OK MAGA, round two will be better? Prove it.

We've been here before. The last time MAGA summited, not much was accomplished that lasted. Will this time be different? My list of things that Trump should pursue to burnish his legacy.

Solo, near the summit of Mt. Borah, 12,665', Idaho’s tallest peak. Late 2007. Things have always seemed much more simple to me alone, way up in the mountains. But no matter—the flat world awaits your inevitable return.

When Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, I was only mildly surprised. Back then, most Democrats were giddy with the idea that Hillary Clinton would face Donald Trump in the general election right after he was nominated at the Republican convention. The common wisdom almost everywhere was that Trump was the best candidate for the Democrats to face. In the months leading up to the election, I did not encounter a single progressive voter out of many who thought this contest would amount to anything other than an easy layup for Ms. Clinton. It did not, of course, work out that way.

What the Democrats failed to realize was how tone deaf, or perhaps just plain deaf, Ms. Clinton and her many sycophants in the media, in academia, in business, and in the expert classes actually were to the mood of the American electorate that fall. There were, as it turned out, enough voters who resented not being heard or understood by the political establishment that Trump ended up winning.

The reason that I was only mildly surprised by this is that I’d just retired from a quarter-century career in academia to head a 50-state non-profit that advocated for a conservative cause. As I traveled the country during the run-up to the election, I discovered a lot of people who I would have not imagined, at first glance anyway, that were Trump supporters. Far from the media's portrayal of MAGA supporters as racist, misogynist, and bigoted hayseeds, I encountered doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, business people, and other successful individuals who had simply had enough of business as usual. Their reasons for supporting Trump made sense if you bothered to ask them, as opposed to just turning away in smug derision.

But in his four years as POTUS, Trump accomplished, at least in my view, little of lasting significance beyond his Supreme Court picks. Justices Gorsuch, Kabanaugh, and Barrett are, in my view, all brilliant appointments. A rational SCOTUS will benefit this country for decades. That’s the principal lasting accomplishment of the first Trump administration as I see it.

Aside from that, Trump, who favored executive orders over legislation, accomplished little beyond being a temporary respite from wokeism gone amok in the federal government. While I largely agreed with many of Trump’s ideas on illegal immigration, China, involving us in military conflicts around the world, standing up for Israel, trimming federal bloat, neutering the administrative state, and strengthening the economy, I just didn't see much of any of these in a lasting POTUS 45 legacy. Trump showed little interest in actual governing, much preferring to sign executive orders, troll members of the legislative and judicial branches for sport, and then go play golf rather than involve himself in the intricacies of legislation and making permanent much-needed changes to our government.

But I’m willing to give MAGA another chance. Perhaps Trump has learned something.

So, in a manner completely indicative my magnanimous nature and in the spirit of the holidays, I'm willing to graciously extend to MAGA a second chance. Better yet, I'm willing to provide the POTUS 47 administration with some completely unsolicited advice at the cost of a few minutes of their time. Without further adieu, here are the top ten items on my wish list for the coming administration.

1. Kill woke. Although I think that the high water mark for most of this illiberal, discriminatory, and patently illegal nonsense has come and gone, it’s still out there causing no end of mischief—just with different branding. I am not, mind you, in favor of censoring this or anything like it. All that I wish is for woke to compete on a level playing field of ideas, where I am confident that it will be found wanting, instead of dispensing it at gunpoint. Democrats, almost across the board, along with academia, most of the administrative state, and the media are willing acolytes of this postmodern, Marxist bullshit. Woke is a not-so-veiled attack on Western values that has been pursued with zealotry akin to a weird combination of some religious and drug-addled fervor. Did someone slip some peyote buttons into the communion? What’s that in the holy water?

2. Break stuff. This sure appears to me to be a large part of Trump’s mandate. Taxpayer-funded entities from both within and outside the government, whose raison d'être have long expired, are a counterproductive social contagion ad infinitum, ad nauseum. When someone is well compensated to fight for a cause, the ride is over once they put a “W” up on the scoreboard unless they can find something new to fight for. When those raising money hand over fist to advocate for gay marriage, for instance, were wildly successful (mostly because a critical mass of Americans don’t think that it’s the governments’ business to regulate who you marry), they didn’t just declare victory and go home; they found something else to perpetuate the good life—gender identity. Though mission creep very often results in promoting things that are a bridge too far for almost everyone with any sense, the mirage of a noble cause is gold if you are a paid advocate precisely because the payoff is unlikely. Nothing brings in money like chumming for distant virtue. So it would be nice to see a dagger put in the heart of a lot of this nonsense—simply by defunding it. As an American, I absolutely recognize your right to speak freely. I do not recognize your right to make me pay for it.

3. Fix immigration: I’m unambiguously for orderly legal immigration. It’s one of the things, IMO, that makes America great. At this point, I would gladly trade the whiny nimrods who populate many universities, much of the federal bureaucracy, and blue cities for people willing to walk 4000 miles to get here for a chance at a better life. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yeah, baby. Welcome to America! But the process needs to be fair. One shouldn’t be able to game the system by breaking the law and then counting on lefty NGO's to make the bad thing that you did just go away. I know scientists from all over the world who’d like to be here but wait years for a chance, while economic migrants, few of whom are fleeing actual political persecution, just walk across the southern border in a blatant violation of our laws and claim political asylum. I’m for bringing everyone to America who wants to contribute to the enrichment of the American dream, including some economic migrants and those fleeing persecution. But the way that we are allowing this to happen now is upside down. This has become a serious problem under Biden’s mismanagement. It is probably one of the principal reasons that the “border czar” candidate got clocked in the recent election.

