Air Force Reverses This Biden Administration Decision on Ashli Babbitt

 

The U.S. Air Force will provide full military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran fatally shot inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by then-Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd.

The development comes after Judicial Watch wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urging him to “make a new determination granting military funeral honors” for Babbitt, which had been denied by the Biden administration. Senior counsel Robert Sticht asked Hegseth to consider two recent updates related to the case.

First, on January 20, 2025, President Trump granted clemency for certain offenses relating to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Presidential proclamation states, “This proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.” President Trump (a) commuted the sentences of certain individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021; (b) granted a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted  of [similar] offenses….

Second … on July 2, 2025, the United States of America paid a damage award of nearly five million dollars to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Judicial Watch and I brought forward on behalf of the Estate of Ashli Babbitt and her husband Aaron Babbitt to ensure justice and accountability for the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021. Once again, Gen. Kelly's denial of military funeral honors for Ashli's funeral cannot be reconciled with this landmark legal settlement. Many well-documented facts now clearly show that the fatal shooting was not justified.

For example, Ashli was the only official homicide on January 6, 2021. Ashli, age 35, was unarmed when she was fatally shot. She stood 5’3’ tall and weighed 115 pounds. Her hands were up in the air, empty, and in plain view of Lt. Byrd and four armed officers behind him. Seven additional armed officers were behind Ashli, including four Containment and Emergency Response Team officers. Ashli posed no threat to the safety of any officer nor any Member of Congress who stayed after Member evacuation. Ashli was begging officers to call for backup before she was shot. Officers ignored Ashli. The only shot fired that day was the one Lt. Byrd fired to kill Ashli. Lt. Byrd was not in uniform. Lt. Byrd did not identify himself as a police officer or otherwise make his presence known to Ashli. Lt. Byrd also did not give Ashli any warnings or commands before firing the shot that killed her. Ashli never saw Lt. Byrd because he was hidden from her view. She was ambushed and defenseless. Multiple witnesses at the scene yelled, “you just murdered her.” Lt. Byrd later told the world on NBC Nightly News that he “had no clue” about the individual he shot. “I didn't even know it was a female until hours, way later ... that night,” he said. (Judicial Watch)]

Persuaded by developments since the initial request was denied in 2021 and the circumstances of her death, Under Secretary of the Air Force Matthew L. Lohmeier wrote to Babbitt's husband and mother telling them he believe the "previous determination was incorrect." 

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton praised the decision. 

“Ashli Babbitt’s family is grateful to President Trump, Secretary Hegseth and Under Secretary Lohmeier for reversing the Biden Defense Department’s cruel decision to deny Ashli funeral honors as a distinguished veteran of the Air Force,” said Fitton. “Judicial Watch’s team spent years investigating, litigating, and exposing the truth about Ashli’s homicide. Judicial Watch is proud to have done its part in bringing her family a measure of justice and accountability for Ashli’s outrageous killing. And our battle for justice will continue.”

Which Democrat Will Merge Into the 2028 Sane Lane?

 

Supposedly, the tiresome comedy stylings of Gavin Newsom – he’s the equivalent of a Wednesday night prop comic opener down at the Gooberville Giggle Works – have thrust him into the forefront of the Democrat race for the 2028 nomination. What a sad and pathetic state of affairs that is. He’s trying to claim the Fighter Lane. You see, he fights by hiring a couple of they/them mediocrities to run his social media account, pumping out an endless series of tweets that are nearly as funny as leprosy. They are directed at Trump, who ignores them; if a nitwit tweets in the forest, does it make a sound? This is fighting in the eyes of the Democrat activist class; this is pathetic in the eyes of normal people.

A lot of them are trying to crowd into the Fighter Lane. We need somebody who’s going to fight the perilous peril that is Donald Trump and his authoritarian authoritarianism that’s literally fascist Nazism! Of course, the fighting is entirely performance art. You’ve got Pete Buttigieg out there promising to fight. This Navy veteran – he’s all yours, swabbies! – looks less like a bruiser than someone you want to give a wedgie, and who would eagerly receive it. Illinois governor/behemoth JB Pritzker seeks to waddle into the fighter lane, too, though if he does, he’s going to have to wear a sign on his back reading “Wide Load.” Well, he does have weight on his potential opponents – he outweighs all of them put together – but the dude’s not going to have endurance for the long haul; he breaks a sweat resting.

