Even CNN Had to Admit It: Donald Trump Is Remaking America

Guest Opinion by Perry Hooper Jr.

Every once in a while, the evidence becomes so overwhelming that even CNN has to acknowledge what millions of Americans already know. A CNN segment featuring chief data analyst Harry Enten has been circulating again, and while the segment originally aired in 2025, its central conclusion is even more significant today. Enten described President Donald Trump as “the most influential president certainly this century” and said that Trump was fundamentally remaking the United States. Coming from CNN, those words are remarkable, but what makes them important is that Enten was not offering a political endorsement. He was looking at measurable changes in American policy and concluding that Trump had altered the direction of the country in ways few modern presidents have accomplished.

That is precisely what Donald Trump told the American people he intended to do. He did not run for president promising to become a better manager of the Washington establishment or to make minor adjustments around the edges of a government that had lost touch with the people it serves. Trump promised to challenge the assumptions that had governed Washington for decades, particularly on trade, immigration, energy, national sovereignty, and America's relationship with the rest of the world. His critics dismissed those promises as campaign rhetoric, yet the numbers CNN highlighted demonstrate that Trump did not merely talk about changing Washington. He changed policy, and in doing so he changed the terms of the national debate.

Trade provides one of the clearest examples. For decades, political leaders in both parties talked about unfair trade while American factories closed, manufacturing jobs disappeared, and entire communities watched their economic foundations move overseas. Washington accepted a system in which foreign governments protected their own industries while enjoying access to the American market, and anyone who challenged that arrangement was immediately warned by the experts that the consequences would be catastrophic. Trump rejected that thinking. CNN pointed to the dramatic increase in the effective U.S. tariff rate as evidence that his administration had fundamentally changed America's approach to international trade, forcing foreign governments and multinational corporations to recognize that access to the American consumer could no longer be taken for granted.

That change represents something larger than tariffs themselves. Trump challenged the assumption that globalization should always come before the American worker and that America's leaders should measure success by how comfortable our trading partners were rather than by what was happening in Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and thousands of other communities across the country. The political establishment had become accustomed to explaining why American workers simply had to adjust to plant closures and lost jobs. Trump asked a much more basic question: Why should the world's largest economy continue accepting trade arrangements that do not put its own citizens first?

Immigration tells much the same story. Americans were repeatedly told that the border was simply too complicated, that meaningful enforcement was impossible without some grand Washington compromise, and that the country would have to tolerate millions of illegal entries while politicians debated the issue endlessly. Trump rejected those excuses and treated border security as a basic responsibility of the federal government. CNN's analysis cited the enormous decline in net migration as another example of how significantly Trump had changed federal policy. The point was not simply that the numbers moved; it was that a president had finally demonstrated that the government could enforce the nation's immigration laws when political leaders actually had the will to do it.

That matters because elections are supposed to have consequences. Americans voted for a secure border, immigration enforcement, stronger trade policies, energy independence, and an administration that would place the interests of American citizens ahead of Washington's permanent bureaucracy and the demands of the global political class. Trump did not campaign on those issues and then place them on a shelf after Election Day. He treated the promises he made on the campaign trail as instructions from the voters, and that alone separates his presidency from generations of politicians who perfected the art of campaigning one way and governing another.

There is one reason the political establishment has never fully understood him. Washington judges success by process, relationships, protocol, and whether the right people approve. Trump judges success by results. He asks whether the border is secure, whether American workers are being protected, whether foreign governments are being forced to negotiate fairly, whether American energy is being unleashed, and whether the federal government is responding to the citizens who pay for it. Those are also the questions an increasing number of Americans are asking, which helps explain why Trump's influence extends far beyond any single piece of legislation or executive order.

Ronald Reagan reshaped American politics because he challenged the accepted wisdom of his era. Trump is doing the same in ours. I served in public office long enough to understand how difficult genuine change can be. Government agencies resist it, entrenched interests resist it, political consultants resist it, and the media often attack it before they have even considered whether it might work. Washington has constructed an entire ecosystem around preserving the status quo, and Donald Trump's greatest offense against that system has always been his refusal to accept that the status quo deserves to survive simply because it has been around for a long time.

That is why this CNN analysis is worth remembering. The American people did not elect Donald Trump to manage national decline more efficiently or to become another caretaker of a political system they had lost faith in. They elected him to reverse course. They elected him to challenge failed assumptions, put American citizens first, and force Washington to remember that government exists to serve the people rather than the other way around.

The political class can complain about his methods, the pundits can object to his style, and the legacy media can spend every evening searching for a new controversy. None of that changes the record. Eventually, results become more powerful than rhetoric, and even those who have spent years criticizing Trump are forced to acknowledge the scale of what has happened. CNN's own analyst said Donald Trump was remaking America. The better way to put it is that Trump is restoring an idea Washington had nearly forgotten: America does not have to accept decline, failure, or second place as inevitable. That is the change Donald Trump promised, and that is the presidency the American people elected him to deliver.

Perry O. Hooper Jr. is a longtime Alabama Republican figure, former Alabama Legislator and Montgomery businessman. He served as Co-Chair of “Alabama Trump Victory” in 2016, and served as an at-large delegate to the Republican National Convention. He is a noted civic leader in Montgomery with deep family roots in Alabama’s legal and political history.

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