💬 The Rubin Recap: The Sunday return to normalcy ...

Trump is breaking norms to get America back to a state of normal

Welcome back to the Sunday “Return to Normalcy” edition of The Rubin Recap.

I hope you can take a minute to recognize what an extraordinary president Donald Trump is. He is not like the others. He’s shown us that in many different ways during the five years he’s been the American president. Over the last week, he showed us again — with his move to take military action against Iran — that he’s not like the others.

In sports, they call someone whose game is far above everyone else’s a generational talent. That’s Trump. A generational talent. He’s basically the Babe Ruth of presidents.

One unique way that he is not like the others is that Donald Trump is remarkably ideologically consistent. And I don’t mean since we was elected in 2016. I mean going all the way back to when the man was in his mid-30s. You probably have seen old clips of Trump on Oprah or Larry King’s show in the late ‘80s, saying all the same things then that he said in 2015, and has said ever since. I know I’ve played them on the show.

There’s another even older clip of Trump that I played on the show this past week that I think is very instructive of who Trump is, how he thinks — and how little his moral center has changed over 46 years.

This clip is from an interview with New York gossip columnist Rona Barrett in 1980, when Trump was just 34. In it, he’s talking about military intervention as it pertains to Iran, and, more broadly, about how dealing with a rogue state (like Iran had just become at the time) can set to the tone for diplomacy with other countries. Pay close attention to what he says here.

Sound familiar?

Trump’s remarkable record of ideological consistency is hardly all that sets him apart from other presidents in recent American history.

Most presidents campaign on upending the status quo and then, upon reaching the White House discover, presumably, upholding the status quo is easier than upending it. Not Trump.

The man has taken a sledgehammer to the status quo. Think about it. How different was Clinton from George H.W. Bush? And how different was George W. Bush from Clinton? And, really, how different from W was Obama?

You probably have to go all the way back to Lincoln to find a president who’s been more consequential than Trump. And I’m not suggesting everything he’s doing will 100% work out perfectly. But it’s undeniable that the guy does things — tariffs, illegal immigration, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba, and now Iran, among other things. “The Donroe Doctrine.” And all of this has been done with an eye toward sending China a message.

Now, you might say, “Dave — Trump has defied norms like no other U.S. president in our lifetime has. How does defying norms return us to normal?”

Because president after president has upheld these “norms,” upheld the status quo — and incrementally over that time, our culture has changed in ways that are quite shocking. Taxpayer money was used to provide health care, food and other social services to illegal immigrants. Suddenly, you were forced to address people using pronouns that made no sense at all. I could go on and on.

Sometimes, to get things back to normal, a leader must defy some so-called norms.

There’s a clip that’s been going around social media all week that I think really illustrates how Donald Trump is defying the norms and shattering the status quo — and how others who were president, or tried to be, merely endeavor to uphold the norms. Uphold the status quo.

It’s 13-seconds and it shows Kamala Harris during her campaign and Joe Biden when he was president answering a question on their approaches to Iran. And it contrasts with Trump’s take on how Iran should be handled. The difference could. Not. Be. Clearer. And we know what Obama’s approach to Iran was.

Know that even though there are strong contenders to succeed Trump, once Trump finishes his second term, most likely, whomever comes next will return to upholding the status quo. There will be no generational talent on the bench behind Trump. Which is why Trump is acting with the urgency that he is — so that by then, things will at least mostly be back to normal for America.

Tommy Robinson was right about basically everything

Nearly 10 years to the day since Tommy Robinson made his first visit to The Rubin Report, he returned for an hourlong discussion about what’s happened in England over the last decade with mass Islamic migration — and how he accurately predicted much of what would happen as a result.

We unpacked a lot during the conversation, including the Muslim grooming gang scandals in the U.K., the cultural and political effects of unchecked mass migration, the Unite the Kingdom rally he helped lead, and the broader fight over free speech. It’s worth noting that we recorded the interview a day before a Muslim immigrant from Senegal went on a shooting rampage at a bar in Austin, Texas, killing three and wounding more than a dozen others. The gunman wore a sweatshirt with the words “Property of Allah” printed on the front during the deadly shooting. Tommy also had a direct message for Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 to “save America.” He thinks the vote for Trump was about a lot more than just saving the U.S. Check out the full interview ⬇️