The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and his eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.

Although only partially implemented during Trump’s first term, maga policies nevertheless marked a break from many past Republican orthodoxies, especially in their signature skepticism concerning the goal of nation-building abroad and the so-called endless wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, that tended to follow. But like all counterrevolutions, there were intrinsic challenges in the transition from simply opposing the status quo to actually ending it.

There was a promising start during Trump’s first administration. Corporate interest in a porous border to ensure inexpensive labor was ignored; immigration was deterred or restricted to legal channels, and the border was largely secured. Deregulation and tax cuts, rather than deficit reduction, were prioritized. Selective tariffs were no longer deemed apostasies from the free market, but acceptable and indeed useful levers to enforce reciprocity in foreign trade. Costly middle-class entitlements were pronounced sacrosanct. Social Security and Medicare were declared immune from cost-cutting and privatization.

This “action plan to Make America Great Again” went hand in hand with an effort to transform the Republican Party. What had once been routinely caricatured as a wealthy club of elites was reinvented by Trump as a working-class populist movement. Racial chauvinism and tribalism were rejected. Race was to be seen as incidental to shared class concerns—notably, reining in the excesses of a progressive, identity-politics-obsessed bicoastal elite. Athletes who in 2020 had bent a knee to express outrage at “systemic” racism were in 2024 celebrating their scores by emulating Trump’s signature dance moves.

Despite intense resistance from the media, the Democratic Party, and the cultural Left, the first Trump term enjoyed success in implementing many of these agendas. After losing the 2020 election—in which nearly 70 percent of voters in key swing states voted by mail-in ballot—Trump left office without a major war on his watch. He had overseen a period with 1.9 percent annualized inflation, low interest rates, steady economic growth, and, finally, after constant battles and controversy, a secure border with little illegal immigration.

Yet during the succeeding four-year Biden interregnum, the world became far more chaotic and dangerous, both at home and abroad. Biden’s general agenda was to reverse by executive order almost every policy that Trump had implemented. And while Trump was successfully reelected in 2024 after reminding voters that they had been far better off under the maga agenda than during Biden’s subsequent shambolic tenure, the changed conditions in 2024 will also make implementing that agenda even more difficult than after Trump’s first victory.

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

Second, in the 2024 election, Trump won a record number of Hispanic voters (somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, depending on how the term “Hispanic” is defined) in one of the most dramatic political defections from the Democratic Party in history. While voters’ switch to Trump can be largely attributed to the deleterious effects of the Biden-Harris open border on Hispanic communities, schools, and social services, no one knows what, if any, might be the paradoxical political effects of the mass deportation of many within these same Hispanic communities.

Will Hispanic voters continue to resent the ecumenical nature of illegal immigration across the southern border, which now draws millions from outside Latin America? Will they wish to focus primarily on violent criminals while exempting on a case-by-case basis Mexican nationals, many of whom have kinship ties to Hispanic U.S. citizens? In sum, no one yet knows the political consequences of deporting all—or even 5 to 10 percent—of the Biden-era illegal aliens, given their unprecedented numbers. Even if polls tell us that 52 percent of Americans support “massive” deportations, will that number still hold true if they eventually include friends and relatives or entail five or six million deportations?

Trump’s fiscal policies pose similar known unknowns. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised a number of large tax cuts to various groups. For example, eliminating taxes on service workers’ tips might cost the treasury in excess of $10 billion a year. Trump’s call to make tax-free the incomes of police officers, firefighters, veterans, and active-duty military personnel would translate into at minimum a shortfall of $200 billion a year in federal tax revenue. Another $200 billion in annual revenue would be lost if, as promised, Trump once again allowed state and local taxes to be deducted from federal income taxes. Some $300 billion per annum would also vanish under Trump’s proposals to cease taxing hourly overtime pay. Other promises to eliminate taxes on Social Security income, cut corporate taxes to 15 percent, or reextend his 2017 tax cuts could in toto reach $1 trillion in lost federal revenue per year.

The 2024 yearly deficit was projected at about $1.83 trillion. So how would Trump reach his goal of moving toward a balanced budget if all the promised tax reductions were realized, with a yearly loss of at least $1 trillion in revenue added to the nearly $2 trillion currently borrowed each year? No one knows the precise increase in annual revenues that will accrue from greater productivity and economic growth due to Trump’s deregulatory and tax-reduction agendas. Furthermore, how much income can be expected from proposed reciprocal tariffs on foreign imports? And how much will realistically be gained in savings from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency and their promise to cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget?

