There are moments in history when a nation hits rock bottom and, from there, makes the decision to rise.
Maduro, then El Mencho.
The United States lived that moment on January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump once again took his oath on the Lincoln Bible and promised, with the same conviction as always but with renewed urgency, that America would be great again. Today, on the eve of his State of the Union address before Congress — broadcast live on February 24, 2026 — the balance speaks for itself. Not in terms of rhetoric, but in hard numbers, in captured bodies, in sealed borders, and in pockets that once again feel the weight of the dollars they deserve.
January: The Fall of Maduro and the Return of the Monroe Doctrine
The year opened with an operation that shook the entire Western Hemisphere. On January 3, 2026, 200 American soldiers and 150 aircraft executed a surgical operation in Caracas that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. The Venezuelan dictator, who had resisted decades of sanctions and international pressure, was transferred to New York to face drug trafficking and terrorism charges before the federal justice system.
The operation was not an impulsive act. It was the culmination of a meticulously designed strategy that included Operation “Southern Spear,” the deployment of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group from Norfolk, Virginia, and months of diplomatic, military, and economic pressure that progressively strangled the regime. Trump rightly compared it to the execution of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani during his first term, and to Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in the summer of 2025. In every case, the message was the same: America’s strength is not a bluff.
The geopolitical significance of Maduro’s capture transcends Venezuela. The 2025 National Security Strategy had explicitly declared that “after years of neglect, the United States will reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” With Maduro in handcuffs on American soil, that document ceased to be paper and became the new reality of the continent.
The Cuba-Nicaragua-Venezuela axis, which for decades served as an operational base for drug trafficking, Russian money, and Chinese influence, was decapitated at its most visible link. China, which had lent more money to the Venezuelan regime than any other adversary of the United States, watched as its diplomats in Caracas couldn’t make it out of the country before the operation began.
The message to Beijing was deliberate and unequivocal.
February: The End of El Mencho and the Total War Against the Cartels
If January was Venezuela’s month, February wrote another chapter that many thought impossible. On Sunday, February 22, 2026, the Mexican army executed an operation in Tapalpa, Jalisco, that resulted in the death of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes — known in the criminal world as “El Mencho” — the undisputed leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and one of the most wanted drug traffickers on the planet.
What made that result possible was a 13-month campaign of systematic and relentless pressure by the Trump administration. On his first day in his second term, Trump signed an executive order designating the CJNG and other cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations — a classification that unlocked military-grade intelligence resources, the possibility of “material support” criminal prosecutions, and unprecedented coordination between U.S. Northern Command and the Mexican army. On February 27, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the extradition of 29 high-ranking cartel leaders, including Antonio Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho’s brother known as “Tony Montana.” On March 7, El Mencho’s son and designated heir, Rubén Oseguera-González, alias “El Menchito,” was sentenced in Washington, D.C. to life in prison plus 30 years, with a $6 billion asset forfeiture order. And just 72 hours before the Tapalpa operation, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Kovay Gardens, a CJNG-controlled resort in Puerto Vallarta, severing a $300 million revenue source that fed the cartel’s financial structure.
By the end of 2025, the DEA reported seizing 47 million fentanyl pills — enough to represent over 369 million lethal doses — from cartel smuggling networks including the CJNG. Monthly fentanyl seizures at the southwest border fell by half in the first half of 2025 compared to previous years. The “total elimination” strategy that Trump designed alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio was not a stroke of luck. It was the logical consequence of treating the drug trafficking problem with the seriousness it deserves: as an existential threat to national security, not as a foreign relations matter to be negotiated with kid gloves.
The Hemisphere’s Geopolitics: A Continent That Remembered Who’s in Charge
Trump’s influence across the American continent over the past year has been of a magnitude not seen since the Cold War. Border apprehensions fell 87% between October 2024 and October 2025. The Department of Homeland Security increased ICE’s budget by 400%, enabling a record 600,000 deportations by December 2025.
