NOTE: Mark Tapscott is Senior Congressional Analyst at The Washington Stand and former Executive Editor of the Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner. I am very grateful for his outstanding review of my new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, on sale now! — RDM
by Mark Tapscott
October 8, 2026
Only once or twice in a generation does a conventional wisdom-rupturing book come along like Rod Martin’s Trump’s New World Re-Order: Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule.
While bowing to Thomas Kuhn’s familiar landmark, I avow this one could as credibly be titled “The Structure of American Political Revolution.” Martin shows us how and why the Political Establishment erected by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression nears its final gasps, and is being replaced by a modern-day re-ordering and revitalization of the Constitutional Republic founded in 1787.
Martin is quite capable of such work, having previously served as an adviser on PayPal’s pre‑IPO startup team, serving as special counsel to founder and CEO Peter Thiel. He also served as policy director to former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, as well as an officer of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. The value of such experiences is evident throughout Re-Ordering.
What is also evident on every page is Martin’s abundant intelligence and insight, as well as his eager willingness to learn from others, both their accurate observations and their fumbles.
Put most simply, Martin writes the first genuinely probing explanation for why America is how and where it is today, and what is ahead of us if men and women of faith, determination, and high principle display courage and fortitude of a piece with that seen in the Founders of this nation.
It’s impossible in a space as limited as this column to probe every detail of the case Martin’s presents, but allow me to capture the essence of the work, as he puts it in his introduction:
“Trump is not merely changing policies he dislikes. He is dismantling an entire order and building another. At home, he is dismantling the unaccountable technocratic state Franklin Roosevelt built in place of our constitutional system: the permanent government of “independent” agencies, credentialed “experts,” judges, NGOs, intelligence operatives, and bureaucrats who continue to rule regardless of whom the people elect.
“Abroad, he is replacing the globalist system Roosevelt’s generation built for the world of 1945: a system in which America carries the burdens, subsidizes its allies, tolerates mercantilism, dilutes its power through multilateral institutions, and is told that serving its own citizens is not only corrupt but shameful.
“Those two projects are not separate. They are of a piece: one restoration of sovereignty at two different scales. At home, elections have to matter. Abroad, nations have to matter—and American power has to serve the American people.”
For a succinct examination of the heart of how Trump is carrying out this dismantling and recreating, I encourage you to check out my piece for The Washington Stand entitled “‘Demographics-are-Destiny’ Deep-Dive Points to 2030 GOP Electoral Realignment.”
It is essential, regarding both Martin and myself, to understand that what is written herein is not remotely unqualified praise or agreement with only the second Chief Executive to serve two separated terms in the White House. Trump’s flaws, like those of everyone else, are many and varied.
That said, Martin points out that “geopolitics, like generations, is in many respects shaped by impersonal forces. But history is entirely personal. It is subject to a personal God, and it is repeatedly redirected by particular men: Alexander and Caesar, Washington and Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan. There are moments when institutions are exhausted, consensus has failed, and the future turns on whether one man can see what others cannot — and endure what others will not.”
It cannot be doubted that Trump has endured an unprecedented opposition that has sought for a decade to defeat, incriminate, humiliate, and finally silence him. He could have waved goodbye to it all in 2021, gone back to Mar-a-Lago and enjoyed his vast wealth. But he didn’t; he learned hard lessons from the first term, thought through strategies for a second term and is now carrying it out. That deserves respect because it is a grit and guts that is uniquely American.
Now, moving along, my purpose here is to do a deep-dive similar to the TWS effort but focused on two cornerstones in the foundation of analyses and logic that lead to Martin’s conclusion that American politics are nearing the dawning of a landmark realignment. To that end, we must examine both the linear and cyclic nature of history, and the varying roles played by successive generations. Thus, this column’s title above regarding the role of Gen Z in these matters.
Martin puts it this way regarding the ebbs and flows within and without human history:
“Throughout history, certain patterns reappear with unsettling regularity. Time is linear — the ancient pagans were wrong — but cycles spiral within the forward motion. Civilizations do not rise and fall linearly. Beneath the onward march of technology and progress, there are rhythms — cycles of cohesion and decay, faith and apostasy, construction and fire. The ancients saw this more clearly than we. What they missed was that these cycles don’t negate history’s forward motion — they shape its cadence.”
In other words, there are discernible and often repeated patterns in history, which given the unchanging nature of God and man shouldn’t surprise us. But those patterns function within a distinctively directional supervision afforded by factors like the march of technology. That march is epitomized, to cite but one example, by the movement from walking, to riding donkeys and horses, to driving automobiles, thence to winged flight and henceforth space travel.
“Modern Americans like to think we are exempt from such things. We are not. Our founding was a cycle-breaker, yes — but it was also a cycle-starter. Since that founding, our nation has moved through a series of roughly 80-to-90-year upheavals; existential crises that remade our institutions and redefined who we are. The American Revolution. The Civil War. The Great Depression and World War II. Each of these moments ended an old world and forged a new one.
