What a long strange trip it's been. My unlikely journey from scientist, university lecturer and journalist to MAGA
It's true. The journey begins with the Saturn V and ends with the pummeling of woke culture, the media, Venezuela, and Iran. It's unusual—but it feels right. Time to come clean.
Note to readers. If you are new to Howlin’, the following should establish some useful bona fides for this piece.
Why 21st-century science is in trouble
Why I left my faculty job disillusioned higher education, academics and science
As much as you may already dislike the media, you probably don’t dislike it enough
This piece has been a long time coming. As readers of Howlin’ know, I’ve excoriated Donald Trump and MAGA many times when I thought that they had it coming—which was a lot—but also tried my best to be open-minded about what I thought were Trump’s successes. As I’ve stated, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, I’m never going to like the guy, even if he does things of which I thoroughly approve.
At least that’s what I’ve thought up until now.
There’s a conflict inherent in my contradictory views on Trump. How do I reconcile my acknowledgment that Trump has delivered like no other POTUS of my lifetime (which goes back to Eisenhower), while not much caring for the guy? It’s quite the conundrum. I’ve tap-danced around this many times, but I’m about out of moves.
There’s nowhere to go except across the Rubicon. I’ve come to understand that Donald J. Trump is more than just the lesser of political evils—he might actually be the most substantial POTUS of my lifetime. Trump has forced me to respect him, even if I still don’t much like him. That’s OK; for me, “like” no longer has much of anything to do with it. Admiring Trump as a person is no longer necessary for me—the important thing is recognizing the good that I think he’s done for the country.
I can't think of a single substantive issue affecting our nation that would be in better hands had Trump not been elected last year. This is not just about the political alternatives to Trump in the here and now; it’s also about the history of American politics for the past six decades and our long, slow, painful march from once leading the world in war and peace to leading the world into mediocrity. Trump is the first president to stop this slide dead in its tracks. This has been some feat. MAGA is more than just a slogan.
But let’s start in the here and now, where memories are fresh. Thanks to Trump, men are no longer welcome in women’s sports or bathrooms. Medically nefarious gender reassignment procedures for minors, often instigated behind parents’ backs, are currently passé de mode by force of federal law. Sanity, at long last, is prevailing over the insanity of “gender identity.”
Woke, in general, has met its match in Trump. Good riddance.
Trump successfully closed our borders to illegal immigration, something that both parties assured us was impossible for over 40 years. It’s a good thing too. Great Britain and Europe are currently experiencing the consequences of opening borders to unchecked migration in order to satisfy progressive sensibilities on the left and business interests on the right.
One may think that allowing an influx of millions, thought grateful enough for an economic opportunity to gladly aid in furthering agendas for their interlocutors, works—but it doesn’t take long to find out it doesn’t work exactly as one might have assumed. Especially if political self-preservation is on the table.
Just ask the living, breathing embodiment of fecklessness and political idiocy, British Prime Minister (for the time being) Keir Starmer, how this works. Starmer doesn’t own this constituency; it owns him. Everyone in Great Britain who voted for Brexit saw this coming way before the guy who fancies himself the smartest in the room.
Another outcome of effectively closing our borders is that finding illegal drugs on our streets has become not only more difficult but also much more expensive. Crime is down and serious criminals are being deported. An ancillary effect of border security is that drug cartels in Mexico are under attack. All of these are wins.
SCOTUS is interpreting law instead of making it. The federal government is doing a much better job of executing the responsibilities enumerated by our Constitution or enacted by law and staying out of things that involve neither. All of this leads back to Trump.
Our geopolitical adversaries now understand that if you chant “Death to America,” even if you have a vote on the UN Security Council, you’re going to spend what little time you may have left before shedding your mortal coil with one of Uncle Sam’s boots sticking out of your fanny.
Do you imagine that Venezuela and Iran are the only international targets of Trump’s ire? He’s put Russia, China and North Korea on notice without firing a shot at any of them. China, in particular, is currently reeling from the loss of both energy and political cover from two of its most useful proxies. I am as certain as I can be that Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, now needs a handful of sleepy gummies and a shot of Goalong before turning in each night.
In other good news, I expect Cuba to fall before the arrival of summer. I’m far from unhappy at seeing pissant irritations like this go away.
None of this just happened spontaneously. It took someone with nerve and conviction to effect these changes. What makes Trump so different from most politicians is his desire to actually solve problems. The last thing that most politicians want to do is fix anything because keeping people wound up and divided is necessary for perpetual fundraising. Satisfied constituents are less helpful in this regard.