So far, Trump’s proposed radical tax cuts are quite popular, mostly transparent, and often detailed, while the commensurate massive reductions in federal spending are as yet none of the above. The political success of Trump’s tax and spending reductions will hinge on the degree to which he can eliminate massive unpopular waste, slash useless programs, increase federal revenue from targeted foreign tariffs, and through incentives grow the size and incomes of the taxpaying public and corporations—without touching sacrosanct big-ticket items like defense, Social Security, and Medicare. It bears noting that no prior administration has been able to cut the annual defecit while also massively reducing federal income taxes.

Trump has also promised a radically new and different cohort to run his cabinet posts and large agencies. In his first term, Trump’s agenda was stymied by both his own political appointees and the high-ranking officials of the administrative state. Starting in 2017, they saw their new jobs as either warping maga directives into their own preferred policies or colluding to block a supposedly unqualified and indeed “dangerous” Trump. Almost monthly, his cabinet heads or agency directors—John Bolton, James Comey, John Kelly, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Christopher Wray—were at odds with their politically inexperienced president.

Anonymous lower-ranking officials routinely claimed to the media that they were internally frustrating Trump initiatives and leaked embarrassing (and possibly fabricated) anecdotes about their president. One supposedly high-ranking Trump official known as “Anonymous” —later revealed to be a rather low-ranking bureaucrat named Miles Taylor—began a New York Times hit piece, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” He further boasted of how appointees deliberately tried to sabotage Trump policies and executive orders.

But paradoxes also arise from Trump’s 2024 remedies for this earlier internal obstruction. Given this past experience, only genuine outsiders appear immune to the compromises and careerism endemic among veterans of the administrative state. And yet such would-be reformers often lack the insider knowledge, expertise, and familiarity with the government blob needed to reduce or eliminate it.

The radical growth in the federal government, the surge in entitlements, the increases in regulations and taxes, and the soaring deficit and national debt were overseen by so-called experts in the bureaucracy as well as by traditional politicians on both sides of the aisle. In response, would-be reformers have talked grandly about the dangers of unsustainable national debt, the interest payments that now exceed $1 trillion per year, and the need to rein in nearly $2 trillion in annual budget deficits. But few, especially in Congress, may be willing to cancel the sacred-cow programs that have enriched their constituents, provided jobs for millions of Americans, and offered high-paying revolving-door billets for retired politicians and their staffers.

For example, the general public, liberal and conservative alike, acknowledges vast waste and wrongheaded procurement at the Pentagon. Auditors quietly grant that massive subsidies and corporate welfare to pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, and crony-capitalist wind- and solar-energy companies are near scandalous. An increasing number of voters now believe that the government needs to get out of the business of guaranteeing student loans that are nonperforming, stop funding boondoggles like high-speed rail, and dismantle the vast dei-commissar system at government agencies.

Yet those most familiar with these programs are their beneficiaries. And those who could most effectively discontinue them are precisely those who perhaps could least be trusted to do so. Therefore, outsiders are needed, even or especially those without the degrees and résumés customarily required to run these huge government entities.

Trump’s cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth, for example, a decorated combat veteran who wrote a book on the Pentagon’s pathologies, is by conventional standards unqualified to be the defense secretary. He is not a four-star officer, former Fortune 500 ceo, or prior cabinet official. Unlike his two predecessors, however, he would not revolve into the office from a post at a defense corporation with huge Pentagon contracts.

The fbi nominee Kash Patel has a lengthy record of government service in Congress, the executive branch, and legal circles. But he also is a fierce critic of the fbi and was once himself a target of agency monitoring. Indeed, Patel wrote a book about fbi misadventures, incompetence, and political weaponization. He promises to move the agency outside of Washington, D.C., and to end its political contamination—which has earned him fierce opposition from within the bureau and its congressional and media supporters.

In rejection of the Republican establishment that obstructed him in his first administration, Trump has often opted for anti-big-government picks who were once Democrats or who otherwise emphatically reflect the populist nature of the new Republican Party, such as Tulsi Gabbard (National Intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services), Dr. Marty Makary (Food and Drug Administration), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (National Institutes of Health), or Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Labor).

