The Formidable Mr. Trump
By David Samuel McCalmont
The Formidable Mr. Trump
Those who've been paying attention have noticed a historic and transformative regime change that has taken place over the past six months, and the best way to gauge the relative success of this transformation is to watch the behavior and reaction of major players on both sides of the aisle.
As expected, assessments of Trump's initial 180 days, given by those right of center, range from apoplectic cheerleading to crusty backbiting. The vast majority of those on the Left – raised as they have been on the “hermeneutics of suspicion” – however, find themselves navigating in an ocean of delirium, saying and doing awful things that don't in the least help their cause.
The monopoly of leftist power over the narrative that reached, guided, and controlled the message for the majority, has been ebbing and crumbling for at least a decade. What happened beginning on January 20, 2025, has created even more fissures and fragmentations within that monopoly.
For the most part, a leaderless Left cannot engage its most formidable adversary – President Donald J. Trump – on an even playing field. They know it; everybody knows it. The pall of fear and despair that permeated life among those who have no overwhelming grievances against our nation's past or present, has dissipated.
It's gone.
It is no more.
It is nearly impossible to keep up the pace and enthusiasm of those hectic First 100 Days, and to accept the reality that the death grip the Left had on the country, and particularly on the political and social Right, has actually disappeared.
So, where does that leave us in July 2025? A Trump supporter might say “The honeymoon is over.” And the Friday evening right-wing Champagne toasts have given way to the gritty nuts and bolts of implementing transformative policies, while the Left continues to drink itself into oblivion.
It's possible to run off a roster of Trump's Greatest Hits in this kind of essay. At the top of anybody's list would be Closing the Border. Democrat lynchpins echoed the mantra that it couldn't be done without a wall of new legislation. Republicans – or I should say, Donald Trump – illustrated that all that was necessary was a new president with a vital sense of patriotic will, resolve, and common sense. Trump’s action put a nasty spin on Democrat inaction. The last official count across all our borders tells an incredible compare-and-contrast story: Virtually no illegal immigrants came into the U.S. in June 2025 vs. tens of thousands under Joe Biden in June 2024.
Voters can feel the difference.
The substory to Closing the Borders would be Deporting the Illegals Already Here. Democrats are flummoxed with Trump's numbers of deportations. ("Can't be true"!) More than one million people not here by our invitation have left the country as of the end of June, either by force or persuasion. What is triggering most of the self-deportations is the lifting – or the threat of lifting – the middle class federal subsidies and handouts that make life instantly uncomfortable for poor illegals in a wealthy land.
Democrat acceptance of scofflaws has given way to Republican stigma of shame for these people. ICE is rounding up and arresting the truly horrible examples, but the ones who've been living in our shadows with the help of local Democrats see no future in America living a couple steps ahead of an arrest warrant and without the wherewithal to earn a living like those around them. They are taking en masse Trump's offer to go home and then get in a legal queue for readmittance under our rules.
“America First” Reigns Supreme
Rather than continuing with the less successful and arguably more controversial America First campaigns (tariffs, lawfare, CRT, transgenders in sports, delegitimizing transgender surgeries for minors, globalism, free speech and antisemitism, Iran/Israel, NATO, Ukraine/Russia), I'd rather proceed toward a discussion of why Republicans and Trump supporters feel confident and good about most things – and conversely why Democrats and their allies on the Left feel downright awful.
Why are J.D. Vance and his family living large and enjoying life in Disneyland while Rosie O'Donnell descends into a hellhole of personal depression in a land far away? Why are conservatives categorically happier than liberals? Polls prove it. Psychiatrists anecdotally validate this assumption. Right-wingers are enjoying life, are seeing the glass three-quarters full; leftists are a mess in a downward spiral to doom, believe the glass is three-quarters empty, and think MAGA is conspiring to make them miserable.
Something is at work beneath the surface that is being felt by both conservatives and progressives and that has resulted in diametrically opposite reactions.
The psychological punches to the Left's sense of well-being flowing from an unearned invincibility and entitlement staggered it into the ropes. Meanwhile, those on the Right – expecting good things in the long run – were giddy with excitement as their side rattled off runs in the early going with no apparent errors. For the first time this century, the Left is leaderless with no game plan. Its dismissive ideological shibboleths have been swallowed up in a black hole of launched offensives in the neighborhoods of power they’d had under their control for ages.
Nobody expected quite the whirlwind of activity President Trump gave us in those first 100 days. His blizzard of executive orders was a full employment policy for the thousands of lawyers lining the halls of the DNC angling to write legal petitions that would slow the hated America First juggernaut.
From the Right, you could hear an astonished “My Goodness!”
From the Left, an anguished “W.T.F.?”
•••
As long as there are people who can't accept reality and realpolitik, there will always be leftists. Right now, at least for the time being, they have become whining screeching ranters who’ve been relegated to the margins of discussion. It's no longer “cool” to be transgender, or to brag about your transgender offspring, or to spout woke nostrums in public, or even declare that America can't survive without another ten million unvetted border crossers.
The Left is still with us, and, like herpes, could arise again to defile the body public, but at least for this glorious moment, society is no longer weighed down by leftist idiocy every time it turns around.
And, oh, Rosie O'Donnell is still overeating, overdrinking, and over-medicating, in Ireland…
We are now in the most tumultuous part of the changes. I fully expect that this column today will be littered with commenters yakking about Epstein and Trump and how that overshadows anything Obama might have done to create Russiagate. Okay, have at your “Trump was photographed with Epstein and that proves he's the horrible Orange Man!” You are being childish played by the media. The number of people photographed with Epstein or at his island is so large it probably includes friends and relatives or friends of friends and relatives of relatives of yours. Give it up. What Obama did should put him in jail. And the legacy media that applauded themselves for putting Nixon there, should also join Obama.
Thank God for Donald Trump, a real American!