Trump desires acclaim far more than money—and that makes him unique. His desire to achieve results above all else, along with a high degree of native intelligence, makes him dangerous to foes. Watching Trump deal with enemies, from the left in America to Islamic radicals in the Middle East, is like watching a cat toy with a mouse who hasn’t yet figured out what’s for dinner.
It’s not all wonderful. I saw a note somewhere on Substack a few days ago that mentioned Trump attracting two distinct personality types into his administration. I'm paraphrasing, but the writer mentioned attention-whoring, dim-witted opportunists with plastic surgery, teeth brighter than the surface of the sun, and bespoke wardrobes who never encountered a microphone they didn’t like, and group two, heart-attack-serious hawks looking for fannies to plant American boots in.
The former tend to run domestic policy; the latter work on Iran, Venezuela, China, etc. If anything trips Trump up, it will be too many of one group and not enough of the other. I also agree that this is the reason why Trump currently fares better on foreign rather than domestic policy. This needs some work.
As I stated in the beginning, this piece is more than just a mea culpa; it’s about the decades-long journey that got me to where I am right now. If you are one of the many folks out there who have been on a similar journey, you are not alone. It’s increasingly acceptable to tell erstwhile friends and colleagues who suffer TDS to bugger off. You haven’t fallen into some cult or spiraled into some horrible fascist dark hole. You are seeing a rebirth of American exceptionalism. It’s not perfect—but what is? It’s still OK to feel good about it.
People of my age have been here before. I grew up in the 1960s when everything seemed possible in the USA. The space program embodied this. Living in South Florida, I would walk outside every time a Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo rocket was fired into space to see if I could somehow catch a glimpse from hundreds of miles away.
The ranks of astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs were filled with men who had flown combat missions in WWII and Korea and the Bell X-1, Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, and North American X-15 in peacetime. Further, higher and faster—with swagger. Astronauts were heroes. President Kennedy said we'd put some of them on the moon by the decade's end, and we believed.
The Saturn V rocket, with USA emblazoned on the side in 20’ tall red letters, was the embodiment of American pride during this era. The Saturn V is still possibly the most impressive machine ever built despite being designed with slide rules. It embodied the can-do ethos of that era.
No excuses, no bullshit; we were going to the moon, realizing the gleam in the night eye of our every ancestor since we crawled out of burrows after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Just about everyone who watched the Apollo 11 mission remembers the countdown.
“T minus 25 seconds… 20 seconds and counting. T minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal, 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence starts, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero, all engines running, liftoff. We have a liftoff, 32 minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11. Tower cleared.”
In the 1960s, with slide rules and IBM 360s running HASP (a primitive batch processing system for mainframe computers that had orders of magnitude less memory than your cellphone), we fucking put men on the moon. Take that, you rainbow-haired, postmodern studies freak who can’t figure out which bathroom to use. Your generation now requires AI and two Material Safety Data Sheets to place a Coexist bumper sticker on a Subaru. I don’t care what you think about MAGA or most anything else.
I was 13 years old in the halcyon days and certain that America was the greatest place on earth. That felt really good. I’ve wanted to feel that way again for a long time.
Contemporaneous events were already sowing the seeds of decline in 1969. Our war in Vietnam had left us divided and weary. Protests over racial injustice swept the nation, evoking lots of ugliness. In the early 1970s, a coalition of ex-hippies, campus radicals, and two reporters from the Washington Post—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—parlayed a third-rate break-in at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., into taking down a president. That apparent shift in power to the masses became a gold rush that would change society very rapidly—and not entirely for the better.
Simply reporting the news became passé. Now, every self-respecting journalist was determined to win a Pulitzer by bringing down someone or something in power. That was the new mission in journalism.
All of this would have been one thing if the majority of journalists chasing down stories had actually possessed the investigative chops of Woodward and Bernstein. But since they did not, it was quite another. Objectivity in journalism took a back seat to sensationalism fifty years before Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, recently told the world that it needed to go.
Along with objectivity went quality and substance down the tubes.
College campuses, steeped in unrest throughout the 1960s, became breeding grounds for ideas that had very little to do with American exceptionalism and everything to do with tearing down the USA and rebuilding it in a new image our founders would not recognize. Che Guevara tee shirts were suddenly de rigueur for not only anthropology professors but every dimwitted budding campus Marxist—of which there were many.
America, according to the new paradigm, was a fundamentally flawed place. Identity politics and disdain replaced the ruthless competence and endless optimism that sent men to the moon and back multiple times. It was around this same time that recreational drug use became mainstream and commonplace. I wonder why.
