The Covid years were tough, and now they’re finally ending. In two weeks, I’ll have a health book coming out that in part explains the story of why the lockdowns were so devastating. At the same time, Trump’s election gives hope to aggressively address the issues outlined in the pages.

Former President Donald Trump hit a grand slam Tuesday. Republicans finally reclaimed the Senate and the White House four years after America’s deadly lockdowns coincided with a year of political turmoil and ended in a riot at the Capitol. Trump’s legacy was almost diminished as an ex-president whose tenure was defined by cultural unrest and whose exit interrupted the smooth transfer of power.

On Election Night 2024, Fox News anchor Bret Baier characterized Trump’s comeback from the Capitol disaster as “probably the biggest political phoenix from the ashes that we have ever seen in the history of politics.”

Trump came back through all of it despite Democrats doing everything in their power to thwart his return — impeachment, bankruptcy campaigns, criminal convictions, and even two attempted assassinations — as one of the most triumphant figures in presidential history.

Not only would Trump survive the opposition campaigns, he would conquer the institutions that empowered them and reclaim moral authority over a divided nation. Trump ran as the flag-bearer for the widest multi-racial tent the Republican Party has seen in decades. He nearly doubled his share of the black vote, dominated with male voters, and won over more Hispanics, outperforming past vote totals, and becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004. The Trump-built coalition came out on top as a colossal bipartisan movement united for free speech over censorship, administrative integrity over agency corruption, and an authentic tolerance for our neighbors that Americans have evidently begun to finally recognize. Such recognition, however, took a long time to materialize.

I conceived of the idea for my book a year and a half after emerging from the coronavirus lockdowns, about half-way through the Biden administration when inflation and social division were thriving. Most Americans did not simply go “back to normal” immediately once the lockdowns were lifted. I certainly did not.

Americans coped with the lockdowns using tech, drugs, and food, the highly addictive engines of the nation’s health crises. Neighbors who are already sick are most prone to getting sicker, but there are far more financial incentives to engineer a sick-care system than a true health care system. For me, the book became a passion project to learn the fundamentals of metabolism and conclude my own chapter on Covid with a presentation of how our lifestyles, manipulated by corporations, lay the groundwork for the chronic disease epidemic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks so much about. When no one’s eating, exercising, or sleeping properly while isolating with screens, it’s no wonder everybody seems so sick and depressed. Americans meanwhile became more addicted and more divided as the pandemic raged. I cover in the book how campaigns for “Body Positivity” are backed by Big Food and Big Pharma eager to profit off personal apathy towards personal health.

The Democrats botched the recovery and incentivized sedentary lifestyles through shutdowns and pharmaceutical handouts. Big Pharma made almost $100 billion on the experimental Covid vaccines that were being mandated by the government. Then Democrats reopened a country where everything became more expensive because of their massive spending. Meanwhile, they continued to fan the divisive flames of racial- and sexual-grievance in the aftermath of the 2020 riots and the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spent four years exploiting the worst impulses of identity politics in Washington while driving down Americans’ savings with inflationary rollouts and minimizing concerns as “transitory.” Biden made “equity” and “rooting out systemic racism” a focal point of the federal bureaucracy within 48 hours of his inauguration and continued to tell Americans that Republicans are irredeemably racist and homophobic.

Trump returned from political exile to end the Biden-Harris administration with historic gains among minority voters after black television star Amber Rose blew the curtain off the left’s racist grift at the Republican National Convention this summer. Rose was one of the few effective celebrity endorsements for Trump. She said she had evolved from believing whatever the Democrats and the media told her about the former president to someone who actually met his supporters and condemned the left’s lies.

“I realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love,” Rose said. “And that’s when it hit me: These are my people. This is where I belong.”

Of course, she didn’t neglect to tack on a reminder about inflation.

“When you cut through the lies you realize the truth,” she said. “American families were better when Donald Trump was president.”

I watched the speech from the apartment I leased in a rural part of Colorado during my final year out West to write my upcoming book. I had experienced the first three Biden years in Denver, where I checked out by drowning my brain with artificial dopamine via marijuana to numb the expensive isolation, which seems to be a familiar story across post-pandemic America. The fact that everything cost more was an added insult to the trauma from the lockdown era. I was never homeless and I was never starving, but I certainly wasn’t thriving. In Trump’s pre-Covid term, America was flourishing.

When things did open up in Denver, I was immediately struck by the absolute contempt of my new gay neighbors, naive to think Colorado would be welcoming of gay conservatives. The community there wasn’t, however, because too many leftist gays had bought into a toxic form of identity politics sold to them by Democrats. Cracks in the narrative of Republican supporters as universally intolerant, however, grew deeper with Trump’s broad bipartisan victory.

Trump’s landslide reflects a triumph over the lockdowns, inflation, and division that defined the Biden years as a majority of Americans voted for an end to toxic wokeness. Trump re-emerged from his Mar-a-Lago exile under the weight of criminal convictions and attempted assassinations to lead a historic and broad coalition to make America truly healthy again four years after the Covid pandemic wrecked plans to make America great again. The new president-elect promised on election night to inaugurate a new “golden age of America” on the eve of its 250-year anniversary, giving Americans hope that the best is really yet to come.