When Donald Trump succeeds you as the President of the United States, you failed.

To understand Trump beyond blindly loving or hating him requires understanding the context in which he emerged.  Trump is and always has been a reflection of, and a referendum on, his contemporaries.  Not just because he is, by nature, a mud monster who does not get meaningfully muddier when others throw mud on him, yet ironically reveals how muddy his opponents always were for having such “mud” to throw at him in the first place.  For the past decade, he has largely remained the same entity, even as he has grown into the role to which he now returns.  It was the entity of a Ross Perot Democrat from 1992 who also happened to be a rough-and-tumble stand-up comedian.

Pierce through Trump’s coarse language, gratuitous nicknaming, caps lock “truthing,” and attack-dog reflexes, and the political animal revealed under that skin is mostly just a pragmatic moderate. This was part of the reason I rejected him in 2016. Hindsight, of course, has a funny way of clarifying that which was visible at that time. Those who have not bothered to revisit some of their old assumptions, or who intentionally tint their observation and understanding of events by refusing to ever take off their ideological bifocals, are liable to miss that.

When Trump first descended the golden escalator, America was in a new gilded age of its own – sick to its cultural core, depressed in its middle, weak and scatterbrained in its multilateral management of wars abroad, yet presenting as superficially healthy under the handsome disguise of Barack Obama.  As he completes his return today, he inherits the worst inflationary disaster and state of military unpreparedness in 45 years.  America’s southern border is not just an entry point for 12-18 million illegal invaders in four years, but the scene of a modern-day slave trade.  He inherits a fractured patchwork nation replete with the worst street crime in 30 years, cities that compete with each other to be the murder capital of the United States, and states that cannot tabulate legal votes for weeks on end following an election.

Donald Trump also inherits the most partisan-weaponized morass of federal departments, executive agencies, and law enforcement divisions in our entire history.  This degree of corruption, careerist incest, and insider politics has not been seen since the 1870s-80s, if it can be compared to even that.  He re-enters office with a greater degree of awareness of the many traps, ambush spots, and of the legions of partisan spies, vipers, wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing, and even the wolves who come as wolves – all of which caught him by surprise last time, and derailed and sabotaged his first presidency from start to finish.  Since leaving office, many of those institutions that were trained against him under the pretense of executive “accountability” have been deployed outwards against ordinary citizens on a level not seen since the era of Woodrow Wilson.  The coordinated lawfare campaign against him across four jurisdictions at the same time, not only sought to jail him, but also to break him and demoralize him, his campaign, and his many millions of supporters.  Nothing like this had ever been seen before, especially under such bald, thin, and pathetic legal grounds.

This nation reels from years of nonstop international humiliations in the form of a Chinese spy balloon that traversed the entire American mainland with impunity, and of the Taliban and ISIS-K terrorists who swarmed Bagram Airfield and Kabul Airport, overran American-trained Afghan forces, instantly re-imposed Sharia traditions upon the people of Afghanistan, and killed 13 American service members after our forces withdrew, left behind hundreds of citizens and allies, and also abandoned $80 billion in weapons and military equipment at the Afghanistan Standard Time midnight mark (11:59 pm) of the 20th anniversary of 9/11.  Dictators and terror organizations, emboldened by years of appeasement and demonstrations of American weakness, incompetence, and neglect, have made de facto alliances and initiated a new war against the West that we are not yet ready to call a “World War,” even though one of them has already produced the largest batch of casualties on the ground since Stalingrad.

