DV Journal

History has repeated with Donald Trump’s journey back to the White House, trumpeted by the widely embraced “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogan. However, another week of economic turmoil makes me wonder whether “greatness” is the target we should be seeking. Why not “Make America Happy Again”?

Seen constantly for the better part of a decade on the president’s signature red baseball caps —  as well as on bumper stickers, other merchandise and even the sides of barns — MAGA is more than just a slogan. It’s a globally recognized brand.

The words are mnemonic and adaptable. Upon being sworn into office in January, Trump promised to stop inflation and “Make America Affordable Again” — a winning political idea if ever there was one. He also pledged that steps would be taken to secure the borders and “Make America Safe Again.” Then, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was named Health and Human Services secretary, Trump promised to “Make America Healthy Again.”

Most recently, when imposing new tariffs on nations far and wide and calling it “Liberation Day,” the president said the action would “Make America Wealthy Again.” Those watching financial markets collapse undoubtedly thought otherwise, and the president partly (and possibly temporarily) backed down.

Given all this and for other good reasons, maybe this is the time to Make America Happy Again. Let’s add “MAHA” to the mix.

After all, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is what the Founding Fathers claimed as the nation’s national purpose. To be sure, feeling safe, happy and prosperous makes it easier. In some ways, the reverse might also be true, and achieving some degree of happiness might enable people to feel safe, healthy, and like their resources are adequate.

In other words, can a nation be great if its population is unhappy?

And that’s where the rub comes in. In the most recent 2025 World Happiness Report, America dropped to 24th among the 147 nations listed, our lowest ranking ever and far below an 11th-place finish in 2012.

And where were people, by their own reckoning, happiest? Following top-ranked Finland were Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, Norway, Israel, Luxembourg and Mexico.

Specifically, the ranking is based on responses to this question: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

A quick glance at the top countries suggests what one would expect: that higher income yields greater happiness, though not systematically. Deeper research indicates that if America entered a golden age, as Trump promised, happiness would increase for most people. However, as two Princeton University researchers have shown, a persistent share of miserable people would not get happier no matter how much their incomes increased. (I think most of us recognize this.)

Of course, some deep problems must be resolved if America is to become happy again. “Death of despair” — drug overdose, alcoholism and suicide — is now the leading cause of death for people in the 1-to-44 age bracket. According to the Trust for America’s Health, “between 2002 and 2022, the combined rate of deaths due to alcohol, drugs and suicide has increased by 142 percent, from 74,003 deaths in 2002 to 207,827 deaths in 2022.” A significant upward acceleration started with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Happiness is an elusive thing, but it’s still a fundamentally worthy goal for a nation to pursue. Trump seems to believe there is too much despair in America and that security, prosperity and health are essential remedies. In these early months of his new administration, the chessmen are just beginning to be arranged on the playing board, so to speak.

Every time the pieces are nearly set up, some key Trump player, or Trump himself, turns the board over. Uncertainty, as measured by the weekly Economic Policy Uncertainty index, is approaching an all-time high, and consumer confidence is headed south.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s results will Make America Happy Again.  Ultimately, it’s up to us to find our own happiness. Some of the president’s proposals could help — as would less economic upheaval.

Ask Ohio Republicans about filling the U.S. Senate vacancy created by Sen. JD Vance becoming vice president, and two names come up right away: Donald Trump and Sherrod Brown.

Trump has won Ohio in three consecutive presidential races, and Gov. Mike DeWine has made it clear anyone he picks to fill the seat must have the support of MAGA Republicans to avoid a divisive GOP primary in 2026.

“It has to be someone who could win a primary. It has to be somebody who could win a general election, and then two years later, do it all again,” DeWine has said. “So, this is not for the fainthearted. This is not for someone who just wants a seat.”

And a priority among Buckeye State Republicans is that the candidate can handle heavyweight competition from the Democrats, including a possible attempt to return to Washington by recently ousted U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.

After a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago with DeWine, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted is getting some attention. Supporters say he’s got a lot going for him: good looks, lots of friends, a kind smile, and a successful political career. But what he doesn’t have is the thing he probably needs most – the support of MAGA.