The Fighter Lane would be crowded just with JB alone, but with Gov. Hairstyle, Alfred McKins-E Neuman, Spartacus Booker, Big Chief Warren, and others potentially competing, the smart play would be to seek another lane. Call it the Sane Lane. That’s the lane where the candidate embraces normality and lets the lunatics tear each other apart over their total dedication to left-wing insanity and hatred of Trump.

What does the Sane Lane look like? Well, it looks a lot like the way we ended up with Bill Clinton. For those of you who weren’t around when Bill Clinton came out of nowhere in 1992 – he had been the governor of a southern state and was known primarily for giving the longest and most boring Democrat convention speech in history. He did it despite having a libido limited only by the angle of his Peyronie’s disease. He did it because he had some charisma, and he took the radical position that crime is bad and people should work instead of getting welfare

Yes, at the time, most Democrats were saying the same kind of thing that the Democrats now are saying about crime and people working instead of being on welfare. They were for crime and against people working instead of being on welfare. But Bill Clinton understood that normal Americans did not see things that way. He was liberal on everything else, probably driven harder to the left by that hideous shrew of a wife, to the extent he ever interacted with her after allegedly implanting Chelsea. But the fact that he was willing to put criminals in jail and to make welfare cheats work had the effect of making it safe for normal people to consider him. The fact that he had a personality helped, too. After all, the cycle before, candidate Michael Dukakisbot had been unable to manage to say that he would want to off a guy who raped and murdered his wife. You know, if you can’t take the position that you’d want to waste a guy who did your spouse, you’re certainly not going to protect the rest of us.

Bill Clinton won by merging into the Sane Lane. But who’s going to do that this time? The Sane Lane is wide open, just waiting for somebody normal to come along.

Now, it’s not only going to be crime and welfare where the Democrat choosing to race down the Sane Lane is going to have to be a heretic. No, the Democrats have managed to embrace a much wider variety of bizarre social pathologies that normal people totally reject than they espoused back in 1992, and they were pretty sick weirdos then. Today, the Democrats as a whole are on the 20 percent side of 80 percent issues like mutilating kids to conform to their Munchausen mommies’ delusions, allowing perverted dudes in locker rooms and on playing fields with girls, open borders, urban chaos, and DEI, to name a few. 

And it’s not just pure policy positions. It’s, if not charisma, at least not being a repellant weirdo. Bill Clinton seemed pleasant, perhaps a bit of a rascal. He did not give the impression that he hated working-class people; instead, he gave the impression that he understood and appreciated them. That’s hard to grasp for the typical smug blue-bubble professional managerial class Democrat whose closest brush with people who work for a living is asking his illegal alien nanny to make sure that Kaden’s steel-cut oats are gluten-free.

There are some other candidates who might try the Sane Lane. Gretchen Whitmer is one (HT @NanHayworth). Sure, Michigan sends out mos def Stepford Wife vibes, but she knows her state and understands that she needs the votes of people who used to be Dems but voted for Trump. Still, it’ll be hard for her to distance herself from the obsessions of her suburban Chardonnay lady demo – assuming she tries to.

I recently wrote about Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman who makes an effort not to come across as hating the normies. That’s his selling point, and it’s a big one. But lately, he’s signed onto every leftist shibboleth that’s undulating out there in the ether. One of the things you’ve got to do if you’re going to be in the Sane Lane is have a Sistah Soulja moment. She was the third-tier rapper who wondered aloud why we didn’t have a Kill Whitey Week back in 1992. Today, that’s pretty much a plank of the Democrat platform; no one in the Fighter Lane would ever stand up and say, “No, I don’t think you ought to murder white people.” Trump would be against murdering white people, so most of them would have to be for it. But Bill Clinton said it, and that put him on the map. He went against the hard left of his party, solidifying the feeling of security normies had voting for him.

