This week, Donald Trump won Time Magazine’s vaunted “person of the year” for the second time in the last decade. The results weren’t even close. If this were a Hall of Fame vote for a famous athlete, the President-elect would have been unanimous. After having been unceremoniously ousted from the White House in the first presidential coup in history, the 47th President mounted the most improbable comeback, in which he overcame a mountain of opposition – from relentless media bias, to all-out lawfare in the courts, to two failed assassination attempts on his life.
Having succeeded against all odds, the President endeared himself to the American people through the trials and tribulations of the last four years. He has revolutionized our political psyche, and altered not just our political discourse, but our culture in general – rekindling a sense of optimism in a long dormant American spirit. At the ballot box, the American people offered him a landslide victory for his sacrifices – he carried both houses of Congress and was the first Republican to win the popular vote outright in twenty years.
His electoral college victory was seismic; he is the first Republican in nearly four decades to eclipse three hundred and ten electoral votes. By county, he almost septupled his opposition – making the whole map blood-red, which offered undeniable testimony of MAGA’s generational impact, one that has forever altered the course of American politics – and will outlast its progenitor long after he departs the political arena for good.
To think that the country was an inch away from losing everything just six months ago, as a bullet grazed Donald Trump’s ear that fateful day in Butler, Pennsylvania, especially given the hindsight of his presidential victory, is mind boggling. Had the now famous chart not been up at the right moment or had there been a wrong turn of the head, America’s final light of hope would have been darkened forever. There was so much riding on this year’s election – from the integrity of the justice system to the sovereignty of our borders, to the state of the economy and the prospects of the American Dream.
Had fate gone the other way, America could have well been on the pathway to World War III. In a world loaded with nuclear weapons, the prospects of Armageddon are as real as ever. As John F. Kennedy once remarked, “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” If the stakes of the 2024 election could be encapsulated into a single statement, it would be that. America, and the world, was headed rapidly down a warpath. Europe, facing its first land war in eight decades, was edging unnervingly close to a continent-wide conflagration. Same with the Middle East, which, now with a toppled Assad regime, is more volatile than ever, like a gasket about to blow. Add into the calculus aggressive Chinese and Russian regimes, and you have yourself an exceedingly bleak picture – a world that could easily devolve into chaos, resulting in more needless death and destruction, if things went badly.
Before it was too late, Americans woke up to this reality. In this context, the Trump movement is best framed as a political revolution. Like any revolution, things take time to catch traction. Eight years ago, when Donald Trump, who had just won his first historic race, was also featured on Time Magazine, he was given the ominous caption “President of the Divided States of America.”
Eight years later, Time’s editors finally realized what huge swaths of the country already knew a decade ago. Now, President Trump is portrayed in a positive fashion, looking regal and statesmanlike – his stance is more open and his face tilted upward, as to signify a hopeful future. Removed is the ominous language and dark coloration; instead, the President-elect is highlighted and forward facing, a much more optimistic bearing (and a welcome change from that well-known liberal rag) that casts the President in his rightful position as the catalyst of a new dawn in a United States saddled by uncertainty and despair.
Between his three elections, Donald Trump has amassed more votes than any presidential candidate in history – and it’s not even close. He has collected 214,477,092 popular votes and has garnered 848 electoral votes. No other presidential candidate comes close to these numbers. Barack Obama, the last Democrat to win two terms, collected 135,401,180 popular votes and 697 electoral votes, or 151 fewer than Donald Trump, over the course of his political career. And Obama of course, unlike Trump, did not have to deal with a rigged election system, whereby urban centers dumped buckets of untraceable ballots for his opponent – many dispositively linked to deceased persons or illegal aliens – in late night drop boxes, exploiting last-minute law changes made under the pretext of covid. This proved to be the scam of the century, and the fact that Donald Trump still prevailed, despite these systematic challenges working against him, underscores just how significant a landslide victory it was.
Accordingly, the 47th President has plenty of capital at his disposal to implement sweeping reforms – from mass deportations to cutting government regulations and reshaping the federal bureaucracy to getting his cabinet secretaries confirmed. The potential for a revolutionary change of course, one that will set a long torpid government upon much stronger and agile footing, should not be taken lightly.
American liberalism, which reached its zenith under the regimes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, has torn our country at the seams. Economically, it has driven out American industry and strangled domestic business, severely wounding the American Dream and leaving all of society worse for the wear with products of significantly reduced quality. Culturally, it has sown untold division throughout society, putting the races and sexes against one another, and browbeating legacy Americans to feel ashamed of their past, particularly the glorious and heroic feats and fruits of that past, and the great individuals responsible for making the United States into the most powerful country the world has ever known.
On matters of foreign policy, America’s integrity has been all but squandered with decades-long endless wars that have profited military contractors and international plutocrats at our detriment. American business no longer exists in many areas of the country; our entrepreneurial spirit and core identity has been dissipated of meaning and purpose. Our adversaries, like China and Mexico, run roughshod over the remains of a countryside razed by the reckless and stupid policies – from outsourcing jobs to shutting down factories – architected by a grossly incompetent ruling class. This regnant order, embodied by Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, in the collective lacks the foresight and wisdom to see beyond their petty aims and caprices, ignoring what is best for the greater good.
Our institutions have also taken a major beating. Law enforcement, from local police forces like the NYPD to federal agencies, like the FBI and ICE, have been demoralized – sometimes beyond repair. Many otherwise competent officers have been driven out by DEI and other woke policies such as vaccine mandates, which have resulted in a weaker overall force. Liberal policies have created a chilling effect on speech, where anyone who supports a candidate or policy anathema to Woke Progressivism is kowtowed into submission, lest he risk losing his job or worse. Justice in America has been nearly vanquished: rather than prosecute violent criminals, prosecutors and district attorneys have received their marching orders from George Soros-types, choosing to mercilessly punish anyone who gets in their way.
This system has all but destroyed what remains of constitutional governance – including its most important element of fair and impartial justice. Due process no longer exists in many parts of this country, including the Capitol, where illegitimately appointed “special counsels” have gone open season on political opponents – and for years with little accountability, always protected by a rogue and ruthless justice system. When all is said and done, the Jack Smith hatchet job will go down as one of the darkest chapters in the history of American justice. Lawfare – replete with communist judges and kangaroo courts – has brought this country to the brink of annihilation. Donald Trump was thus given a mandate to heal our society and bring respectability back to the institutions that have abdicated their public trust by abusing the powers they have been granted – to an order of magnitude never thought possible in the United States of America.
Even if Donald Trump accomplished nothing more, his legacy has already been cemented: the sea change he ushered forth in our politics will continue to reverberate for years to come. But the President is well poised to deliver an agenda as consequential and historic as his victory.
If successful, he will reshape both presidency and the country alike in his image, putting the United States on a forward-looking path that finally casts aside liberalism’s fetishistic obsession for decline and stagnation once and for all. He will have engineered a model of governance that statesmen and stateswomen will be sure to emulate for decades to come. Fifty years from now, Donald Trump will be seen as the turning point in American history – where the shackles of a stagnant liberal order were finally shattered, and the ability for Americans to move confidently forward, having reclaimed their natural birthright as a dynamic and spirited people, was given a new lease on life.
Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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