Trump’s Unknown Frontiers Trump is rewriting the rules of politics, economics, and culture—and no one, not even the experts, knows what happens when the old orthodoxy finally breaks. By Victor Davis Hanson
https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/04/trumps-unknown-frontiers/
Donald Trump’s far-ranging counter-revolution, to quote the old Star Trek mission statement, seeks “To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Because no conservative president has dared to question the last 70 years of progressive cultural, social, economic, and political dominance, all traditional wisdom, all our renowned “experts,” and all the self-described “authorities” have no real credibility in their mostly flawed analyses and wrong prognoses.
Read what our legacy media predicted in March for this summer’s economy, or in January for the future of the border, or what would happen should the U.S. Air Force enter Iranian airspace.
Take the border. “Comprehensive immigration reform” (a euphemism for rolling amnesties and a still-open border) was the establishment’s answer to 10,000 foreign nationals storming the border during peak surges of the Biden administration.
But no president had ever simultaneously 1) pressured Mexico to close its borders and patrol ours, 2) announced a plan to complete a border wall along the entire US-Mexico boundary, 3) stopped catch-and-release, 4) ceased refugee applications after illegally entering the U.S., 5) introduced policies encouraging voluntary self-deportation, and 6) prevented all illegal entries at the border.
The result is that we do not know the full effects of these combined border policies.
So far, one million foreign nationals have lost jobs, and 2 million Americans have gained them since Trump’s inauguration. How much money will be saved in local, state, and federal entitlements if illegal immigrants return home?
How much trauma and costs will be avoided if 500,000 criminal aliens are deported?
How many serious and lethal hit-and-run accidents will be prevented?
To what degree will the idea of citizenship be reenergized once it is not reduced to the equivalency of mere residence?
How many emergency rooms will have more space for U.S. citizens? No one knows, but the consequences could be enormous.
The U.S. has never applied so many tariffs in so many ways upon so many goods from so many countries. As a result, economists have sworn since March that we are headed to a recession, stock collapse, stagflation, and high unemployment.
But do they really know the profit margins of our mercantile importers, who tariff our goods but expect easy entry for their exports to the U.S.?
Can importers pay a 15% tariff, still make a handsome profit, and not raise costs excessively on the U.S. consumer? If trade surpluses do not matter and tariffs hurt those who implement them, why do sophisticated Europeans, adroit Japanese, and smart Chinese prefer surpluses and tariffs to our deficits and zero or low tariffs? Are they on to something?
Do moderate tariffs encourage rather than retard American enterprise, on the theory that it will not be undercut by dumping and exchange manipulation and can also compete with far cheaper energy and transportation costs?
No one really knows these answers because the U.S. has never tried the current policy in quite the present way before. We do know that the radical free trade and asymmetrical tariffs of the last half-century empowered China to world power status with a dangerous military and hollowed out the U.S. industrial interior.
Is the $2 trillion budget deficit, as predicted, set in stone? Will the national debt only grow to unsustainable levels? However, federal agencies have never announced annual cuts of nearly $200 billion—along with a ten percent reduction in the budget deficit.
Never has the government promised to deregulate and fast-track permits for construction, energy development, and manufacturing from 2-3 years to mere months. What will the financial results be?
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggests that $15 trillion in new foreign investments are now promised. If accurate, what will such influxes do to employment? To federal revenues? To the economy in general?
Is it possible that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could be right that $300 billion in federal income will come from new tariffs—if true, that might reduce the deficit by another 15 percent?
What is the effect on the economy of cheaper energy costs when production is slated to rise without draining the strategic petroleum reserve on the eve of elections?
No one has ever questioned universities before so systematically.
We do know that student loan debt has spiraled to $1.7 trillion. Graduation rates have dropped to about 50-60 percent of those who enroll. The average student now takes six—not four—years to graduate. Today’s graduates, by all accounts, leave universities with fewer analytical skills, less language fluency, and reduced general knowledge than in past decades. Faculties have never been more weaponized, with 90-95 percent reportedly holding progressive views.