In sum, while it is not impossible for reformers to emerge from the status quo, it is precisely those “unqualified,” “firebrand,” or “dangerous” outsiders without “proper” experience in government, without prestigious degrees and credentials, and without sober and judicious reputations within the bureaucracies (indeed, they are sometimes the very targets of the agencies that they are tasked to reform or end) who are most immune to being compromised by those bureaucracies.

But it is abroad where the implementation of the maga agenda will be most severely stress-tested, particularly regarding China, Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East. Trump’s first term was neither isolationist nor interventionist. He loathed nation-building, but he also ridiculed the appeasement strategies of prior administrations. Recalling the Roman military commentator Vegetius’s famous aphorism si vis pacem, para bellum (If you desire peace, prepare for war), Trump’s strategy in building up the nation’s defenses and reforming the Pentagon was not to fight elective ground wars or to democratize foreign nations, but to avoid future conflicts through demonstrable deterrence.

A good example is his first-term experience with radical Islamists in the Middle East. On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration killed by drone the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani near the Baghdad airport. Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath. After the Trump cancellation of the Iran deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases in Iraq and Syria—most of which, ironically, Trump himself wished to remove.

A few days after Soleimani’s death, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike of twelve missiles against two U.S. airbases in Iraq, assuming that Trump had no desire for a wider Middle Eastern war. Tehran had supposedly warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks, which killed no Americans. Later reports, however, did suggest that some Americans suffered concussions and that more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed. Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East, while restoring deterrence that prevented, rather than prompted, full-scale conflicts.

Yet in a second Trump administration, such threading of the deterrence needle may become far more challenging. The world today is far more dangerous than it was when Trump left office in 2021. The U.S. military is far weaker, suffering from munitions shortages, massive recruitment shortfalls, dei mandates, and dwindling public confidence. The State Department is far less credible, and America’s enemies have been long nursed on Biden-era appeasement. Four years ago, for example, no one would have dreamed that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians would become casualties in a full-scale war on Europe’s doorstep.

Indeed, an inept Biden administration crippled U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters. In March 2021, Chinese diplomats brazenly dressed down newly appointed Biden-administration diplomats in Anchorage without rebuke. The debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the greatest abandonment of U.S. arms and facilities in American military history. Six months later, an observant Vladimir Putin correctly surmised that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would likely face few countermeasures from a now humiliated and unsteady United States.

In late January 2023, the meandering and uninterrupted week-long flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the American homeland seemed to exemplify the general disdain enemies now held for the Biden administration. Indeed, foreign foes assumed that there would be few Western consequences for their aggression, at least during a window of opportunity never before seen—nor likely to be repeated.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists, followed eagerly by a ragtag mob of Gazans, stormed into Israel. They murdered, tortured, raped, or took hostage some 1,200 Israeli victims, sparking a theater-wide war against Israel instigated by Iran and its surrogates.

The serial Houthi attacks on international shipping intensified to such a degree that the Red Sea joined the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean as virtual no-go zones for Western shipping, given the absence of visible American and nato deterrents. By autumn 2024, Iran had launched five hundred missiles, rockets, and drones at the Israeli homeland, with the United States loudly enjoining de-escalation and restraint on our Israeli ally.

By year’s end, tens of thousands of North Korean combat troops were fighting with Russians on the Ukrainian border. And by late 2024, the combined Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, and missing had passed one million, in the greatest European charnel house since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.

All these foreign wars and quagmires pose dilemmas for maga reformers. Again, Trump was not elected to be a nation-builder, globalist, or neoconservative interventionist. Conversely, he is no isolationist or appeaser, on whose watch the world would continue to descend into the chaos of the past four years. Yet Trump in 2024 is much more emphatic about the need to avoid such dead-end overseas entanglements, or even the gratuitous use of force that can lead to tit-for-tat entanglements. That caution may obscure his Jacksonian foreign policy and wrongly convince opportunists to test his frequent braggadocio and purported deterrence credentials.

In this regard, Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as vice president and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, along with Tucker Carlson and the once-Democratic pacifist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as close advisors—
coupled with his announcements that the hawkish former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley would not be in the administration—may be misinterpreted by scheming foreign adversaries as proof of a new Trumpian unilateral restraint.

