Guest Post: Trump Unleashes Gen X to Save America (Here’s why it might work)
My friend, former Representative Clay Cox penned this post. We Gen-Xers are the generation of Slacker, but also Red Dawn. I’ve long thought we are the generation with the skepticism and cynicism needed to slay the government behemoth. Has Trump 2.0 recruited the right Gen-Xers to get the job done? Rep. Cox thinks so.
President Trump’s second-time-around advisors and cabinet are full of people who spent their childhoods as, what today’s new parents call “free-range” kids, and then came of age in the 80s and 90s: Sean Duffy, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Doug Collins, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Lee Zeldin, etc, Gen Xers all, with Vice President JD Vance missing the cut by a year or two.
As an X-er myself, I can tell you that the common trait making each of these people great choices to lead is one that might surprise: confusion. Imagine growing up in an America where, as a kid, you rarely heard your parents talk about the federal government. Oh sure, we learned about what went on in Washington D.C., and even took a fifth-grade trip there (by train). But for the average Gen-X kid, the federal government was the Army or the Post Office. It simply wasn’t something we thought much about, as it wasn’t the invasive, controlling behemoth whose thumb we live under today.
Upon entering high school, we became more aware of government, largely because we were told by our president that, even then, it was too big and not the solution to our problems, which was fine, because the same guy consistently told us America was the “greatest country in the world”, “the shining city on the hill, a place where anyone could succeed”. We believed it. In home room, we stood for the pledge of allegiance each morning, then bowed for the moment of silence, and to do otherwise literally didn’t cross our minds.
We were also the first generation to learn about MLK and the civil rights movement in school. That message was also hopeful and simple: It was stupid that previous generations hated because of race. Race shouldn’t matter; it MUST not matter. This obvious truth was reinforced by everyone’s heroes of the day. Every kid wanted to play like Michael Jordan or dance like Michael Jackson. Our moms watched Oprah, and we saw Bill Cosby’s Huxtables as the ideal American family. When we graduated high school America was on top of the world, the cold war was won, communism defeated and racial bigotry seemed not only ridiculous, but coming to an end. It truly was Ronald Reagan’s morning in America.
Now imagine the same Gen-Xers living through the era of woke; being told everything we were raised to believe was wrong and our tightly held, fundamental values were the problem. We were expected to accept America=bad, socialism=good, an unlimited number of genders and that race is the most important thing about a person. The result: confusion. However, with an open mind, we attempted to apply these new wave principles to our lives, only to watch our culture crumble, our freedoms of speech, choice and expression attacked and our government grow out of control.
But no more. America has tried it both ways, and the verdict is in. Woke doesn’t work for anybody but freedom works for everybody. And President Trump has unleashed Generation X- with a new clarity- to put things right.
Clay Cox is a former State Representative from Gwinnett County, Georgia and can be reached at claycox6-at-gmail.com.
