Practical outcomes despite flaws

Trump's policies echo what Democrats themselves once supported, which highlights just how far the opposition has drifted from reality. While they chase academic theories and ideological purity tests, Trump is focused on practical outcomes that directly impact Americans’ everyday lives.

https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/decisive-leadership-in-an-age-of

Decisive Leadership In An Age of Decline

Trump's first year: heavy handed, but getting things done. I'll take it.

Quoth the Raven

Oct 03, 2025

All things being equal, I think President Trump is doing a damn good job his first year in office. Sure, there are things that I could choose to take exception with — not cutting as much spending as anticipated or dangerous ideas involving stablecoins in the Treasury market, for example — but all in all, Trump is getting the big things right.

Every once in a while, I check in on the Democrats to see if they have somehow organically manifested one new brain cell while they just sleep, lobotomized and Matrix-pod style, in the liquid goo of groupthink, identity politics, race hustling, “academic” theories, and post-post-post-postmodern ideologies (the fourth post just kills you)—and I’m quickly assured that they have made no progress whatsoever.

For example, here’s Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett stating just days ago that just because somebody commits a crime, it doesn’t make them a criminal, while her yoga teacher nods along in deep agreement as though she has just presented a breakthrough in differential geometry at MIT and he’s in the class following along, taking notes.

And then there was Senator Mazie Hirono’s line of questioning to FBI Director Kash Patel days ago, where she was incensed that FBI agents — supposed to be the “tip of the spear” in fighting terrorism — were required to do pull-ups.

And how about Jake Tapper interviewing himself Hakeem Jeffries about the current government shutdown due to Democrats seeking to offer medical care to illegal immigrants?

I also watch the people who appear one after the other on MSNBC to claim that arresting criminals is somehow racist—like this guy:

And in case you’re wondering how Kamala Harris is doing after receiving the curb-stomping of the century in the presidential election, she has also resurfaced, eager to prove that she appears to still have an affinity for both word salads and red wine.

Yes, I look at these examples and scores of other ones.

I watch all of this and think to myself, “Things could have been way, way worse.”

One of the main arguments against President Trump so far during his term has been that he has been acting with a heavy hand. This was the critique with DOGE, it was the critique with his appointees, it was the critique with tariffs, it’s been the critique with him speaking out about James Comey’s indictment, and it has definitely been the critique with how he is handling illegal immigration.

But honestly, the country had gotten so far off track in the four years prior to this term that any pushback from the above idiocy was going to feel heavy-handed.

How exactly is Trump supposed to respond to Joe Biden’s head of nuclear waste being a bald man wearing lipstick in a dress, stealing luggage from women at airports? Is Trump supposed to say, “This is completely normal behavior!” or “Great job, can we keep him on for another term?”

“Well, acktschully…”

How is Trump supposed to look at millions of illegals being allowed to cross the border with zero repercussion—many of whom are unvetted criminals—and respond?

Is he supposed to throw Alejandro Mayorkas a testimonial dinner for repeatedly lying in front of Congress with a smirk while knowingly keeping the country’s borders open?

And how exactly is Trump supposed to tackle the problem of crime in major cities and drugs and homelessness ravaging Washington, D.C.? Is he supposed to kick back in his chair and act as though everything’s fine?

You can hem and haw all you’d like about his companies’ bankruptcies in the past, but the point is Trump is a “get-shit-done” kind of person, even if it is with a heavy hand.

Even the worst that the private sector business world has to offer is millions of times more efficient than bureaucrats in government who have no idea how the free market rewards results. If Trump wakes up at 6 a.m. and goes to bed at midnight every day and only spends 2 of those 18 hours making swift, decisive decisions about getting things done while spending the rest watching Fox News and battling with the press, his days will likely still be 100 times more productive than Joe “6 Handicap” Biden’s or Kamala “Unburdened From What Has Been” Harris’ would be.

I once saw a documentary where Trump was talking to one of his workers at his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland while they were working on it. He was having a back-and-forth with someone that was helping him design a golf course, and at some point Trump just pleaded with his employee to stay out of the way of people who were getting things done. The employee had a gripe about something small on the course or how something was being done, and Trump’s message to him was: if the project is moving forward, then don’t rock the boat. He’s results-driven.

Yes, Trump’s decisions may not always be perfect, but that is superseded by his ability to take swift corrective actions at a time when the nation desperately needs it most.

Was his formula for figuring out tariffs for other countries nuanced and carefully done? Probably not. But did it get the attention of the world and send a broader message that the United States is actively reevaluating its trade deficit? It sure as hell did.

Is Immigration and Customs coming down with a heavy hand on illegal immigration? Yes, they are. But is that sending a message to future illegal immigrants and ones that are still here? Yes it is.

And is Trump’s decisive action to battle crime in inner cities with a heavy hand sending a message about his expectations for law and order? You’re damn right it is. The message is “the bullshit stops today” — and it’s a message our inner cities have needed to hear since the “Summer of Love” riots in 2020.

