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With the presidential election decided and the once and future president Donald J. Trump poised to reenter the White House on January 20, America stands on the threshold of a new era of prosperity at home and peace abroad. The final year before the republic celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence will see the end of four years of chaos masquerading as "unity" under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, a disastrously unqualified presidential candidate who offered more decay, decline, and disorder masquerading as "joy."
Trump's return, which Harris will be constitutionally obliged to certify on January 6, will also represent a rare break with rule by Washington's corrupt and discredited administrative-managerial caste in favor of an administration determined to demolish its structures, banish its values, and prevent its return.
With a trifecta of Republican control in the White House and both Houses of Congress, along with a Supreme Court majority, Trump will have the power to maintain and expand the tax cuts of his first administration. He will also have the opportunity to slash the bloated federal budget by as much as one-third, the goal set by Department of Government Efficiency co-chief Elon Musk, a shrewd businessman and tech leader who also happens to be the richest man in the world. These measures will both restore hard-earned capital to the American people and significantly lessen irresponsible public spending and debt liability. The overall effect should reduce or eliminate lingering Biden-era inflation while powering the same levels of respectable growth that benefited the country in Trump's first administration.
Meanwhile, protections for American jobs and manufacturing will reverse decades of economically harmful and strategically short-sighted decline and strike a blow against middle American poverty, the national addiction epidemic, and "deaths of despair" that have kept much of the population from prosperity. Pro-growth policies in the energy sector will restore the economically and strategically essential goal of American energy independence, a major achievement that Biden recklessly abandoned.
The powerful legacy of Trump's first administration has already attracted impressive pledges of foreign investment as well as a near-immediate willingness to talk peace from all sides in the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It has even prompted unexpected Mexican resolve to work productively on controlling the United States' southern border and drug trafficking, issues Biden and Harris barely addressed and tried hard to avoid in their failed presidential campaigns. The same foreign leaders who were content to snub or ignore Biden's feckless foreign policy team up until just a few weeks ago are now preparing to work for lasting solutions that the incumbent president's absent leadership consistently failed to realize but that Trump is well positioned to deliver.
The Biden-Harris administration saw our greatest enemies on the march to disrupt an American-led world with little opposition. The incoming Trump administration, by contrast with Biden's sedate and self-involved Washington, already sees them beating a retreat. With Trump back in office, the year 2025 will likely see decisive ends to the wars and the expansion of security arrangements—such as the historic Abraham Accords of 2020—that will assure renewed American ascendancy. An ever-more-isolated Vladimir Putin will have to comfort himself with dubious gains in eastern Ukraine while Iran's mullahs sullenly accept the destruction of their clients in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen; lose their lucrative international oil markets; abandon their dreams of regional hegemony; and fall asleep every night hoping they do not share the fate of Bashar al-Assad.
As American confidence and wealth grow under Trump's restored leadership, the president-elect also seems ready to end any role in national government for the destructive anti-American ideologies of critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—thought systems that subordinate merit, hard work, and excellence to race, skin color, and grievance. Preliminary signs suggest that few Americans will miss either CRT or DEI, which state and local governments, courts, the private sector, and, increasingly, even the fading left-leaning bastions of academia and legacy media are racing to abandon. Unburdened by what has been, the hardworking majority of all backgrounds will find routes to prosperity without government and its malign adjunct ideologues standing in the way.
The fight will be hard, and resistance may be formidable. The GOP's congressional majorities are slim, and the administrative state is as resourceful as it is ruthless. Most Democrats and a declining but still powerful cohort of establishment Republicans would prefer a weaker nation without Trump over a stronger America with him. But if we have learned anything about Donald Trump over the past decade, the safe bet is that America in 2025 will be stronger, freer, wealthier, healthier, and happier than it has been for a long time and possibly ever. Truly, it will be great again.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
