By Wayne Allensworth
When President Trump’s second term began almost a year ago, I was ready to give him and his team every benefit of every doubt. And it appeared for a while like there might even be some semblance of a plan to dismantle the administrative state. That hope was unfounded. Team Trump has no plan, no strategic vision, and no real understanding of what faces us. What Trump and his deputies have done so far is not only shallow but also haphazard. Most importantly, they have no conviction about who “we” are. Trump’s base is in Middle America, especially in areas decimated by deindustrialization and the social decay and pathologies that came with it. That base comprises a remnant of the American nation, the ethnic core that any nation-state must have to remain a coherent polity.
That base is white. But like so many of us, Trump has absorbed a creedal, ideological view of what it means to be American. We are loath to be seen specifically defending a white base. Before I go any further, I voted for Trump three times and yes, he is far better than the alternative. But “better” for what? Trump has the attention span one might expect in a social media age and often seems to start something — remember DOGE, the ballyhooed Department of Government Efficiency? — then jump on to the next “win,” thinking more of optics and slogans and appearance than of a coherent strategy to save the remnant of America that supported him, which he does not acknowledge. A case in point is immigration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been carrying out raids targeting illegal aliens, enough to attract the ire of the globalist-leftist alliance and its militant wing. But the number of actual deportations is highly questionable. And there is no movement — Vice President J.D. Vance’s recent welcome comments notwithstanding — toward limiting legal immigration, which will finish the job that the 1965 Immigration Act began by overwhelming Trump’s base. The Great Replacement continues.
If anything exposed Trump’s limitations, it was the Epstein affair. The public wanted the material released and malefactors prosecuted. None have taken place. True, we have not — at least yet — been drawn into a ground war in the Middle East, but America First is merely a slogan when it comes to Israel. Trump vastly overestimated his ability to influence Russia, but we won’t go to war in Ukraine. That leaves him looking for a “win” somewhere else. As Colonel Douglas McGregor recently told Tucker Carlson, Trump is all about optics, something unremarkable for a reality TV star. While Mexico (what happened to that “big, beautiful wall”?) is the major drug supply route feeding the cartel infrastructure in American cities, Trump for some reason (oil or perhaps the need for a “win?”) seems tipping toward neocons like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who want war with Venezuela. That would suit the globalists right down to the ground, as war is the health of their state — but not of ours. And nobody, in spite of all the talk we heard earlier, seems to take massive debt seriously enough to really do anything that would put a dent in it.
Yes, Trump has done some very laudable things: limiting refugees, attacking the “trans” agenda and federal government’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and at least making plans for a war against the Mexican cartels. I welcome the ICE raids. But he missed a golden opportunity during the Los Angeles immigration riots to invoke the Insurrection Act and carry out mass deportations. Apparently, there won’t be any. The administration’s claims about deportations, even if true, would be a drop in the mass immigration bucket. But again, they are highly questionable. There has been a “Trump effect” of emboldening our people to speak more freely. But Trump’s approach is scattershot, and he and his team are behaving as if the system itself and its institutions were fundamentally sound. They are not. They seem to believe that a few election cycles of “wins” will transform — and is already transforming — the country. The Dems are on the run, aren’t they?
First, it’s not at all apparent that they really are. November 4’s election results bear that out. Far-left Democrats are regrouping — and it is not clear, as Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen polling has pointed out a number of times, that the country, especially young people, are actually moving right. We are whistling past the graveyard yet again. What’s more, as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia recently told Carlson, most congressional Republicans actually hate Trump and are simply intent on blunting his MAGA moves while they wait him out. Greene believes that Washington is unchangeable — and she’s probably right. Meanwhile, the U.S. is bailing out Argentina, holding out a financial “lifeline” to the regime. What’s “America First” about that? Who will bail us out? MAGA is being co-opted by the usual suspects. GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas wants to be president — and is now making the rounds complaining about “Anti-Semitism” on the right, meaning any Republicans who question Washington’s passionate attachment to Israel.
The Trump tariffs did not crash the economy as the globalists claimed they would, and might have had some positive impact, but his trade deals, as McGregor observed, are also questionable. Yet Trump thinks he can conjure a “Golden Age” out of optics, sound bites, and attitude. Whatever momentum the administration had in its first hundred days has dissipated. Neither he nor his underlings understood and still don’t understand our dire straits. We can’t elect our way out of this. National elections can help stave off disaster for a while, but we live in a deeply-divided society that is beyond healing.
A few years ago, I wrote about using national politics in that manner — a holding action — while a new political arrangement could work itself out. MAGA is an electoral vehicle, but is not so much a grassroots movement with intent and purpose beyond sticking it to the Democrats. At the time, it was clear that various resistance actions out in the heartland were crying out for an organizer to meld them into a coherent and effective resistance movement. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA is nice, but not what we need most. Someone could have picked up the political hundred dollar bill laying around in the form of parents’ resisting leftist school boards, county sheriffs resisting gun control laws, regional movements in California and Oregon to split away from leftist state governments to join other states, and on and on. But Trump is a one-man show and nobody had the imagination to think outside the box of conventional “conservative” politics.
That opportunity is still out there, even if the GOP has already declared victory and folded its tent. What lies ahead is not going to be pleasant. We are in for a bumpy ride.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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