If one can judge from recent public opinion polls, Americans are waking up to the fact that the four years of the Joe Biden Follies—a golden age for felons, nut jobs, and liars both big and small—was an abject disaster for our country and citizens. President Trump and his team will be stuck cleaning up an abysmal mess while the ideologically-blinded “Progressives” complain endlessly and file lawsuits. However, we can at least hold out hope that Joe Biden’s single greatest accomplishment—exposing the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the current crop of Democrat leaders—has prepared fed-up Americans for the reforms now in motion.

Although protestors on Inauguration Day had their day in the sun thanks to the inevitable coverage on MSNBC and CNN, for the most part we saw a dignified and peaceful transfer of power. President Trump’s address and Day 1 executive orders made plain that this will be a determined and focused administration that plans to bulldoze anyone who tries to stop them from restoring law and order, fiscal prudence, and global authority to a nation that has been bullied and battered by those who clearly hate America and Americans.

Take a deep breath and enjoy this moment. The storms are right on the horizon.

The task of aligning federal government revenues and outlays is going to involve mass layoffs of federal workers and contractors, program closures, and freezes on expenditures that will touch every corner of our country. Few will rejoice when schools fire staff, infrastructure maintenance is curtailed, and access to healthcare becomes even more problematic, but the era of endless borrowing and spending leading to annual deficits in the trillions is now ending. The abrupt and frustrating adjustments to a reality where government will no longer masquerade as Santa Claus is going to be a shock to those who have grown accustomed to money raining from the sky. The new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will most certainly not be very popular, especially among the soon-to-be-unemployed bureaucrats of Washington, D.C., but it will provide a necessary counterbalance to the spendthrifts who have long ruled our nation. 

We will, in addition, need to deal with the bizarre exhibitionism and moral relativism that have captured our culture and emptied our souls, which is a cancer that will take far more than four years to excise. 

No one likes being judged, so it is little surprise that we have been encouraged for decades to stop making judgments about what is good and evil, right and wrong, smart or stupid, or normal and abnormal. This has been a boon to those who prefer we be titillated rather than enlightened, and there have been power and profits to be found by convincing troubled children, adolescents, and adults that perversion and self-destruction are actually freedoms, so it is no surprise that nose rings and Narcan today define the lives of many. Bad personal habits, a disinterest in common courtesy, and selfish self-regard define a great deal of our celebrity-driven media circus, which has had a pernicious influence on the gullible, but we can at least hope that the generations of damage can now begin to be reversed.

We also will have to face the harsh fact that our safety and security increasingly rests on a global supply and data chain that, should it be interrupted even briefly, will lead to chaos. We must not forget that only a few years ago fear of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate that primarily killed the very old and already ill emptied dealerships of new cars, led to shortages of critical medical supplies, and had us all frantically building pyramids of security toilet paper in our garages. It did not take much, other than media-driven panic, to throw our lives into complete turmoil.

Now imagine what would happen if China launches their long-expected invasion of Taiwan, the Ukrainian war explodes across borders into NATO countries, or even a single hypersonic missile arcs over the deserts of the Middle East toward an oil refinery. We have already seen the massive disruptions that occurred when undersea communication cables were cut and gas pipelines sabotaged. Any regional war that would drag the United States, China, and Russia into confrontations that might not be readily controlled or contained would give is a lot more to worry about than a shortage of avocados at our local supermarket.

Moreover, no American President, no matter how resolute, can fully protect us against the actions of rogue states and the terrorists they sponsor, but we at least will now have an assurance that attacks against Americans and American interests will no longer be ignored, although even the most forceful retaliation has its limits when attacking criminal or tribal gangs because our moral compass will not allow us to risk harming innocents. The cowards who shield themselves behind civilians will always be a problem, but good intelligence and drone attacks guided by satellite surveillance can make it much easier to administer justice to the unjust.

President Trump, his Cabinet, and his appointees have a mighty task ahead of them, and the snarky second-guessers and sore losers among Democrats and their allies will not make their jobs any easier when money will be tight, our society is damaged, and the global dangers surrounding us are great. Nonetheless, we can reasonably expect less outlandish stupidity than we had grown accustomed to over the past four years. Moreover, we can be confident that self-inflicted damage to our nation and global interests will no longer be the norm.

With a little luck and a lot of work, we might soon have back a nation that is respected by our allies and feared by our enemies. Will this process be without its faults or mistakes? No, it will not. However, it will proceed apace and we will all, in the end, be much better off for it, for which we can be thankful.