Victor Davis Hanson
Almost immediately, Trump unleashed a counter-revolution not just to remedy the Biden disasters but to address their symptoms growing over a half-century of leftwing domination of U.S. institutions.
In miraculous fashion, the border was quickly secured, with near-zero illegal entries.
Over two million illegal aliens either self-deported or were deported by ICE. For the first time in half a century, immigration into the U.S. was strictly legal.
Oil and natural gas production hit historic highs. Draining the strategic petroleum reserve was abruptly stopped. Efforts began to refill it.
The U.S. now pumped more oil and gas per day than any other nation in history.
New foreign investment in 2025 after ten months was reported by the Trump administration to have reached $20 trillion. Critics objected to that figure and claimed the total would be only half that—in other words, some seven times higher in ten months than the reported $1.4 billion during the last year of the Biden administration.
Yet in a paradox reminiscent of this historian Livy’s shrug that first-century Romans “have reached the point where we cannot bear either our vices or their cure,” the media and the Left soon screamed about “affordability.”
That is, after spiking prices up over 20 percent in four years, they blamed Trump for not lowering them in ten months—as if the medicine of likely averaging 3 percent inflation in 2025 is worse than the yearly Biden disease of 5.2 percent.
When the border was destroyed, and millions rushed through and dispersed among 340 million Americans, how exactly was the rule of law to be restored?
Politely asking the millions who broke the law to kindly return to their homelands and try again—legally?
To ask half a million criminals to please show up at the nearest police station and register to be sent home?
To stop a virtual one-sided trade war that hollowed out the U.S. industrial base, what was the proper medicine?
To ask China politely to cease dumping products below the cost of production, raising one-sided tariffs, stealing technology, ignoring patent and copyright laws, and running up $300 billion in trade surpluses?
Mexico had sent a million illegal aliens a year to the U.S. for decades. Its cartels kill over 70,000 Americans a year. Their gangs rake in $15 billion in human trafficking and drug profits.
Mexico’s new Chinese partnership ensures it has a $171 billion per year trade surplus with the U.S. It receives over $60 billion in cash remittances from its supposedly destitute expatriate illegal alien community, the majority of them on some sort of American public assistance.
How is one to stop all that?
To have President Obrador help a stumbling Biden off the stage in Mexico City?
To send Border Czar whiz Kamala Harris down to Latin America to negotiate for a U.S. secure border with those who destroyed it?
Canada promised—and has so far welched—to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense, while the U.S. protects it. As thanks, Canada runs up a $62 billion trade surplus with the U.S., much of it due to its own asymmetrical tariffs, and leaves its side of the longest border in the world poorly guarded.
What is the proper response? More dialogue with NATO’s members most in arrears?
More praise of the world’s longest and safest border?
Yes, Donald Trump tweets too much. He can be uncouth and certainly disruptive and harsh—like chemotherapy. But does this make his medicine worse than the disease he inherited?
Did Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC, or Jasmine Crockett ever offer a systematic plan to close the border, to ensure measured, diverse, meritocratic, and legal only immigration? Did they have an agenda to end the Iranian nuclear threat?
Do they allege Trump is mentally challenged because for so long they all conspired to hide Biden’s dementia and became in the process expert diagnosticians of cognitive decline?
What were their proposed remedies for serial attacks on U.S. installations in Syria or our ships in the Red Sea—lifting the Houthis’ terrorist designation?
What was the Left’s solution to the Ukrainian Stalingrad other than to keep feeding it “as long as it takes”?
What was the plan for the Pentagon’s shortfalls? A military always 50,000 recruits short?
Were we to keep draining the strategic petroleum reserve before every midterm or general election?
Does anyone think that DEI, ESG, and trillion-dollar wind and solar subsidies have made the U.S. more prosperous, competitive on the world stage, or united at home?
Certainly, the Trump administration has not emphasized enough that its economic medicine is longer-term and will take more time than just 10 months to cure four years of disaster. But that said, it will ensure a far stronger economy in 2026 than between 2021–24. In the meantime, the Trump administration might have reminded strapped Americans that keeping inflation at 3 percent is for now far better than the yearly 5.2 percent of the prior four years.
Certainly, Trump’s administration has not explained enough how hard it is to enforce immigration law—and how easy it was in the decades before 2025 simply to let 25-30 million illegal aliens roam in.
Certainly, the Left’s chaos strategy of street violence, attacking ICE, smearing the National Guard and ICE as Nazis and the Gestapo, shutting down the government, urging soldiers to break the law, cherry-picking partisan, left-wing lower-court judges to block executive orders, has, as planned, created a sense of chaos and provoked Trump to reply rhetorically in kind.
But all that said, the current medicine is really preferable to the fatal disease. For the first time in five years, there is hope of real affordability, of legal-only immigration, of a deterrent U.S. military abroad, of a content of our character not the color of our skin meritocracy, and a U.S. energy powerhouse that will supercharge the economy—in opposite fashion to the prior, European-like harness upon it.
In a perfect world, Trump should be more conciliatory, less provocative, tweet less, and avoid ad hominem attacks—in the fashion that effective chemotherapy for Stage 4 cancers should be easily administered, cherry-sweetened, and with zero side-effects.
But until then, bitter chemotherapy remains life-saving, while far more toxic cancer is life-ending.
Discussion (3)
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Victor - Trump and his team DO state the results of his policies short and long term. The problem is you need to read conservative media to hear it. Any good news simply does not get reported by corporate media, so the average person only hears bad news and sees “mean tweets”. Don’t know what to do about that, what do you propose (since I have heard you in the past decry the lack of the administration touting success or promising more hope for the future)?
Even worse, there is no chemotherapy or any known treatment available to treat the societal cancer of progressivism. Speaking or demanding the truth as antidote would be like 'trying to cure leukaemia with leeches".