'You Are Here': How Trump's Foreign and Domestic Agendas Are Working to Restore American Dominance

It’s not a short-term plan, but that’s because the goal is so totalizing: reassert global dominance for the singular goal of protecting and enriching American citizens.

There’s a lot of talk among from Trump’s opposition—both domestic and global—about broken campaign promises. Democrats and their media love to say that President Trump promised no new wars, and here we are at war with Iran. He promised to slash gas prices, yet here we are with gas prices over $4 a gallon. He promised to tame inflation, yet the cost of goods remain stubbornly high. This line of attack has filtered down to the American people, who are giving the President lower marks on the economy than they gave President Biden in some polls, though on an objective level, inflation and gas are lower than they were under Biden.

Here’s the problem with that narrative: If you go back to President Trump’s campaign promises and his inaugural address, you can see how he laid the groundwork for the exact agenda he’s carrying out, both on the domestic front and on the foreign policy front. It’s not a short-term plan, but that’s because the goal is so totalizing: reassert global dominance to protect and enrich American citizens, restoring the United State as the world’s only super-power for generations to come.

And while there’s currently pain at the pump, a broader look at the President’s agenda reveals that it is in service of a much greater goal: making Americans ultimately much more prosperous.

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2025, President Trump laid out the main goals of his administration, which would weave his domestic policy and his foreign policy together to accomplish complementary goals. And he’s made good on those promises.

He promised that our country will flourish again. “We will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer,” Trump said. “During every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply, put America first. Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored.” The top priority would be “to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.”

You can already see here how the domestic and foreign policy agendas are intertwined in Trump’s mind: Being “proud, prosperous, and free” involves both how we see ourselves internally as well as how much power we have to insist on our interests at the expense of our adversaries.

It’s two sides of the same coin: Prosperity at home, dominance abroad. That’s the Trump agenda in a nutshell: Reassert global dominance for the singular goal of protecting and enriching American citizens. We have to be the greatest superpower on the global stage—and we have to use that power to enrich and protect our own people. “From this moment on, America’s decline is over,” Trump promised.

You need both pieces of the puzzle for that goal to be achieved. If we only focus on domestic policy, that leaves us vulnerable to the whims of our adversaries. But if we only focus on foreign policy and spreading our influence without the goal of using that power for the enrichment of our own citizenry, you end up with Bush-era quagmires that rob us of treasure and precious souls in the name of spreading our influence.

Enriching and protecting Americans by leveraging foreign and domestic policy in tandem to create a balance of maximum influence and maximum prosperity is the key to understanding every one of President Trump’s actions since he assumed office in his second term.

And it explains why he was willing to allow a temporary rise in the cost of gas and goods if it meant a long-term reassertion of American dominance—both militarily and in terms of energy.

Across different areas, Trump’s domestic agenda has closely followed the roadmap he laid out in that inaugural speech.

DOMESTIC PROMISES

• He promised to secure the border, and he accomplished this pretty much on Day 1

• He promised to address our unaffordable health care system, and he’s gotten us most favored nation pricing on most pharmaceutical drugs

• He promised to enrich the United States, and the stock market has reached new heights since he’s taken office

• He promised to address fraud, and he started that with DOGE and has now appointed the Vice President as chair of the President’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud

• He promised to address wokeness in our institutions and began the long process of addressing DEI and other areas where there has been a government-imposed focus on equity instead of equality.

• He promised to restore manufacturing, and we’re currently in a manufacturing boom that is in its early stages

His foreign policy agenda has similarly delivered on the promises he made.

FOREIGN POLICY PROMISES

• He promised to free our armed forces to focus on the sole mission of defeating America’s enemies, and he has certainly followed through on that

• He promised to make the U.S. military the strongest it’s ever been, another promise kept

• He promised to be a peacemaker, and he’s resolved nine conflicts across the globe

• He promised to end the mass fleecing of the American consumer by imposing tariffs on countries that have tariffs on us, and he did

• He promised to avoid new wars and he’s used limited military operations when necessary wherever possible

The President’s opponents claim that he violated the promise to avoid war and to bring down costs. But neither of these is true.

Here’s how he spoke of war it in his inaugural address: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”

This, too, is a promise kept. He has won battles, he has ended wars, and he has avoided lengthy entanglements. With Operation Epic Fury, he did all three: We defeated Iran militarily, we entered a ceasefire with them and switched to economic pressure as soon as possible, and even now, the President is doing his best to get Iran to sign a deal.

Prior to Operation Epic Fury, Iran was given every opportunity to avoid a war by committing not to enrich uranium, and hopefully they will realize that’s in their interests soon. Far from a forever war or endless war of regime change, we are methodically accomplishing the goals the President set out from the outset with precision.

It’s true that gas prices have gone up, and that’s tough on American consumers (though they are still at least a dollar less a gallon than they were at the Biden heights). Trump’s opponents tell us ad nauseam that the Strait of Hormuz was open before he started Operation Epic Fury. But we could never have achieved energy dominance so long as Iran had the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. Imagine them having that capability while also possessing a nuclear weapon!

In other words, the long term goal the President has in mind of restoring America as the world’s only superpower based on our energy dominance was inconsistent with the short term goal of keeping gas cheap for now. He has decided that as part of our pursuit of energy dominance, we have to make sure that there are no global chokepoints that we don’t control—chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, where an adversary can simply decide to hold 20% of the world’s oil hostage. Controlling every oil chokepoint on the globe is crucial to establishing our dominance, especially over China.

Meanwhile, the Iranians are nearing the end of their rope. With the U.S. blockade preventing Iran from exporting its oil, it’s running out of storage space. When that happens in a few weeks, they will have to stop pumping oil, which will result in permanent damage to their pipes. The blockade is costing them $500 million a day. When they open the Strait of Hormuz, which the President’s Operation Freedom is hopefully forcing them to do, gas prices will plummet.

And that’s how the President plans to address inflation more generally, which, as you can see from his inaugural address, was always about energy for him:

“I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices. The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill. America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it. We’ll use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

Some of this the President already did. On Day 1, he signed an executive order to massively deregulate barriers against drilling, expanding energy across the nation and rolling back the Democrats’ restrictive climate regulations. He directed government agencies to streamline permitting and accelerate energy production wherever possible.

His operation to arrest Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela similarly unleashed significant amounts of oil onto the free market which had previously been going straight to China on the cheap as repayment for $100 billion in loans.

But beyond that, it’s clear that President Trump views inflation as a direct result of the cost of energy, and once gas comes down, so will prices.

The President’s domestic and global agendas are two sides of the same coin, being carried out in a balance that is currently causing pain at the pump. But viewed through a wider lens, the entire agenda is designed to make Americans exponentially safer and more prosperous.

It was all there on Day 1. As the President put it, “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored . . . And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.”