By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-10-21 04:26:31 | Updated at 2026-10-21 06:00:08
1 hour ago
In “Trump’s New World Re-Order,” author Rod D. Martin brings history and current events into focus, explaining the natural law and statutory law that anchor the policy of President Donald Trump’s second term.
From the executive’s obligation to deport, to Trump’s use of tariffs, to the legal cases that are rewriting case law (Chevron deference) Martin clarifies the transformation underway in the federal government.
Martin explains America First not as a retreat from international affairs but as a healthy ordering of priorities.
On America First, and Socialism
Nick Zifcak: You bring up Ordo Amoris, or the order of love. You also discuss how the left has undermined that principle.
Rod Martin: It’s an idea that comes from St. Augustine, of course, the very early centuries of the Church. The idea isn’t that you don’t love someone far away. You do love your neighbor as yourself, but you have a duty to those closest to you.
I have more of a duty to make sure my wife is fed and clothed and lives indoors, than I have to ensure that your wife does, because she has a husband. The idea is just very, very practical. It’s that my children are depending on me. Some random children in India aren’t depending on me in the same way. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care about them. It means that I have to take care of the home front first to be able to care for them. The left largely turns this on its head.
These are people who constantly tell us that America is the most oppressive, horrible place in the world. And also, everyone should have a right to come here.
It’s just nonsense, but again, it externalizes those duties to people far away, which is convenient from a socialist mindset because socialism is fundamentally about power.
Zifcak: In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is very popular. And he’s very popular, from my observation, because he addresses real problems that people face.
How do you get the voters to think about this when they support the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], which they feel is looking at the real problems they’re facing?
Martin: People say lots of things and they certainly want to persuade voters. … Sometimes they mean it. I mean, and I’m not saying that just in terms of Democrats, that’s also true of Republicans.
The point remains that the proof is in the pudding. Do you have a system that actually increases prosperity or increases poverty? Do you have a system that increases independence or dependence? That’s as true in domestic affairs as in international.
We have fostered a climate of dependence among our allies that is not beneficial to them. It does not help them. We don’t want to pull back from helping them. We want them to actually be able to help themselves. Because what if something happens to us? From beginning to end, the Ordo Amoris concept is really, really important.
Congress Delegated Power to the Executive
Zifcak: You discuss Congress delegating its legislative authority to federal bureaucracies. You’re not suggesting that Congress get into the nitty-gritty of rule making?
Martin: It would be better if Congress actually did its job. For Congress to do its job, we'd have to get realistic about the resources they have available. Have you been to a U.S. House member’s office? They’ve got like 15 23-year-olds, in a closet somewhere. They can’t run the government. That’s ridiculous. So we should get them proper sized office buildings and proper sized staff and pay them enough money that they can actually do the things they’re there to do. And until you do that, you’re never going to be able to solve the delegation problem.
But the problem isn’t that Congress delegates rulemaking power. That’s not the problem. The problem is that it isn’t accountable. And being accountable to Congress is very difficult. What we’re talking about in these agencies—it involves legislative power, it involves judicial power, but it is fundamentally executive power. That has to be responsible to an elected person. He’s called a president. So that’s how that must run for your vote to count. It’s fundamentally about being responsible to the voters every two to four years.
The Challenge of the CCP and China
Zifcak: You discuss China as a major challenge, but also about China being brittle.
Martin: Yes, China is very brittle, and it’s brittle for reasons, very specific reasons. First and foremost, it’s still a centrally planned economy. They can pretend that they’re capitalist. And I’ve heard some people, actually even some people I respect a lot, say that in some ways they’re more capitalist than the United States.
No, they’re not. Go into a board meeting in any company in China and guess what? There’s a CCP apparatchik in the back of the room who’s actually making the decisions. They go through the motions of corporate governance. They go through the motions of capitalism.
Chinese people’s ability to support their parents is collapsing at a time when the number of young people is shrinking and the number of old people is ballooning because of the one-child policy, which is really the biggest undercurrent of all.
It’s in about 10 years and it might be a little less or it might be just a little more, but you’ve got about a decade ahead. At the end of which, this snowballs, and you just have this huge number of elderly who have to be supported by this shrunken group of young working age people, and they just can’t do it. It’s combustible, it definitely could produce a counter revolution, but more than that, it just means in terms of development economics, they’re going to get old before they get rich. And there’s just no way to avoid it now.
Zifcak: The midterms are approaching. What do you hope that voters, readers take away from your book?
Martin: We are in the beginning phases of an industrial supercycle. You’re seeing that in the capital expenditure boom. You’re seeing that in manufacturing growth. Elon Musk is about to build a semiconductor fab that is actually a little bigger than TSMC’s biggest in Taiwan. We’re just seeing incredible upsurges in all of the things that create really high-paying, middle-class blue collar jobs, which is what we lost over the last 30 years.
Because our politicians in both parties told us for 30 years, “Oh, those jobs are never coming back. We can never compete with all that cheap labor somewhere else.”
Well, yes, we can because our labor is more productive. It’s better educated in most cases. And it’s here. We’re 26 percent of the world’s economy. Everybody’s exporting here. Isn’t it easier to just make it here?
I am encouraged to note that Donald Trump is actually much more astute in his history, perhaps, than people think he is. So he’s perfectly aware that the odds are against him, that it wouldn’t matter what you did, the president’s party always loses the midterms. The president’s party, of whichever party, has won the midterms about three times in living memory. So it almost never happens. So he has orchestrated a plan designed to survive the Democrats taking the House. And I think he knows what he’s doing. Still, the midterms are very important.