I expect Ro Khanna would concede that no, you shouldn’t murder white people, and since he’s a smart guy, he wouldn’t add a bunch of qualifiers to that like most of the other Democrat dummies would. But that’s about all you’re getting out of him. He doesn’t seem to hate MAGA folks. Everything else on the Democratic agenda he’s on board for, from DEI to taxing you into the poor house. Khanna makes a very good first impression – I found him likable and intelligent – but it’s the second impression that’s going to be a problem when he has to start explaining why he thinks some men menstruate, especially since he’s obviously too smart to believe that nonsense.

Rahm Emanuel is another Democrat who could conceivably try out a test ride in the Sane Lane. He’s recently been on with Hugh Hewitt and Megyn Kelly, and he tries to come across as reasonable. He agrees that boys should not play in girls’ sports and concedes that this is going to put a target on his back from his left. But that’s as far as he goes. When you start pushing him on whether he thinks children should be castrated to conform to delusions of being the other gender, he’ll pivot to tell you the real problem is that we don’t give enough money to public school teachers. It’s going to be hard driving in the Sane Lane if your party’s enforcers require you to embrace insanity.

But what if there was a sane Democrat candidate, one who could pass as normal, one who could forthrightly say that crime is bad, that we shouldn’t discriminate against anybody based on immutable characteristics, and that the trans stuff has gone from treating weird people with respect to putting them on a pedestal at the expense of everyone else? One who could say, “You know, Trump is right not to want black and other people to get murdered in our blue cities.” What if you had a Democrat who just wanted things to be normal, which is what Joe Biden said he wanted but didn’t deliver – though, in his defense, he was a human eggplant who was too senile to form a coherent sentence. And what if this hypothetical candidate came out and said that he opposes Trump, but he doesn’t think Trump is Hitler, and he doesn’t think Trump's supporters are Nazis?

That’s one heck of a needle to thread, adhering to Democrat ideology at some level while repudiating enough of it to win normies without alienating the blue hair brigades. The Democrats are coming off the 2024 defeat that they still don’t understand. They think it’s because Kamala was a drunken mid-wit trollop, which is true, but not the reason she lost. America would be happy to have a drunken mid-wit trollop who created a booming economy, security, and a sense of normalcy. Kamala lost because a majority of Americans despise the kind of cultural, economic, and political nonsense the Democrat Party stands for. But the Democrats are stuck in a Seymour Skinner death spiral: “No, it’s the voters who are wrong.”

This means the Democrats are going to think that the answer is to go harder left, and you find that in the Fighter Lane, not the Sane Lane. What needs to happen is what happened in 1972 and 1984, elections following the loss of an alleged moderate. They need to get beaten so badly that their desire to win overcomes their desire to please the left. And for that reason, in 2028, the Sane Lane is probably going to dead-end.

How Left-Wing Ideology Fuels Crime and Chaos

 

Recently, there’s been almost an epidemic of left-wing hysteria about violence, murder, and people who commit violent crimes.

It’s more than just hysteria. There’s been an effort to defend people that commit heinous crimes or almost glorify them or just neglect the severity of their crimes on innocent people.

It takes various manifestations. But it does reveal and illustrate this element of leftism, that it’s heartless, it’s cruel, it’s cold. It’s almost as if, to make an omelet, you have to break, as Josef Stalin said, a few eggs.

I’ll give you a few examples.

We have over 600 sanctuary jurisdictions. And that means that in these areas of states, cities, and counties, when an illegal alien commits a crime and he’s apprehended and he is not legally in the United States, these jurisdictions will not turn him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a Department of Homeland Security agency. They will not do it.

In other words, they’re saying to all of us: “We would rather let these people out—and they do get out—and maybe commit crimes, and that’s a price we’ll pay, in opposition to border security.”

We see another manifestation with President Donald Trump’s 30-day takeover. It’s not a takeover. It’s an augmentation of the Washington, D.C., police forces by bringing in federal forces. And for the first time in decades, there has been an eight-day period where there hasn’t been a single murder in Washington, D.C. The residents seem very happy, although careful not to express that joy because it’s contrary to the mainstream leftist governance of the city.

