“Trumpism is finished.” “Conservative populism is dead.” “MAGA is over.” These predictions are making the rounds again, much as they did after Donald Trump’s first impeachment, his 2020 election loss, January 6, his second impeachment and each criminal indictment. The people making them have been wrong before. There’s little reason to assume they’re right now.
Over the past decade, Trump has been one of the world’s most consequential political leaders. He has also achieved more than any Republican president in at least a century, in my view. His record shouldn’t be reduced to the outcome of a midterm election. If the question is whether his policies should continue, the case for them is strong across the economy, foreign affairs and domestic politics.
Critics once warned that Trump would wreck the Republican Party and damage conservatism. The broader picture in the West looks rather different. Conservative parties have struggled or moved toward the political center. Canada hasn’t had a conservative prime minister since 2015. Britain’s Conservatives hold only 118 of 650 seats in Parliament, while Marine Le Pen has never won more than 42 percent in a French presidential election. Germany’s conservatives govern alongside the Social Democrats, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has been praised for shifting toward the middle.
The American right, by contrast, has continued to win while promoting lower taxes, lighter regulation, social conservatism and a strong military. Democrats had less trouble defeating moderate Republicans such as John McCain and Mitt Romney. Trump has been a more difficult opponent for them for most of the past decade. Few other Western conservative leaders can make the same claim.
We were told populism would wreck the economy. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Trump worked with Congress to lower taxes and reduce regulations, while also cutting the size of the federal workforce. The Washington Post reported that between December 2024 and June 2026, the number of federal employees fell by 255,000, a decline of 12 percent.
Households have seen gains, too. Median household income, adjusted for inflation and measured in 2025 dollars, rose from $77,230 in 2016 to a record $87,460 last year. That figure describes the household right in the middle of the income distribution. People may understandably look back fondly on the 1980s or 1990s, but the American middle class has never been wealthier than it is today.
Inflation, a defining problem of the Biden years, has eased. Core inflation—which excludes often-volatile food and energy prices—reached 6.6 percent in September 2022 and was still 3.3 percent in November 2024. By this September, it had dropped to 2.6 percent. Overall inflation was 3.7 percent, close to the eurozone’s 3.8 percent and Britain’s 3.5 percent. American households are under pressure, certainly, but they aren’t facing a uniquely American problem.
The economy is also growing faster than those of many peer countries. In September, the OECD forecast U.S. real GDP growth of 2.2 percent for 2026, the strongest rate in the G7. More recent figures showed annualized growth of 3.4 percent in the third quarter, compared with 0.5 percent in the European Union and about 1.3 percent in Canada.
The United States remains far wealthier than other major economies, and the gap is widening. The International Monetary Fund forecasts 2026 GDP per capita of $95,212 for the U.S., compared with $65,699 for Germany, $61,108 for Britain, $60,105 for Canada, $51,448 for France, $35,400 for Japan and $15,371 for China. America isn’t just the richest major economy. It is pulling farther ahead of much of the West.
There were also warnings that Trump’s foreign policy would isolate and weaken the country. Instead, his administration has taken a more direct approach to China, the United States’ principal geopolitical rival.
Washington’s political establishment once argued that China’s rise could benefit America, a position the Obama administration expressed as recently as 2012. Trump took a more skeptical view. His tariffs helped shield the U.S. auto industry from heavily subsidized Chinese competitors. His attention to the Panama Canal and Greenland has also sought to block Beijing from gaining strategic positions in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the administration is rebuilding a military that had become weak and distracted, and the economic gap with China has grown: U.S. GDP was $7.3 trillion larger in 2016 and $11.3 trillion larger last year.
In the Middle East, Trump has sharply weakened Iran’s military, which posed a threat across the region. Some predicted the Strait of Hormuz would be shut. It hasn’t been. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Persian Gulf oil exports, including shipments through Hormuz and alternative routes, are now above prewar levels. This has happened without an invasion or U.S. troops on the ground. With a stronger military and a growing economy, America’s influence overseas may be greater than it has been at any point since the early 2000s.
Social conservatives who worried Trump didn’t share their priorities can point to a substantial record. Republican presidents had promised for decades to overturn Roe v. Wade. Trump followed through, and the decision was reversed. Unlike some earlier Republican appointees, the justices he selected have not shifted left. The Supreme Court now has a firm conservative majority on many major constitutional questions, its strongest such majority since the early 1930s.
The southern border has also been closed to illegal immigration, fulfilling a promise Republicans had made for years without delivering. Critics said strict enforcement would devastate the economy. The economic figures suggest otherwise.
By almost any measure, the Trump movement has been unusually successful in American politics, and the country is better off than it was before and better positioned than many of its peers. Democrats, meanwhile, have not made a convincing case that they would produce a stronger economy, a more effective foreign policy or safer streets. Their central campaign promise has instead been to pursue Trump and the people who worked with him. That sounds more like retribution than a plan for prosperity.
Voters, myself included, may be frustrated by the conflict with Iran and the cost of gasoline. Some are simply tired of the constant political turmoil and may think a Democratic victory would bring a little calm. Still, Ronald Reagan’s warning is worth remembering: “Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.” Freedom has a cost. Americans are stronger, wealthier, safer and freer than they have been in decades, and those who want the country humbled know that.
Democrats on the left, from socialists and Marxists to more conventional party members, did not campaign on making people’s lives better, this argument goes. They campaigned to punish voters for demanding more than the small concessions the political establishment once offered.
Don’t mistake a midterm loss for the end of a movement. Republicans did not abandon Reagan after losing eight Senate seats in 1986, and Democrats did not turn away from Barack Obama after losing nine in 2014.
We have a sense of which policies have worked and which have failed. We know how to make the country better for ourselves and our children. We also know what Democrats’ past policies have produced and what they might do to the Constitution if given the opportunity.
We won’t get everything we want—probably not ever. But the country has made real progress, and the work of shaping it into the country we want is not finished.