Nothing like this can be understood as merely this day’s quirky set of issues.  Any of these threats individually could end a nation.  Together they illustrate a crisis far beyond anything the West has seen since the 1850s – by far the worst decade in American history – combined with a global picture that resembles the 1930s.  As I explained back during the maelstrom of 2020, the moment was there for Donald Trump to meet, but he failed.  He spent the next four years licking his wounds, refocusing, and rallying for the greatest comeback in history, surpassing Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and Richard Nixon.  But the five-year reign of terror from March 2020 to the present day is nothing less than one of the darkest eras in American history, comparable only to those previous eras mentioned. Is Trump really the leader most uniquely suited to fix all this?  No, probably not.  But Western Civilization depends upon him now, just as it once depended upon the leadership of Winston Churchill, and before that depended upon that of Abraham Lincoln.  Whatever he manages in the four years he has left, Trump is now America’s most transformational political figure since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The Republican Party has a new identity that bears his political DNA and signature – a distinct departure from its old neocon ideology that overextended America’s imperial reach into Iraq, Libya, Syria, and beyond during the decade before.  The MAGA Republican today is as the New Deal Democrat was one saecular cycle ago.  And with the gradually emerging consensus around Trump, the 80-year-old rules of a broken-down political order are being rewritten for the 21^st century.

Let’s travel back to a more “innocent” time.

In 1992, the Democratic Party had the following items in its party platform, which Bill Clinton embodied about as faithfully as you could expect:

· We call for a revolution in government – to take power away from entrenched bureaucracies and narrow interests in Washington and put it back in the hands of ordinary people.  We vow to make government more decentralized, more flexible, and more accountable – to reform public institutions and replace public officials who aren’t leading with ones who will.

· We seek . . . to repair the damaged bond between the American people and their government, that will expand opportunity, insist upon greater individual responsibility in return, restore community, and restore national security in a profoundly new era.

· Only a thriving economy, a strong manufacturing base, and growth in creative new enterprise can generate the resources to meet the nation’s pressing human and social needs.  An expanding, entrepreneurial economy of high-skill, high-wage jobs is the most important family policy, urban policy, labor policy, minority policy and foreign policy Americans can have.

· We need a national crackdown on deadbeat parents, an effective system of child support enforcement nationwide, and a systemic effort to establish paternity for every child.

· The success of democracy in America depends substantially on the strength of our community institutions: families and neighborhoods, public schools, religious institutions, charitable organizations, civic groups and other voluntary organizations. In these social networks, the values and character of our citizens are formed, as we learn the habits and skills of self-government, and acquire an understanding of our common rights and responsibilities as citizens.

· The goal of our nation must be to make abortion less necessary.

· Democrats in 1992 intend to lead a revolution in government, challenging it to act responsibly and be accountable, starting with the hardest and most urgent problems of the deficit and economic growth. Rather than throw money at obsolete programs, we will eliminate unnecessary layers of management, cut administrative costs, give people more choices in the service they get, and empower them to make those choices. To foster greater responsibility in government at every level, we support giving greater flexibility to our cities, counties and states in achieving Federal mandates and carrying out existing programs.

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However true the Democrats of 1992 onward really were to these ideas and principles is a different question for a different article. The Democrats had been out of the White House for eleven, going on twelve years, which inherently necessitates a lurch towards the modern center. And in 1992, this was where they believed the “center” was. After the red wave of 1994 where Republicans, running on the platform of the Contract with America, took the House and Senate for the first time in 42 years, Clinton triangulated his own liberalism with the conservative aspects of his party platform even further.  In a summit meeting with Newt Gingrich up in New Hampshire in June, 1995, Willie opened with the following:

When I came here in 1992, I was running because I thought we ought to change the direction of the country. I thought that we were in danger of losing our standard of living, and that we were coming apart when we ought to be coming together. I was worried about the decline in middle class income, the growth of the underclass, the high unemployment rate at the time, the exploding deficit and declining level of investment. I was also worried very much about the breakdown of our families, the number of children growing up in poverty, and the whole breakdown of a lot of the social factors that are very important to all of us and made us what we are. I said then, and I will reiterate today that I thought what we needed then, I still believe what we need is an economic strategy that focuses on creating jobs and raising incomes, a social strategy that rewards work and family in terms of welfare reform and everything else we do, reinforces responsible child rearing and responsible work; that we ought to do it in a way that reduced the size of the government and the bureaucratic burden of the government, but kept the government on the side of ordinary Americans.