But what’s weird is Trump is getting lambasted by mostly wealthy, white, protected liberals, that he’s an autocrat, a dictator for coming into Washington and trying to help people live normal lives in the inner city.

Again, the theme is they don’t care about the number of people, this week, that have been saved from either being killed or maimed or wounded. But there are two or three other examples that are even more egregious.

We all remember the Department of Government Efficiency 19-year-old, Edward Coristine. I hope I can mention his nickname without seeming foul, but he was called “Big Balls.” And he worked for Elon Musk. He was attached to the Social Security department, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Health and Human Services, etc., looking at the budgets of these various Cabinet divisions.

He was walking late in Washington, D.C., after a gathering. A young woman left ahead of him. He was worried that she shouldn’t have been walking a short distance alone to her car. When he followed her, he heard her scream.

There were 10 young thugs. They were trying to carjack her car and hurt her. She was confronting them. He ran over, pushed her in the car, tried to get her secure. She locked the car. Then he faced off with these 10 people, and he was beaten to a pulp, as you would expect.

Two of them, the prime suspects, were arrested, detained. And of course, a local judge in Washington, D.C., a liberal-appointed judge, let them out. They’re out now stalking people again, no doubt.

But the point is, a lot of people on social media and the Left said, “Why should we worry about a wealthy, basically, white kid, who gets roughed up a bit? Is that why Donald Trump went into Washington? And if so, we don’t really care.” It was very heartless.

It reminded me, very recently, do you remember the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson? He was a person from the middle class, was born without status or advantages or money, and he worked himself up to the leadership position of one of the largest health care concerns in the United States.

And Luigi Mangione—a 25- or 26-year-old wealthy, well-educated kid, high status, privileged—decided that he was an enemy of the people because health care was not universal and UnitedHealthcare may have refused coverage to certain people in need. So, he decided he was going to kill him. And he did kill him. He murdered him. It’s on tape.

And what was the reaction of the Left? Some on the left canonized him. They even made a play about him here on the West Coast. He is a folk hero. A former Washington Post reporter did an interview and talked about how magnetic he was, how good looking he was.

There was one other example. There was a Blackstone—that’s a real estate investment firm in New York—executive, a very successful young woman in her 40s, Wesley LePatner. And a deranged or angry—I don’t know what we would call him—young man walked in broad daylight with a semi-automatic weapon.

He was angry because he felt he should have been given a chance to go to the National Football League. And he had a vague idea where the National Football League headquarters was in Manhattan. He burst in through security. He didn’t even get up to the NFL. Instead, he saw various other offices that had nothing to do with his grievance. And he shot and killed three people. One of them was Wesley LePatner.

She was a 42- or 43-year-old mom, very successful, all well-liked. It was a horrendous accident. And yet, when you looked at the social media response, it was very similar to Ed Coristine’s action that earned him sarcasm or criticism, very similar to Luigi Mangione, who was, as I said, made a hero for murdering someone.

In this case, the shooter was contextualized. People said, “You know what? She makes thousands of dollars per minute. I’m not going to worry that she was offed by somebody who was from the underclass.”

What is the common denominator of all of this new leftism? It’s sort of Stalinistic. It basically says:

For the greater good of the revolution, there are enemies of the people. We don’t wanna know what their independent circumstances are. We don’t really care if they’re moms or nice people, if they’re bad people. All we know, in our Marxist binary, they’re on the wrong side of the ledger. They’re the victimizers and the poor people who were murderers or are thugs and assaulted them, they were the victimized. They had a perfect right. We’re gonna weigh in.

In other words, it’s one of the most heartless and disturbing aspects of contemporary, popular culture, and it’s pretty much the domain of the Left: “We can use violence, any means necessary, to hunt down and kill enemies of the people, or hit, assault, rough up people that we feel are not sufficiently sympathetic to the underclass.”

It should stop because it leads to a French revolutionary, Jacobin chaos, if we’re not already there.

