Happy Old Year?
2025 Trump is definitely not Kamala Harris. Is the die cast?
PETER BRIMELOW WRITES: James Edwards, host of the Political Cesspool radio show, asked a number of us to grade Trump’s first year for the December 22-29 2025 issue of American Free Press, where he is a columnist. The result has been picked up by Kevin MacDonald’s Occidental Observer (here) and Ron Unz’ Unz Review (here). Both allow comments.
(Note about my ID line: of course I was an editor, not “the” editor of Forbes Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, as I should have thought to specify. But I was indeed the Editor of VDARE.com—and am the Editor of peterbrimelow.com, which went unmentioned, to my chagrin).
Some of the Occidental Observer and Unz Review comments on the American Free Press, symposium, from disillusioned Trump supporters, are scathing. Naturally, this causes me to reconsider my assessment. Am I getting too soft in my old age? (I’m not as old as Trump—but dismayingly close).
I faced a similar dilemma in the early 1980s. I had been a bitter critic of President Richard Nixon from the Right and worked for his heroic primary challenger Rep. John Ashbrook in 1972.
But then I found myself much more tolerant of Ronald Reagan.
Was this, I asked myself, because I was by then a married man—and thus more intimately acquainted with various ignominious practical necessities familiar to professional politicians, such as Lying Low, Playing For Time, Running Before The Wind, and even (up to the point of but not of course including!) what Shakespeare called the Lie Direct?
My considered answer: no.
Reagan was the greatest American president of the twentieth century.
His success was so total that the two parallel crises that brought him to power and on which he focused to the exclusion of details—the Cold War and inflation—are now discounted and forgotten.
Similarly, Trump like Reagan has, as practical matter, tightly focused on issues that I care about. Thus he has ended, and is reversing, illegal immigration.
Of course the ultimate issue is legal immigration, on which Trump has flip-flopped infuriatingly. But some of the flopping is very good.
And there’s also the similarly inspiring rhetoric. Trump’s famous 2018 “shit-hole countries” comment, implicitly a justification of the 1924 Immigration Act’s National Origin system, may well resonate through history, albeit less elegantly, like Reagan’s 1987 “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall” speech.
In any case, as I said despite all Trump’s flaws on the eve of the (now increasingly suspect) 2020 election:
[L]ike so many American patriots, I must say that I will always thank Donald Trump for that great night of November 8, 2016.
Although assailed with impending political dispossession, constant cultural humiliation and relentless Main Stream Media propaganda, we can still say with G.K Chesterton’s donkey:
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
Happy New Year to all my, and VDARE.com’s, readers.
Peter Brimelow, former editor of Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and VDARE (U.S.): 10/10. He gets a 10 because he’s not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. It really is that simple. The Biden administration was an absolutely catastrophic, an incipient communist coup—communist in content but fascist in form because it often worked through private sector entities. It turns out, for example, that it was the federal government that was pressuring banks to force payment processors to drop Dissident Right content creators. (My wife, Lydia, and I mentioned we suspected this in our VDARE swan-song videos). A second Biden/Harris administration would have been worse. Appropriate symbol: the J6 martyrs would still be in jail.
Trump is infuriating in many ways, such as the rhetorical flip-flopping, Zionist whoring, and apparent inability to get Congressional Republicans to actually do anything. But from my immigration-obsessed perspective, he has already triggered a serious exodus — the foreign-born population has fallen by more than 2 million in 10 months. He seems to be hampering legal immigration through regulatory changes (which also occurred during his first term). And he’s surfacing issues that VDARE.com was writing about going back 25 years—Birthright Citizenship, the Refugee Racket, cultural incompatibility of Third World immigration, etc. It adds up.