The Republican Party is now the party of peace, and Trump the most reluctant president to spend American blood and treasure abroad in memory. Trump broke with previous Republican interventionism largely because he damned past American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars while they distracted from an unsustainable national debt, a nonexistent southern border, and a floundering lower-middle class. Similarly, it is no wonder that the public often sees the use of force abroad as coming at the zero-sum expense of unaddressed American needs at home. Moreover, a woke, manpower-short military has disparaged and alienated the working-class recruits who disproportionately sought out combat units and fought and died in far-off Afghanistan and Iraq.

Recently, however, even as President Trump’s inner circle emphasized a stop to endless conflicts, Trump himself in November 2024 warned Vladimir Putin not to escalate his attacks against Ukraine. Yet that warning was followed by massive Russian air onslaughts against largely civilian Ukrainian targets—and further threats of tactical nuclear weapons deployed against Ukraine. Trump also instructed Hamas and Hezbollah to cease their wars against Israel, and advised the former to release the hostages, Americans particularly—or else.

Vladimir Putin no doubt took note, but he also may have wished to encourage America’s enemies to test Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric against his campaign’s domestic promises to mind America’s own business at home. So, is there a way to square the circle of neither appeasing nor unwisely intervening?

Trump will have to speak softly yet clearly while carrying a club. For the first few months of his tenure, his administration will be tested as never before to make it clear to Iran and its terrorist surrogates, as well as China, North Korea, and Russia, that aggression against U.S. interests will swiftly incur disproportionate and overwhelming repercussions—in order to prevent wider wars that eventually might require the use of much larger forces.

Ukraine is, paradoxically, a case study of both the dangers of American intervention in distant foreign wars and the consequences of being regarded as weak, timid, and unable or unwilling to protect friends and deter enemies. The cauldron on the Ukrainian border, as already noted, has likely already caused between 1 and 1.5 million Ukrainian and Russian casualties, soldiers and civilians alike. There is no end in sight after three years of escalating violence. And there are increasing worries that strategically logical and morally defensible—but geopolitically dangerous—Ukrainian strikes on the Russian interior could escalate and lead to wider wars among the world’s nuclear powers. Joe Biden’s post-election decision to allow Ukraine to launch sophisticated American missiles deep into the Russian homeland was met by further Russian warnings of escalation to the use of
nuclear weapons.

Many on the right wish for Trump immediately to cut off all aid to Ukraine for what they feel is an unwinnable war, even if that cessation would end any leverage to force Putin to negotiate. They feel the conflict was egged on by a globalist Left, as a proxy conflict waged to ruin Russia to the last Ukrainian soldier. These critics see the war as conducted by a now undemocratic Ukrainian government, without elections, habeas corpus, a free press, or opposition parties, led by an ungracious and corrupt Zelensky cadre that has intrigued with the American Left in an election year. Preferring negotiations that might cede Ukrainian territories already occupied by Russia for guarantees of peace, they point to polls revealing that less than half of the Ukrainian people are confident of a full military “victory” that would restore the country’s 1991 borders.

In contrast, many on the left see Putin’s invasion and the Right’s weariness with the costs of Ukraine as the long-awaited proof of the Trump–Russia “collusion” unicorn and generally perfidious Trumpian Russophilia. They judge Putin, not China’s imperialist juggernaut, as the real enemy. And they discount the dangers of a new Russia–China–Iran–North Korea axis. To see Ukraine at last defeat Russia, recover all of the Donbas and Crimea, and destroy the Putin dictatorship, they are willing to feed the war with American cash and weapons—again, to the last Ukrainian.

Trump vowed to end the catastrophe within a day by doing what is now taboo—namely, calling up Vladimir Putin and making a deal that would do the seemingly impossible and entice Russia back inside its pre-invasion borders of February 24, 2022, thus preserving a reduced but still autonomous, and even secure, Ukraine. How could Trump pull this off?

Ostensibly, Trump would be following the advice of a growing number of Western diplomats, generals, scholars, and pundits who have reluctantly outlined a general plan to stop the slaughter. But how would the dictator Putin face the Russian people with anything short of an absolute annexation of Ukraine, after wasting a million Russian casualties?

Perhaps, after the deal, Putin could brag to Russians that he institutionalized forever his 2014 annexations of the majority-Russian Donbas and Crimea; that he prevented Ukraine from joining nato on the doorstep of Mother Russia; and that he achieved a strategic coup in uniting Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea in a grand new alliance against the West and particularly the United States, with the acquiescence if not support of the nato member Turkey and an ever more sympathetic India.

