Where Would We Be If Trump Hadn’t Won His Second Term?

How One Election Changed the Course of Policy, Power, and the Administrative State

Photographer: Evan Vucci/AP Photo

History rarely gives a country the luxury of knowing what might have been. But the 2024 election came close. Half the country wanted to preserve the machinery of managed decline, convinced that slogans could substitute for outcomes. The other half decided that government had grown too confident in its own incompetence and reached for the off switch. If the first group had prevailed, America today would look less like a republic that corrected course and more like a corporate board meeting in Brussels.

Shout out to Joe Capp for planting the seed!

The Administrative Mirage

By 2023, Washington had stopped behaving like a capital city and begun to resemble a holding company. Agencies wrote regulations the way marketing departments write mission statements—grand, vague, and self-congratulatory. Congress nodded, the press applauded, and citizens paid for the applause.

The Environmental Protection Agency was a case study in bureaucratic inflation. Between 2015 and 2023 it issued more than 4,000 pages of new guidance and “risk evaluations,” most of which evaluated everything except actual risk. Chemical safety was no longer about chemistry; it was about compliance.

That changed when Lee Zeldin took the helm in January 2025. Under his leadership, the agency proposed in September to refocus risk evaluations on specific uses and exposure pathways, and in October announced it had cleared more than 3,000 chemical-risk notifications under TSCA Section 8(e). It was not glamorous, but it was the kind of efficiency that decides which plants open and which jobs survive.

Had the previous administration remained in office, that backlog would still be growing, padded with press releases about “environmental justice” and “sustainability” while actual environmental progress sat in committee.

The NGO Roundabout

For decades, American foreign aid has been less about development abroad and more about activism at home. USAID is the perfect example. In FY 2023 it managed more than $40 billion across thousands of programs, much of it routed through layers of NGOs and contractors. Auditors and congressional staff have long warned that a large share of those funds recycle through the same consulting firms and “advocacy partners” that shape domestic policy debates.

That cycle broke only when the 2025 reforms required quarterly audits and direct accounting for every sub-grantee. Within six months, dozens of nonprofit shells dissolved because they could not document any purpose beyond moving money. Had the Democrats kept control, that loop would still be humming quietly in the background, redistributing taxpayer funds through Geneva and back into American politics under the banner of “equity.”

The Speech Police

One of the more revealing tests of power is how a government defines the word “safety.” Under the previous administration, safety meant supervision. The Department of Homeland Security partnered with universities and think tanks to identify what it called “harmful narratives.” Translation: ordinary people expressing political opinions online.

Documents released in early 2025 confirmed that the so-called Election Integrity Partnership—a coalition of government officials, academics, and social-media executives—had been flagging and suppressing posts during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. The First Amendment was treated as a suggestion rather than a standard.

If that model had remained intact, the country would be having a very different conversation about “free speech” today, assuming we could have it at all. Twitter might have been litigated into silence or strangled by advertising boycotts. The government would not need to censor anyone directly; it would simply redefine acceptable conversation and let compliance do the rest.

The irony, of course, is that the people who warn most loudly about “authoritarianism” are usually the ones most eager to centralize authority over speech.

The Ritual of Waste

Bureaucratic waste rarely disappears on its own; it has to be embarrassed into retreat. According to the GAO, agencies made about $162 billion in improper payments in FY 2024—over- or under-payments, or payments to ineligible recipients. That is roughly 2–3 percent of total federal outlays, the size of a mid-sized national economy.

Reforms now force agencies to justify overhead and cut duplicative “outreach” grants—many of which once funded studies to evaluate other grants. Billions were saved in the first quarter alone. In most workplaces that would be called insanity; in Washington, it used to be a career path.

This is what the Founders feared when they warned about a government large enough to supply all your needs. It eventually decides that you are one of them.

A War That Never Happened

From June 13 to 24, 2025, Iran and Israel traded direct strikes, and every analyst on television predicted a new Middle East war. Under a different administration, that forecast would have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Previous presidents learned that there is no faster way to look “presidential” than to start managing a crisis.

This time was different. Within days, the White House pushed both governments toward a cease-fire and ordered an audit of U.S. backchannels that had enabled escalation. Policy driven by inertia was replaced with policy guided by intent. The headlines called it reckless restraint; historians may call it discipline.

The Numbers No One Can Deny

Results are a better argument than rhetoric. Early 2025 brought modest improvement for Black workers before a late-summer slowdown. By August, the Black unemployment rate was about 7.5 percent, and Black homeownership hovered near 44 percent, essentially unchanged from previous years. According to the Census Bureau, real Black household income declined 3.3 percent in 2024, even as overall median income stayed flat.

Those are not miracles or failures; they are the reality of policy choices finally colliding with arithmetic. Opportunity expands when regulation lightens and employers are allowed to grow. The political class that profits from managing inequality cannot afford for people to outgrow their dependence. Programs are power, and dependency is their currency. When individuals start thriving on their own, they threaten the entire business model of bureaucratic compassion.

The Road Not Taken

If Trump had lost, the United States would now resemble Western Europe—high energy costs, restricted speech, and layers of bureaucracy congratulating themselves for saving society from freedom. Gasoline would be near eight dollars a gallon, power grids would be rationing “usage days,” and the same officials who failed to manage inflation would be holding climate conferences about “sustainable austerity.”

We avoided that, but only barely. Bureaucracies don’t die. They hibernate. Every one of them is waiting for the next progressive administration to wake them from their nap and hand them the checkbook again. The administrative state is like kudzu; even when you burn it back, the roots are still there.

Why My Voice Exists and Why It Needs You

I started saying these things in my early thirties. I am fifty-seven now. I live with the regret that I did not keep going when it mattered most. I felt unheard. I measured my work by the silence after I hit publish and called it failure. I walked away. That decision did not just cost me. It cost my kids, my wife, the readers who needed a voice that did not flinch, and me most of all.

In 2006 I wrote One Million Dead and The Fear of a Black Republican. I told it how it was. The facts were rough. The conclusions were uncomfortable. I did not sand the edges. Then life crowded in, and I decided the quiet meant I was wrong. I should have stuck to my guns. The spark I felt back then was real. It is still real now. The magic never left. I connect the dots. I always have.

Here is a header image from my original site in 2006. ;-)

It makes sense when you know my background. I worked as a mechanic on large-format printing presses. I have also spent my entire life analyzing, quite literally, everything. I learned to read a system, identify its weak points, and fix what was broken. That is what I am doing here. I decipher. I repair. I put the pieces in order so the truth can run clean.

Independence is not a hobby. It takes records, research tools, and a considerable amount of time. None of that is funded by the institutions I criticize. I am willing to pay the price, even if it means I go out broke and hungry. If that is what it takes, so be it. I would rather be truthful than comfortable.

But I also know this: if you want more of the work that tells the story straight, it has to be sustainable. My Substack needs to grow. The finances need to grow. Otherwise, I am cooked, and the work slows when it should be accelerating.

I told it like it was then. I tell it like it is now. I am not quitting again. If this voice matters to you, help me keep it loud enough to be heard.

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