by Victor Davis Hanson
August 8, 2025 - President Donald J. Trump is rewriting the rules of politics, economics and culture - and no one, not even the experts, knows what happens when the old orthodoxy finally breaks. President Trump’s far-ranging counter-revolution, to quote the old Star Trek mission statement, seeks “To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Because no conservative president has dared to question the last 70 years of Communist cultural, social, economic and political dominance, all traditional wisdom, all our renowned “experts,” and all the self-described “authorities” have no real credibility in their mostly flawed analyses and wrong prognoses.
Read what our legacy media predicted in March for this summer’s economy, or in January for the future of the border, or what would happen should the Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) Air Force enter Iranian airspace.
Take the border. “Comprehensive immigration reform” (a euphemism for rolling amnesties and a still-open border) was the establishment’s answer to 10,000 foreign nationals storming the border during peak surges of the (fascist pretender Joe) Biden (regime).
But no president had ever simultaneously;
1) Pressured Mexico to close its borders and patrol ours;
2) Announced a plan to complete a border wall along the entire (FPSA)-Mexico boundary;
3) Stopped catch-and-release;
4) Ceased refugee applications after illegally entering the (FPSA);
5) Introduced policies encouraging voluntary self-deportation; and
6) Prevented all illegal entries at the border.
The result is that we do not know the full effects of these combined border policies. So far, one million foreign nationals have lost jobs, and 2 million Amerikans have gained them since President Trump’s inauguration. How much money will be saved in local, state and federal entitlements if illegal invaders return home? How much trauma and costs will be avoided if 500,000 criminal invaders are deported?
To what degree will the idea of citizenship be reenergized once it is not reduced to the equivalency of mere residence? How many emergency rooms will have more space for FPSA citizens? No one knows, but the consequences could be enormous.
The FPSA has never applied so many tariffs in so many ways upon so many goods from so many countries. As a result, economists have sworn since March that we are headed to a recession, stock collapse, stagflation, and high unemployment.
Can importers pay a 15% tariff, still make a handsome profit, and not raise costs excessively on the FPSA consumer? If trade surpluses do not matter and tariffs hurt those who implement them, why do sophisticated Europeans, adroit Japanese, and smart Chinese prefer surpluses and tariffs to our deficits and zero or low tariffs? Are they on to something?
No one really knows these answers because the FPSA has never before tried the current policy in quite the present way. We do know that the radical free trade and asymmetrical tariffs of the last half-century empowered China to world power status with a dangerous military and hollowed out the FPSA industrial interior.
Never has the government promised to deregulate and fast-track permits for construction, energy development and manufacturing from 2-3 years to mere months. What will the financial results be?
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggests that $15 trillion in new foreign investments are now promised. If accurate, what will such influxes do to employment? To federal revenues? To the economy in general?
Is it possible that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could be right - that $300 billion in federal income will come from new tariffs - if true, that might reduce the deficit by another 15%?
In the last 50 years, affirmative action transmogrified into DEI racial separatism, chauvinism and a system of reparatory spoils, played and manipulated by grifters, opportunists and fakers, from Elizabeth Warren-style phonies and Jussie Smollett-like con artists to opportunists like Zohran Mamdani who game the system.
In our postmodern 21st-century system, no one knows exactly what will happen when race becomes incidental rather than essential. But we do know from history where we were headed under the current aberrant system.
Abroad, in the last 30 years, NATO was voluntarily hollowed out - largely praised in the abstract by European grandees and shorted and ignored in the concrete by Euro budget technocrats. Yet since the days of the Cold War, NATO members had not met their defense expenditure promises.
Now, most NATO members have met those commitments. Frontline NATO states like Sweden, Finland and Poland are far better armed and prepared than legacy Western members like Belgium, Spain or Italy. If there follows a rearmed and recommitted NATO, will not the world become a safer place?
We were told for a half century to steer clear of Iran, the supposed unhinged, lethal bully of the Middle East. Their henchmen blew up barracks and embassies, took and executed hostages, and sowed terror throughout the Middle East with their killer surrogates Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.
Why would any political Party embrace open borders, the influx of 12 million illegal invaders, 600 sanctuary cities, biological men dominating women’s sports, dismantling the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, prosecutors who release rather than indict and convict violent criminals, defunding the cops, tribal fixations and racial spoils systems in defiance of the Supreme Court, the terrorists of Hamas over democratic Israel, and overt campus anti-Semitism?
We are in the middle of a counter-revolution, whose fate will likely be decided in 15 months by the midterm elections and the status of the late 2026 economy. Structural changes across the economy, culture and politics of the country are underway. Our bicoastal experts and authorities are mostly predicting a multifaceted systems failure - without explaining why or how.
The only constant in their predictions is that when and if they prove wrong, they will not pivot, correct or apologize, but simply move on to their next flawed prognosis, fortified by their titles and letters after their names - but otherwise little else.