LAURA INGRAHAM: Richer, safer and stronger: Why the Trump agenda deserves to keep going

"This is the end of Trumpism!" "Conservative Populism, RIP." "Goodbye, MAGA!"

If these pronouncements sound familiar, its because they are. The same people predicting this now in op-eds, online and in podcasts predicted the same after Trumps first impeachment, after the 2020 election, after January 6, after the second impeachment and after every criminal indictment filed against him.

Their wishful thinking is as dim-witted now as it was then.

Any fair-minded political analyst would admit that over the past decade, Donald Trump has been the most consequential leader in the world, and that he has accomplished more than any Republican president in at least the past 100 years. His record should not be judged on midterm results but on what it has delivered. And if the question on the table is "Should Trumps policies continue?" the record says yes — politically, economically, geopolitically and culturally.

Critics predicted Trump would destroy the Republican Party and set back American conservatism. The opposite happened. Across the West, the right has either collapsed or made its peace with the governing consensus. Canada hasn't had a conservative prime minister since 2015. Britain's Conservatives hold just 118 of 650 seats in the House of Commons. Marine Le Pen has never cleared 42% of the vote in a French presidential election. Germany's conservatives govern in coalition with the Social Democrats, and in Italy, The Economist recently praised Giorgia Meloni for "tacking to the middle."

Only in America has the right governed on low taxes, lighter regulation, social conservatism and a strong military — and kept winning. Democrats had little trouble beating moderate Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney. Trump has confounded them for most of a decade. No other leader on the Western right can say that.

We were told populism would wreck the economy. It hasn't.

Trump worked with Congress to cut taxes and roll back regulation, and he has trimmed a bloated bureaucracy: Between December 2024 and June 2026, the federal workforce shrank by 255,000 employees, or 12%, according to The Washington Post.

Ordinary families have benefited. Real median household income rose from $77,230 in 2016 to a record $87,460 last year, both measured in 2025 dollars. Those figures are adjusted for inflation and describe the household squarely in the middle. Nostalgia for the '80s and '90s is understandable, but the American middle class has never been richer than it is today.

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Inflation, the defining failure of the Biden years, has been tamed. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, peaked at 6.6% in September 2022 and was still 3.3% in November 2024. This September it stood at 2.6%. Headline inflation of 3.7% is in line with the eurozone's 3.8% and Britain's 3.5%. Americans are not uniquely squeezed.

Growth is outpacing our peers. In September, the OECD projected U.S. real GDP growth of 2.2% for 2026, the highest in the G7. The latest data are stronger still: the economy grew at a 3.4% annualized rate in the third quarter, compared with 0.5% for the EU and roughly 1.3% for Canada.

The upshot is that Americans are by far the wealthiest people of any major economy. The IMF projects 2026 GDP per capita of $95,212 in the United States, against $65,699 in Germany, $61,108 in Britain, $60,105 in Canada, $51,448 in France, $35,400 in Japan and $15,371 in China. The United States is not merely the richest major country on earth; it is pulling away from the rest of the West.

Critics warned that Trump's foreign policy would leave America isolated and weak. Instead, he is charting a course to victory over China, our only serious geopolitical rival.