History and Tolkien, Trump, and Reagan

Like many readers of this site and at least half the American population, I watched Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47^th president and the signing of his sorely needed, sensible executive orders with relief, satisfaction, and a good deal of hope. To paraphrase one important Lord of the Rings character, it had been a long four years since we’d had any hope.

But like another Tolkien figure, I’ve lived long enough to witness many defeats, and many fruitless victories. Will President Trump prove capable of leading the American Republic into our Golden Age, as he promised? Or will his second term turn out to be just a valiant but wasted win?

Only the Almighty knows, but allow me to prognosticate. Unlike my fellow Streamers John Zmirak, who recently emphasized Trump’s ruling reasonableness, and Jules Gomes, who noted the return of God in the second inaugural ceremonies, I will take a different tack: examining the challenges facing the president and our country in light of American history and (more) J.R.R. Tolkien.

America’s 20^th-Century Internal and External Enemies

America’s main enemies in the 20^th century were external: German/Japanese fascism and then Soviet Communism.

Sure, we had internal issues to deal with: civil rights, protestors, poverty, drugs, hippies, the designated hitter. But none of those truly endangered the fabric of our society and government and, aside from a few outlier groups (radical hippies, Black Panthers, DH), they didn’t question the system so much as call for America to realize its ideals. And our economic health was good, overall, with national debt manageable.

Foreign threats were much more daunting. The Nazi-Imperial Japanese alliance threatened to permanently take over large chunks of the planet, and even upend the entire international order and enshrinement of transcontinental brutality for years to come. (As horrifyingly set out in The Man in the High Castle.)

Whatever his other faults (and they were legion, especially on the domestic front), Franklin Roosevelt did successfully lead us to victory — admittedly with lots of Soviet Russian and some British help — over global fascism.

Reagan’s Cold War Victory

That worldwide conflict spawned an even more more perilous one, as our erstwhile Soviet allies transmogrified into a truly existential threat that, at its height, had almost 40,000 nuclear weapons aimed at us. Presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan navigated that dangerous conflict with general bipartisan agreement — at least at the POTUS level.

But it was Reagan who provided the vision and means to end, not mend, the Cold War. Our 40^th president rightly called out atheistic Moscow for ruling over an “evil empire” — and matching deeds to words, unleashed our economy in order to facilitate a military buildup that, eventually, caused the Kremlin to cry “Dyadya!” (“Uncle!”)

Although that didn’t happen until 1991, under Reagan’s former Vice President George H.W. Bush, it was Reagan’s policy of deep-sixing détente and opposing global Marxism that gave us the peaceful win. Yes, he faced internal American foes — anti-nuke marchers, opponents of tax cuts, the media, Ted Kennedy — but by and large these were bothersome nuisances, not substantial threats. And, like those of the 60s and 70s, they never really expressed reservations about our Republic’s legitimacy.

Trump’s External Enemies Are Manageable

The predicaments confronting Trump are the opposite of those every other American president since 1945 faced, and indeed most resemble those that sent the great Abraham Lincoln to his grave.

No doubt foreign perils abound: the economic and military rise of Communist China, Islamic terrorists, and Iranian plots. And Orthodox-nationalist Russia still has more nukes than any other nation. But none of those has both the power and the ideology to rain nuclear fire on us, as did the USSR. The US remains the world’s most powerful nation, militarily — albeit with limitations. No one will destroy us from outside, as was possible from 1945 to 1991.

Trump’s Main Enemies Are Internal

No, what threatens to bring us down is, as Trump correctly identified, “the enemy within.” The Democrat Party years ago abandoned the reason of Truman, JFK, and even Jimmy Carter for Marxist madness, with all that that entails.

Then-candidate Trump outlined this last October in a speech he delivered in Butler, Pennsylvania — the same place where he was almost assassinated three months earlier:

“I always say there’s an enemy from within and there’s an outside enemy, and if you’re smart, the outside enemy is not going to be a problem. Russia, China, and North Korea, we’re not going to have a problem if you have a smart president. If you have not such a smart president, then it’s a problem, but we have an enemy from within, which I think is much more dangerous than the outside enemy.”

