Back in the 1990s when college football was played mostly by amateur athletes, my wife and I attended a Texas A&M-Texas Tech football game with another couple where we both had children enrolled at Tech. My wife was from Puerto Rico, and my friend’s wife was from France. Soon after the kickoff, a conversation between our two wives occurred in which, Ingrid, my wife at her second football game, was explaining to her French friend, Joelle, basics of American football.
I am reminded of this little exchange when listening to current media commentary about U.S. politics from obfuscating pundits and politicians. They offer even less insight into the American political scene than my wife who grew up in San Juan watching baseball, but whose football knowledge was limited. Specifically, they fail to provide their listeners of our current political divisiveness against the background that the two political parties, who were manned by America’s ‘Greatest Generation’ working in a collaborative manner, no longer exist.
The Clinton 42/Gore Administration (1993-2001) was the last moderate Democratic presidency. Moderate Republicans have not held the presidency since the Bush 43/Chaney Administration (2001-2009). Having governed since 1945, starting with Harry Truman 33 and followed by Dwight Eisenhower 34, moderate Democrats and Republicans crafted the First American Generation until the parties became almost interchangeable by 2000.
Communist China was opened into the Western world of commerce during the end of Bill Clinton’s second term and early in George Bush’s first term. America’s World War II rebuilding programs and Cold War ‘globalization’ subsidies were not updated or discontinued. The damage to the American lower and middle classes began taking their toll while the technical revolution of the 2000s created STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) elites and multi-billionaires.
The parties that evolved took radically different approaches to correct this economic imbalance!
When Barack Obama 44 took office (2009-2017) as the first political outsider president, his progressives immediately began expanding the Welfare/Administrative State of presidents Wilson 28, Roosevelt 32, and Johnson 36. Progressives sought to bring government paternalism to those economically damaged by international policies prolonged beyond their expiration dates by the ‘moderate’ predecessors from both parties. By using proven Marxist organizing principles of expanding class divisions and redefining cultural norms to attract voters, the Obama Progressives superseded the old Democratic Party in everything but name. University theorists, cultural revisionists, and the mainstream media bought wholeheartedly into this plan.
It took another political outsider Donald Trump 45 (2017-2021) to initiate the first awakenings within the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan 40 (1981-1989). His political tactics were taken from his experience as a real estate developer in New York City in dealing with crooked local politicians and corrupt labor unions. Borrowing from the Reagan years, Trump began curbing costly federal regulations and lowering taxes as incentives for greater entrepreneurship, opportunities, and rapid growth.
Trump, however, could not survive the onslaughts and witch hunts of Obama Progressives, the non-support of the moderate Republican ‘Never-Trumpers’, the COVID19 pandemic, and his own personal frailties. He lost to Joe Biden 46 (2021-2025) after only one term. Biden had run for president three previous times before being elected in 2020, now a tired, mind-challenged 78 years of age. From the Oval Office, he enjoyed realizing his ancient dream after forty-four years in the federal government while he allowed the Obama Progressives to exercise control over his administration.
Trump 47 was reelected to a split term in 2025 beating Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris on an America First agenda. The Progressive Party proclaimed itself to be in ‘resistance’ to every Trump program.
Assuming Trump lives to complete his term, when the 2028 presidential election begins, the score between Obama’s Progressive American Party (PAP) and the Trump new America First Party (AFP) will be: PAP 3, AFP 2. But the election will not just be one to extend the series but one defining which direction America will take in the 21st century.
The War Between the States was preceded by the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 followed by the rebellion of the southern states. Newsweek reported that in 2025 there were 13 Sanctuary States and 220 Sanctuary Cities. Sanctuary ‘nullification’ of federal law expanded into ‘rebellion’ in Minneapolis in 2026 with riots and protests in other sanctuary cities.
The widening division of an uninformed American public away from the moderate political parties into increasingly diverging new party alignments, occupying their old party carcasses, could make the 2028 presidential election one of the most divisive since 1860.
Nullification – resistance – rebellion – insurrection – chaos!
TW3
February 12, 2026
John Whitmore Jenkins
