(Daily Signal)—Is America heading into a “golden age” in President Donald Trump’s second term?
That was the question put up for discussion Thursday in a Munk Debate hosted by the Aurea Foundation in Toronto. The Munk Debates have been hosted semi-annually since 2008 and feature civil discourse by the “brightest thinkers of our time.”
On one side was Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Kellyanne Conway, who acted as a special counsel to Trump in his first term as president. On the other was New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and former senior adviser to President Barack Obama Ben Rhodes.
The debate was moderated by Canadian author Rudyard Griffiths.
“I think we have to acknowledge, whatever our views are, that the first 100 days and counting of his presidency have been some of the most consequential in American history since” President Franklin Roosevelt, Griffiths said to start the discussion.
He said that sweeping changes have been happening both nationally in the United States and globally as a result of Trump’s second term in office.
Roberts, who is the author of the book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” began his remarks by saying that the last four years under President Joe Biden were a “dark age” in American life.
“It was a time when the government opened our southern border to chaos, but also a time when that same government shut the doors of our schools and churches,” Roberts said in his opening statement. “It was a time when bureaucrats told our children that bigots are people that somehow believe boys are boys and girls are girls as opposed to understanding biology.”
Roberts described an America in which “elites” in Washington thought they knew all the answers to the country’s problems as they ignored everyday people. This attitude was rejected, Roberts said, which is in part why America is at the dawn of a new golden age.
Trump’s election has already brought reforms to the American government that have not only been a massive reversal of how things were done before in Washington, but are already proving popular, Roberts said. He pointed to a recent poll by Rasmussen Reports showing that more people think America is on the “right track” than at any time in the 20-year history of the poll question.
In closing his remarks, Roberts joked that he was inviting the Toronto audience to join the United States as the 51st state.
President of the @Heritage Foundation @KevinRobertsTX jokes about Canada becoming America’s 51st state and is met with boos at tonight’s @munkdebate, taking place in Toronto, Canada 👇 pic.twitter.com/oLeGy1sl5W
— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) May 29, 2025
Klein, the New York Times columnist, pointed to what he said were the ways in which Trump and his supporters are wrong.
“They are filled with contempt for the systems that undergird the world we’ve built,” Klein said. “It’s not just that they don’t know how they work, it’s that they don’t see the parts that are working.”
What this means is that Trump and his administration are putting the things that are working at risk, he said, while pointing to how the American economy has grown dramatically since the 1990s.
“In 1990 America accounted for about two-fifths of the overall GDP of the G-7 countries, today we are about half,” Klien said.
The G-7 countries are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Klein noted that per person GDP in the U.S. is about 40% higher than in Europe and 60% higher than in Japan. This has happened while China’s GDP has been slipping, he continued.
Klein, who recently authored the book, “Abundance,” said that to break the global system that America built and profited from “doesn’t serve America’s interests, is not going to bring us a golden age.”
Conway, who not only advised Trump but is a pollster as well, said in her opening remarks that America is “not just rebounding, it is roaring back with confidence and clarity.” She pointed to polls which showed that “nearly three-quarters of the country” believe the United States was on the wrong track and said that it was clear that the country responded to a presidential candidate who promised a new golden age in the 2024 election.
The result was that Trump won the “popular vote” as well as all seven swing states, she said. This came with a huge upsurge in a diverse set of voters who used to be a part of the Obama coalition and “massive swings among non-college educated households.”
Rhodes, who is also the co-host of the podcast “Pod Save the World,” asked rhetorically in his opening remarks, “If this is a new golden age, why do you have to compel institutions to be a part of it?”
The former Obama adviser said he agreed with his debate opponents that the border needed to be secured, “but this system is being run on terror.”
He said that “75% of people being sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador have no criminal record” and that many came to America “legally” according to the libertarian Cato Institute.
“A society that runs on fear is not going through a golden age,” Rhodes said. He pointed to tariffs as an impediment to American growth and said that countries will look elsewhere for trade, “most likely to China.”
Rhodes said that the Trump golden age is for “the Trump family, some very wealthy people, and maybe some people that are happy to see brown people deported and white South Africans taken into America as refugees.”
Roberts said in his first opportunity to respond that the Biden era was an age of “inversion” in which the federal government “reigned supreme,” and the people responded by saying they “want their country back.” And this was the case in poll after poll from Americans of every background, the Heritage president said.
He pointed to policies that have now begun to pick up steam, like “universal school choice,” which recently passed into law in Texas.
Klein said that Trump’s policies have already been bad and that the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill making its way through Congress was “the largest wealth transfer in history” from the poor to the rich. He said that things “aren’t going well now,” and that they will get worse when Trump’s policies really kick in.
Conway said that she had optimism about a new golden age like many of the American people and said that Rhodes mentioned in 2021 that he couldn’t wait for New York Attorney General Letitia James to put Trump’s children in jail.
“That’s not the language of optimism in the golden age,” she said. “But no worry, because the elite and the effete are being undermined.”
Rhodes responded that he can’t remember many of his social media posts and thought it was bizarre to consider a presidential election the start of a golden age since they happen every four years.
The moderator brought in a debate about tariffs and whether they could be a part of a golden age.
Roberts said, “What we prefer is a reciprocal tariff system that dishonors the great violators of free trade.”
Can America have a Golden Age without tariffs?@KevinRobertsTX, President of the @Heritage Foundation responds at tonight’s @munkdebate:
“What we prefer is a reciprocal tariff system that dishonors the great violators of free trade.” pic.twitter.com/zvhgbPwjWX
— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) May 30, 2025
Klein said that Trump continually “borrows from the future,” and that tariffs are an example of that because the U.S. is using force and leverage against friendly countries less likely to do business in the future.
Rhodes spoke about tariffs and the issue of fentanyl.
“There is not a fentanyl problem on the northern border of the United States,” he said while comparing the amount of fentanyl that crossed the border to the size of a “backpack.”
It only takes 2 milligrams of fentanyl—the equivalent of four grains of salt—to kill you. 1 gram of could potentially kill 500 people.
Yet Ben Rhodes, host of Pod Save the World, says that “there is not a fentanyl problem on the nothern border of the United States,” during… pic.twitter.com/RDU5Dzp1yi
— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) May 30, 2025
On the issue of national defense, the debate opponents found some common ground. Klein said that Trump was “right” that European nations don’t spend nearly enough on national defense.
WOW. @nytimes‘s Ezra Klein admits that “Donald Trump is right that Europe needs to spend more on defense.” 👇 pic.twitter.com/7Ac5ltfWnY
— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) May 30, 2025
He said that if Trump calling out European nations to do more on defense got them to act with a little more “vigor” again, that would be good for Europe and possibly the U.S.
Roberts said that Trump is upending the status quo, including on defense.
.@KevinRobertsTX: Trump’s Gold Age Means the ‘Upending of the Status Quo’
“ Last fiscal year, the United States spent 3.4% of its GDP on Defense Canada spent something under 1.4%. Your prime Minister, maybe because he wants to make the president happy, but I’m just an American.… pic.twitter.com/33YnYKBSi7
— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) May 30, 2025
“Last fiscal year, the United States spent 3.4% of its GDP on defense. Canada spent something under 1.4%,” he said. “Your prime minister, maybe because he wants to make the president happy, but I’m just an American, I’m assuming maybe he means it as well. If we’re gonna pick on Trump, maybe we’ll pick on Mark Carney. He said Canada needs to get to 2%.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
