The Cold Civil War Is Over. We Won.

Josh Hammer on Jan 24, 2025

The civilizational inflection point in our cold civil war happened sometime between Donald Trump's second inaugural address on Monday and the end of his new presidency's second day on Tuesday. At some indeterminate moment between Monday's soaring midday speech, in which the first nonconsecutive two-term president in over 130 years artfully took a sledgehammer to the entire Obama-Biden era legacy without so much as uttering the men's names, and Tuesday's epochal executive order coming as close as legally possible to banning wokeism throughout the republic, the war ended. And as with the English capturing New Amsterdam from Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch centuries prior, it happened without firing a single shot.

The maestro of Mar-a-Lago is known to fancy the Village People hit "Y.M.C.A.," but perhaps the more apropos tune to blast at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this week is Queen's anthem "We Are the Champions."

Let's take a step back.

Barack Obama, a Chicago radical in the Saul Alinsky/Bill Ayers mold, declared war on America during his 2008 presidential campaign. We know he declared war because he more or less said it: He vowed on Feb. 19, 2008, to "fundamentally transform America," and one does not seek to "fundamentally transform" that which he loves and seeks to conserve. If that Freudian slip was our cold civil war's Fort Sumter, then Obama's presidency that followed was the extended opening campaign. Indeed, Obama did "fundamentally transform" America: He passed the nation's largest new entitlement program since the Great Society, maligned cops and soured race relations, helped constitutionalize same-sex marriage, realigned our Middle East interests toward the fanatical Iranian regime, and more.

The first Trump presidency was, in many ways, the American people's reaction to the rise of the woke Obama-era Democratic Party. The first Trump administration, for all its occasional internal dysfunction, brought a welcome course correction back toward normalcy and sanity: The economy was revving, the border was secure, and there were no new foreign wars. The tweets may have been a bit "mean," for the pearl-clutchers who care about such things, but on an objective basis, things were really going quite well. That is, until the Wuhan virus arrived, St. George Floyd the Martyr had his fateful traffic encounter with Derek Chauvin, and the "Great Awokening" kicked into lightspeed.

Joe Biden won a questionable election and proceeded to weaponize COVID-19 vaccines, the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol jamboree, race, religion and so much more to finish the job once and for all against the Americans Obama so aptly demeaned as "bitter" clingers and Hillary Clinton ridiculed as "deplorables." The Biden presidency, which saw both a vice president and a Supreme Court justice selected solely due to their status as "women of color," embodied Peak Woke. And true to their antebellum race-centric partisan forebears, race-centric Biden-era "DEI" Democrats fought hard -- a four-year-long Pickett's Charge.

But it's now all over. Trump won America's cold civil war by adapting an old Reaganite mantra from the days of the actual Cold War against the Soviet Union. The Gipper proclaimed his bold Cold War strategy, differentiating himself from Henry Kissinger and the detente crowd, with this memorable line: "We win and they lose." It is hardly an exaggeration to say that mentality, and that national policy, won the Cold War.

At some point during his four years in the political wilderness -- perhaps around the time Biden and Jack Smith tried to incarcerate him, or perhaps around the time an assassin came within millimeters of murdering him on national television -- Trump decided to adapt Ronald Reagan's succinct victory formulation. The result? This astonishing first week of the second Trump term.

The apotheosis -- the coup de grace for the woke beast -- was Trump's bombshell Tuesday evening executive order, "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity." In one fell swoop, Trump purged the crux of wokeism -- the neo-Marxist dichotomy of dueling "oppressed" and "oppressor" classes euphemistically known as so-called "diversity, equity and inclusion" -- from American public and private life. Diversitycrats from the deep state to the Fortune 100 boardroom to the Ivy League all now face the same reality: Get out before it's too late. Get out before the lawsuits start. Get out before Trump reprises his old "The Apprentice" TV role and yells, "You're fired!"

And so the mass resignations have commenced. They will only accelerate from here. It's all over. Hallelujah!

In his 1951 farewell address to Congress, Douglas MacArthur said that "in war, there is no substitute for victory." Maybe it's time for Trump to add a bust of MacArthur in the Oval Office, right next to the recently returned bust of Winston Churchill. Like the 45th and 47th president, those two men know a thing or two about winning.

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To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.