One only needs to do a precursory Google search online to find that many of the policy positions Trump has put in place are ones that Democrats would have approved of in the ’90s or early 2000s. I see countless clips surfacing of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and even Chuck Schumer talking about how illegal immigrants don’t belong in the country — and how we need a secure border:

Odd. It seemed pretty simple for them to understand a decade or two ago, but perhaps this was before the party had engineered a plan to try and use said immigrants to tip the scales of elections, or before we learned we are all racists without even knowing it.

There’s also been critiques about the Trump administration taking equity stakes in public companies. I’m constantly being flamed by people telling me I’m supporting socialism because I own Intel and other companies that I think the administration might invest in.

To be truthful, I see their point about socialism. But the Trump administration isn’t ultimately looking for a state-planned, socialist economy—it’s trying to protect and call attention to the assets the United States does have and will need to rid itself of dependence on foreign nations. It would be a different story if the United States wasn’t in such a precarious position in relying on the rest of the world to provide us with the things that we desperately need to maintain our quality of life and national defense.

Is it a heavy-handed approach? Again, a little bit. But do the ends justify the means if companies like Intel—now potentially paired with some of the biggest names in the world in semiconductors—become technological staples in the United States so we don’t have to rely on other countries? Sure.

I’ve been saying for years that the pandemic exposed our reliance on other countries, specifically China. The Trump administration is looking at the industries most critical to national security and is trying to ensure their success and survival.

At the end of the day, what matters most is not whether President Trump has been flawless in his first year in office, but whether he has been effective in steering the country back toward stability, sovereignty, and common sense. The answer to that, in my opinion, is yes.

His willingness to confront uncomfortable truths—whether about immigration, crime, or foreign dependence—shows a level of courage that has been missing in Washington for decades. The heavy-handedness that critics point to is not the sign of recklessness, fascism, white supremacy, colonialism, Project 2025, climate change or whatever progressive talking points claim this week, but instead it’s the natural outcome of a leader who refuses to accept decline as the new normal.

Criticism will always come, especially from political opponents and the media, but leadership is not about pleasing everyone—it’s about setting a course and holding firm when the inevitable resistance comes.

Trump’s approach may ruffle feathers, but it’s also forcing conversations that need to happen. It’s not enough to nod along politely while the country crumbles under bad policy like President Autopen did for four years; someone has to make bold choices and demand accountability, even when it isn’t popular.

Looking at the big picture, Trump’s first year demonstrates that he is not only capable of making those choices but also committed to doing so consistently. The fact that his policies echo what Democrats themselves once supported highlights just how far the opposition has drifted from reality. While they chase academic theories and ideological purity tests, Trump is focused on practical outcomes that directly impact Americans’ everyday lives.

Books on the Ends of Civilizations

 

Five Best: Books on the Ends of Civilizations

Selected by Johan Norberg, the author of ‘Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations.’

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/five-best-books-on-the-ends-of-civilizations-4f1d126e?mod=arts-culture_feat2_books_pos4

By Johan Norberg

Oct. 2, 2025 12:57 pm ET

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The ancient city walls of Itchan Kala, the old town of Khiva, Uzbekistan. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Lost Enlightenment

By S. Frederick Starr (2013)

1. In the 10th century, the world’s most advanced civilization was the Baghdad-based Abbasid Caliphate, uniting the Islamic world from North Africa to Central Asia. We don’t have to go further than the letter A to see how much the West borrowed from this Arab culture: Arabic numerals, algebra, algorithm and arithmetic. It was an empire of open commerce and striking intellectual tolerance. Scientists and philosophers were free to learn from anyone and test new ideas. In “Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane,” S. Frederick Starr guides us through the scientific brilliance of the Central Asian region. “By any measure, this was one of humanity’s great ages of thought and creativity, a true Age of Enlightenment,” he writes. But when rulers felt threatened by religious and political fragmentation, they imposed narrow orthodoxy through state coercion and a new system of schools, devoted to indoctrination instead of inquiry. They triumphed—and in doing so crippled a civilization: “Never again would open-ended scientific enquiry and unconstrained philosophizing take place in the Muslim world without the suspicion of heresy and apostasy lurking in the air.”

9 BOOKS WE READ THIS WEEK

Controversy at the Smithsonian, a Jazz Age caper from Thomas Pynchon, Rome’s long history and more.

The World of Yesterday

By Stefan Zweig (1942)

2. During the golden summer of 1914, the Austrian author Stefan Zweig visited a resort near Ostend in Belgium. The hotels were full, people basked on the beaches, children flew kites. A newsboy announced the latest threats between the great powers. But, Zweig writes, “we had been familiar with these diplomatic conflicts for years; they were always happily settled at the last minute.” Not this time. “The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European” is Zweig’s beautiful eyewitness account of the end of a civilization. He describes how Europe tore itself apart in the 20th century through two world wars ignited by nationalism, fascism and communism—“the most inconceivable decline of humanity into a barbarism which we had believed long since forgotten.” Zweig recalls the economic and social progress before World War I and the optimistic sense of European unity. But the golden summer ended and demagogues soon discovered that their path to power was to set nation against nation.

