There was a lot of sneering about the president’s prime-time address to the nation last week, when he trumpeted his achievements for the year. It was too “loud.” It was too “partisan.” It was too boastful. It was too “Trumpian.” It interrupted the finale of “Survivor.” Oh, no!
But Donald Trump was right to count the ways his administration has delivered on its promises this year. Nobody else will.
“I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” was Trump’s theme, with a modest pitch for an optimistic outlook in 2026.
On Thursday, the day after his speech, fate smiled on him when inflation figures came in at 2.7%, well below the 3.1% predicted by experts and below the long-term US average. Democrats were devastated.
But you probably didn’t hear the good news because only news that hurts Trump counts, and if you did hear it you would have had to wade through all sorts of qualifications and caveats crafted by Grinches in newsrooms across the land. The media gatekeepers suddenly become sticklers for footnotes when there’s a risk that Trump might be shown in a positive light.
The problem with governing competently is that people quickly take it for granted. When was the last time anyone talked about the border?
Schemes
The Washington Post last week bemoaned the changes implemented in Trump’s first year to rein in the federal government bureaucracy so you know they were good.
“Entire agencies were deleted,” it wails. “Nearly 300,000 employees were forced out of the federal workforce . . . [the Trump administration also] gutted or eliminated offices and programs devoted to civil rights and diversity.”
Hurrah!
Ditto for requiring that agencies cut 10 existing rules or regulations for every new rule introduced, ordering staff back to the office five days a week, allowing fossil fuels to be used in federal buildings again, canceling tens of millions of dollars in Environmental Protection Agency contracts to left-wing advocacy groups, terminating all federal “Fake News media” contracts, as Trump called them, and ending Biden’s $2.5 billion “Digital Equity Act,” race-based slush fund.
What’s not to like?
Success is not just measured in problems solved. One of Trump’s superpowers is to shine light on extreme Democrat malfeasance around the country, which was turbo-charged during the Joe Biden interregnum.
From revelations of staggering Somali fraud to new evidence that 315,000 votes in Georgia in 2020 were invalid, conservative belief has been vindicated time and again.
Minnesota’s “industrial scale” welfare fraud could reach $18 billion, most of it committed by Somali immigrant groups.
Under two-term Gov. Tim Walz, taxpayer money was so easy to steal that “fraud tourists” traveled to his state, according to federal prosecutors who have charged almost 100 people so far.
“Every day we look under a rock and find a new $50 million fraud scheme,” says Assistant US Attorney Joseph Thompson, a career federal prosecutor.
Minnesota is especially bad, but it’s just the tip of the fraud iceberg. For example, the Government Accountability Office released a report this month revealing more than $20 billion in systemic Obamacare fraud, including fake enrollments and payments to dead people.
Federal welfare spending has been growing more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually, or $70,000 per low-income household per year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
And, wherever there is a gushing torrent of unaccountable taxpayer cash, fraudsters come calling. Turning a blind eye only benefits unscrupulous politicians like Walz, who gain reliable voting blocs and generous donations from the scammers.
‘Common sense’
It’s a grind, but Trump is attempting to right the ship and recoup taxpayer money.
His latest effort is to make migrant sponsors pay back the money that migrants received through taxpayer-funded welfare and Medicaid, a law that was never enforced under Biden.
The administration is following the old adage: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
ICE deportations, for instance, should reach 650,000by year-end, plus almost 2 million self-deportations as illegal aliens realize the gravy train has stopped. It’s hard-earned, but still only a portion of the hordes Biden ushered across the border.
The horrendous criminal records of so many being arrested seem to validate Trump’s claim Wednesday night that “our country was being invaded by [people] who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions and insane asylums.”
Common sense compassion is back when it comes to the surgical mutilation and hormone abuse of children brainwashed into questioning their sex.
“Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men,” said the quiet achiever of Health and Human Services, Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill, last week when announcing new administration policies to restrict what the left euphemistically calls “gender-affirming care” for minors.
“Children are innocent and need our protection,” he said.
Amen.
Yet the Democrats will admit no wrong and have not renounced a single policy.
In fact, last week the Democratic National Committee decided not to release the “autopsy” of their 2024 election loss, claiming it would be a “distraction.”
No wonder Democratic Party approval is in the toilet, or as CNN’s election analyst Harry Enten put it last week, “lower than the Dead Sea.” A Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters last week found that only 18% approve of the way Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while a whopping 73% disapprove.
That’s a death spiral.
GOP divided
But there are storm clouds on the horizon for conservatives.
The right is split, as we saw from the high-profile internecine feuds hijacking AmericaFest, the first big TPUSA event since Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Instead of giving the audience of mainly college and high school-age kids the tools they crave to combat the left, the event’s most dexterous debaters, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro, wasted their speeches fighting about toxic Candace Owens.
This only helps Democrats who are chortling with glee and fanning the flames of disharmony.
If Democrats do win back power in 2028, it will be worse than we can imagine. There will be no guardrails. They’ll stack the Supreme Court and create new Democrat states to entrench their power in perpetuity.
For all their problems, they benefited from staging the longest government shutdown in history and will do it again to slow Trump’s agenda, block election integrity reforms and demoralize his administration.
Only axing the filibuster can neutralize that Democrat weapon. A promise to get rid of this outdated tradition should be the Christmas gift Senate Republicans give to America. Then all good things can flow.
Merry Christmas to you all, and see you in 2026.
The post Miranda Devine: Trump’s ‘loud’ speech rightly counted off all the ways his admin delivered for America in 2025 appeared first on New York Post.
