The unadulterated havoc created, and almost blissfully sustained, by the Biden administration has put a spotlight on attributes of this president that many Americans find reprehensible.

Two years have passed since Joe Biden dubiously ascended to the White House on the promise of ushering in a new era of moderation, transparency, and globalism.  Instead, his ham-handed policies, whether conjured up from what remains of his feeble mind or from his cynical cast of puppet masters, are blazing a nationwide path of destruction on the American economy and psyche.  Why not, then, spare ourselves the collective misery of the present and ponder what might rectify our national embarrassment in a hypothetical Donald Trump v.2.0 presidency?  For the calculating and common sense–minded Trump, the below should be no great surprise.  It is for the sake of bringing greatness back to America that such well intended reforms should be implemented prior to or upon his triumphant return to Washington, D.C.

"Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are."

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A simpleton may lay blame at the feet of Trump's insatiable social media bombast for his failure to secure victory in the 2020 election.  Rather, one could argue that his first term in office was undone by the company he kept.

Trump's inner circle was no reboot of Lincoln's Team of Rivals; rather, it was a conglomeration of subversive Obama holdovers, ruling-class politicians owed electoral favors, and glad-handing lackeys doing the bidding of the ever-watchful GOP.  Plain and simple, the disparate efforts of this group, whether by nefarious design or through sheer bureaucratic ineptitude, crippled Trump from the onset.

Russiagate alone was enough of an internal coup de force to oust almost any Republican president.  In 2025, Trump would be best served relying on those trusted agents around him who left the political establishment and who are loyal to his vision of American exceptionalism.

He should also consider a drastic culling of the herd from the top down, slashing the size of his National Security Council and vetting its personnel, as well as removing politically motivated sycophant military leaders from positions of influence in the Pentagon and throughout the Combatant Commands.  Obama infamously purged the military ranks of conservative-minded general officers, replacing them with many enlightened academic liberals in uniform, who, in some circumstances, had never commanded troops in a combat role.  The US military is a critical part of the foundation on which the American experiment was built; it must be spared the destructive yoke of wokeness and restored to its former greatness.

The same sentiment can be applied the U.S. Intelligence Community, where liberal bureaucrats hide out for many decades, seething at the notion of a Republican administration.  In places like the CIA, where human intelligence is collected, synthesized, and published, there should be no question of personal animus or ideology being woven into products consumed at the highest levels of power in Washington.

A Right Jab

As the COVID-19 pandemic stubbornly grinds on through executive fiat alone, more and more data are exposing the real dangers the hastily approved and distributed "vaccines" brought to the forefront.  While many dismiss the "#diedsuddenly" social media phenomenon as yet another vast right-wing conspiracy to impugn the scientific community, by the time Trump returns to office, we could very well possess definitive proof of the destruction of the human immune response wrought by government-mandated or coerced injection of gene-altering mRNA shots.

For Trump to succeed in any campaign for his return to the presidency, he must immediately consider a shift in his public stance on the jabs and Operation Warp Speed.  A change of this magnitude would be a difficult one for Trump to accept, as a leader who has doggedly boasted of his administration's life-saving prowess through the advent of the vaccine rollout in 2021.  This stance is quickly becoming unsustainable, as seemingly every news cycle is littered with unexplained deaths of young adults, celebrities, and athletes in peak physical condition.

As excess deaths and non-COVID-related mortality statistics become more appealing for American mainstream media to report on, it will behoove Trump to embrace the sentiments of his voting base.  Among the anti-vaxxers, vax-skeptical, vax-injured, and of late the vax-remorseful, a cacophony can be heard, and they demand that Trump end his reticence to acknowledge potential adverse effects of his signature first-term achievement.

Any adviser paying attention to polls and social media could craft a simple yet effective pivot in message for Trump to hammer home: it's Dr. Fauci's fault.  With Fauci's trustworthiness in the toilet and increasing scrutiny on his motivations and astronomical pandemic profits, Trump could claim a P.R. victory using the tried and true tactic of plausible deniability.

Does it hurt Trump's image in any way to state to the American people something like this?  "Look, we were in the midst of a global pandemic, one that we had little understanding of at first.  Not being a scientist, I deferred to the career experts who provided me the best courses of action as they knew it at the time.  They were wrong."

The COVID saga is far from over, and blame will abound for many years.  The vaccine issue has the real potential of grounding a second Trump nomination for the presidency before it even begins.  It is not too late to course-correct.

"It is well that war is so terrible ... lest we should grow too fond of it."

—R.E. Lee

It goes without saying that American foreign policy under Joe Biden is an abject failure, replete with human loss of life and tragedy, displaced millions, and a significantly diminished stature on the world stage.  The humiliation of the abandonment of Afghanistan, seared into American minds as bodies fell from retreating U.S. military aircraft and flags were lowered for the fallen U.S. soldiers, cannot be forgotten.  Where once America enjoyed hegemony in the world, it now finds itself in a proxy war with Russia and on the brink of another with China.

Trump turned to his Art of the Deal tactics in his first term, and if he isn't already holding back-channel discussions with world leaders, much like what John Kerry did in an unofficial capacity to broker then–former president Obama's Green New Deal, he should strongly consider it.  The world has not witnessed this level of brinkmanship between East and West since the Cold War, and the feckless Biden regime is one overplayed hand from a nuclear conflict.  Trump can cement his strategic relationships with leaders like Putin and Xi, while simultaneously averting serious threats to the American homeland and undermining Biden's unceasing and hideously expensive weaponization of Ukraine.  He can once again proclaim himself a peacetime president, a distinction rarely enjoyed by U.S. presidents.

Many commonsense approaches that Trump could take in his second presidency need no explanation.  Americans who vote for Trump expect, and will likely see to completion, the fulfillment of his promise of a wall on the southern U.S. border.  For the preservation of our national security, economic well-being, and identity, the resumption of Trump's border policy is paramount.  Other actions that go without saying include the outright gutting of the DOJ and FBI, once-proud institutions rankled by liberal activism and corruption perpetrated by political extremists in the ranks.  In a society so deeply rooted in law and order, the existence of a two-tiered system of justice is intolerable and must be reformed or systematically dismantled.

The rot and decay that Donald Trump attempted to abate in his first term, only to see his efforts reversed by Joe Biden, can still be exorcised from Washington.  The most critical question remains: is Trump capable of tempering his hubris and embracing commonsense but perhaps personally humbling reforms that may invigorate his base and propel him to a second, thoroughly transformative return to the White House?  The state of American greatness depends on it.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.