Looking Back To Future Greatness
Donald Trump's Appeal To American History
Corporate media will no doubt soiled their knickers listening to President Donald Trump’s inaugural address.
President Trump makes no apologies as a rule, and he certainly made none in his speech. He did not apologize for his campaign rhetoric, he did not apologize for his politics, and he certainly did not apologize for the United States of America.
From the very beginning, Donald Trump made his vision of America clear, and it is a vision from America’s past—of America’s “Gilded Age” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
From the very beginning, Donald Trump made it clear he does not offer any apologies for that period of American history, nor for any other period.
From the very beginning, Donald Trump made it clear he wants to see the United States fully restored as an industrial and manufacturing superpower, an engine of material wealth and prosperity.
Donald Trump’s vision for America’s future is without a doubt “muscular”. To achieve that vision Donald Trump is looking back to America’s past.
The “Golden Age”
Donald Trump signaled his intent to bring about a new “gilded age” with the very first sentence of his inaugural address:
The Golden Age of America begins right now.
I suspect it was not lost on President Trump that “Golden Age” is a synonym for “Gilded Age”. I suspect that will not be lost on his detractors either.
Nor is there any mistaking what Trump means by the term: he wants an America that is muscular, vibrant, propserous, and powerful.
We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.
One thing even Trump’s detractors are compelled to acknowledge: The man has an unequivocal and unhesitating love of this country. When he promises to put “America first”, one has little doubt that he means to do exactly that.
Intriguingly, to bring about Trump’s “Golden Age”, he starts by calling out the crass corruption of the past four years—corruption that most academics like to argue is the hallmark of America’s original “gilded age”1, as the Encyclopedia Britannica entry demonstrates in its first sentence.
Gilded Age, period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in U.S. history during the 1870s that gave rise to important novels of social and political criticism.
It would be hard to find a period of American history more politically corrupt than the past four years. Granted, that is not the opinion of the gauleiters of the outgoing administration, lamentable creatures such as Merrick Garland, who spent his last days as the nation’s worst Attorney General pouting that people were saying mean things about him and the Department of Justice.
The reality, of course, is that the DoJ had been fully weaponized against Donald Trump as well as his lawyers, his associates, and every one of the J6 protesters.
Donald Trump wasted no time in his inaugural address calling out the serial civil rights abuses of the Garland’s DoJ.
The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.
Trump means to clean house at the DoJ as step one of the vision he has for America’s Golden Age.
Calling Out The Corruption
Nor did Donald Trump stop with lawfare when calling out the failings and corruptions of the (Biden-)Harris Administration. No one was spare his rhetorical glare.
As we gather today, our government confronts a crisis of trust. For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.
FEMA and DHS especially were pilloried, as was the failed government of the state of California and the City of Los Angeles.
We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad. It fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens, but provide sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.
We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defence of foreign borders, but refuses to defend American borders or more importantly, its own people. Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina, been treated so badly. And other states who are still suffering from a hurricane that took place many months ago. Or more recently in Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defence. They’re raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting, but we can’t let this happen. Everyone is unable to do anything about it.
As anyone who has not been drinking Democrat Kool-Aid by the gallon already knows, the Los Angeles Wildfires are a showcase of the peculiar incompetence and idiocy of Democrat-led government.
Donald Trump wants to change all of this.
Even Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s crusade to restore Americans physical health got a shout-out, along with the failed and unconstitutional Department of Education.
We have a public health system that does not deliver in times of disaster, yet more money is spent on it than any country anywhere in the world. And we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves, in many cases to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them. All of this will change starting today, and it will change very quickly.
Donald Trump was explicit in claiming his election as a mandate to change things in Washington, DC. Given that his inaugural address had all the rhetorical subtlety of a bulldozer, there is little doubt that he intends the most massive and consequential root-and-branch reform of the federal government ever, easily surpassing the post-Watergate work of the Church Committee.
Defending This Country
Donald Trump laid out first steps which were quite predictable—mainly because he had been talking about them almost since he won the election last November. His most important first steps were all about securing the southern border.
Declaring an emergency at the southern border and sending troops to the border to buttress CBP agents patrolling that border.
Massive deportations of criminal illegal aliens.
Reinstate “remain in Mexico”
Trump is also upping the ante with respect to Mexican drug cartels by declaring them foreign terrorist organizations. One hopes Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is paying attention, because here also Trump may be recallng early 20th century history—specifically, how the US sent a punitive military expedition under General John J. Pershing into Mexico, pursuing the bandit Pancho Villa2.
At a minimum, Trump will be setting the stage for direct military action in Mexico by stationing troops at the southern border and designating the cartels as foreign terrorists. The position of the US government since 2001 has been that the President of the United States has fairly broad authority to use military force against foreign terrorist organizations3.
Trump did not say he would be ordering an invasion of Mexico. He did say he was ordering everything that would come before an invasion of Mexico.
We may fairly conclude that Donald Trump is not willing to compromise when it comes to the drug cartels. He wants them wiped off the face of the Earth.
Full disclosure: so do I.
Rebuilding America’s Factories
Trump moved easily from defending the realm to reiterating his determination that America be a manufacturing superpower once again. Judging by the way he connected manufacturing prowess with overcoming inflation in this country, he clearly sees manufacturing as the pathway to prosperity.
