Opinion: How the MAGA Mandate Can Save America from Becoming Venezuela

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Trump 2.0 is on its way, and there are three ways it can go.

This second Trump term could easily be four years of bitter fighting, with four sides at each other’s throats – the MAGA movement, the establishment Republicans, the Democrats, and the apolitical part of American society that just hates thinking about complex things like principles, law, philosophy, culture, and change.

That’s roughly how President Trump’s first term went, and it was a disaster. Many of us thought at the time that this was President Trump’s fault; the last four years have shown us that 90% of the fault lay with those other three groups.

The second option is that it could go smoothly, the Washington way: the MAGA movement compromises with the Democrats and the establishment Republicans on everything, making small improvements in the tax code, simply cutting the rate of growth of government spending, closing the border but leaving the existing cancer in place, and so forth. Calmly kicking the can down the street on all of America’s problems, as moderates have advocated for the past century while the debt climbed, the free market grew ever more centrally controlled, and the cultural rot spread.

This would be the easy way. And America simply cannot afford that option either.

The third option is for the MAGA movement to barrel forward, attacking every single issue on the MAGA agenda as quickly as possible. Put all the drug dealers, rapists and murderers on death row, deport the rest of the illegal aliens, reform the tax code, shrink the bureaucracy back to Constitutional boundaries, purging the Federal Register of all the unconstitutional CO2-fear-inspired regulations that are destroying our economy. And prosecute all the criminal politicians who illegally shut down businesses, churches, farms, schools, parks, hospitals, and everything else during the covid panic, so that no politician ever dares such tyrannical measures again.

With the House, Senate, and White House in Republican hands, this “full speed ahead” agenda is possible, but only if there is absolute unanimity on the GOP side of the aisle. We can not tolerate the always-destructive “maverick” behavior so common among Republicans (and nearly non-existent among Democrats). There simply isn’t time for the usual months of Senate confirmation hearings, months of budget battles, arguments over department closures and DOGE proposals.

If we don’t see the Trump agenda put into place within the first few months, there is no chance of having positive enough economic results to retain both houses in 2026. The success of modern Republican governance must be undeniable throughout the 2026 election season, and that will simply not be possible if we allow a few troublemakers to prevent the necessary changes from kicking in.

This probably sounds like a typical partisan warning – “if we don’t do this right, we’ll lose the next election.” But even though that’s true in part, it’s not the main point here. The big picture here has nothing to do with partisanship. The nation is in too much immediate danger to move slowly.

The Constitutionally-limited government of the United States of America has been under attack for over 110 years. The attack began in earnest in 1913, with the 17th Amendment, the Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, and the anti-American presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Since 1913, methodically, step by step, the forces of the Left have grown the government, raised the tax burden, and spread the claws of federal and state bureaucracy into every aspect of American life and work (as dozens of other countries have done the same).

These United States were so highly turbocharged by our wonderful start under the George Washington administration and our perfectly contained limited government structure, that our economy and civil society flourished, growing by leaps and bounds for 120 years. Even the progressive era that Wilson started couldn’t stop it; all it could do was slow it down.

But slow it down they did. They applied brakes, speed governors, obstacle courses. Under Wilson and FDR, under LBJ and Carter, under Obama and Biden, and even during the years in between, because few Republican presidents fully realized how the rot continued to spread beneath their very noses, even when the White House wasn’t encouraging it.

And that’s why we have reached the danger zone. For the past thirty years, the standard of living of America’s working class – yes, both white collar and blue collar – has been dropping, for the first time in our history. The Left succeeded in unmaking the American experiment; the Left has stopped America from being the country where any hard worker can make it big if he applies himself.

We now have a crippling national debt so great that the day is in sight when all federal revenue will have to be dedicated to service the debt.

We now have such a massive welfare class that businesses have to utilize immigrant work visa programs to get employees, or even worse, knowingly employ illegal aliens because citizens are unwilling to work at all.

And we have such high crime in our big cities that residents and businesses are racing each other to be the first to move to other states.

The Democrats didn’t do all this damage alone. The mousy establishment Republicans, who spent a hundred years calling it a victory when they just slowed down the rate of Democrat destruction, are accomplices too. The mousy apolitical types, the people who can’t handle a debate and cry until there’s a compromise to make the fighting stop, are accomplices too.

We just can’t kick this can down the road any longer.

The MAGA movement’s key issues – border control, crime-fighting, regulatory reform, spending cuts, a manufacturing resurgence, shrinkage of our overgrown leviathan – are imperative. They must take place now, as quickly as humanly possible.

The Democratic party, largely using the climate hoax as cover, has destroyed our auto industry, our housing industry, our farming and ranching industries, and the energy sector. The amount of damage done in the name of the false religion of CO2 fear since the Obama years is unfathomable, and must be reversed immediately if our nation is to survive.

This sounds like an exaggeration; it’s not.

Most American manufacturing has already been moved to China, but of the manufacturing that remains here, most of that too is dependent on Chinese vendors for key components. Most entrepreneurially minded individuals, who would have founded successful businesses in the 19th century, take desk jobs working for others today instead, because the tax and regulatory codes are too oppressive. And tens of millions of honest, law-abiding Americans, in cities and suburbs and college towns, must live in constant fear of robbers, rapists, and killers whom an ethically-warped government catches but refuses to incarcerate.

This is America today, not just because of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but because millions who share their totalitarian philosophy have infested the halls of power for generations.

When President Trump takes the oath of office again on January 20, he will need to move at the speed of light. Only unanimity – the singular, united focus on these corrective measures – can save this country from going the way of Venezuela.

May Divine Providence grant our elected Republicans (and perhaps some enlightened Democrats) the grace for such teamwork and tenacity. The good Lord has helped this nation before; we need His help now more than ever before.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo