With the onset of the year 2025, a general sense of growing optimism seems to have become the order of the day across the land. Considering where things stood just four years ago, few could have predicted what has transpired. But those of us who have lived long enough to witness our nation consistently alternate between left and right, old and new, darkness and light, realize that the worm always turns. It is just a matter of time. And as we enter a second Trump era, it is fair to say that the nation has been turned upside down – again.
We are facing a year in which artificial intelligence (AI) seems certain to continue impacting American society so profoundly that many are calling it a new Industrial Revolution. So, how appropriate it is that an AI search for “the worm always turns” defines the saying in a way that seems perfectly apropos to once and future president Donald J. Trump: “A situation can change suddenly, allowing someone who has been unlucky or unsuccessful to become successful or lucky.”
The Pendulum Swings
Consider how far the pendulum has swung since 2020. Few, if any, presidents experienced more bad luck than Trump during that fateful year. With the economy firing on all cylinders, jobs aplenty, solid economic growth, secure borders, and no new wars – in sum: peace and prosperity – along came a once-in-a-century pandemic that ruined everything. Hundreds of thousands died, millions more were stricken, and the economy crashed to the point of 20% unemployment as the country descended into a perilous darkness no living human had ever before witnessed. While it was a tragedy of the same magnitude as 9/11/01, the terrorist attacks on that awful day were at least explicable and could be avenged. Not so the pandemic.
No one, most of all Trump and Anthony Fauci, had any genuinely informed idea of how to cope when COVID-19 hit with a vengeance out of the blue. Joe Biden stood on the sidelines and attacked Trump mercilessly for his handling of the pandemic – as if he could have handled it any more effectively. But in the end, the fact that it transpired on Trump’s watch made it almost inconceivable that he, or any president in similar circumstances, could have been re-elected.
As if that wasn’t unlucky enough for Trump, May 25, 2020, all but signaled the death knell for the 45th president. When George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police, the nation went off the rails with a newfound radicalism overtaking the culture writ large. All of a sudden, the country’s values were forcibly shifted far to the left with the rise of cultural Marxism in the form of Black Lives Matter. BLM raised a staggering $90 million in the twinkling of an eye as it fomented protests and ruinous riots for weeks on end in 200 cities across the land. The cancel culture arrived in force, and ordinary Americans suddenly felt frightened to exercise their First Amendment rights and speak their minds.
Between overwhelming resistance to his presidency, the pandemic, and the rise of BLM, Trump faced headwinds of epic proportions. Incredibly, the twin pillars of peace and prosperity, ordinarily the foundations of any successful re-election campaign, no longer seemed relevant. And it didn’t help that Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, came unglued as the presidential race approached its pinnacle, throwing the re-election operation into disarray. In the end, it is actually remarkable that Trump came so close to winning. The switch of a mere 50,000 votes in three states would have turned his defeat into victory. Trump’s outspoken challenges to the outcome failed, as he lost every one of his 60 lawsuits seeking to rejigger the outcome. And then came the upheaval of 1/6/21 and a second impeachment. He was abandoned by most of his allies, virtually all of whom were convinced that he would leave Washington in disgrace, never to return.
Unbeknownst to the political establishment, and likely to Trump, at the time was that he would rise from the ashes four years later on a run of luck – and, many believe, divine protection – that would lead to a phenomenal and drama-filled reversal of fortune.
Unity Turns to Division
Biden had won the 2020 election, promising to unify the nation. It should have been a relatively simple task, requiring only healing and unifying rhetoric from a president with the bully pulpit who was a veteran of political wars for half a century. But the 46th president reneged on his pledge, issuing repeated ominous warnings of the dangers of the MAGA movement, calling Trump and his voters semi-fascists, among many other pejoratives. Whether he believed such words or simply employed them in a naked attempt to scare the nation about Trump and the Jan. 6 riot, we will never know. But it led to a strategy of legal warfare, with leftists prosecuting four cases that completely boomeranged on Democrats, reviving Trump’s fortunes when they were designed to bury him.
While Biden and his party believed – or perhaps hoped – Republicans were over Trump and looking for a new standard-bearer, the 2024 primaries revealed the opposite. The GOP still wanted him back. Trump quickly dispensed with an array of impressive rivals, including Ron DeSantis, the rising star from Florida, and Nikki Haley, who carried the torch for a neoconservative movement long since out of favor with rank-and-file GOP voters.
What followed was a remarkable run of good fortune for Trump that led to a result that was virtually unthinkable four years earlier. Consider all the what-ifs that laid Biden and Harris low and led to Trump winning a delayed second term.
The What-Ifs Leading Up to 2025
It is famously said that hindsight is 20/20. That said, the election could definitely have produced a different outcome but for a series of decisions over which Trump had no power, all of which broke as much in his favor as they did against him in 2020. What if Biden had actually sought unity? What if he had shut down the lawfare strategy of his fellow leftists that produced the opposite of its intended effect? What if he had not broken his pledge to be merely a transitional president? More specifically, what if Biden had triumphantly fulfilled his pledge to be a one-term president, as he should have, after Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms, allowing for an open primary that would have given Democrats the chance to choose someone other than the inept Kamala Harris? What if Trump had not benefited from a pitiable debate performance by an addled opponent who was forced out of the race four months before the election? And ultimately, what if Trump had to face a truly competent Democrat instead of Harris, one of the worst presidential candidates in history?
But then there is the greatest what-if of them all. What if Trump had not pivoted his head at exactly the right moment on July 13 in Butler, PA? The bullet that nipped his ear would have blown his head apart. And what if a Secret Service agent had not spotted the barrel of a gun sticking out from the bushes in a second attempt on his life? It was then that many began to believe that this man, this force of nature, was destined to return to the ultimate seat of power.
Trump now finds himself in a far greater position to succeed than if he had survived the 2020 election. If he had eked out re-election at that time, he would have been forced to deal with the continuing fallout from the pandemic and a nation still in the throes of a radical cancel culture. As 2025 arrives, after four years in the wilderness, he is armed with a decisive victory in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, surrounded by talented and compelling appointees committed to his America First agenda, and emboldened not just by successes in his first term but the stark and flattering contrast between his first administration and that of Biden and Harris. Unlike in 2016-17, few can argue that his victory was a fluke.
This is not to say that 2025 will be anything other than another Trump-fueled wild ride. But it will be the antidote to 2020 and 2021. The reforms sought by the incoming president are beyond profound. He seeks nothing less than to alter the entire modus operandi of the federal government. He will face boundless opposition as he and his surrogates engage in the down-and-dirty work of breaking the stranglehold of the deeply entrenched Washington bureaucracy. The Swamp sought to break him from the moment he entered the White House in 2017 as a political novice with no understanding of the overwhelming resistance he would face. But knowledge is power. As a fearless, battle-scarred victim-survivor of forces he now understands are singularly committed to his destruction, you can bet that in 2025 and beyond, he will not let it happen again in what promises to be a twilight struggle to recapture the soul of America.
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