A Mount Rushmore Moment

Trump's second term has me considering questions I never thought I'd ask!

As we stand here today just over a month into Donald Trump’s second term, I have to write something I never thought I’d write:

Will Donald Trump deserve a spot on Mount Rushmore?

Keep in mind: I’m asking this question as someone who didn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020. Even going into his second inauguration here, I was skeptical that he would keep the promises he made and instead be like every other politician out there.

But the first month has been the most promising month of governance in my lifetime. If it keeps up, Trump will be the most consequential President since FDR. And unlike FDR, he will have actually bent the trajectory of this country in a positive direction.

But to fully understand why we can make this claim, we have to understand where we are and how we got here.

The Cold Civil War

I first used the term “Cold Civil War” in this piece back in January of 2022:

But, as I cover in the piece, the roots of the war and the path we’ve found ourselves on goes back much farther. I’ve been tracing it since 2008, but you could certainly date it back even further.

And it’s not just me noticing this. Eric Weinstein noted this in a recent tweet:

A cold war is delineated from a hot war by a lack of bullets. But on the other end, a cold war is more intense than your basic, every day, governance and politics by the no-holds-bars methods leveraged by both sides. Cold civil war begins when decorum, norms, and compromise end.

And as Eric notes, that is absolutely where we are now. Politics is about pure power now, and it will stay that way until the Cold Civil War is won.

The Two Sides

The views of the two sides are obviously a function of one’s own beliefs. History will ultimately be written by the victors, but I’ll frame it as this:

On one side is the American establishment, with a powerful coalition of bureaucrats, the media, and various “urban elites” as the foot soldiers in supporting the Globalist view of America as a piece of the international community.

On the other side is represented by Trump and his allies, an insurgent force brought into power with the backing of a broad coalition who feel disenfranchised by that establishment movement that has run the country for most of the past 40+ years.

With this framing, you can chart Trump’s rise in 2015/2016 as the opening salvo, but many who support his side would claim that the incitement started far earlier than that with various actions of Presidents Bush (x2), Clinton, and Obama.

Their claim would be that, somewhere along the line, American leaders stopped being for the American people and ended up serving a broad “globalist” concept rather than serving the interests of the American people.

After spending a lot of time thinking about this, I’m inclined to agree, and I think it’s something we can trace back to two years… 1963 and 1971.

JFK Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?

The assassination of JFK in December of 1963 bears all the hallmarks of a coup. If it happened anywhere but the US, we’d take it for granted that it was a hostile takeover of the country.

This is a much longer point to litigate, but the foreign policy dynamics at the time and the actions of certain high-level bureaucrats point to a conspiracy. As does the long line of US Presidents who kept those documents classified to this day.

What we’ve had since Kennedy is a long-line of political elites who have pursued their own agenda, notably globalist and interventionist, seamlessly no matter which party was in charge. Both Bushes began wars in the Middle East, Clinton started military engagements in the Balkans, and Obama continued to escalate the conflicts that Bush started.

All of them, no matter the party, pursued free trade and varying degrees of lenient immigration policy. I could go on, but you get the idea.

What the Fuck Happened in 1971?

There’s a reason that there’s a website literally called “WTF Happened in 1971”. That year serves as an inflection point for a whole array of metrics.

Productivity diverged from wages:

Income inequality began to increase:

Inflation accelerated greatly:

And much much more (notably, the U.S. also left the Gold Standard in 1971). Check out WTF Happened in 1971 for more details.

Scroll through there, and you can start to get a picture that many Americans intuitively grasp: something has been very wrong in this country for the last 50 years.

Sure, it’s worked for some Americans who have been positioned to take advantage of the gains of globalism and technology.

But despite what urban elites claim, most Americans are not that much better off today than they were in the 1980’s or 1990’s. Homes are harder to buy, good jobs are harder to come by, energy prices have skyrocketed as production has stalled, and technology like smartphones and social media have ironically done more harm than good.

The view that I have been coming around to is this: the U.S. has been controlled by a globalist force since at least 1971, a force that does not serve the will nor interest of the American people. Instead, it serves largely to enrich it’s own class, both within the US and abroad, and is focused solely on its grasp on power.

The Orange Man Cometh

Trump’s rise in 2015 was a direct response to the most overt globalist yet: Barack Obama.

