A Meditating Cowboy Runs for President: Dustin Dunbar’s Make America Whole Again

Most political books are written to make you angry. They pick a villain, sharpen the knife, and count on your outrage to sell copies. Dustin Dunbar’s Make America Whole Again sets out to do the opposite, and that alone makes it worth a look.

Dunbar is running for President in 2028 as an Independent, and his book doubles as a manifesto and a memoir. The premise is unusual for the genre: he argues that America’s political division isn’t really about policy at all. It’s a symptom. The real war, he writes, is inside us — an unhealed split we keep projecting outward onto the other party, the other coast, the other tribe. Fix the inside, and the outside starts to follow.

That framing comes straight from his own life, and the personal chapters are the strongest in the book. Dunbar grew up shuttling between Republican farming grandparents in Oklahoma and Democrat schoolteacher parents, and he never fully picked a side. He describes himself, memorably, as a “meditating cowboy” — Oklahoma grit crossed with a doctorate in Spiritual Psychology. He’s also candid about hitting bottom: alcohol addiction that cost him his marriage and nearly his life, followed by getting sober at 48 and rebuilding from the ground up. His central idea — “love with boundaries,” the notion that compassion without limits becomes chaos while limits without compassion become cruelty — reads as something he earned the hard way rather than something he workshopped.

Where the book gets ambitious is in scaling that principle up to national policy, and here readers will find plenty to chew on regardless of where they sit. Dunbar wants to flatten the federal bureaucracy into small, AI-assisted “pods,” deploy forensic AI to catch fraud the moment it happens, and create an “American Equity Fund” that gives ordinary citizens a stake in the AI economy. He makes a genuinely fiscally conservative case for enforceable international AI and nuclear rules — arguing it’s cheaper to build shared guardrails than to keep policing the world alone. Lighter chapters float a four-day workweek with Wednesdays off and a “Salt Revolution” of sodium-ion batteries to loosen America’s dependence on foreign lithium.

Not all of it will land for every reader. Some proposals are sketched more than engineered, and the spiritual register of the closing chapters — Dunbar is a self-described Christian mystic — will resonate with some and lose others. A skeptic will want harder numbers behind a few of the bigger claims. But the ideas are specific enough to argue with, which is more than most campaign books offer, and they refuse to sort neatly onto the usual left-right grid. That’s clearly the point.

What holds the book together is its tone. Dunbar genuinely seems to like his fellow Americans — all of them — and he writes like a neighbor rather than a candidate working a crowd. He closes with a single-page reminder to save the 988 crisis line, addressed to “MAGA Maniac, Woke Warrior, or something in between.” It’s a small gesture that captures the whole project: the belief that the person across the political aisle is still family.

You don’t have to buy every proposal to appreciate what Dunbar is attempting. In a season when we’re told relentlessly that the other side is the enemy, Make America Whole Again is a hopeful, big-hearted argument that the real work starts closer to home. Finally, a book about fixing the country instead of just yelling about the other side.

Nicole Killian