The State Department signed seven Safe Third Country agreements, facilitating deportations to Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, and Paraguay. When Panama resisted, Trump threatened to take control of the Canal, and Panama relented, agreeing to accept foreign deportees. El Salvador, under the leadership of Nayib Bukele — a strategic ally of Trump — agreed to receive hundreds of Venezuelan deportees in its celebrated mega-prison, in exchange for $6 million in assistance.
The reactions across Latin America to the Venezuelan operation were a perfect thermometer of the new hemispheric order. Countries living under the weight of decades of caudillismo and ideological dependence on Caracas reacted with condemnation or silence. But Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, and other partners aligned with Washington celebrated what Trump called “cleaning up the neighborhood.” The so-called “Trump Doctrine” — a muscular update of the Monroe Doctrine — proved it wasn’t campaign rhetoric but state policy with teeth. Washington didn’t just speak again: it acted again.
The Economy From the Bottom Up: The Worker Comes First
One of the most solid pillars of Trump’s message has always been the real economy — the one measured not in Wall Street indices but at the gas pump, in the grocery bill, in the paycheck of a worker in Texas, Ohio, or Florida. And in that arena, the numbers from the past year tell a genuinely encouraging story.
Inflation, which under the Biden era peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest level since 1981 — stood at 3% in January 2025 when Trump took office, and has continued moderating. Core inflation — which excludes food and energy and which economists consider the best indicator of structural trends — reached its lowest level in nearly five years by the end of 2025, well below the consensus expectations of 62 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The White House summed up the result with precision: the inflation rate has fallen approximately 70% from its historic peak under Biden.
Gas prices are perhaps the most tangible data point for the average citizen. Under Biden, fuel prices reached historic highs, even after his administration drained the Strategic Reserve to artificially manipulate the market.
Under Trump, gas prices have fallen to their lowest average in 1,682 days. In 36 states, the price per gallon dropped below $3. In 20 states, below $2.75. And in 5 states, below $2.50. American families are on track to spend the lowest share of their disposable income on gasoline in two decades.
On wages, the contrast with the previous period is stark. During Biden’s four years, American workers lost more than $2,900 in real purchasing power because inflation outpaced wage growth month after month.
In Trump’s second term, real wages have grown nearly 4%, equivalent to roughly $700 in additional purchasing power — and projections point to $1,200 by the close of his first full year in office.
The labor force participation rate in the “prime age” group — people between 25 and 54 years old — rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026. Trump signed the most ambitious tax legislation in modern American history, including the elimination of taxes on tips, the elimination of taxes on overtime pay, and the elimination of taxes on Social Security income. These are not accounting abstractions: they are thousands of additional dollars annually in the pockets of the workers who need them most — those who earn by the hour and depend on their physical labor to make ends meet.
U.S. GDP grew at an annualized rate of 3.8% in the second quarter of 2025 and 4.4% in the third, after the tariff turbulence of the first quarter. Companies have committed investments of trillions of dollars in operations on American soil, generating hundreds of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and technology sectors. Today, more people are employed in the United States than at any point in the nation’s history.
A Foreign Policy That Doesn’t Cost the Taxpayer
One of the most persistent criticisms of American foreign policy over the past decades has been its staggering cost. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost over $2 trillion combined, not counting the price paid in lives and in global credibility. Trump understood something his predecessors deliberately ignored: a strong foreign policy doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive for the taxpayer if it’s structured correctly.
At the NATO summit held in The Hague in June 2025, allies agreed to raise their defense spending to 5% of their GDP — more than double the previous target. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was explicit about the significance of this achievement: “NATO is now much better positioned to project military, diplomatic, and economic power.” What this means in practical terms is that Europe will pay more than $1 trillion in additional annual dollars for its own defense before 2035, relieving the burden on the American budget. This is not abandonment of allies; it’s demanding that allies hold up their end of the deal.
In the Middle East, Trump negotiated a ceasefire in Gaza that outlets in Tel Aviv and The Times of Israel attributed directly to his team. The negotiation, led by special envoy Steve Witkoff, prevented a major escalation in a region that had been on the brink for decades. In June 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer destroyed Iranian nuclear infrastructure — resolving with calculated force a problem that an entire generation of diplomats couldn’t solve with words. And it committed no ground troops, opening no occupation front that would drain the Treasury for decades.
