differences in effort and achievement, which are themselves a product of inborn differences in ability or a consequence of deeply ingrained habits.
It is not possible to eliminate these differences, and our attempts to do so have degraded much of life into a zero-sum game of spoils, state-created privileges, and recrimination. America was founded to be a modern country, where individual initiative and talent counted for more than birth and pedigree. It is supposed to be a place where one can become a self-made man or descend from privilege into poverty because one is judged and rewarded chiefly as an individual.
DEI and affirmative action have weakened our national spirit and discouraged some of our most talented young people. A combination of oligarchic economics and credentialist gatekeeping led a generation of talented white and Asian men to retreat from the struggle of life and become scarce within our universities and largest corporations.
Who knows what they might have achieved in the absence of this perverse, demoralizing system. We rightly recognize that discrimination did a lot to hurt black Americans when DEI’s mirror image, the Jim Crow regime, was in force several generations ago. We should be equally honest in confronting the damage, both individual and collective, over the discriminatory superstructure erected over the last 50 years to wage an unwinnable war against disparate impact. DEI was simply this campaign’s latest and most virulent iteration.
Executive orders canning the federal government’s many DEI bureaucrats and creating a “snitch line” is simply returning the favor to those who made us endure a censorious culture of mutual surveillance in the name of diversity.
For the last 50 years, individual fairness was a secondary consideration, and any pushback was met with hostility, i.e., “Check your privilege!” Trump’s reelection is just a sign that we ain’t doing that anymore. The mass firings of the DEI staff are a necessary step to reduce these commissars’ power and prestige and to discredit the false ideology that sustains their influence. The private sector will follow suit eventually since so much of this stuff is artificial and unpopular, a brittle edifice held up by threats of public censure and corporate efforts to avoid employment law liability.
Pardons Needed to Undo Political Persecution
The pardons for the J6 defendants were also handled well. While I agree in principle that people who damage property and assault cops should be punished, the punishment must fit the crime. No one said the Code Pink protesters back in the 2000s were guilty of insurrection and indistinguishable from Jefferson Davis.
The treatment of the mostly nonviolent January 6 defendants, including harsh pretrial conditions and inclusion of charges reserved for Mafia witness intimidation, tainted the whole process. These were political prisoners, singled out for their political beliefs and loyalties, and they were treated differently and unfairly because of those beliefs.
Trump is Setting the Agenda
Trump has changed the Republican Party and the country. The biggest change comes from the existence of a positive message, the greatness agenda. He has articulated a vision of America’s future that is strong, prosperous, focused on excellence, and that rejects the self-flagellation and anti-morality peddled by the left.
Conservatives were engaged in a fighting retreat before Trump came along because they accepted the moral outlook of the “progressives.” In other words, they defined themselves by their willingness to implement the same goals at a slightly slower pace by focusing on fiscal responsibility. Every time there was a conflict over first principles, they would buckle. The whole enterprise reeked of weakness and insecurity.
Now it is we who are on offense. With Trump at the helm, we are setting the agenda and telling the left that they need to get out of the way or there will be consequences.
It’s better to be the hunter than the rabbit, and it’s nice to be winning again. This is truly an exciting time to be alive.
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