Husted was Ohio’s secretary of state in 2016 when Donald Trump was first running for president, and in the weeks before the election, when Trump said he was concerned it might be rigged against him, Husted said it was “irresponsible” for the Republican nominee to make such a comment. “We should not question the legitimacy of the American election system,” Husted said.

Trump apparently forgave him, as Husted was asked to warm up the crowd at a Trump rally at Dayton International Airport in September 2020. But when Husted came out wearing a mask (albeit a Trump mask), and tried to make a joke about making masks great again, he was loudly booed by the crowd, with one person yelling: “Get off the stage!”

Susan Daniels, a conservative activist in the Cleveland area, recently sent an email to a large list of friends with the subject line: “‘NO’ to Jon Husted for JD Vance’s Senate seat.”

“He’s bad news all around and is a RINO. He is the Republican version of the slimy Sherrod Brown,” she wrote.

Among the other frequently mentioned candidates — Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Rep. Mike Carey, former Ohio Republican Party Chair Jane Timken and attorney Mehek Cooke — the one who’s closest to the MAGA movement is Carey.

A former energy industry lobbyist and self-declared outsider, Carey won a multi-candidate Republican primary for the 15th Congressional District in a special election in August 2021. The district stretches from the western suburbs of Columbus to Dayton and includes several rural counties dotted with small towns.

Carey won the GOP primary with the endorsement of Donald Trump, and he has been an outspoken supporter of the president-elect.

In Congress, Carey serves on the powerful Ways and Means Committee and the House Administration Committee, which investigated the role of Mark Zuckerberg’s money (“Zuckerbucks”) in the 2020 campaign through the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

State Rep. Jeff LaRe, who represents a district just outside Columbus, ran against Carey in the 2021 special election GOP primary. Today he’s urging DeWine to pick the congressman.

“I got to know Mike as a competitor,” he told InsideSources. “He proved he has the ability to pull out a victory in a contentious primary. That’s going to be important because whoever Gov. DeWine appoints is going to have to run nonstop.”

One possible objection is DeWine’s expressed concern about taking another member from the GOP’s extremely slim majority in the House of Representatives. “It’s a reality of where we are today after the president took a few,” DeWine has said.

But a veteran Ohio GOP strategist with connections to several of the potential picks told InsideSources on background that the size of the majority has already become so narrow it’s no longer a factor. “On this question on the majority, there is no functional difference between 216, 217, and 218. Anything of real controversy, or if there is a division in the caucus, that vote would have to wait until April, anyway.”

Much more important, the strategist said, is being able to stop three-term Democrat Brown, who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno in November, from making a comeback.

“We worked so hard to finally defeat him, and we don’t want to reopen that door.”

Carey outperformed Moreno in his district by almost 18,000 votes.

Carey also has the support of the Columbus Fire Fighters Union IAFF Local 67 and the Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters, the state’s largest union of firefighters.

“Mike has been fantastic to us,” said Steve Stein, the president of the union. One positive, according to Stein, is Carey’s experience in Congress. “It’s tough for Ohio to lose someone like Sen. Sherrod Brown, with his seniority in the Senate. But Mike has experience on the Hill. We’d love to see someone like him tapped for that role.”

For another viewpoint, see: Counterpoint: The War on Woke is Scam on Middle America

Critics can’t agree on what “woke” means. Going back a bit into our history is the idea of Black people being “woke” from the oppression of the White man and what we, as a society, can do about it. However, the term has been appropriated for a variety of left-wing causes.

On the other side of this is MAGA. What is this MAGA movement, and what does it mean to be in it?

Like woke, being MAGA is also hard to define.

Most political movements have difficulty defining themselves, and finding the right label has been a challenge.

For example, I’m a libertarian republican, but hawkish. A contradiction in our basic political terminology. Just as calling me MAGA would be inaccurate, so, perhaps too, is calling me conservative, depending on who’s talking at any given moment.

The woke idea has been appropriated mainly by White liberals at the expense of Black people and has come with such force because the authoritarian tendencies from the left leave you woke or out of the crowd.

The White liberal political groupthink that comes with the term, and the movement for transgender rights, a mainly trendy White problem, continues to transform as Whites exploit civil rights for White aims. Woke, at this point, varies from non-racist or even anti-racist to acculturate leftist movements that have little to do with whether I’m going to be gunned down by police while eating a donut.

