The Optimistic View of Trump 2.0

Editor’s Note: Before you jump to conclusions, I am writing The Pessimistic View of Trump 2.0 tomorrow. Now that we are six months into Trump’s second term, the purpose of writing these two articles is to show how I am torn in two directions on the Trump presidency.

We are six months into the Golden Age.

Gas prices are low.

Egg prices are way down.

The stock market is doing great.

A recession has become less and less likely.

Americans are replacing foreigners in the workforce.

The First Amendment and Second Amendment are protected.

Illegal immigration has subsided after several decades due to Trump’s policies.

No American president since Herbert Hoover has made greater use of protective tariffs.

Kamala Harris never became president. The Democrats are locked out of power in Washington. By winning the 2024 election, Donald Trump blocked them from pursuing their evil agenda. The Left has lost cultural and political ground on immigration, transgenderism and anti-White discrimination. Generally speaking, winning is better than losing and the Right has turned the tide in key cultural battles.

Trump was successful in pushing the Big Beautiful Bill through Congress which will fund the border wall, codify 28 of his executive orders including several on immigration and create a new ICE by hiring thousands of new agents. Mass deportations haven’t happened yet because the current version of ICE lacked the resources and detention capacity to execute mass arrests and deportations, but Trump could still deliver on this promise down the road. It was never going to happen overnight.

While there is noise in Congress about a new push for comprehensive immigration reform, it is unlikely to happen and several Republican congressmen can always be found agitating for it. Salazar introduced the Dignity Act in the last Congress. The so-called farm worker amnesty doesn’t apply to illegal aliens currently in the United States. It just tinkers with the existing H-2A visa program. Unlike H-1B visas which harm college graduates in the tech industry, Americans aren’t competing for these jobs anyway.

Blackpillers claimed that there was no difference between Trump and Kamala Harris on immigration and that just as many illegal aliens would come in under Trump. This has been proven false. The border hasn’t been this quiet in decades. While the president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally change legal immigration levels which are set by statute, Trump has shuttered the refugee resettlement program while admitting White South Africans. The Trump administration has reduced legal immigration in other creative ways by slowing green card renewals and approvals and by creating new taxes and barriers to entry in the Big Beautiful Bill. While Joe Biden was flying illegal aliens into the country on planes, the Trump administration has shutdown the CBP One app and ended Biden’s parole programs. It has also created new financial incentives to encourage illegal aliens to self deport from the country. Tens of thousands of illegal aliens have taken advantage of it. The Trump administration has a very different approach to immigration than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Activists who are incapable of conceding that Trump has been largely successful in halting illegal immigration are crippled by Trump Derangement Syndrome.

In the run up to the 2024 election, the greatest fear expressed online by blackpillers was that Trump would start a “war with Iran.” While it is true that Trump is a Zionist who attacked Iran for Israel, he bombed Iranian nuclear sites and nothing happened in response. He pulled back from regime change. No American soldier has “died for Israel.” The worst case scenario was avoided. The Iranian response to the attack was a coordinated face saving gesture like the response to the assassination of General Soleimani in 2020. Trump appears to have used the strike to wash his hands of the issue. Trump’s aggression toward Iran was always about their nuclear program. Operation Midnight Boomer has given him the excuse to move on from Iran without harming America or doing much damage to Iran. Furthermore, Trump’s falling out with Rupert Murdoch makes further conflict with Iran less likely since FOX News championed it.

As for the Epstein Files, I was personally never invested in the issue. It is true that Jeffrey Epstein was likely an asset of the CIA and Mossad, but this didn’t figure much into why I voted for Trump in the 2024 election. I never believed he would release the Epstein Files in the first place because it would be “bad for the Jews.” By bombing Iran for Netanyahu and covering up the Epstein Files, Trump has stoked more suspicion of Israel than we have ever seen before on the Right. The taboo on the Jewish Question has collapsed on the populist Right. Overall, the cultural warming trend that we were excited about in the spring – think of Shiloh Hendrix raising $750K over dropping n-bombs or Trump calling out White Genocide in South Africa – has accelerated through the summer. Six months into Trump’s second term, “naming the Jew” is ceasing to be taboo in certain corners of the Right. Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes would have simply been buried underneath the noise of the usual cultural battles in a Kamala Harris presidency.

Smart people on the Right knew that Trump was a Zionist MIGA shill when we voted for him in the 2024 election. We lived through four years of his first term. We knew that Blumpf would probably return at some point. We had ample experience with MIGA in Trump 1.0. Thus, it is unreasonable to get angry, emotional and blackpilled over Trump returning to form and acting like the Zionist he has always been. We voted for him because we knew in our heads that we weren’t going to win on that issue by 2028 (there are too many pro-Israel Boomer evangelicals), but that we could make progress on immigration and other issues that matter to us. We have a lot to be happy about based on our expectations.