“We are now in America’s fourth such moment. The pattern is unmistakable. The pillars of the postwar order — military, monetary, moral — are hollowing out. The center does not hold because the center is gone. America’s elites have failed: economically, culturally, strategically, morally. Trust is dead. Rage is rising. And the regime believes it can suppress all of this through mass censorship and coercion. It cannot. The old order is cracking. And underneath it, the fire is already lit.”
That’s a lot to bite off, which is another reason to check out my Washington Stand piece to make sense of the demographic and other factors fueling the movement (and then head over to Amazon and pre-order your copy of Martin’s book).
Martin forthrightly praises three of his most essential sources, George Friedman, William Strauss, and Neil Howe, three gentlemen of whom I was only vaguely aware beforehand. Here’s how “my friends” at ChatGPT describe them:
“George Friedman is a geopolitical analyst, author and forecaster, best known for founding Stratfor, the private geopolitical intelligence firm, and subsequently Geopolitical Futures. His signature book, The Next 100 Years (2009), forecasts shifts in global power, conflict and technology. His work emphasizes how geography, national interests and economic pressures shape countries’ behavior.
“Neil Howe is a historian, economist and author, best known for developing Strauss–Howe generational theory with the late William Strauss. Their books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) argue that American history follows recurring cycles of roughly 80–100 years, comprising four eras: a high, an awakening, an unraveling and a crisis. Howe updated that argument in The Fourth Turning Is Here (2023). Strauss and Howe also coined the term ‘Millennial Generation.’”
Relying mainly on Strauss and Howe in this particular sector of his work, Martin puts great emphasis on the four generational types in operation throughout the cycles within history:
1. Prophets (like the Baby Boomers): born after a Crisis, raised during a High, come of age during an Awakening (in the case of the Boomers, two at once: the hippies on one side, the Jesus people on the other). They are moralistic, values-driven, and focused on vision.
2. Nomads (like my own Generation X): born during the Awakening, they come of age during an Unraveling. They are skeptical, snarky, pragmatic, and toughened by neglect.
3. Heroes (like Millennials, or eighty years ago, the “Greatest Generation”): born during an Unraveling, come of age during a Crisis. They are institution-builders, team-oriented, and optimistic about reform.
4. Artists (like Gen Z): born during a Crisis, protected as children, and come of age in a post-Crisis world. They are sensitive, adaptive, and focused on healing.
While I, as a Boomer, would likely describe my generation in somewhat different emphases, Martin takes these four types and shows how they function within the movement of history:
“Each generation plays its part in the cycle, not because of fate, but because of formation. The conditions into which you are born shape how you view authority, purpose, and risk. The Boomers rejected their World War II-era parents’ conformity. Gen X rejected the Boomers’ otherworldly impracticality. Millennials, scarred by 9/11 and 2008, crave security and collective meaning. Gen Z, raised amid chaos and collapse, seeks authenticity and stability. This is not deterministic. It’s just human.”
Martin elaborates on the role of Gen X, noting that:
“Gen X, born between 1961 and 1981 in Strauss and Howe’s reckoning … we saw institutions crumble. We learned not to trust the experts or the system. We were those latchkey kids, children of divorce, shunted between different, war-ring parents. Millions of our would-be peers were killed in the womb by abortion. We were the first to be raised in an America that no longer even pretended everything was fine. No participation trophies. No helicopter parenting. We grew up watching the idealism of our boomer parents implode into narcissism, stagflation, and retreat.”
There was a pause in the chaos, thanks in great part to millions in my generation (myself included) who recognized in Ronald Reagan the values, courage and decisiveness we realized America so desperately needed. Martin continues:
“We also watched Ronald Reagan restore much of what had been lost and save the world from Soviet Communism and the ever-present (to us) fear of nuclear annihilation. We watched him do this in large part by rejecting the received wisdom and consensus and charting a new path.
“And we adapted. We became skeptical, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, antiauthoritarian. We didn’t expect the system to work for us — so we created our own. We are the builders of the modern tech economy, the veterans of the War on Terror, the quiet engines of American productivity and leadership through the last quarter-century of decline. We haven’t screamed for attention: We’re virtually invisible. Rather, we’ve quietly taken responsibility. Since childhood.”
And in taking responsibility, Martin sees his generation recovering and reconstituting the essence of the American Republic.
Will it happen? It certainly appears to this author to be in the formative stage, nearing the actual process of finally disposing of the old order.
But, as Martin acknowledges, there are no guarantees. And surveying the wreckage of the public schools, the collapse of respect for authority, the evaporating attention span spawned by digital dominance of daily life can lead one to a very different conclusion.
What counts going forward is this: What do you think?
— Mark Tapscott is Senior Congressional Analyst at The Washington Stand and former Executive Editor of the Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner. You can and should follow him at his Substack, Mark Tapscott’s Copy Desk.
