When the active-duty Air Force and Missouri Air National Guard bomber crews who attacked the Fordow uranium enrichment plant in Iran went to work last Friday, they kissed their loved ones goodbye, not knowing when or if they’d be home. That’s when their families became aware something was happening.

“When those jets returned from Whiteman on Sunday, their families were waiting, flying American flags and shedding tears of pride and relief,” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week.

The jets rejoined into a formation of four, pitching out to land right over the base — a landing Caine said was greeted by incredible cheers and tears from the families who sacrifice and serve right alongside the pilots.

“One commander told me this is a moment in the lives of our families that they will never forget,” Caine said at a press conference Thursday at the Pentagon. “That, my friends, is what America’s joint force does. We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we test, we evaluate every single day. And when the call comes to deliver, we do so.”

It was a moment of consequence, excellence, leadership and guts.

In the past 12 days, some of the most consequential decisions in American history, those that will affect generations and leave a substantial impact on our culture, economy and political alignment, have been made either by President Donald Trump or because of him. But they have been largely either downplayed or not fully analyzed in terms of how they all connect.

The U.S. Steel deal between the iconic American company and Nippon Steel happened because of Trump’s ability to apply pressure through negotiations that sometimes bewildered everyone involved. But they led to the literal reversal of fortune of an industry, from the additional supply industries that include mechanics, construction workers, transportation systems such as railways, and energy.

The 50% tariffs Trump announced the day he visited the U.S. Steel plant in West Mifflin were also seen by American manufacturers as a signal that Trump was committed to revitalizing American steel mills. It also signaled an overall mandate to reshore manufacturing in the country.

While much of Wall Street warned that the tariffs would cause a widespread recession, a former critic of the tariffs, Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, did an about-face and wondered if Trump outsmarted everyone, laying out a scenario that keeps tariffs well below Trump’s most aggressive rates long enough to ease uncertainty.

That a steelworker or a welder working for a defense contractor would watch what happened to Iran’s nuclear program and feel a part of it is a nuance in American journalism that is often missed.