Donald Trump became a disruptor from the moment on June 16, 2015, when the political outsider descended the golden elevator in a tower bearing his name to announce his presidential candidacy.
It’s safe to say that few, including most of those media attendees who even bothered to cover the event, took the spectacle very seriously.
Many of those who did cover it, treated it with incredulity mixed with smug condescension.
During the primary season that followed, Trump’s disruptively brash business battle-hardened New York campaign style offended powerful political establishment elites from both parties.
Nevertheless, his brutally comical caricatures of some opponents such as Hillary Clinton ("Crooked Hillary") and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — "Pocahontas" — along with "tell-it-like-it-is" candor, rang true with rapidly growing audiences.
Trump’s media-savvy communication skills disruptively circumvented capacities of media monopoly moguls to block his messaging which included transparently calling out their own misrepresentations and omissions of facts.
In doing so, "fake news" became recognized as a prevalent truism that is now broadly registered on the public psyche.
The eruption of a financially successful and politically unbeholden interloper on the political scene disrupted the abilities of powerful special-interest lobbies, traditional establishment GOP donors, and entrenched partisan bureaucracies and agendas to control Donald Trump.
He didn’t need their fealty to make himself famous or rich.
Independent candidate and President Trump disrupted career ambitions of Washington, D.C. swamp bureaucrats who watched their ideological agendas and patronage appointments abruptly — unexpectedly — vanish.
In short, Donald Trump was consequentially transformative for the very reasons that all these groups found him to be so disruptive . . . because he exposed how they have previously and since led America into a very dangerous decline.
So they concocted a basement bunker campaign that elected someone that was more "presidential," an "experienced political figure" who would "unite the country" following disruptive Donald.
And they immediately reversed virtually all of his policies.
On his first day in office, President Biden’s declared war on fossil energy.
He cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline which would have delivered an estimated 830,000 barrels of Canadian crude oil to U.S. refineries daily along with more than 40,000 American jobs.
Soon afterwards he launched an effort to overturn an oil drilling program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, and empowered Department of Interior regulatory efforts to delay drilling permits.
Let's remember that President Biden had inherited an America that was not only energy independent, but also a leading global oil and gas exporter.
Little wonder that Biden administration energy policies, in combination with profligate Green New Deal/Build Back Better spending, drove skyrocketing gas prices, commodity costs, and inflation not seen in many decades.
Biden had also inherited a strong national economy with 1.4% inflation which has jumped by more than 13% since his January 2021 inauguration. As a result, the average American has lost the equivalent of $4,200 in annual income since then.
Joe Biden immediately ended Trump’s southern U.S. wall construction, his "remain in Mexico" immigration vetting safeguards, and a Title 42 law which let the federal government deport border crossers who claim asylum during a public-health emergency.
As direct consequences, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the number of migrant encounters has surpassed a staggering two million during FY 2022, nearly 25% more than last year’s total.
Predictably, Biden’s de facto open southern border policy has invited rampant cartel narcotics and sex trafficking, with synthetic opioid overdose fatalities (primarily fentanyl) now accounting for more than 107,000 deaths reported between December 2020 to December 2021.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), fentanyl has now become the leading cause of death for all people in the U.S. between 18-45 years old, surpassing suicides, COVID-19, and car accidents.
Joe Biden has been notably silent on escalating American lawlessness, most particularly rampant in Democrat-dominated urban areas. Only recently — with crime representing a major midterm election issue — has Joe mentioned the urgency of funding rather than eviscerating police budgets.
Regarding national security, there’s a stark contrast between the two presidential administrations here as well. Unlike former President Trump who favored a strong military defense budget to repair neglect of the Obama years, President Biden has gone full bore on woke indoctrination, disarming our troops with lectures on offensive pronouns.
American defense policy and commitment which was respected both by friends and adversaries under Trump, took a devastating credibility blow with Biden’s Afghanistan debacle which withdrew our military before civilians, left 13 service personnel casualties, and abandoned more than $80 billion in advanced weaponry along with the enormously strategic Bagram air base under Taliban control.
And unlike divisive Trump, weren’t we promised that Joe Biden would at least provide a healing voice of unity to a sorely polarized nation?
Little evidence of this comity was expressed during his darkly ominous Sept. 1 "Battle for the Soul of the Nation" speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia which vitriolically assaulted 74 million Trump voters as enemies of the state.
So whereas Joe certainly qualifies as a champion disruptor in reversing the Trump progress he inherited, his aren’t the sort of disruptions that our working for our nation.
I, for one, welcome a return to disruptions that restore the vision and initiatives that previously made America greater, and will do so again.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.