Why America’s Natural Ally, India, Is Pulling Closer to Russia and China

 

We’re currently in a little rough patch with India.

Narendra Modi, who’s been the prime minister for 11 years—a very powerful figure within India and a player on the national scene—he’s a center-right politician, if not, you know, unabashedly right-wing. So, he would be a natural partner for the United States under President Donald Trump. And they did have very close relations in the first term.

And Trump sees India as a large, English-speaking counterweight to China. It’s got 1.4 billion people. China’s a little bit bigger, but China has a falling—drastically falling—birth rate. India’s pretty steady.

So, India seems like it’s going to be more ascendant in the future, even more than China. And they’ve had a lot of border disputes along the Himalayan area, as they have with Islamic Pakistan. It’s also the largest democracy in the world.

So, you add up all of these ingredients and it seems like a natural ally of the United States in general and Donald Trump in particular: conservative governance, suspicious of China, democratic, English-speaking, closer to the United States than Islamic Pakistan, which has given us, you know, that was the sojourn or a base for Osama bin Laden.

And then, more importantly, Indian Americans are now numbering 5 million or 6 million people. We’ve opened the borders wide open to people immigrating from India. And they immigrate often with a lot. They have English facility—gets them a leg up on other immigrants. And more importantly, they come with capital and skills. And they’re a very influential minority, very successful minority in the United States. And we welcome them with open arms.

So, you would think that the Modi-Trump, Indian-American relationship would be great, but it’s not. And why isn’t it? Well, one reason is that India traditionally ran large surpluses with us, given their tariffs and our lack of tariffs for India. But recently, that has closed.

And now Indian economists and American economists and politicians disagree whether India has a big surplus with the United States in trade or a small—depending on how you count material goods, services, remittances, etc.

By the way, there’s about $35 billion to $40 billion in remittances that go to India. It’s right behind Mexico and Central America.

So, it should be a very profitable relationship, especially for India to have all of its citizens free to come to the United States. And millions apparently do, and they get billions of dollars in remittances. They run a trade surplus with us. And we have a lot of commonalities as English-speaking democracies. But we’re not.

And so, why aren’t we? One of the greatest problems is Donald Trump slapped a tariff. And he said, “India’s tariffs are too high.” And they replied, “Well, if you look at services and the other intangibles that I mentioned, maybe it’s not that bad. And we’re working on it.” But Trump really did put high tariffs on India.

The second thing is, India buys a huge amount of Russian oil, along with China. We’re talking about secondary boycotts in the Trump administration and the United States. And what I mean by that is Trump will put high tariffs, if not sanctions, on countries that buy oil—buy Russian oil. Not just Russia itself that sells its oil.

This is very controversial because in the Indian mind, we’re not going to, necessarily, sanction Germany or some Europeans that buy Russian energy, natural gas and oil. Nor have we taken on the Chinese juggernaut that buys Russian oil.

So, India is saying, “Why are you picking on us, a rival of China, and so much commonality?”

And Trump would reply: “Because you’ve been buying Russian oil for over three and a half years and fueling the Russian war machine that invaded Ukraine. And we’re now at delicate, critical periods in the Ukraine-Russian war. And if you were just to back off, voluntarily, the purchases of Russian oil, and maybe we could then pressure China and maybe I could consider tariffs.”

And Prime Minister Modi said, “No.” And he not only said no, but he wasn’t going to be bullied around. And one of the results is now he is triangulating with China and Russia. So, he’s developing better relations with his traditional rival and enemy, China, and he’s cementing his relations with Russia.

Remember, during the Cold War, Russia was very close to India. India was a veritable proxy of Russia. We backed Islamic Pakistan. So, in those wars between Pakistan and India, there was a Russian-American dimension. We were on the wrong side of it, in my opinion, because India was an English-speaking democracy. Pakistan was an Islamic autocracy, de facto.

But my point is that it has strong ties, historically, with Russia and it’s developing ties with China, and it’s pulling away from us, despite the fact that we allow them trade concessions, asymmetrical tariffs, generous remittances to be sent back. And it’s the second-largest immigrant group in the United States.

