Trump Put America Last

On election morning, Donald Trump went on Fox News and boasted that America “took over Venezuela in 48 minutes”. By the time the votes came in, it turned out he couldn’t hold Kansas. The state elected its first Democratic senator in nearly a century. Texas and South Carolina flipped Senate seats too. Barely two years after Americans sent Trump back to the White House, they handed Democrats control of both houses of Congress.

As an Australian, I backed Trump because he was prepared to say what working Americans had spent years trying to tell the Republican Party. He promised working-class and middle-class families a president who would look after them. I wanted to see what a right-wing populist could do for the bloke driving the truck and the family running the shop. To be fair to Trump, some of that came through in his executive orders, right down to requiring commercial drivers to understand English well enough to read the road signs. But the good he did has been overshadowed by the war in Iran, the cost of living and his handling of Jeffrey Epstein.

The people who elected him wanted their factories back. They wanted control of their border. They were sick of sending their sons to rebuild countries whose names the politicians who sent them could barely pronounce. Trump understood that anger well enough to offer a test for his own presidency. Judge him, he said in his inaugural address, by “the wars we never get into”.

Fair enough, Mr President. Let’s talk about Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly pressed Trump to turn his attention to Tehran. In February, the United States and Israel went to war together. Eight months later, as Americans prepared to vote, Netanyahu was pressing Trump to launch fresh strikes after the election. Netanyahu is entitled to argue for what he believes serves Israel. Americans elected Trump to exercise an independent judgement about what serves them. What use is an America First president who can find it in himself to say no to practically everybody except the prime minister of Israel?

Conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson exposed the thinking behind this adventure months before it began. In an interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, Carlson asked how many people lived in Iran. Cruz didn’t know. “You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?” Carlson asked. Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie took that objection to the floor of Congress. He sought a vote requiring congressional approval for war with Iran. In September, Massie introduced articles of impeachment against Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, accusing him of continuing the war without congressional approval. If members of Congress reckon somebody else’s son should fight, the least they owe his mother is a vote she can look up.

Some might dismiss the Iran quagmire as a single rotten interventionist decision of the Trump administration. Then consider the overthrow of Venezuela’s leader, the talk of using economic pressure to turn Canada into the 51st state and the threats to take control of Greenland. Even the Bush-era neoconservatives, who thought Washington could remake the Middle East, might have blushed at that shopping list.

At home, the Jeffrey Epstein files had already cost Trump something his pollsters obviously missed. Epstein was a convicted sex offender who mixed with the rich and powerful. His victims wanted answers. So did the people who believed Trump when he promised to drain the swamp. Yet it took Massie and others pushing to force a House vote to prise the records loose. Among the few Republicans who signed was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia Republican congresswoman who had spent years defending Trump. He eventually signed the law, and the Justice Department released nearly 3.5 million pages. Imagine having to drag the bloke you elected to drain the swamp all the way to the plug.

What did those 3.5 million pages produce by way of arrests? Epstein had been charged and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell had been convicted years before the files came out. As of today, the disclosures have produced no publicly reported new federal charges in the United States. Investigators in Britain, Norway, Poland and Latvia asked Washington for evidence and witness testimony so they could pursue possible crimes in their own countries. As recently as October, those requests had still not been granted. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche explained in February that disturbing photographs and emails alone might not give a prosecutor enough to charge anybody. Fair enough. Which leads did American investigators pursue? Which witnesses did they interview? And why were investigators overseas still waiting for a reply? Those girls were owed more than a page count.

The voters who wanted answers about COVID had much the same experience. Take Dr Anthony Fauci, the public face of America’s pandemic response. Sure, Joe Biden gave Fauci a pre-emptive pardon before leaving office. But what happened next was on Trump’s watch. When Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times at a Senate hearing, Republican Senator Rand Paul asked Trump’s Justice Department to prosecute him for contempt over his refusal to answer. By late August the effort had stalled over whether the case could sustain an indictment. After all the Republican bluster about holding Fauci to account, voters were still waiting for answers.

Then came the bills. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which he disbanded eight months early, was supposed to slash spending. Washington finished the financial year nearly US$2 trillion in the red. The economy grew, but on the eve of the election petrol cost a third more than a year earlier, and more than 40 per cent more than before the war. A bloke driving an hour each way to work scarcely needed a Democrat to explain what a war in the Persian Gulf had to do with him. He got a reminder every time he filled the tank.

Immigration ought to have been Trump’s strongest ground. Instead, the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, provoked a backlash that spread well beyond the activist left, while deportations fell short of the administration’s own target of a million a year. The Migration Policy Institute counted about 980,000 deportations in the first 18 months of Trump’s second term. For a sense of the scale, the same institute estimated that 15.8 million people were living in America without legal status in mid-2024. Then Trump told an Iowa audience he was willing to let migrant farmworkers stay if their employers vouched for them. I don’t recall an employer’s reference figuring in the mass deportation pledge.

Where does that leave those of us who actually believed what Trump promised? Conservative commentator Matt Walsh offered his verdict after the election when he wrote that “the MAGA political brand is dead” but “America First as a movement and principle lives on and must live on.” I agree. We’re well past the point of talking about fractures in Make America Great Again. MAGA is dead. Trump killed it by betraying it. What’s being touted as MAGA now is what remains of the Cult of Trump. Its devotees have no real political convictions left, just a pin-up boy. The same voices that spent 2024 demanding no new wars spent February explaining why this one was different. America First was always the idea at the heart of the real MAGA. Those of us who still believe in it owe Trump no such loyalty.

Greene’s resignation statement offers a better starting point. Secure the border and stop employers using imported labour to undercut American wages. Bring manufacturing home so a young couple can raise children on the proceeds of an American job. Stop borrowing money to bankroll foreign governments. Make Congress answer for the wars it funds and open government files even when doing so embarrasses your own side. Massie has already shown what that last part costs. Trump endorsed a primary challenger who beat him in May, and he leaves Congress in January. It’s why I’d sooner trust him to lead the movement than anybody whose chief qualification is Trump’s blessing.

America First has two years to break with Trump, recruit primary challengers and convince families that their wages, their taxes and their sons will be in better hands. That will take a leader willing to tell Trump he was wrong about Iran and tell Netanyahu no next time he comes calling. If Republicans can’t find the courage for that much after losing Kansas, then the next occupant of the White House will be a Democrat.

The consequences of another Democrat in the White House will be every bit as disastrous for the rest of the world as they will be for the United States. The Democrats have their own addiction to forever wars. Their ambitions go well beyond deciding which countries America ought to bomb. Give them back the White House and they will put the weight of American diplomacy and foreign aid behind pushing such cultural Marxist policies as abortion on demand and the promotion of gender transition for children, including in countries whose people want neither. As for those of us who object, the global political censorship regime they’ll try to build will make Australia’s eSafety Commissioner look like a free speech advocate. That could yet be Trump’s most enduring achievement. He may have taken a movement built to put America first and ended up handing the entire world back to the globalists.

“Patriotism means to stand by the country.”
– Theodore Roosevelt