In Venezuela, the cost of the operation that captured Maduro was infinitely smaller than the cost of allowing that regime to continue serving as a platform for fentanyl, Russian money, and Chinese expansionism in America’s backyard. Trump didn’t invest in rebuilding a country destroyed by socialism; he invested in restoring hemispheric order, and demanded that Venezuelan oil — the world’s largest proven reserves — be available to the market under conditions that benefit the United States. This is not imperialism; it’s economic common sense with strategic reach.
The Peace Won by Strength, not by Begging
There is a paradox that Trump has embodied more consistently than any other recent president: lasting peace is not negotiated from weakness, but imposed from strength. For decades, American foreign policy oscillated between costly interventionism and diplomatic naivety. Trump found a third way: demonstrable deterrence combined with the proven willingness to act when necessary.
Tensions with Russia over Ukraine did not escalate toward a direct war between nuclear powers, in part because Trump established from day one that he would not send peacekeeping troops and that he expected Europe to assume the greater financial and military burden of that conflict. That clarity of position — though uncomfortable for many in Brussels — prevented the strategic ambiguity that has historically been the seed of the most catastrophic conflicts. The borders of chaos are better managed when the adversary has no doubts about where your tolerance ends and where your response begins.
In the hemisphere, the combination of cartel terrorist designations, strikes against drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean, pressure on Colombia, Mexico, and transit countries, and finally the operation in Venezuela, sent a message that no diplomatic summit could have conveyed with equal effectiveness: disorder has consequences, and consequences arrive in uniform.
Rubio and the “Secretary of War”: The best team in decades
Behind Trump stands a team that few governments in the recent history of the United States have been able to match in ideological coherence and operational effectiveness. Marco Rubio, as Secretary of State, has proven to be the diplomatic architect Trump needed to translate his geopolitical instinct into executable strategy. The son of Cuban immigrants who knows firsthand the price of totalitarianism in Latin America, Rubio has designed the pressure on Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua with a precision that combines the hardness of America First with the long-term vision of a free hemisphere. Bloomberg recently described him as the figure who has managed to give both America First nationalists and neoconservatives something to celebrate in this administration’s foreign policy — a politically brilliant and strategically effective synthesis.
Pete Hegseth, heading the Department he himself has insisted on calling the “Department of War,” has delivered on his promise: the return of the warrior ethos to an institution that for years had been subjected to ideological experiments that eroded its cohesion. The military muscle that executed the operation in Venezuela, that maintained a deterrent presence in the Caribbean during Operation Southern Spear, and that coordinates with Northern Command in the pressure against the cartels, is the product of an institution that once again has clarity about its purpose.
Together, Rubio and Hegseth form the most functional foreign and domestic policy duo that Washington has seen in generations. One speaks the language of statesmen; the other speaks the language of combatants. Trump speaks the language of the people.
And all three speak the language of results.
The State of the Union: A Nation that Believed in itself again
When Donald Trump stands before Congress tonight, he won’t be reading a speech written by consultants to look good in the next morning’s headlines. He will be reporting to his employers — the American people — the results of a year of governance that has reconfigured the geopolitical map of the continent, restored purchasing power to the working class, sealed the most porous border in recent history, and proven to the world that the United States has lost neither its will nor its capacity to act.
January was Maduro’s month. February was El Mencho’s month. And each of those months represents not just a tactical victory, but the confirmation of a doctrine: that America’s security begins in its hemisphere, that allies pay their share, that the worker matters more than the lobbyist, and that peace — the real, lasting kind — is built from a position of strength that the adversary respects because it has no other choice.
The state of the Union, at the close of the first full year of Trump’s second term, is this: a safer, stronger nation, with more money in the pockets of those who work, with less poison crossing its border, with fewer dictators on the continent, and with a clear message to the rest of the world. America came back.
And this time, it’s here to stay.
Sources: USAFacts State of the Union 2026, The White House, U.S. Department of State, AS/COA, Atlantic Council, Foreign Affairs, Axios, CNN, PBS, Fox News.
