A Very Consequential Two Weeks for Donald Trump’s Presidency

        When the active-duty Air Force and Missouri Air National Guard bomber crews who attacked the Fordow uranium enrichment plant in Iran went to work last Friday, they kissed their loved ones goodbye, not knowing when or if they’d be home. That’s when their families became aware something was happening.

        “When those jets returned from Whiteman on Sunday, their families were waiting, flying American flags and shedding tears of pride and relief,” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week.

        The jets rejoined into a formation of four, pitching out to land right over the base — a landing Caine said was greeted by incredible cheers and tears from the families who sacrifice and serve right alongside the pilots.

        “One commander told me this is a moment in the lives of our families that they will never forget,” Caine said at a press conference Thursday at the Pentagon. “That, my friends, is what America’s joint force does. We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we test, we evaluate every single day. And when the call comes to deliver, we do so.”

        It was a moment of consequence, excellence, leadership and guts.

        In the past 12 days, some of the most consequential decisions in American history, those that will affect generations and leave a substantial impact on our culture, economy and political alignment, have been made either by President Donald Trump or because of him. But they have been largely either downplayed or not fully analyzed in terms of how they all connect.

        The U.S. Steel deal between the iconic American company and Nippon Steel happened because of Trump’s ability to apply pressure through negotiations that sometimes bewildered everyone involved. But they led to the literal reversal of fortune of an industry, from the additional supply industries that include mechanics, construction workers, transportation systems such as railways, and energy.

        The 50% tariffs Trump announced the day he visited the U.S. Steel plant in West Mifflin were also seen by American manufacturers as a signal that Trump was committed to revitalizing American steel mills. It also signaled an overall mandate to reshore manufacturing in the country.

        While much of Wall Street warned that the tariffs would cause a widespread recession, a former critic of the tariffs, Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, did an about-face and wondered if Trump outsmarted everyone, laying out a scenario that keeps tariffs well below Trump’s most aggressive rates long enough to ease uncertainty.

        That a steelworker or a welder working for a defense contractor would watch what happened to Iran’s nuclear program and feel a part of it is a nuance in American journalism that is often missed.

        Sen. David McCormick (R-Pa.) told the Washington Examiner that it is an integrated story, both in terms of the consequences of those decisions, bolstering our economic capability and our independence.

        “But it’s a confidence in leadership story too,” McCormick said.

        McCormick, who took office in January after winning against an entrenched Democrat few thought he could defeat, said the nuance of how intertwined moments such as these are is often missed.

        “These are reinforcing themes,” he said.

        McCormick, who grew up in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, argues that often the best of the best in the military come from the heartland, from working on the shop floors to defending the country. They understand that the planes might have been made by a member of their community or even their family.

        “That is where the grit of the country lies,” McCormick said. “Of course, they see what they do as part of something bigger than self because often people don’t understand the vitality of their profession.”

        McCormick, who served in the Army and was part of the 82nd Airborne Division deploying to Iraq during the Gulf War, was joined by Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) in praising Trump’s airstrikes.

        McCormick said he talked to Trump about the historic strikes on Sunday.

        “I just called him and just said, ‘Man, so when I put boots on the ground myself personally 30 years ago, I never imagined we’d have this kind of terrorist threat, the risk of a nuclear weapon, and this kind of leadership and competence,'” McCormick said.

        The president told McCormick something profound about the people who were part of the operation.

        “The president said, ‘Those young people are magnificent.’ And I said, ‘You know what, Mr. President, the thing about them is, my heart swells when I see that kind of leadership with those 40 kids shooting the Patriots in Qatar,'” McCormick said of the soldiers fighting to intercept Iranian missiles that targeted the U.S. base at Al Udeid.

        McCormick recalled that Trump said, “These are the best America has to offer, and every time I’ve interacted with them, that’s what I said.”

        It is hard to dispute that Trump is a man of consequence following the U.S. strikes in Iran, the ceasefire struck only 12 days after the war began between Israel and Iran, and his brokering of a deal to increase defense contributions across NATO dramatically.

        And this all happened in under two weeks, beginning with Trump signing the U.S. Steel deal on June 13 and continuing Friday morning with the Supreme Court ruling that individual judges lack the authority to grant nationwide injunctions. The latter was a breathtaking victory for Trump, who has been hampered by activist judges throwing up everything but the kitchen sink to try to curtail his agenda.

        There is an old wisdom in political science that real presidential power, whether domestic or international, is the power of persuasion. In less than two weeks, Trump has shown that his impact on American history has centered on his persuasive powers and using them to execute leadership.

        While elites struggle to understand the appeal of Trump and conservative populism, what they miss, what they have always missed, is the nuance of what “Make America Great Again” meant to voters. The media saw it as a vulgar attempt at nationalism, often brazenly calling it so. But it never was. For most Trump supporters, it meant the connective tissue not with him but with each other, that they were all part of something bigger than self.

        To date, Franklin Roosevelt has had the longest impact on American politics in our short history. Trump will exceed that, especially if he continues to have two-week stretches such as these.

        Salena Zito is a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.