Next, I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices. The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth and we are going to use it, and they use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.
One cannot listen to such rhetoric and not think of America’s industrial titans of the gilded age—men such as Andrew Carnegie and J. D. Rockefeller—and the industrial behemoths they built.
That Trump’s vision of America’s future recalls such men, both of whom were at one point the richest man in the world, has an irony all its own, given that Elon Musk, currently the richest man in the world, is an ardent Trump supporter and is heading up the cost-cutting initiative “The Department of Government Efficiency”.
Trump pairs his vision of American economic greatness as being rooted in the industrial prowess of the guilded age with trade policies straight out of the gilded age. On this Trump is quite explicit: he wants the trade and tariff policies of President McKinley.
President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States, the United States, I mean, think of this spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.
This especially will give economists and politicians on both sides of the political aisle heartburn, as it has been prevailing wisdom for decades that tariffs are a bad idea.
Yet we should note that President Trump’s experience with tariffs in his first term were not exactly bad, and indeed where goods prices stand in this country may be giving him a window in which to enact tariffs—or at least use them as negotiating leverage in trade talks—without risking significant economic harm to the US.
Trump’s reasoning is that, if he can roll back the economic clock to President McKinley’s era, America will prosper.
Would Dr. King Agree?
Inauguration day coincides with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., day, set aside to honor the slain civil rights leader and Nobel Prize laureate. It is only to be expected that Donald Trump made mention of Dr. King in his address:
Today is Martin Luther King Day and his honour, this will be a great honour, but in his honour, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.
This, of course, begs the question as to what Dr. King would likely think of Donald Trump’s agenda.
While it would be foolish to speculate on what Dr. King thought of America’s Gilded Age, we do not need to speculate about what Dr. King thought about an economic agenda focused on making sure people had both jobs and job skills to earn a decent paycheck. Dr. King was an unequivocal supporter of an economic agenda for full employment, recognizing that jobs were an integral part of any effort to overcome poverty, economic injustice, and even racial injustice.
That is one point on which Dr. King’s own rhetoric aligns rather well not just with Donald Trump’s inaugural address but also Trump’s pre-COVID economic record during his first term of office.
Dr. King would blanche at the thought that material prosperity alone would put America back on the path to greatness and glory, but he was fully supportive of the jobs a healthy economy produced. Trump’s own track record in his first term showed that a commitment to jobs in general produces good employment results even for minorities in this country, and that is something Dr. King absolutely would support—we know this because he did support it.
Can Trump Do It?
Trump is definitely aiming high with Agenda 47. He is setting high expectations for himself on jobs, on the economy, on inflation, and on foreign trade and foreign relations.
Will Trump deliver on all of the agenda items outlined in his inaugural address? Probably not. With an agenda as long and as expansive as Agenda 47, it would surprise almost no one if Trump was not able to realize a few of those goals and objectives.
Yet even if Donald Trump can accomplish only half of his political agenda by 2028, his Presidency will have been a success.
If Donald Trump can accomplish any significant portion of his political agenda by the mid-terms in 2026, his Presidency will be a phenomenonal success.
Yet perhaps by delivering a speech that is an unquestioned, unapologetic, full-throated cheer for America’s Gilded Age, by making bold and unapologetic statements about America’s past and future, while connecting America’s future to America’s past, Trump has already succeeded in this regard: he dares Americans to dream, and to dream big.
He dares Americans to thnk of ourselves as a great nation with a great history and a greater future.
He dares people everywhere to believe that people are capable of great things.
Donald Trump looks to America’s past to articulate his vision of American greatness, but to realize that greatness he looks to America’s future.
For any President in any era, that’s the right message and the right vision for beginning a Presidency.
This American hopes very much Donald Trump succeeds. May he truly be the rising tide to lift all ships everywhere.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Gilded Age". Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 Jan. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/event/Gilded-Age. Accessed 20 January 2025.
Mieri, M. General Pershing’s Mexican Expedition to Capture Pancho Villa Predates His World War I Career. 9 Mar. 2016, https://www.americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/general-pershings-mexican-expedition-capture-pancho-villa-predates-his-world-war-i.
Yoo, J. The President’s Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations Against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them. Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Dept. of Justice, September 25, 2001, https://www.justice.gov/file/146041-0/dl?inline
Inspirational!
I second the nomination of Mr. Kust to be the peoples' representative at the White House.
Very well done.
And you know, in spite of whatever flaws Andrew Carnegie had, he was an amazing American. He grew up in a stone shack in Scotland, so poor that there was no door in the doorway or glass panes in the one window, and with just dirt for a floor. He came to America all alone, at age fifteen, made a million dollars by the age of about twenty-one by very daringly taking risks in the stock market, and then invested it all in foundries. He hired the best people, and helped invent new steel alloys, which built railroads, skyscrapers, and new conveniences like elevators. Then after he became as rich as Elon Musk, he used much of his fortune to build and stock hundreds of libraries across America. He did so because he repeatedly saw the innate intelligence and potential in his poor immigrant employees, and reasoned that if they could just self-educate in their free time they could become enormously successful and happy in life.
Trump is right - we could use a mindset like Carnegie’s in America again!