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In case you read all that and found yourself wondering, “okay, but what about the border(?),” in 1996, the Democratic Party platform said the following:

Today’s Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became president, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again. … Just since January of 1995, we have arrested more than 1,700 criminal aliens and prosecuted them on federal felony charges because they returned to America after having been deported.

With just a handful of exceptions – namely being his interest in tariffs and reciprocity among allies in furtherance of existing agreements, and the compounded urgency for mass deportations and visa revocations, and the soon-to-come DOJ audits into the rest of the federal government for their abuses over the last five years – the Democratic Party platform from 1992 is Donald Trump’s Republican Party platform today.  And the sight of a billionaire suddenly emerging out of nowhere as a working-class champion and outsider campaigning against illegal immigration, free trade, foreign interventionism, and the norms of Washington insider politics was nothing new to anyone who was of age when Ross Perot was polling with 37% support of the national electorate.

It turns out that most of Trump’s ideas today, largely deriving from that very platform, are overwhelmingly popular; more-so his opposition to the radicalism of the Biden/Harris administration.  His narrow victory belies a growing national consensus on the issues he championed by contrast.  Americans polled 65% “wrong track” in 2024.  The majority of citizens favor mass deportation and a completion of Trump’s famous border wall.  The majority of citizens do not look favorably on the institutional overhauls and sudden dramatic shifts in American life that were implemented under the pretense of pandemic caution, and they oppose similar restrictions and other left-wing environmental fever dreams like the banning of gas stoves, the internal combustion engine, and the coal mining and energy industries.  Americans do not favor thermostat maximums or “non-essential” air travel bans, and they recoil at the idea that taxpayer dollars would be used to fund gender transition surgeries for prisoners and illegal aliens.

Most Americans also prefer abortion neither banned nor unlimited, but permitted at the early stages of pregnancy and not permitted late term unless necessitated by a medical emergency.  Put another way, Americans’ intolerance for laws regulating abortion slowly recedes the more that unborn child starts to look and behave like a baby.  The hostile public reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, therefore, was less about actual abortion policy and more about the public’s general preference for the status quo.  When Trump came out earlier than anyone else in support of IVF and committed himself to upholding the constitutional implication of the Supreme Court’s decision, which returned the issue of abortion to the people in their states, and even risked angering the pro-life Right by outright stating that he would not sign a national abortion ban, the American people took him at his word.  No amount of abortion rights ballot measures in states or hysteria over “Project 2025” manifested into a meaningful pro-abortion movement against Trump.

The key to Trump’s electoral success on these issues is that he never positioned himself as uniquely invested in any of them. The first three years of his first presidency gave credibility to his normalcy in a way none of the other more ideological candidates had.  After the 2022 midterms gave Republicans a narrow victory in the House and net loss in the Senate, his Party gradually reset itself, both within the House as a chamber with the ousting of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House and the compromise that elevated the sober, judicious, and generally agreeable Mike Johnson, and the removal of Ronna McDaniel as the RNC Chair in favor of Michael Whatley and Lara Trump.  As it was doing this, public opposition to Joe Biden was growing and Trump was abstaining from the primary debates while the others competed for a distant second.  The gradual unity of the Republican Party around new leadership more focused both in its opposition to Biden and in its reluctant cooperation with Ukraine – the one aspect of Biden’s presidency that remained marginally popular – offered a dual benefit to Trump as a new kind of established outsider.

It is easier to define what Trump’s MAGA Republican Party isn’t rather than what it is.  But just like in 1992, the antithesis has just one name: George Bush.  If the American public – left and right – has anything that unites it, it is the shared dissatisfaction of the Bush dynasty and the political order that name has now come to represent, along with the names of Dick and Liz Cheney, David Frum, and Bill Kristol.  For leftists, old-guard Republicans were nothing more than useful idiots to marginalize Trump and further the façade that Democrats represented a bipartisan bulwark of stability against him as a coalition of 21^st century cold warriors.  For the Right, any utility from a Bush presidency (such as a solid Supreme Court appointment like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) was undone by policy failures (and another disappointing Supreme Court appointment like David Souter and John Roberts) and a conflict abroad that, despite military successes, revealed a weakened national state that enabled the Democrats to return to power until checked by a massive red wave in the House and the emergence of a fresh class of conservatives with no Bushie affiliation, first in 1994, then again in 2010.

Finally, 1992 was America’s first post-Cold War election.  H.W.’s presidency had been, at best, an appropriate epilogue to the Reagan Era.  The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union was dissolved by the end of 1991, and the treaty that formed the European Union was signed mere days before the Iowa Caucus.  The dawn of the new era was appreciated but not yet understood, as evidenced by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.   Any effective leader must understand the moment.  By 1992, it was clear that H.W. no longer did.  The same turned out to be true of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden starting in 2009, as evident by the Russian “reset” button, the abandonment of America’s missile defense shield in Poland, the “red line” in Syria, the “aid” to Ukraine (apparently predicated on Hunter Biden’s board membership of Burisma) after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and the Donbas, and the 2015-16 Iran Nuclear Deal.  We are still dealing with the mess Obama made of the world from his failure to understand the moment.  And today, there may be no one else who understands the moment quite like Trump.

If the past 35 years have imparted an enduring political lesson, it is that perhaps up until now, America has generally preferred the personality of Democrats, but not their ideas or policies.  Virtually none of the policies enacted in the Obama and Biden era, such as the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, and the Inflation Reduction Act, were popular.  Even serious Democrats behind them have misgivings generally about their success.  But any advantages on ideas that Republicans might have enjoyed during this era were often nullified by: (1) their elevation of a safe yet sterile candidate (Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney) or of the utterly inept and easily attackable (Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin, Richard Murdock, Kari Lake, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, etc.); and/or (2) the association of the Party at large with an event so toxic that it tainted the entire brand (the Iraq War and January 6^th).  In 2016, Trump reversed the former problem.  In 2024, he overcame the latter.

By counterintuitive fashion then, Donald Trump’s epic comeback on a platform that re-asserts the principles of Ross Perot and Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party from 1992 – and the new Republican Party’s return to power around him – constitutes the greatest conservative victory since 1980.

“Okay, Vivek, you could’ve just said that last part…”

The point is not the punchline.  The context of Trump’s comeback cannot be understood without an appreciation of both the cauldron of compounded crises that define this dark era and the normalcy of Donald Trump and his new ruthlessly centrist MAGA Republican Party as largely just a group of Perot Democrats from 1992.  And yet… something about this whole thing feels a lot bigger than that, right?

The last time the Republicans won the popular vote, the Democrats momentarily panicked at the thought that maybe they really were an enclaved minority party in America, until they saw how unpopular the Iraq War was fast becoming and how fleeting George W. Bush’s support was.  Nothing about 2004 was particularly transformational, which was why so much of America became instantly energized by Barack Obama in 2008. Something about the present moment seems different.  It feels transformational.  Trump’s cabinet picks, the Republican House’s killing of the 2024 Christmas omnibus funding measure, and the weeks of pilgrimages, and of fealty, tribute, and hatchet-burying visits by world leaders, tech gurus, and business leaders to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago palace all speak to this.  Everyone understands that Trump is a lame duck, and yet it’s the easiest thing to forget because it looks and feels like he’s already the President.

But lots of presidents have looked, acted, or been perceived as transformational.  That was certainly what Obama went for.  Did he succeed?  Yes, in the sense that he magnified the cronyism of Washington, kneecapped America’s national standing even more than his predecessor had, and left the nation in such a bitterly divided social and cultural state of shambles that it took a chance on Donald Trump in the first place. That history repeated itself an accelerated form and with force-multiplied intensity over the past four years – the unofficial third term and second shadow presidency of Obama that will finally end on January 20, 2025.  The beginning of the end of Trump is also the end of the beginning of the political war that sparked the moment he descended that escalator.

It is the “turning” that will define America’s 21^st century identity, just as Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal did in 1932, and as Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party did in 1860.

But we’ll get into that in Part II.

– Vivek