Like woke, MAGA has become a word and a movement taken from its small-government, dovish roots and hijacked, not from liberal authoritarian Whites but Christian nationalist authoritarian Whites and/or the alt-right.

Instead of reveling in shrinking the government and protecting borders, MAGA has become a rallying cry for a minority of White conservatives who see a browning America and want to make adjustments to the racial harmony of the country. Some commenters at the Charlottesville, Va., rally went so far as to advocate for a country that is 85 percent White and Christian. Where the hell does that come from? Donald Trump certainly never, ever, suggested anything like this.

Woke and MAGA appear to be at odds with each other, but they have some similarities in goals that are worth noting. Not to silence the cries of Black people with legitimate complaints, MAGA wants more police training and more funding for law enforcement. If the left thinks more money will fix the schools, why won’t it fix the police? Why is it anti-woke to even suggest it?

At the heart of the Black community are serious deficits in education. Like the GOP before it, MAGA seeks to push hard for school vouchers. Not because White donors can’t afford it but because too many Black students can’t. They want those kids in school with their kids, and the right-wing fight against the soft segregation of public school districts is noteworthy and important.

While we’ll continue to hear authoritarians try to use terminology and labels to divide the public by race, religion and partisanship, we must remember that our struggles and hardships end up hurting us all the same, even after the division. The question we should be confronting is how these terms are used to divide us, and we should be answering it by seeing our common enemy and fighting that instead.

To be woke is to be MAGA, as both movements are about ensuring an equitable and fair society. A society where the nation’s underclasses, across racial lines, have been abandoned by the institutions that govern us and the leaders of movements primarily interested in enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

We need to ignore these labels to establish a consensus in moving America forward and finally making America great again for everyone.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For another view, see “McGarrigle: Why Voters Should Vote for Republicans.”

On Tuesday, November 8, Americans will once again head to the polls to exercise one of our most important rights – the right to vote. This year, however, the stakes are higher than they have ever been before as the differences between candidates go beyond policy.

Rather, we are choosing between those who believe in truth, democracy, and freedom and those who embrace dangerous election lies, hateful rhetoric, and political violence. The best way to protect our democracy, keep the government out of our bedrooms and doctors’ offices, and stop the spread of MAGA extremism is to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot.

It should come as no surprise that in normal election cycles, I also strongly believe that voting for Democrats is the best decision. Ordinarily, that is for policy reasons. But there is nothing ordinary about this year. We have one party – the Republican Party – that has been taken over by far-right extremists, including some calling for violence against our elected officials and institutions.

The Republicans are not even pretending to appeal to moderates anymore. Their platform calls for, among other things, a national ban on abortion; support for total and absolute gun rights; rejection of sound climate science and backward-looking energy policies that prop up the fossil fuel industry; drastic cuts and changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid relied on by millions of citizens; elimination of the Affordable Care Act which would lead to loss of insurance and coverage for pre-existing conditions for millions of Americans; and, of course, more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, forcing the tax burden down onto middle-class Americans and shockingly, even the poorest among us.

Moreover, we have the continued assault on our electoral system based on the “big lie” created by former President Donald Trump and his allies. We are learning every day just how deep and terrifying this assault really is. Across the country, Republicans are trying to take over election boards, county commissions, city councils, and school boards to force their dangerous view of the world on the rest of us.

We are seeing these forces at work right here in Pennsylvania where the Republican candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, has made controlling elections, through his power to appoint the secretary of state and certify voting machines, a central tenet of his campaign. He supports a complete ban on abortion, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or even the health of the mother, and even supports charging a woman who had an abortion with murder.

His historically extreme education policy would cut public education funding by half and he has vowed to turn Pennsylvania into the Florida of the North. No, thank you. Beyond Harrisburg, our U.S. Senate and House races are also vital for protecting our democracy. If Republicans take control of the U.S. House and Senate all progress stops in terms of fighting inflation, global warming, women’s rights, common-sense gun control, civil rights, and protecting our elections.

That’s why we here in Chester County need to throw our support behind Democratic candidates at all levels, from our state legislature, to governor, to the House of Representatives, to the U.S. Senate. Our very democracy is on the ballot in November and there is only one party intent on preserving it, for everyone.

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