https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/31/reflections-on-the-counter-revolution-in-america/
When Donald Trump entered office, he faced a number of choices that had confronted the last three Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They all had the choice to either shrink government and reduce deficits or slow government growth while cutting taxes.
They had the choice of using American power to restore deterrence by invading belligerents (e.g., Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan) or targeting enemies without deploying ground troops to change governments.
Republicans could either impose tariffs to ensure trade balances and fair trade or argue that free, even if unfair, trade was in the U.S.’s interest by lowering consumer prices, keeping domestic producers competitive, and assuming foreign subsidies were unsustainable.
They had the choice to either reverse the left-wing domination of culture or moderate its fated influence.
They could have shut down the open border and eliminated illegal immigration or publicly condemned it while tacitly maintaining an influx of hundreds of thousands per year for the corporate world, rather than millions.
In general, no Republican president of the past 50 years sought to radically reduce the size of government and balance the budget. None closed the border and began deportations. None avoided optional ground wars while solely hitting aggressors from the air. None led a cultural counter-revolution to reverse the left’s long march through our institutions.
Why?
Because to have done so would have constituted a veritable cultural counter-revolution that would incur an unacceptable level of hatred and resistance from the entrenched left—defined by the nexus of the media, bureaucracies, campuses, foundations, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the Democratic Party. The latter were deemed just too formidable—and dangerous—to confront in a single term, if ever.
Or so it was felt by prior Republican administrations. So, most stayed clear and sought to deregulate, cut taxes, keep illegal immigration to about 30,000 or so a month, and use rhetoric to oppose the left’s cultural revolution.
Not so with Trump. The target of four years of lawfare in his wilderness years, he has now become a true counterrevolutionary determined not to slow down the progressive trajectory of the last 60 years but to end it and return the U.S. to the center—at least as now defined by a balanced budget, reciprocal fair trade, full use of all modes of energy, a closed border, legal only immigration, no optional ground wars abroad and a fierce effort to end the woke/DEI/ESG/Green New Deal leftwing orthodoxy.