Two weeks before the November election, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s hopeful book "America’s Golden Age" described “Trumpism and an Era of Limitless Possibilities.” Then the bottom fell out – and America today is facing the total cancellation of the Trump agenda.
But what is this agenda, you may ask? You would hardly know had you watched the President’s 30 speeches in 30 days preceding the 2026 election.
While some cite the Iran war as the cause of MAGA’s downfall, underneath that façade is an anti-technology, anti-entrepreneurship rebellion by a well-organized, battle-tested (in 2020), Chinese-funded Democratic Socialist cadre set on fulfilling Barack Obama’s goal of “fundamentally transforming” America.
Gingrich describes the Make America Great Again agenda as "reducing regulatory red tape, shrinking the role of government, expanding investments in new technology and economic growth, and arousing entrepreneurial energy and talent to accelerate the development of a dramatically wealthier and safer America.”
Trump’s singular first-term achievement was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill rewarded working-class Americans by temporarily eliminating taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security income, making permanent the TCJA tax cuts, increasing the Child Tax Credit and the SALT deduction cap, changing the gift tax exemption, and establishing Trump child savings accounts.
To offset revenue losses from these actions, Trump chose to rely on tariffs – not just for the revenue but also as a prod to “encourage” corporations to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
While tariffs have raised the cost of some consumer goods, they also brought commitments of $22 trillion in corporate investment that Trump said would lessen reliance on foreign-controlled supply chains – which the COVID pandemic had exposed as a threat to national security.
Now, those tariffs are in jeopardy, along with the investments and jobs they were supporting, as well as the 320,000 high-paying jobs created by U.S. manufacturers and foreign direct investment since January 2025.
The MAGA agenda also encouraged investing in trade schools and apprenticeships in manufacturing and technology, including robotics and “superior” intelligence. Gingrich touted AI as the defining innovation of the 21st century.
But AI requires electric power.
Democrats who have opposed natural gas and nuclear energy now oppose data centers that need that energy. The anti-entrepreneurial spirit driving the DSA includes calls for imprisoning Elon Musk, canceling regulatory reforms, and preventing innovation through the same lawfare that has crippled nuclear energy for the past half-century. As Musk and fellow billionaires like Jeff Bezos have focused on robotics and space exploration, the rage against billionaires could destroy these burgeoning industries as well.
China, a society Gingrich says is dominated by engineers and engineer-think, encourages emerging technologies. By contrast, the U.S. political system is dominated by lawyer-think. Lawfare has been the left’s chief weapon against President Trump and the entrepreneurial society he has tried to revitalize.
Because Trump is that rare President who built wealth in the private sector, and because his Cabinet is packed with entrepreneurs, they are targeted by lawyers, bureaucrats, and academics to whom innovation is something to be regulated, not celebrated and encouraged.
To bureaucrats, educators, and the Obamacare-driven medical industry, the greater the number dependent on their services, the more jobs in their fields.
The Make America Healthy Again initiative, and Trump’s negotiations that have lowered prices for prescription drugs (for which Americans have subsidized the entire world for decades) are anathema to those who tout “Medicare for All” when Medicare is teetering on insolvency.
Similarly, MAGA’s support for school choice, cutting subsidies (including student loans) for universities that often are hotbeds for radical politics, grade inflation, and incompetent graduates, is anathema to these increasingly irrelevant institutions.
Government schools, embarrassed by low test scores and high reading and math illiteracy, have eliminated grades and gifted and talented programs while increasing budgets for non-academic political causes. Additional funding is unlikely to improve academic success. Moreover, their opposition to school choice shouts that “children are our money pit.”
Gingrich points to seven events that could prevent America from entering what should be its “golden age,” including nuclear war, defeat by an axis of evil, another pandemic, a victory of anti-modernity Islam over Islamic modernizers, and continued strife in Africa.
Topping his list are a failure of America to embrace artificial intelligence (and the data centers and electric power it requires) and increasing domestic political and cultural division. Yet the truth is that Americans are just as deeply divided on the first five threats Gingrich listed.
As Abraham Lincoln said long ago, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The victor’s solution used in the past in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Khomeini’s Iran, and other nations throughout history was to eliminate anyone who stood in the way of “progress.”
America is today at a crossroads far greater than the one Lincoln confronted (and which got him assassinated). Yet many voices are crying out for national healing and reconciliation.
Will they be heard?
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