In the wake of his decisive victory in the 2024 presidential contest, Donald Trump can no longer be dismissed as a mere aberration on the American political scene. His stunning rise from supposed political oblivion has placed him in the company of some of America’s great historical figures and continues to confound most elite observers.

Indeed, the long arc of Trump’s triumph is bewildering to contemplate. After a lifetime in the public eye as a celebrity, real estate mogul, and reality star, he filled his critics in 2016 with skepticism and then outrage. He ended his tumultuous first term as a pariah, stripped of his public platform on Twitter and, in the estimation of his critics, without a path back to power. His steady, plodding “revenge tour” was dismissed as the quixotic dream of a madman who refused to accept that the world had rejected him.

Trump has once again proven the world wrong, surviving defamation,  lawfare and a felony conviction in our courts, and even assassination attempts only to secure a victory that leaves him more popular and more powerful than ever before. 

An important aspect of this newfound popularity has been the extent to which it appears Trump has diminished the spiritual leader of the woke left, Barack Obama, who now appears as an ephemeral, lame, enervated has-been. Obama has been humiliated and denied an effective fourth term with the defeat of the inept puppet Kamala Harris. Obama may well be remembered, more than anything else, for his role in provoking Trump to launch his daring political career by mocking him in public.

The Democratic machine spent more than the $1 billion it raised in trying to elect Harris, going into disastrous debt as it paraded the entirety of gilded Hollywood in front of the electorate. The people rejected it, defied them, and chose Trump instead with an equally firm rejection of the “woke” dispensation of the past decade. The Biden presidency, one can hope, was the peak of this deranged period of open borders, overt anti-white racism, gender insanity, lawfare, and the incessant politicization of our common life by hectoring elites.

“The Donald” has repudiated an entire era and its assumptions, most of all, the feeling of inevitability that had for so long supported the left and plagued many of us on the right. He ran on the strongest anti-immigration platform in American history, but he won bigly with Hispanic males. He made inroads in the bluest of states, including his home, New York, and even came close to flipping New Jersey. Trump reclaimed support among young men, who finally stood up against the emasculating scolding of the progressives, and their young female protégés. Trump has energized the Republican Party like no politician since Ronald Reagan and given conservatives an opportunity to win in a world they, and their enemies, believed had left them behind. 

The agenda Trump has proposed—sweeping tax relief, dismantling the federal bureaucracy, repatriating millions of illegal aliens—would change the trajectory of the country’s future. Some on the right are skeptical of Trump’s ambitious mandate and his prospects of fulfilling it, but there are reasons to believe the next chapter will play out differently than his earlier term. Trump’s first term produced some solid results, but those years were vitiated by a costly battle with the establishment and the deep state.

Trump’s legitimacy is difficult to question now, as he has received a firm mandate of the people, and his enemies have exhausted themselves in a long and fruitless struggle to destroy him. Trump has preternatural stamina—he is a 78-year-old man who eats at McDonald’s regularly and can riff for hours without stopping. He has simply outworked and outlasted his opponents. There are murmurings of “resistance,” but they carry a resigned echo. The left knows that it’s “Joe-ver.” What else can they do to stop a man who already cheated death?

Trump does not have the defeated disposition that is common among many movement conservatives. He is not a professional critic or a skeptic of anything. He is a man of action with large reserves of energy and confidence. When he says the next four years will be the greatest America has ever seen, he believes it, and his enemies shudder because they know he means it, too. We may be surprised to see how easily Trump delivers on many of his bold promises.

There is reason to believe Trump is not finished surprising us. To quote Schopenhauer, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” Trump is an American visionary who has done things no one thought possible, and opened doors many did not know existed. He still has time to pull off his greatest surprise of all. He can secure a legacy as a popular president who defied the slanders of the “haters and losers,” and left his country better off than he found it.