And what would Ukraine and the West gain from such an example of the Trumpian “art of the deal”? Kyiv might boast that, as the bulwark of Europe, Ukraine heroically saved itself from Russian annexation, as was envisioned by Putin in the 2022 attempt to decapitate Kyiv and absorb the entire country. Ukraine was subsequently armed by the West and fought effectively enough to stymie the Russian juggernaut and humiliate and severely weaken the Russian military—to the benefit of nato and EU nations. Trump might then pull off the agreement if he could further establish a demilitarized zone between the Russian and Ukrainian borders and ensure EU economic help for a Ukraine fully armed to deter an endlessly restless Russian neighbor.

What would be the incentives for such a deal, and would they be contrary to the interests of the American people or antithetical to the views of the new Republican populist-nationalist coalition? First, consider that if Trump were to cut all support for Ukraine, it would likely soon be absorbed by Russia. The maga Right would then be blamed for a humiliation comparable to the Kabul catastrophe. Indeed, the fallout would likely be worse, since the situation in Ukraine, unlike the Afghanistan mess, required only American arms, rather than lives. In contrast, if the conflict grinds on and on, at some point the purportedly humanitarian yet pro-war Left will be permanently stamped as the callous party of unending conflict, and seen as utterly indifferent to the Ukrainian youth consumed to further its endless vendetta against a Russian people who also are worn out by the war.

Both Russia and Ukraine are running out of soldiers, with escalating casualties that will haunt them for years. Russia yearns to be free of sanctions and to sell oil and gas to Europe. The West, and the United States in particular, would like to triangulate with Russia against China and vice versa, in Kissingerian style, and thus avoid any multi-power nuclear standoff.

Trump wants global quiet in order to increase and stockpile American munitions with an emboldened China on the horizon. He will inherit a U.S. military budget dangerously exhausted by wasteful procurement of overpriced systems like the F-22 aircraft and the littoral combat ship, by cuts in training for troops and maintenance of ships, and by massive aid to Ukraine and Israel. Accordingly, Trump prefers allies like Israel that can win with a few billion, rather than those that continue to struggle after receiving $200 billion, as Ukraine has done.

Last, Europe is mentally worn out by the war, and increasingly reneging on its once-boastful unqualified support for Ukraine, as it hopes the demonic Trump can both end the hated war and be hated for ending it.

The same challenge of forcefully dissuading bullies while avoiding exhausting wars will confront Trump in the Middle East. To restore deterrence, Trump will have to put the Houthis on notice that their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea will earn them something more deleterious than the Biden administration’s passive deflections of shore-to-ship missile attacks. That passivity has so far cost the Unites States about $2 billion in munitions without achieving tangible results.

Iran, of course, is at the nexus of Middle Eastern tensions. Both fear of Tehran’s missiles and the Biden administration’s opposition paralyzed the Abraham Accords. Iran supplies all the terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—that have attacked Israel since Trump’s departure. Accordingly, Trump will likely lift American restraints on Israel, supply the necessary heavy-duty ordnance should it wish to retaliate against Iranian attacks by taking out Iran’s nuclear program and oil-export facilities, and deter Russia and China from intervening to help their client Iran.

In sum, to ensure that there are no theater-wide conflicts in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe and beyond, Trump will have to use disproportionate force to dispel the image of the United States as indifferent to aggression due to fears of costly intervention.

The maga revolution that will now ensue in the four years of Trump’s second and last presidential term promises to remake America in ways only haphazardly realized four years ago. In Trump’s favor this time around are his past years of governance and his knowledge of the sort of opposition he will now face—after two impeachments, five weaponized civil and criminal court cases, repeated efforts to remove his candidacy from state ballots, two assassination attempts, and three brutal presidential campaigns.

The failed Biden years—the entrance of twelve million illegal aliens through a deliberately opened border, wars abroad, inflation, and soaring crime—helped propel the most spectacular political resurrection in American political history. The backroom Biden removal from the Democratic nomination, the subsequent listless Harris campaign, and the ever more radical trajectory of the increasingly unpopular Democratic Party have all put Trump in a far more powerful position than when he entered the presidency in 2017 or when he left office in 2021.

Trump’s success in resetting the United States will hinge not merely on outwitting the desperation of his enemies, but also on navigating the paradoxes of implementing his own maga agenda.