How’s it all going to end? We’ll see. A lot depends on the fate of the Ukraine war. If the Ukraine war were to end, we would restore friendly relations very quickly. If it doesn’t, things are gonna get worse.

Trump, Bolton, and the FBI Raid Details the Media Isn’t Telling You

 

. Last week, the FBI—under the aegis of the Department of Justice—raided John Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump during his first term. And they raided his home and his house. And they took away documents, which allegedly, the target of the raid were these documents.

Bolton was not arrested. He was not indicted. There was no effort aimed at him personally. But the accusation, apparently, was that he had removed classified documents.

Almost immediately, the Left and the “Never Trump” Right, said, “See, we told you Donald Trump is on a revenge tour. First it was John Brennan, and then James Clapper, then James Comey. He’ll go after Anthony Fauci. Anybody that doesn’t have a pardon is fair game.”

But there’s more to the story than that. In 2019, when Trump fired John Bolton as national security adviser, he was writing a book. And he sold that book on the premise that he had been in the room. The title was, essentially, “This happened in the room” or “What happened in the room.” And he took prodigious notes.

So, he was supposed to be this anti-Trump, high-level appointee and famous in the conservative circles as a war hawk and interventionist. But he had intimate knowledge about how Donald Trump functioned abroad with major allies and enemies and rivals and neutrals and how he was at home. And he wrote this damning book, memoir about Trump.

The Trump DOJ said, “He’s just trying to write this right during the campaign season. And he’s a surrogate for the Biden campaign, in his bitterness. He’s angry. But more importantly, he is using this classified information through the filter of the notes he took and he is going to hurt U.S. national security.”

So, they filed, the DOJ, a motion to stop the publication.

The book was almost out. A federal judge, Royce Lamberth, looked at it and he thought—he basically said, “Well, I can’t really stop the book. It’s gonna be released in a few days.” But in kind of a rare excursus, he said, “John Bolton, you’re doing something wrong. You are violating, likely, national security laws. And if you don’t stop, you’ll be subject, at some point, to criminal prosecution.” And then he let it rest.

Then the DOJ kept investigating. Donald Trump lost the election. During the transition, they looked at it—the Biden transition. When President Joe Biden came into office, they dropped it by June. Six months.

So now the question is, did they go in to get these documents last week because they were on a revenge tour? Retribution against Bolton because he’s been all over left-wing cable news, specifically CNN and, more importantly, MSNBC. And he’s been blasting Donald Trump on everything: the Iran bombing, the Ukraine war, using federal troops in Washington. And therefore, he made himself a target. And this is “old hat,” that he says. “Everybody has adjudicated this.”

There’s two things to watch to see whether Bolton is accurate. But I would, before I’d finish, by talking about those two criteria. I will say that when Donald Trump’s home was raided on Aug. 9, 2022, John Bolton spoke out. And he said, “Let’s not prejudge, you,” basically, you pro-Trumpers, “let’s just let all the evidence, you know, be seen before we make snap judgments.” Meaning, you know, he’s probably guilty.

But more importantly, then he said, “Donald Trump was just—anything that came across his desk. He saw french fries, he got ’em. He saw classified documents, he did, just because he could.” And then on another occasion, “He has no respect for classification. And that’s a lie, that he personally classified these.”

So, he was very critical of anybody who objected to what he thought was an FBI-legitimate raid on Mar-a-Lago.

Now it’s ironic. We’ll see if he uses the same tropes and themes to protect himself in the way that he blasted Trump about a similar raid. But what we’re looking at is to see if it was justified or whether it was vengeful. And if it’s just about an old matter four years ago that the Biden administration, for political reasons, dropped, but a federal judge said, “You know what? There’s something there,“ but it was dropped, to go back and rehash that I don’t think is gonna be worth it.

And maybe it was a vengeful shot across the bow to Bolton. He probably wouldn’t be charged. But also, to other people like Comey and Clapper and Brennan, Fauci, Mark Milley: “All of you, be careful. You’ve done something wrong and we’re gonna investigate you. And that’s gonna cost you a lot of money for legal counsel.” That would not be good, if that were true.

