Trump Coulda Been a Contender
The destruction of a legacy.
June 22, 2026
By
Reprinted from Frontpage Magazine
It’s one of the most justly celebrated moments in cinematic history. In Elia Kazan’s classic movie On the Waterfront (1954), the failed boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who was forced to take a dive during the bout that could have established him as a possible challenger for the championship belt, says to his brother, who was in on the fix: “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”
I was going to make the subtitle to this article “Instead of a bum which is what he is,” but it was just too painful. Trump isn’t a bum, and maybe, just maybe, he will eventually right the ship and get on with the business of making America great again. But showering billions on a regime whose leaders routinely scream “Death to America,” and pretending that the evil men who now control that regime are rational people with whom America can do business — that’s the behavior of one of the America-Lasters who has governed this unhappy land in recent decades, not that of the visionary who promised to take on and defeat those who were selling out our interests.
Or so we thought, anyway. But there no denying that Trump has changed, although some people are trying their best to maintain the illusion that he hasn’t, and that those who oppose his disastrous Iran deal are the same people who have so vociferously opposed him all these years. Mike Cernovich, who doesn’t seem to do much of anything but somehow has amassed 1.4 million followers on X, wrote on Friday: “Look at the Never Trump cover of National Review. Those are same people going after JD. He shouldn’t lose any sleep. lol. They all went all in against MAGA in 2016, and lost. Look also at the 2024 primaries. Same usual suspects. Not one Iowa caucus win.”
Commenting on Cernovich’s post, Donald Trump Jr. wrote: “It’s hard not to notice that nearly all the people shrieking like psychopaths about my father’s peace deal to end the war, opposed him in 2016 and in the 2024 primary. He achieved his goal and destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, but sorry guys, he’s not doing an endless war!!!”
Yet this is not true. I myself supported Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. I’m opposed to endless wars. I’m also, however, opposed to surrendering to and propping up evil regimes. I even wrote a book, Who Lost Afghanistan?, about how one of those endless wars was wrongly conceived, wrongly executed, and wrongly concluded. In another book, Rating America’s Presidents, which I wrote in early 2020, I evaluated each American president on the basis of the America-First principle. After a string of disastrous chief executives came Trump, to whom I gave the highest possible rating.
Meanwhile, the far-left Muslim pundit Cenk Uyghur, who has always hated Trump as much as he hates America and Jews, wrote: “Today palpable joy broke out online when an American politician finally defied Israel and even put them in their place a little. It was so unusual that it was little hard to believe. If Trump and Vance keep this up, their numbers will bounce back up in a way that’ll shock people.”
So Trump Jr.’s claim that the people who hate Trump still hate him and the people who love him still love simply isn’t borne out by the facts.
I don’t have any plans to revise and update Rating America’s Presidents, but if I did, the president would get a significantly lower rating, down at the bottom end of the scale, joining Barack Obama whose policies he now seems to have adopted. But one reason why I’m not going to revise that book is precisely because I’m still hoping that Trump will turn this around.
Israel Hayom, which is owned by Miriam Adelson, who has also supported Trump ran an op-ed Friday that said to Trump: “You could have been the greatest president of all in this era… You could have been that president, as you claim to be, but you failed. You missed the opportunity. Instead, unless you change course against the advice of your vice president and envoy, you will be remembered forever as the president who brought about the humiliation of great America and gravely damaged its strategic power and its leading status in the world.”
I hope this isn’t the final turn in this remarkable president’s variegated career. I hope that once he has stopped turning and turning, he will turn ‘round right. He and those who support his deal, however, should stop pretending that this is the sort of thing Trump has been working toward all along. It’s precisely against all that he has been working toward all along.
And many of us who have stood by him all these years miss the man we stood by.
RELATED:
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