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We have all suffered through an interminably long four years that seemed as though it would never end. From the very first second, things went sideways, and fast. Approaching the 2020 election, we felt secure and confident. Some went to sleep on time on election night, at peace that a popular president pulling record rally crowds was no contest against a doddering basement campaigner.

But the shock and disbelief at waking up to the announcement of Biden’s win quickly turned to horror, as facts emerged about the cognitively vegetative candidate’s inexplicable midnight surge.

The horror melted into a spreading black oil of despair after the January 6th fedsurrection, an induced riot infested with federal agents, and the full scope of the long odds the country really faced became clearer. Brace for impact.

As “Dark Brandon” (or whoever was pulling his strings) slid behind DC’s wheels of power, covid recommendations transformed into mandates, temporary pandemic restrictions transferred to permanent status, and a crowd of profoundly unattractive men with wildly atypical sexual appetites transitioned into the federal government and began busily transforming the nation’s laws to better suit their twisted predilections.

Over an unrelenting four years, they prosecuted and sued the President in every way they could conceive of, limited only by their ability to conscript reckless volunteer lawyers, prosecutors, and judges. They raided his house and dug through Melania’s intimates drawer. They labeled him ‘Hitler,’ called him ‘dangerous,’ and warned anyone who’d listen that he would Destroy Democracy.

Even if only through grossly incompetent negligence, they tried to kill him at least twice, and even successfully shot him once.

President Trump’s re-election seemed so unlikely for so long that many Republicans supported other primary candidates, just because they were convinced the Nation was tired of Trump and he was ‘unelectable.’ When, following the disastrous debate with Joe Biden, Trump finally edged ahead in the polls, the Democrats did the unthinkable, and pulled a sitting, nominated president off the ticket at the last minute.

With two months to go, the Democrats frantically campaigned an unelected, unvetted pinch hitter. They spent a record $2.5 billion dollars in eight weeks selling the least-liked political candidate in history, and flipped the polls back to the donkey. Only the betting markets honestly predicted the outcome, and the joyful but unelected replacement nominee lost badly in an inglorious mudslide.

Trump’s come-from-behind victory was unpredictable and unpredicted. At one point or another, every single political pundit forecast Trump’s loss, and most of them predicted he’d lose badly. But the people, primed by the pandemic, rejected the experts’ prognostications and advice, and stuck with the felon. In that sense, and in countless other ways, President Trump’s re-election was uniquely historic, a miraculous comeback story so unbelievable even the Hallmark Channel would have passed on the script.

In seven days he’ll be restored to where he should have been in 2021. But in nearly every conceivable way, Trump is better poised to accomplish his agenda now than he would have been had he formally won four years ago.

Had Trump in fact won the 2020 election, his faltering Administration would have remained mired in a slough of political despond. Instead, a different take on how things played out is that Trump was gifted with four years to re-arm and re-tool. During that time, instead of re-arming and re-tooling, through catastrophic cultural missteps and toxic identity-group alignments, Democrats did their level best to Bud Lite themselves and alienate vast sections of their traditional base, like black men, Latinos, and women.

Perhaps more often than not, history works in mind-bogglingly mysterious ways. The story of Trump’s 2024 re-election is one of those cases. Although cheated out of the 46th presidency, paradoxically, a much more politically muscular Trump will return to the White House in 2025, stronger, bolder, freed from the shackles of political controversy, and far more focused.

Let us count the 2025 advantages over where he was in 2020. Trump now enjoys a mandate. He has the House. He has the Speaker. He has the Senate (or at least, a claim to the Senate). He has the Supreme Court. The RussiaGate nonsense has been transformed from a political liability into massive political capital — and another type of mandate. The legion of presidential legal battles are over in any legitimate sense; his lawyers mostly conducting mop-up operations.

Ironically, in many ways the Democrats nourished a mesomorphic Trump Administration. By crying about “Trump’s revenge” for months and months and months until our ears bled, and by prosecuting the former president six ways from Sunday, they paved a runway to previously unthinkable future prosecutions.

In other words, among other things, Trump’s four wilderness years demolished a latticework of invisible doctrines, institutional norms, and political precedents that protected treacherous former presidents and insidious government officials from criminal prosecution. Under the long-standing, unstated you-stay-out-of-our-branch-and-we’ll-stay-out-of-yours arrangement, only four years ago judges would have explicitly or implicitly refused to convict bad government actors, protecting them with one archaic defensive doctrine or another judicially-made immunity rule.

But those rules are now obscured or even erased, thanks to the relentless state and federal prosecution of the 45th president. If anything, judges may now be more likely to lean the other way. The Democrats have even opened Pandora’s box to civil lawsuits against former Presidents, something previously unthinkable in the cold marble corridors of the nation’s courtrooms.

The newfound strength of Trump’s brawny political position is obvious in many ways. First, some of the best evidence is the way the world is responding to Trump’s election. We have repeatedly seen the awe-inspiring Trump effect, involving many markets and actors moving toward better positions merely because of Trump’s election.

The domestic and international demand for Inauguration tickets evidences an expectation of power, and such expectations often help manifest the expected result. When world leaders and domestic power brokers act like someone has power, that is power. The expectation is self-reinforcing and creates the very reality they're anticipating.

Then there is the galactic media shift, from relentlessly fawning Biden coverage to wall-to-call critical Trump reporting — even though Trump is not yet in office. They are already obsessed with him. Like Mark Zuckerberg, who gave Democrats $450 million in 2020, but is now throwing Biden under the censorship bus, many former institutional gatekeepers feel the political winds blowing and have completely capitulated.

And what about Trump’s new and powerful allies, like Elon Musk, who were far off stage in 2020, or even on the wrong side? Not only are they allied, but they are all-in allies.

Second, there is the evidence of the man himself. Trump has always been a confident speaker, but now he speaks with an authority and confidence beyond anything seen during his first term. Trump talks like a man whose most ambitious plans have been realized to the fruitfulest extent and who is finally coming into his own.

As evidence, just consider how effortlessly President Trump wheeled out his historic ideas of recovering the Panama Canal (a ‘settled matter’ of international law), making Canada into the 51st state (instead of DC), and buying Greenland —an idea that provoked hoots and howls of mockery in 2019 when he first mentioned it but is now a seen as a serious geopolitical play in an increasingly Arctic-focused world.

Witness Trump’s bold nominations for cabinet and agency leadership positions.

Over the weekend, news emerged of President Trump’s plans to take the oath at noon, then head straight into the Senate building to start signing a record number of executive orders. Say what you like about executive orders, but this tidal wave of action reveals a President who knows exactly what he wants to do and has an agenda clearer than perhaps any Administration in our lifetimes. ...

One week out from this historic Inauguration Day, I am arguing that this muscular Trump Presidency could never have happened without the cheating, the wilderness years, the persecutions, and all the Democrat overreach that drove independents and conservative Democrats into the arms of the Republican party, defying punditry that long claimed the nation’s changing demographics would cement Democrat party power for generations.

In other words, you just can’t predict how history’s big moves will work out. Whoever unleashed the pandemic —intentionally or negligently— which tanked Trump’s second term in 2020, never considered that it might result in this kind of swinging pendulum.