The March of Folly

By Barbara Tuchman (1984)

3. Historians often explain turning points through technological shifts, class identities or geopolitical forces. Barbara Tuchman’s different insight makes “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam” such a notable achievement. She restores folly to its rightful place in history, defining it as “the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.” This helps explain why, in the late 15th century and for decades after, popes squandered the spirit of the Renaissance and cleared the path for the Reformation by neglecting calls for reform and entangling the papacy in intrigue and war. In a rare moment of self-awareness, Alexander VI, the pontiff from 1492 to 1503, allowed: “The most grievous danger for any Pope lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth.” Tuchman saw how vanity, confirmation bias, lust for power and short-termism could ignite wars, debase currencies and expel minorities.

The Road to Serfdom 

By Friedrich Hayek (1944)

4. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek spent World War II in Britain, where he pondered how totalitarians could have consumed Europe—and whether similar ominous forces were stirring in England and the U.S. He dedicated “The Road to Serfdom” to “the socialists of all parties,” because he argued that the drive to control the economy from the top down inevitably eroded liberty, concentrating political and economic power in the hands of planners. Hayek explained that the demand for quick and decisive government action breeds frustration with the slow machinery of democratic procedure. Principles that once bound rulers and made progress possible begin to look like obstacles to be brushed aside impatiently. “It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal,” he wrote. Hayek’s book is a lament for a lost world and a manual for rebuilding civilization after the war. Real progress, he insisted, comes from spontaneous, voluntary forces, not from dictates. It requires both the rule of law to restrain power-hungry leaders at home and a rules-based international order to check rapacious nations abroad.

The Fall of Rome

By Bryan Ward-Perkins (2005)

5. Many contemporary historians insist that the Roman Empire never truly fell. Reacting against older textbooks’ sharp boundaries between eras, some historians today emphasize continuity on either side of A.D. 476, when Romulus Augustus, the last Western emperor, was deposed. But they go too far in arguing that Rome dwindled, and slowly, imperceptibly transformed into fragmented Medieval Europe: Rome undeniably fell. In the fifth and sixth centuries, infrastructure began deteriorating and imperial troops could no longer protect property and trade routes against bandits and barbarian warlords. The historian and archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins draws on a vast range of evidence, from changes in architecture to the diversity of pottery. “The Fall of Rome” shows how the literate, urban world of antiquity disintegrated. Coins, used among all levels of Romans, became scarce as commerce collapsed. Craftsmanship and technology were forgotten. “It was no mere transformation,” Mr. Ward-Perkins writes, “it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’”

Courage to Stand Alone

 

The Courage to Stand Alone in an Age of Cowards

True courage is resisting conformity—standing firm in truth while the crowd bends, even when applause fades and loneliness is the price.

By Maureen Steele

October 3, 2025

The bravest souls are rarely the loudest in the room, but they are often the most misunderstood. In an age when conformity is dressed up as virtue and applause is the currency of self-worth, those who refuse to play by the script become lightning rods. They provoke discomfort simply by existing in truth. They trigger the insecure, unsettle the complacent, and disturb the carefully curated illusions of the fake.

We like to imagine that the pressure to conform ends with adolescence, with the awkward teenage years when belonging matters more than authenticity. But Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments in the 1950s proved otherwise. In a simple exercise—identifying which line matched another in length—he planted actors in the room to all give the same obviously wrong answer. Time and again, the lone real participant abandoned the truth they could plainly see with their own eyes and went along with the group. Three out of four conformed at least once. Not because they were fooled, but because they did not want to stand out. The fear of sticking out, of being “that person,” overpowered reality itself.

And here is the sobering part: that experiment never ended. It repeats itself every day in classrooms, workplaces, media echo chambers, and politics. People choose the safety of the crowd over the solitude of truth. They surrender what they know is real because they do not want the chill of unpopularity or the sting of rejection. The applause comes cheap, but the price of dissent feels unbearable.

Pair that with Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies in the 1960s—where 65 percent of participants willingly administered what they thought were lethal shocks to another person simply because an authority told them to—and you see the bleak pattern. Obedience to authority and conformity to the crowd are the twin forces that crush truth. And yet, every turning point in history has been authored by those who resisted both—the prophets, the dissidents, the whistleblowers, and the reformers.

To live this way is to accept loneliness as a companion. It is to endure suspicion, ridicule, and rejection, not because one is wrong but because one refuses to settle for the comforting lie. Truth costs dearly, but its reward is integrity: an internal compass that does not lose its bearing when the crowd veers off course.

Applause fades. It always does. What endures is the quiet, steady force of those who never sold out, never bent, and never exchanged their essence for acceptance. They may never be fully understood in their time, but they will always be remembered as the ones who saw clearly, stood firmly, and lived bravely.