The federal courts were one of the top five reasons why I voted for Trump in the 2024 election. Trump succeeded in reshaping the federal judiciary in his first term. It is why I thought it was worth giving him a second chance to continue to stack the courts in a second term. We saw that under Biden when Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade and Students for Fair Admissions overturned Bakke which gave the Right major victories on abortion and affirmative action. The Supreme Court just delivered another string of lopsided victories for Trump on limiting the power of district courts to issue nationwide injunctions, Trump’s legal challenge to birthright citizenship, deporting migrants to countries to which they have no connection, state bans of trans-inspired child sex mutilation and making it easier for plaintiffs to sue over claims of anti-White discrimination. Blumpf’s self sabotage in June and July overshadowed the major successes he has had in pushing his agenda through Congress and the Supreme Court.

In the first months of Trump’s second term, Stephen Miller hit the ground running and started dozens of legal battles with various executive orders across a whole range of subjects. Miller has repeatedly stated that time is the administration’s most precious asset. He wasted no time in starting fights. Those executive orders predictably hit a wall of resistance and were stymied by district court judges appointed by Democrats. Blackpillers crowed in triumph as Trump was thwarted by legal speed bumps, but have grown silent as appeals have been filed and those cases have begun trickling up the legal food chain where Trump is competing on friendlier judicial terrain and important precedents will be set. The same thing happened in Trump’s first term over the border wall and the Remain in Mexico policy.

The fact is, we are actually not that far from where I expected we would be when I made my 2025 predictions.The Big Beautiful Bill delivered on tax cuts and border security. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tennessee on “gender-affirming care.” Democrats have fallen in love with the filibuster. Trump got his Cabinet. The usual congressional bottlenecks have forced Trump to rely on budget reconciliation to move his agenda through Congress. We are not at war with Iran. Putin has resisted ending the war in Ukraine. Trump signed a blizzard of executive orders. The Jewish Question has continued to go mainstream. Democrats are still lost in the wilderness. Trump’s Revenge Tour has put an end to Jim Acosta and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. I didn’t think Trump and Elon Musk would have such a swift falling out, but those two have a mutual interest in patching up their relationship.

By voting for Trump in the 2024 election, we are now on the escalator out of the Trump era. We saved ourselves from a Trump 2028 campaign and potentially dragging the Trump era out until 2032. If Kamala Harris had won and become president, the last four years would have repeated themselves and become eight years. We would have gotten a second Revenge Tour against a weakened and unpopular Kamala in 2028. In a year a half, Trump will be a lame duck and the Right will be moving on from his personality cult. He will have had nearly 15 years to “Make America Great Again.” The verdict will be in and Trump will be constitutionally ineligible to run for president again under the 22nd Amendment.

I still believe that when the Trump era is over and Trump has finally retired to Mar-a-Lago that our politics will have become much more mainstream than when he came down the escalator in 2015. The Jewish Question and American support for Israel is the last taboo standing and even that is evaporating. No one cares that you are nationalist anymore or that you are pro-White or support tariffs or want to restrict immigration or deport millions of people. None of that is “extremist” anymore. When deporting millions of people and ending disparate impact has become the measuring stick of success, the glass is still half full. We are slowly redefining the Right on our terms which was inconceivable a decade ago.

There is no persuasive case that we would have been better off today if Kamala Harris had become president. Trump inherited the Ukraine disaster and the Gaza disaster from Joe Biden. Even if Trump has failed to quell those conflicts, there is no reason to believe that Kamala Harris would have succeeded. The Ukraine war would likely be significantly worse with Democratic control of Congress and the White House. The federal courts would not be better stacked with more activists like Ketanji Brown Jackson. The FBI under Kash Patel and Dan Bongino has at least taken a break from hunting down and arresting rightwing activists like the J6 protestors and the mothers who protest abortion clinics.

Even if I am not as thrilled as I was with President Trump in his first five months, I am not persuaded by most of his detractors in our movement. I still think Trump with all of his flaws and limitations has done a lot of good. If Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election, I do not believe there would have been a “collapse.” I do not believe the Southern states would have seceded. I do not believe a “revolutionary” National Socialist movement would have enjoyed any success. Joe Biden was president for four years and none of those things happened. We are still better off because Trump won the 2024 election. Sadly, the status quo might be the best possible scenario, and Trump “has the cards.”