What Internal Enemies Want

Trump went on, listing some of this internal enemy’s major agenda items:

• Open borders that allow in convicted murderers, gang members, and terrorists
• Men playing in women’s sports
• Sex-change operations for illegal aliens
• Cheating in elections
• Privileging aid to foreign countries over aid to Americans
• Even higher taxes
• Dependence on foreign oil and gas instead of utilizing our vast resources
• “Free trade” at the expense of American workers
• Keeping the unwinnable war going in Ukraine
• Getting rid of the Second Amendment.

Why Internal Enemies Want Those Things

Of course, these are but symptoms of the Marxist malady that has infected the Democrat Party and most of the media (not that there’s much difference anymore), transmitted from its Patient Zero, academia.

DEI/reverse racism, transgenderism, destruction of the nuclear family, anti-capitalism, condemnation of merit, hatred of America’s founders and ideals, and especially aversion to Christianity — all these began with far-Left professors (almost the only kind left in universities, alas) and were passed on, especially in the Ivy League institutions but even the military academies, to most of our politicians and almost everyone studying journalism.

President Barack Obama began inserting these beliefs into our government and body politic, mostly sub rosa. The Biden administration, after the first Trump interregnum (as they saw it), then proclaimed them as progressive “gospel” and openly put them into practice. Many question our Republic’s very legitimacy, some even calling the Constitution “profoundly undemocratic” while Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that America is “systemically racist.”

Trump Fights Back

Thank God and the American electorate, then, that Donald J. Trump is back in office. As noted above, he has already begun rolling back the worst of the Obama/Biden insanities:

• Declared an invasion at, and virtually closed, the southern border
• Designated drug cartels as “FTOS” (Foreign Terrorist Organizations)
• Ordered a study on whether tariffs are warranted and established an “External Revenue Service” to collect revenue from other countries
• Pulled our nation out of the onerous and useless Paris Climate Accords
• Directed that we begin using our massive oil and natural gas resources: “Drill, baby, drill!”
• Ordered government agencies to get rid of DEI programs and directors AND…
• Declared that the federal government officially recognizes only the two genders that God created
• Established the Department of Government Efficiency to start cutting government spending programs
• Repealed many COVID-19 rules
• Withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization
• Pardoned or commuted sentences of most of the January 6, 2021 protestors
• Revoked the security clearances of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the letter saying the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

Can Trump Permanently Change the Culture and Not Just the Government?

These measures are all necessary, and hopefully sufficient, to turn the ship of state around from its constant tacking left and get it sailing, if not hard right, at least straight ahead. But what about the body politic and culture? Will four years of Trump – or even that plus eight years of, say, a Vance or DeSantis administration — be enough to rescue America?

Even before the election, Americans were tiring of the “woke” agenda. But that itself was in no small measure because Trump “won the culture war” by leading the charge and enlisting allies over the last decade. The question going forward is whether the domestic enemy-occupied territory — universities, newsrooms, blue cities and states — can be liberated, or whether we will remain an ideologically divided nation. Either we unite, or we will fall.

More Wisdom from Tolkien

Again, allow me to adduce The Lord of the Rings. In that great tale, Aragorn led the forces of Gondor and its allies to defeat the existential threat of Sauron — and afterward, in mopping up operations against other, lesser enemies.

Upon Aragorn’s death, his son Eldarion faced no real external enemies, but rather internal ones. In particular, Tolkien started a story about that issue:

Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless…. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage….

Since Reagan’s Aragornesque defeat of modern Mordor, many Americans, particularly on the Left, became discontented, restless — some even indulging in diabolical delusions about changing God’s created order itself. “First-world problems” were manufactured and ludicrous attendant “rights” created ex nihilo by those sated with too much peace, justice, and prosperity. Tolkien didn’t say whether Aragorn’s successor defeated those “playing at being Orcs” — because he didn’t finish the tale, finding it too depressing to continue.

Earlier in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf, the chief strategist, told Aragorn:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Trump is already uprooting the evils in our fields. How clean America’s soil will be after four years is yet to be known. But let us be thankful that the process has begun.

Timothy Furnish has a PhD from Ohio State in Islamic, World & African history. He’s been an Arabic interrogator in the 101st Airborne, a US Special Operations Command analyst, an author and professor. Furnish is the military/security affairs writer for The Stream.