The Five Things Trump Can Do To Save America

On immigration, left-wing terrorism, anti-white racism, and more

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year in the second Trump administration. It started out with some very solid wins, Blitzkrieg-style action on many fronts. But has the Trump administration hit a stall? Are things going as well as they should be? On this episode of Rufo & Lomez, we’re going to break down the successes and failures and offer a five-point agenda to make sure the Trump administration is a stellar success moving into the midterms and into the end of the second Trump presidency.

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Rufo: We’re almost a year into the Trump administration’s second term, and I thought it’d be a good time to sit down, reflect, and take stock. There was massive acceleration at the beginning. It seems like things have slowed down. It seems like there’s been some spinning on certain issues. So I’d like to talk about what the agenda should be leading into the midterms and the conclusion of Trump’s second term. We’ve come up with five ideas, so why don’t you help set the stage? Where are we in this moment? Then we can launch into these five key principles.

Lomez: Sure. Last week we had our show in the middle of consternation on social media about some statements Trump had made regarding H-1Bs. There was the 50-year mortgage proposal that was not met with great enthusiasm by the Trump loyalists. There was also a statement made about the visas. We had the thing with Antifa in Berkeley from last week that I don’t think we touched on, but it was another big story. We started thinking, okay, this administration is in a lull right now. I think that’s fair to say. There was a lot of activity, as you mentioned, early on, and there were a lot of these proposals. Then the usual thing happens: you run against the brick wall of reality, the practical constraints of doing politics and enacting policy within a government that is designed to grind everything to a halt.

One thing that happens to any administration is that you start focusing your attention on what’s the easiest thing to do, where there’s the least resistance. For most presidents, that is foreign policy, because the executive, for whatever power he might lack elsewhere, still has more or less total control of what happens from a foreign policy perspective. I think the administration has said, “Okay, this is stuff we can get done. We can get Ws on foreign policy, so that’s where we’re going to focus our attention.” To their credit, they’ve done a pretty good job.

Rufo: 10 out of 10.

Lomez: Foreign policy has been remarkable, with great work from the State Department. Even the tariffs, which are not totally foreign policy but are foreign-directed, despite early warning signs that they might not work out in our favor and might disrupt markets, have basically settled out okay. I think we’ve gotten more out of it than I thought we might have. It’s going to take a long time to reshore these massive industries, so we want to be mindful of our time horizon here.