Decline is a choice. President Trump could not have said it better.
Two years ago, everyone was talking about the Roman Empire, musing over its tragic decline. Would the United States fade the same way, with relentless clashes among different demographics fighting for a diminishing share of the government pie?
Was Pat Buchanan right? The Republic is over, and the days of Empire have hastened the end of this once glorious experiment, he claimed.
Historians note that democratic systems don’t last longer than 250 years. Yet the United States will celebrate its semiquincentennial. President Trump will be in office until 2029. Even if a Democrat follows him, the United States will have endured past the expected expiration date.
The United States has lasted. We don’t have an empire. We have a culture, a legacy worth defending.
I once embraced the notion that countries rise and fall in the grand scheme of things. That’s a new concept for me: that the country can still survive and thrive after 250 years.
Decline is a belief, a mindset more than anything else.
The notion of rise and fall has changed over the last thirty years, too. The Soviet Union collapsed. New nations emerged. Russia is still Russia, but it’s never been a democracy. HA!
Countries with large empires saw their colonial holdings released into independence, or they fought for it just as the United States had done in 1776. The United Kingdom has been overrun with migrants, legal and illegal. The citizens of that country, with heritage and heart, have raised their voices demanding change. Political parties are reshaping themselves drastically. Populist right political parties are pushing out the globalist left- and right-uniparty phalanxes across the continent.
Will Europe survive, though? Will these countries enjoy a legacy after having adopted democratic systems long after the United States was born? They aren’t doing so well. The Republics of Spain, Italy, Greece, etc., are hemorrhaging population, have massive debt, and are overrun by third-world migrants. Democracy has not equated to liberty, but rather dysfunction and tyranny.
And let’s face something more damning: America was facing a long, yet slow and steady, decline.
The Cold War ended, and the civilizational rivalries of Islam arose.
Even during Reagan’s presidency, Islamic terror was piercing through the relative wind-down across the globe. The bombing of a Berlin nightclub, the bombing of Pan-Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland – peace would not reign across a world benighted with consumer goods, capital harmony, and democratic ease.
The United States suffered 9/11. One day, we were untouchable. The next day, we were terrorized. Twenty-five years later, our collective pain has worsened with conspiracies about who plotted the destruction, why certain buildings collapsed, and how much our government knew. And why didn’t they protect us?
Twenty-five years later, Islam has forced its way into American streets and our national politics. October 7th, Gaza, Palestinian self-determination has become a political focal point in the last two election cycles. Why are foreign wars being fought out in our elections? We cared about Israel because the Jewish state shared our Western heritage. In fact, that little country in the Middle East has shone out as a standard for why the West is the Best, even though situated in the East.
In the United States, colleges have told the younger generations to hate their country. Critical theory, working in Communism but without the class warfare, has brainwashed the professional classes for the last fifty years to see the United States as “The Bad Guy.”
They believed that Vietnam should have charted its own genocidal course. Global communism was inevitable to these empty intellectuals, so why fight it?
Bush over-extended to fight Al-Qaeda, and he gave up on free market capitalism: “We must suspend the free market to save the free market.” Make it make sense!
Then came Barack Obama, preaching Hope and Change and “We are the change we have been waiting for.”
Yet what was the change he ushered in? Decline. He kowtowed to the Arab world, which only fanned the flames of a latent Arab Spring—the effects of which we are still dealing with. In 2011, he launched an ill-advised war in Libya, then did nothing when militants overran our embassy in Benghazi. Spending sprees, massive government intrusion into the healthcare system, and middle-class couples asked at the 2012 town hall: “I am tired of defending you.”
Obama didn’t care.
President Trump stepped in. He spoke up for the angry common man and his family. He championed “Make America Great Again.”
Decline could be stopped. Would it be reversed?
In his first term, he did his best. He was thwarted at every turn and sometimes took the side of whoever was sitting by his side. Sometimes it was a Democrat who suggested red flag laws, and sometimes it was a pundit who wanted more military strikes on foreign soil.
Then came further decline, from the crashing out of our election system, to the system failures and disregard of Joe Biden.
Thankfully, the voters saw the folly of their ways and restored President Trump to the White House in 2024.
Today, we see restoration.
The haters of America are gonna hate, but they can’t stop Trump from doing great. Liberals in Washington, D.C. (almost all of them) have nothing but praise for the returned commander-in-chief. In the last year and a half, a city once mired in graffiti, trash, waste, rampant homelessness, and crime is pristine once again. The fountains are working, and the public is visiting the national parks. In the last year and a half, Trump has restored our capital to greatness. Washington, D.C. is worth visiting again, worth living in again.
That turnaround speaks of his vision for the rest of the country.
He has presided over a secure border: the United States is one people, and the price of admission is high. Are you ready to become an American, this new man who is an amalgam of all the good of Western society, while winnowing away the wicked?
Higher wages have returned American workers, and illegals are returning to their home countries, no longer able to scam the overgenerous welfare system or excessively sympathetic immigration courts that issued orders to appear, and yet the illegals never showed up.
Trump has augmented Americans by diminishing the government largesse, as well. He has shut down entire federal agencies, many of which were staffed by anti-American insurgents determined to frustrate the president and destroy the country. The federal workforce numbers have plummeted to levels not seen since Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Trump initiated a military parade. He wants a triumphal arch in DC. He is reconstructing the White House for broader and safer venues to receive foreign dignitaries. He fought to restore preeminence in the Panama Canal. He changed the name to the Gulf of America. He wants to take over Greenland (which we already protect at great expense), and he told Canada the flat truth: they would be nothing without us, so they might as well join us.
Decline is a choice, and success is not inevitable. Ben Franklin promised the country “A Republic, if you can keep it.” It’s worth keeping. Will you decline the responsibility to make it happen?
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