The Great Disruptors – The Stream

They dominate recorded history. They pop up often as surprises, and at other times, they are already well known and blossom into disruptors. They can be leaders of nations, governments, businesses, and churches, or soldiers, inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, or writers. But they share one trait. They turn the status quo upside down.

The breadth of their disruption frequently changes societies, sometimes even the world. Sometimes forever. Love them or hate them, disruptors can’t be artificially created; they just are.

Psychiatrists and psychologists dance around the personality traits of the disruptors, offering improbable causes, descriptions, and motives. At the same time, historians are flummoxed at the public’s reaction to a disruptor – they mostly like ’em.

The Disruptor’s distinctiveness is like an armor coat. While their peers talk about social maintenance, comity, continuity, decorum, sophisticated statemenship, and drone on about the responsibilities of leadership, the Disruptor knows that the future waits for no one. If nothing else, they believe in transformative action.

All of this, of course, can be for ill or good.

Disruptors Can Be Heroes … Or Monsters

The first Disruptor we can track in history was in the Garden of Eden. Evil physically invaded the human race in the form of a serpent – an act that required the most significant Disruptor of all, an itinerant Jewish serpent-crusher named Jesus of Nazareth. He did, and does, demarcate all of human history, down to the calendar.

From there on, the world’s disruptors have been mere mortals. Some have come and gone in irregular, unpredictable moments. Others show up when crises arise to finally name the truth of the situation that normal leaders want to ignore. Of course, others arise to further turmoil and encourage bloodshed because they are beholden to the Darkness. Occasionally, it is hard to tell which is which.

In the last hundred-odd years, we’ve had both in positions of immense power. Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were as evil as cannibals at a cookout. But they turned the world upside down, not right side up. They were disruptors.

Disrupting the Soviet Empire

Then we had Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan, and Pope John Paul turning the tide of history towards human freedom, against all odds and the cowering voices of “wise” ones who called for accommodations and appeasements, people who never learned that giving a dog a bone brings it back to your campfire time and again. But these were disruptors. They trusted the truth and the historical reality of good vs. evil, played out time and again for thousands of years.

Decades later, we have Donald J. Trump. He has risen to power twice on the winds of a totally corrupted political and governmental entities, debauched by the ambition for wealth and total control. That process and those politicians, of both parties, have bespoiled the social contract – the covenant – between the American founding and the American people through their venality. They have empowered the worst instincts and most egregious natures of men and women. They created the Disruptor.

Somewhere in an era past, south of Vietnam even, unelected and unaccountable, our foreign policy, military, and intelligence establishment decided an empire is what America would be. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy publicly and privately complained and warned the nation, but the power, allure, and riches of empire were too tempting to resist. Kennedy, consulting his two predecessors, decided to break up the requisite pieces of the empire and paid dearly for the effort.

Trump Disrupted the Corrupt Status Quo

President Trump, like President Reagan before him, is like an autogyro that keeps moving in flight. Both men were shot, and both miraculously survived with seemingly even more determination to disrupt the status quo and recapture foreign and domestic policy for America’s best interests.

President Reagan would go on to perhaps the finest moment in post-World War II foreign policy, when he ignored the urging of the US’s foreign policy, intelligence, and media establishment and left the 1986 Soviet-US summit in Reykjavík, Iceland, with a scowl that needed no media interpretation. His legacy was lighting the fuse that destroyed the communist empire and saved freedom for another day.

After successive presidents presided over the many self-induced tragedies and calamities both at home and abroad, the American people decided that a rough, loud, and braggadocious builder from Queens was just what the doctor ordered.

Like President Reagan, Donald Trump really didn’t need a large communications office – he has exceptional antennae for national moods and issues. He can translate them into succinct, single-phrase statements that resonate with average Americans. And, of course, he poached Mr. Reagan’s “make America great again” and made it a standard by which other polices were to be judged.

The Whole System United Against Him

Every illegal roadblock available to the permanent government that has metastasized its menace over the decades was thrown against the incoming Trump Administration, itself filled with so-called “conservatives” pledged in reality to man-handle the Disruptor and thwart his outspoken intentions. From the transition of government on, Republican “leadership” and the radicalized Democrat Party tag-teamed and inflicted their harm not just on the Trump presidency, but on the American people, all with surprising glee.

After the 2020 election fiasco, the Disruptor did not go away. He fought tooth and nail against the heaviest artillery against him, from preposterous legal wars to rehashing and lying about his policies and intentions so incessantly as to become irrational from its endless repetition.

Love him or hate him, President Trump has set about rejiggering the world order and realigning American interests for a new era, where our enemies and friends are not always obvious.

First, he is asking other nations to help pay the freight that Americans have borne, primarily for over 70 years, for the defense of the Free World.

Some claim he is abandoning Europe, but his precise remarks don’t make that case. Instead, he recognizes the responsibility Europeans have for Europeans and their safety, as Americans must now have for Americans. The US will still hold out a helping hand, just not an unending handout.

While many of us reared on the milk of free trade hold onto that economic concept too tightly, the President has shown us that free trade in the new world order has proven to be primarily a one-way street where the hidden fees, VAT taxes, and government collusion and subsidies undercut or preclude US goods and services from many markets and have become the norm.

He is, at the same time, reframing relations in the Indo-Pacific in response to China’s menace, and in our own hemisphere, where American policy has often been like a parent to a child. The mess that has long characterized South America is, in some ways, an American creation, stemming from both a lack of attention at one extreme and too much at the other.

Disrupting Our Disastrous Immigration Invasion

Of course, his legacy as a Disruptor may well be shutting down the US borders, where up to 20 million illegal aliens broke US laws and were gleefully ushered into the nation in Biden’s four years, with no concern for who or why they came. It was a flood of humans unknown in modern times, accompanied by horrendous child and sexual slavery, and where 300,000 unaccompanied children who came across the border remain “missing” – a vile stain on our nation and the evil people who allowed this to happen.

As a nation, the Disruptor’s policies have shown the country the radical socialist left for what it is, as well as Republicans who squeal the loudest and do the least. They are siding with murderers, drug dealers, child traffickers, terrorists, thieves, and welfare cheats against hard-working Americans in their crazed opposition to anything proposed or done by the Administration, proving common sense is not so common.

Meanwhile, working-class Americans are still reeling from the massive inflation in food, shelter, and energy costs, which cost the average American $1,069 more per month between 2021 and the end of 2023. The work is hard, but steady. And, the Administration has had tremendous success at showing how much waste, fraud, and abuse there is in the system.

Now the Disruptor President is pushing Congress to pass legislation and return to regular budgets to start trimming the vast identified waste across the government, something Congress has steadfastly refused to do for decades. But this time a Disruptor is asking.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.