In the view of this all as a long-simmering cold civil war, the ruling class had maintained power for so long (40-50 years) that the mask slipped. Obama won by paying lip service to various working class mantras, which he quickly abandoned during his presidency. They fully believed that the war had been won. Hillary’s presumed victory was expected to be a coronation not just of the first female President, but also of an enduring globalist rule over the American people.

But as we all know: Trump defied the odds and won, largely by energizing voters who had been so demoralized by this 40-50 year rule that they had been forgotten by the ruling class. Left to rot in their small rust belt towns, viewed with contempt by the elite and termed “deplorables” by Hillary and mocked as “clinging to their guns and religion” by a sitting President.

From there too, what happened from 2016 on can be viewed in cold civil war terms: the entrenched bureaucracy fought Trump tooth-and-nail throughout his term, using the media as their propagandistic mouthpiece. They had him impeached, twice. Covid, which is almost certainly came from a lab, was funded by the US government, happened to get released at the end of his term, leading to mass mail-in voting and, let’s just say a suspicious election in 2020 where Trump was narrowly beat by a walking embodiment of an establishment puppet.

And while it turns out that a senile President works great for letting an entrenched bureaucracy do what it wants, it also turns out to be not very popular with the American people. While Covid enabled a hostile retaking of the US government, it also woke more Americans up to the corruption and outright insanity of the ruling class. Anger simmered more and more as we watched the prolonged insanity of Covid in 2021 and 2022, the treasonous open borders policies, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the race-and-gender-fixated insanity, and much more.

The Return of the Orange Man

Meanwhile, in the run up to 2024, Democrats unwisely decided to continue to attack Donald Trump. They launched various frivolous legal attacks on the man. There was a terrifying assassination attempt that bears a lot of parallels to Kennedy’s assassination 60 years ago.

Funny enough, ten years of constant demonization, lawfare, and assassination attempts made Trump more popular than ever. In 2024 he gained votes with every demographic group in every state in the country. He’s become even more popular in the lead up to his inauguration, and even now as President. As we sit here today, Trump’s literally more popular than he’s ever been:

Despite a solid ten-year track record of failure, the establishment has basically continued their strategy of attacking the man incessantly for every little thing.

Honestly, that’s fine by me.

Trump’s Second Term: The Gloves are Off

That’s a hell of a lot of pretext to talk about the first three weeks of Trump’s 2nd term, but it’s important to understand the lens through which an increasing number of Americans are viewing his second term.

I’m not going to sit here and defend every single thing he’s done. Fixing a bureaucracy as f***ed as ours will be a long and inherently messy process. But Trump is finally governing as a Republican should. Whether past Republicans have been too cowardly, too inept, or too in the pocket of controlling interests is besides the point.

Trump is actively and openly reversing the treasonous immigration policies of Biden, Mayorkas, and the rest of the previous administration. We must have laws and borders in order to sustain a country, and while legal immigration is still allowed (as it should be), anyone who came here illegally should go.

Trump, through DOGE, is actively shrinking the bloated bureaucracy for the first time since America’s founding. This too is of foundational importance if America is to continue to be the most robust economy on the planet.

He’s continued to use the foreign policy of Teddy Roosevelt to “speak softly and carry a big stick” to help drive peace through the threat of American military action, rather than the dementia-ridden weakness that Biden’s administration provided.

He’s also rightfully pushing back on the various gender and DEI insanity of the political left. This is the way it should be, and orients us rightfully toward a vision shared by Martin Luther King Jr., among others, that we should “not [judge] by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Meanwhile, he’s presented a positive vision for American innovation and production. On vibes alone this is beneficial, but he’s also worked with various companies and nations to get them to make investments in the United States. Tariffs too, have been used as a negotiation tactic, sending a message to anyone that there will be benefits to building in America.

In short, Trump’s second term has been unapologetically based. It’s been far better than I expected and it brings an enthusiasm and optimism for America that I haven’t felt in a long time.

If Trump provides a long-term durable win in even one of these areas, he probably goes down as the best U.S. President in the past hundred years.

If he succeeds in two or more of these areas? Put the man on Mount Rushmore. I’d be lying if I said that the hysterical screeching from liberals wasn’t an added perk of this hypothetical.

But schadenfreude aside, we’re likely looking at the most impactful Presidency and historical figure of the past 60 years. I believe this change in trajectory will be incredibly positive if it can be maintained despite the endless attacks from the entrenched bureaucracy and media.

So let’s say Trump does finally defeat those powers and bring durable change to American Government after 50+ years of stasis. In that case, he absolutely belongs right up there with the greats that we’ve carved into the side of a mountain.