As you flip through the final pages of this book, the second year of the Trump presidency begins. For me, Trump’s inaugural year in Washington was a memorable one. I spent the first six months in two alternate realities: one at CNN and the other among the American people, writing this book. As big executives in our nation’s metropolises filled the headlines with stories about Russia and White House palace intrigue, the real story of America was being written on the rickety, church-dotted roads of South Carolina, the sprawling knolls of Texas’s Hill Country, and the blighted but still hopeful streets of Flint, Michigan. These are among the many forgotten cities and states whose inhabitants rarely make headlines but daily contribute to the lifeblood of this country with little notice or fanfare. In the end, they will write the story of the Trump presidency.
The media is sure to use these opening weeks of January 2018 to reflect on the first year of Trump’s presidency, and as they do, let me share with you some things you likely won’t hear much about. As I write these words in September of 2017, there is cause for optimism among forgotten factory workers. Foxconn announced it will build a new factory in Wisconsin, providing jobs for thousands of new workers.1 The Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, which languished in the approval process for years during the Obama administration, have been approved, creating another forty-two thousand jobs.2 As President Trump promised, he has withdrawn from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership, estimated to eliminate hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs.3 Unemployment is at a sixteen-year low, and consumer confidence is at a sixteen-year high as American incomes rise.4
Veterans like the late Barry Lynn Coates are finally being given the top-of-the-line treatment and attention that they deserve. The Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act will make it easier to terminate employees who fail to do their job. Already, the VA has fired five hundred people. President Trump created a VA hotline in the White House and has poured billions into the Veterans Choice Program, permitting veterans who live far from VA facilities to access care. And the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act expedites the process for the nearly half million veterans with pending appeals.5 Under the Obama administration, appeals took up to six years for a final decision!6
In the fight against ISIS, we finally have a president willing to call the enemy by name: “radical Islamic terrorism.” Although President Obama claimed ISIS was “contained”—only to be contradicted by his own Joint Chiefs of Staff—in the Trump administration, ISIS is truly being contained as the US has retaken one-third of its territories in Iraq and Syria.7 Iraqi forces have retaken Mosul, and the president dropped the so-called Mother of All Bombs (MOAB) on a circuit of ISIS tunnels.8 And in an act widely hailed by the international community, Trump decimated an air base in Syria used by Bashar al-Assad to gas the innocent and vulnerable civilian population.
On immigration, President Trump has reduced border crossings by an eye-opening 52 percent. In the first half of 2017, ICE removed 2,798 criminal gang members, a rate on course to more than double the removals of these violent criminals in 2016. Immediately upon taking office, President Trump redirected $100 million in unused DHS dollars to go toward building a wall along the southern border. The VOICE office for victims of immigration crime was created to help innocent American victims like Sabine Durden.
And in what was perhaps President Trump’s biggest achievement of all, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was nominated and confirmed by the United States Senate, ensuring a lifetime of conservative decision-making on the Court that will honor our Constitution and protect men and women of faith.
These are just a few of President Trump’s achievements. As it stands in September of 2016, I am hopeful that Republicans—and perhaps even some Democrats—will come together in passing bipartisan tax cuts that put more money in the pockets of hardworking Americans. I am likewise hopeful for a renewed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, which has had devastating consequences for the Ackison and Summers families.
I would be remiss if I didn’t add an important footnote to the Trump administration’s 2016 achievements: they come amid resistance—resistance from the mainstream media, the left, liberal judges, and even Establishment Republicans. In Trump’s early days in office, Trump’s temporary travel pause from terror hotbed countries was widely misconstrued as a permanent travel ban from Muslim nations. Never mind that more than forty Muslim-majority countries were not even affected by the temporary pause!9 A handful of liberal judges issued a nationwide ban on Trump’s travel pause only to be rebuked by the Supreme Court, which reinstated the majority of it in a unanimous—yes, a unanimous—decision.10 That means that even liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg upheld the Trump travel pause!
But as I mentioned, there has been obstinacy from Trump’s own party as well. While the House did their job in passing $1.6 billion in funding for the wall, the Senate—as of September 2017—has yet to do their part in approving the measure.11 On healthcare too, Republican resistance has meant that Obamacare repeal and replace is a mere dream, not a reality—an unfulfilled promise to the American voter. It is my wish that as you read this you will find my words dated and supplanted by a tangible health care replacement bill.
As President Donald Trump continues on the journey of his first term, I know he does so with an eye for the people, not the politicians. It’s why he said this during his first speech before the United Nations General Assembly: “The greatest [words] in the United States Constitution [are] its first three beautiful words. They are: ‘We the People.’ ”12 The media might tell you otherwise, but I can assure you of the president’s first, guiding principle. It’s you, the American people, who ignored the fallacies of the mainstream media and instead safeguarded the values of liberty, constitutional order, and sovereignty that make America the greatest nation on earth.
Although I often grew concerned and disconcerted by the narratives of negativity concocted by the press, Election 2016 and my travels across America instilled in me a hope, optimism, and realization that the American spirit rests in its citizens. Grassroots movements like the Tea Party and the Trump rallygoers were not top-down orchestrated efforts by the political class but bottom-up organic movements of the people.
What’s the New American Revolution, you ask? It’s the American people’s effort to take their government back, not by force but by ballot. It is, in essence, “the great task” that President Abraham Lincoln bestowed upon us all in those beautifully crafted words of his famous Gettysburg Address: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”13
Where does the revolution go from here? Only time will tell. As Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century Frenchman who wrote of American greatness, so wisely observed, “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.”