As the 1970s progressed, the media, fresh off of Watergate, urged the American electorate as an act of penance to elect a complete doofus—Jimmy Carter—to the Oval Office in 1976. Carter is in the running for the worst POTUS ever. It was on his watch that the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis occurred.
I’m not going to claim that the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was a good person. He was a crook. I’m not going to justify the CIA’s overthrow of the Mosaddegh regime by coup d'état in 1953 either. It was about oil and countering Soviet aggression in the region—common themes during the Cold War. What I will claim is that during Pahlavi’s rule, Iran was mostly peaceful, prosperous and progressive. We should not overlook the value in that. Sometimes the best you can do is a fair distance from perfect. (If you want to learn more about the catastrophic events in Iran during the 1979 crisis and their effect on America, I recommend Jimmy Carter and the Iran Hostage Crisis.)
The Iran Hostage Crisis was a huge, unsettling setback for American pride. We looked both incompetent and impotent in protecting our own citizens and interests overseas. We had gone from putting men on the moon to becoming a laughingstock in just a decade. It was quite the comedown. It ended the Carter presidency (as it should have) and ushered in recession, steep increases in the federal deficit and decades of unease by a thousand small cuts.
There was a resurgence in American pride in the early 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it was less about euphoria than “thank goodness that’s over.”
During the early 1990s, I began my career as an academic—realizing to a small degree my childhood dream of becoming a space scientist. Though I never came anywhere close to being an astronaut, I did work with NASA on several projects. NASA, by then, was not the same organization that I’d admired so much as a child in the 1960s. In the decades that followed, NASA astronauts expressed ingenuity not with spacewalks, moon landings or repairing a seriously damaged Apollo Service Module with duct tape and spare parts, but by wearing Depends for a 900-mile journey to pepper-spray a romantic rival.
My disappointment did not end there. For the next 25 years I spent my time as an academic wondering how so many people with credentials out the wazoo could be so utterly inept at anything besides naked self-preservation. How failing upward so many times was even possible.
The vast interface between academia and the federal government was one gigantic depressing clusterfuck. At one point I wrote a grant to the NSF to acquire some equipment for the purpose of demonstrating that a famous cold fusion experiment could not have possibly worked. The NSF returned the grant along with a note, asking me to devise a strategy demonstrating the potential benefits of my work for underrepresented minorities.
I was aghast. I fired back that cold fusion had the potential to lift everyone on the reservation 20 miles north of our campus out of poverty and provide a direct benefit of jobs for Native Americans. Since the point of the experiment was to show that cold fusion did not, in fact, work, this was nonsensical snark.
I got the money.
After a quarter century of this, I was done. I retired a decade ago in disillusionment and disgust. I didn’t think that I could have a dimmer view of what this country had become until 2020, when COVID came along. Then I got to watch science, my life’s work, betray the country.
But since then, Trump 2.0 has done several things that I believe are making America great again. Every time he blows up another drug boat in the Caribbean or seizes another rogue tanker, I cheer. I thought that taking out Nicolás Maduro was the gutsiest move I’d ever seen by a POTUS—until bombs started falling on Iran.
Trump has restored my pride in American leadership and belief that we can get things done. Not since that long-ago day in the summer of 1969, when I watched a Saturn V rocket propel Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins toward the lunar surface, have I felt such pride in being an American. Just like back then, it feels really good.
Most of what I have had at one time or another is now gone. Life giveth and taketh away. Right now, I’m in the latter half of that process. I’m a retired guy who lives quietly on a small farm near the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere with four wonderful little kids. I gave everything I had at the office when it was my turn in the barrel.
The only things left now are wisdom and experience, and that’s all going to the Groms. When I look around at the politician who I think gives them the best shot at a life as good as I’ve enjoyed after I’m gone, it’s Trump. Second place isn’t even close.
So yeah. I’m into making America great again and not at all ashamed. If you have a problem with that, I’m easy to find.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.
Gentlemen, there'll be no fighting in the war room!
I could use more of the quiet confidence of a Nimitz, an Ike, a Marshall, and less of Hegseth's Patton wannabe false machismo. Guessing the guy's got a half-size bit of manhood in his undies, and is trying to make up for it. His job is to make sure our folks in uniform have the best equipment and plenty of it. I credit him for getting the woke nonsense out of the military and the focus back on lethality, but for God's sake let the folks doing the heavy lifting get the attention, not you.