If universities are taxed on their endowments, will that not force them to reconsider their efforts to maintain their non-profit status?
Will 15 percent limits on overhead charges on federal grants force researchers to watch their budgets and universities to curb their bloated administrative legions?
What is so wrong with curbing the tuition gouging and profiteering off foreign students, and limiting their numbers to ensure access to underserved, deserving Americans?
Will the end of segregated dorms, safe spaces, and “affinity” graduations lead to more integration and assimilation than do the current tribal fixations on race and ethnicity? Historically, does tribalism or assimilation best serve a nation?
Will meritocratic admissions improve student skills, rewarding those who study hard and encouraging those who do not to emulate those who do? Will minorities who are admitted under meritocratic criteria be seen as more or less qualified?
Are far fewer administrators, more emphasis on instruction and less on politics, and more students from the heartland and fewer from communist China or the illiberal Middle East such bad things?
In the last 50 years, affirmative action transmogrified into DEI racial separatism, chauvinism, and a system of reparatory spoils, played and manipulated by grifters, opportunists, and fakers, from Elizabeth Warren-style phonies and Jussie Smollett-like con artists to opportunists like Zohran Mamdani who game the system.
Has any chauvinistic multiracial democracy—like Brazil or India—or any multiethnic or multireligious confederation—such as Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, or Iraq—ever succeeded by prioritizing caste, race, religious sectarianism, or ethnic tribalism?
Can any top-down imposed policy ever be successful when 70 percent of the electorate opposes it?
Can any government that institutionalizes bias and preferences succeed while ignoring class in favor of race—without ever clearly defining which racial criteria justify the entire spoils system, or why?
In our postmodern 21st-century system, no one knows exactly what will happen when race becomes incidental rather than essential. But we do know from history where we were headed under the current aberrant system.
Abroad, in the last 30 years, NATO was voluntarily hollowed out—largely praised in the abstract by European grandees and shorted and ignored in the concrete by Euro budget technocrats. Yet since the days of the Cold War, NATO members had not met their defense expenditure promises.
Now, most NATO members have met those commitments. Frontline NATO states like Sweden, Finland, and Poland are far better armed and prepared than legacy Western members like Belgium, Spain, or Italy. If there follows a rearmed and recommitted NATO, will not the world become a safer place?
We were told for a half-century to steer clear of Iran, the supposed unhinged, lethal bully of the Middle East. Their henchmen blew up barracks and embassies, took and executed hostages, and sowed terror throughout the Middle East with their killer surrogates Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.
But Iran had never really fought, much less won a war, since it pleaded with Saddam Hussein for an armistice from the catastrophic Iran-Iraq conflict.
What will be the effect on the Middle East with a currently impotent Iran, an inert Hezbollah, and a subterranean Hamas in hiding? More importantly, what is the current regional role of Iran without a nuclear program, air defenses, a navy, or expeditionary terrorist forces? Again, no one knows.
Finally, we have never seen anything quite so radical as the new Democratic Party, at least not since the McGovern blowout of 1972. In its 24/7, 360-degree fixation on hating Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda, rarely has a party embraced signature policies that are so despised by the American people. As a result, we have no idea what the result will be other than a national implosion at the polls.
Why would any political party embrace open borders, the influx of 12 million illegal aliens, 600 sanctuary cities, biological men dominating women’s sports, dismantling the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries, prosecutors who release rather than indict and convict violent criminals, defunding the police, tribal fixations and racial spoils systems in defiance of the Supreme Court, the terrorists of Hamas over democratic Israel, and overt campus anti-Semitism?
We are in the middle of a counter-revolution, whose fate will likely be decided in 15 months by the midterm elections and the status of the late 2026 economy.
Structural changes across the economy, culture, and politics of the country are underway. Our bicoastal experts and authorities are mostly predicting a multifaceted systems failure—without explaining why or how.
Yet the only constant in their predictions is that when and if they prove wrong, they will not pivot, correct, or apologize, but simply move on to their next flawed prognosis, fortified by their titles and letters after their names—but otherwise little else.
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