4. Invoke actual, tangible oversight of federal agencies and reign in the federal bureaucracy. For those who believe that government, at all levels, often engages in ridiculous and odious levels of overreach, the recent decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Chevron Deference should have already led to a productive shift in the federal regulatory environment. Way back in 1984, the Supreme Court in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. decided to defer to government regulators in interpreting statutes unless Congress clearly established how any statute should be applied in every conceivable circumstance. This meant, of course, that agency regulators have had the authority to make calls on how to apply statues in laws passed by Congress as they see fit. I thought at the time that this decision was a mistake by a center-left court. Critics predicted that it would lead, in the absence of Congress being even remotely able to speak to every circumstance addressed by a law, to a ballooning environment of regulation by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. And guess what? Chevron Deference was cited in more than 10,000 subsequent decisions upholding some dubious regulations. With the abandonment of Cheveron Deference and an originalist SCOTUS, Trump now has more of the tools that he needs to reduce the administrative state to more of a proper role. But it will still take some effort. So the question isn’t can he, but will he?

5. Address crime, quality of life, First and Fourth Amendment abuses, and other domestic issues: Biden and the left have recklessly experimented with various aspects of socialism and totalitarianism to the detriment of us all. Trump, for all of his buffoonery and personal avarice, is more of a justice-for-the-masses kind of guy. I hope that Trump will back law enforcement when warranted (something that’s not always true) and implement rational solutions to problems surrounding drugs, homelessness, and mental illness. And while Trump is hammering the scrotums of his enemies in the deep state, revenge that he’s vowed to pursue (and is probably due), perhaps he could help everyone who’s not occupying the White House by reigning in domestic surveillance of Americans, stopping federal seizures of assets without a conviction, stopping federal attempts to circumvent the First Amendment, and getting the government out of the business of policing speech.

6. Advocate for Derek Chauvin’s release. Fate recently smiled on Daniel Penny, but on Derek Chauvin, not so much. They say that timing is everything, and the Penny verdict is exhibit #1 for the proposition. Unfortunately for Derek Chauvin, his conviction of third-degree murder, wildly influenced by mob mentality in the wake of the death of George Floyd, is a severe miscarriage of justice that seems likely to continue despite a changing legal landscape. There is simply no way that all 12 members of an unbiased jury should have found Chauvin guilty of murder in the third degree, which requires a high degree of recklessness, sans intent. People do absolutely stupid things every day that result in the unfortunate death of someone else who wasn’t doing anything other than minding their own business. Few of them ever even see the inside of a courtroom, much less jail. This was sure not the case with Chauvin and George Floyd, a career criminal who was largely responsible for his own demise. Chauvin is jailed on state charges, but I would encourage Trump to use his bully pulpit to take up his cause. If the American people actually did hand Trump a mandate, it was to give him the clout to correct seemingly intractable things just like this. Trump can do what he wants about J6 protesters as long as he puts forth the same effort for others with a far better case in their favor when there’s nothing in it for him. Want to put a thumb in the eye of “restorative justice” and all of it’s acolytes? Restore Derek Chauvin to freedom.

7. Demand accountability for COVID. This would include, but not be limited to, anyone who lied, fudged data, manipulated science or caused enormous economic or social harm based on any of the above. In the early days of COVID, there just wasn’t enough data to make decisions based on data. At that point, expert opinion was all that we had. The problem was not just that the experts were, in the fullness of time, proven wrong, but that their motives appear to have been anything but pure. And as the data got better, decision-making did not. Like many of you, I’m perplexed by the current lack of curiosity about what was behind the pandemic that killed millions just a few years ago. I wonder if this could be due to the fact that assauging this curiosity might reveal a joint effort by American and Chinese researchers to circumvent the Obama administration's restrictions on "gain of function" research in this country. They accomplished this by rebranding the work and outsourcing it to a poorly run Chinese lab, where the CCP was more than pleased to keep a close watch on a potential bioweapon. Sound far-fetched? I used to think so too. Now, I’m not so sure. It’d be nice to know, though.

8. Get rid of the Department of Education. I wholly endorse Trump’s pledge to do just that. When the voters hand an elected official a mandate, this is the type of change they are seeking. The Department of Education serves no purpose that could not be absorbed, albeit with some effort, by other federal departments. The Department of Education was founded during the Carter administration for social engineering purposes without any clear justification in the U.S. Constitution. It’s an example of what happens when you happen to control the Executive Branch but don’t know your size. It’s time to undo this mistake. If Trump succeeds here I think that there just may be hope for reigning in the federal administrative state in a lasting manner.

9. Fix stuff. Do you want to know why both Democrats and Republicans, when handed control of all three branches of government, have traditionally not been able to solve problems? It’s less can’t than won’t. It’s because both parties principal interest, the raw pursuit of power, is best served by not solving anything. If you actually solve problems, you can’t fundraise off of them anymore. You can’t use them to fire up your base. Your raison d'être vanishes without fanfare into the ether. Who wants that? People who can’t find a job anywhere else (see #2). Trump will be riding off into the sunset in four years, and breaking off a foot in some of these fannies would be a fine legacy.

10. Try not to be more of an asshole than you have to be. Make putting the country first something other than aspirational. Yeah, I know. Now I’m delirious.

Want to convince me that I’ve underestimated MAGA? Well, here’s your chance. Prove it.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com