But here’s why I don’t think it’s quite like that. To get the FBI’s permission to go into the Bolton home, you had to have two different federal judges examine the request—the permission to enter the Bolton home and office. And they did give it. And they’re disinterested third parties.

Second, why did the Biden administration drop this investigation? They never even told us. And apparently, they dropped it because Bolton had become an ally of the Left. And they did not want to put him in legal jeopardy.

And third, and finally, there were leaks, rumors that the FBI went in there not to examine the old charges of his notes that were used improperly to write his critical anti-Trump book, but because there had been allegations, for a long time, that John Bolton transferred classified information. That doesn’t mean he downloaded attachments, necessarily—CIA or FBI analyses or national security assessments. It just meant that he was trying to transfer some information that he should not to his family, as if he could evade surveillance by intelligence authorities of any impropriety.

If he did that and he actually—as some of the rumors say—then it’s a different story. That would be new information.

And that would mean that John Bolton—maybe to write his notes, maybe to enhance his career as a consultant, or think tanker, or as an author, or just a gadfly—was going back and looking at things that transpired during his first-term service. And it was only a year. But nevertheless, to chronicle it, he didn’t just write it down in his notebook, which could be found and subpoenaed, but he sent emails to particular people, namely his family, to memorialize that. If that’s true, he has legal jeopardy.

So it’s either, likely, something that should not have happened—a vengeful tour, revenge, retribution, payback. I think, more likely, there’s something there or two—as I said—two federal judges would not have given permission to look. And if he did transfer files that were classified, the penalties fall under the Espionage Act. And they can be over 10 to 20 years in imprisonment.

So, we’ll see what’s going to happen. But meanwhile, the Left is alleging retribution. And the Trump DOJ and FBI said, “Just hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Wait till you read the actual request for an intervention or so-called raid. And let’s see what we found and then make an assessment.”

Trump, Putin, and the Future of Ukraine’s War

 

President Donald Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin last week for the much-anticipated summit, I guess we would call it, in Anchorage, Alaska.

Remember the last time American diplomats of a high ranking—Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, the respective secretary of state and national security adviser to the Biden administration—met with the Chinese, they were humiliated and nothing came of it.

Trump thought he could get a ceasefire. After three hours, both Trump and Putin came out to give statements to the press. There was no question-and-answer.

Putin gave a long harangue. How would you characterize it? It was mostly a recital of Russian grievances and the need to be friendlier to America. It was an outreach, not to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Ukraine or Europe, but to America.

And it was in line with Russian strategy that they think Donald Trump is a strong leader, but also, he is more forgiving, or at least more malleable, about seeking a peace settlement rather than the “whatever it takes” attitude of the Biden administration. And he also believes that the Europeans are tired—after three and a half years—that Ukraine is exhausted. And so, he can appeal to Donald Trump to put an end to it on Russian terms.

What are the terms? Well, Trump didn’t outline them in his portion of the post-summit report to the media and to the world. He wasn’t depressed. He didn’t say we should have had a ceasefire. He just said that there were a lot of elements that were, more or less, concluded successfully between Putin and Trump. But more importantly, for the big sticking points, he would have to talk to the Europeans, as was noted and necessary, and President Zelenskyy.

And we know what the outlines are, don’t we? We’ve talked about them. Ukraine will not be in NATO. They don’t have the military wherewithal. They have the moral edge and the moral right—but they don’t have the military wherewithal. Nor does Europe or the United States want to go to that length to give it to them against nuclear Russia to reclaim the Donbas—all of the Donbas—or Crimea.

So, what the sticking point is, right now, these two armies are locked inside the Donbas. Basically, 50 to 100 miles on an undulating line from the Russian borders. And there could be a DMZ, like the one in Korea, and then that could be the basis for a permanent border. But the problem is that Putin has not got the entire Donbas and the regions around it. And the Ukrainians are stiffening.

Both sides are worn out. There’s been a million and a half casualties that are wounded, dead, missing, captive. But Russia has greater reserves than does Ukraine. So, there’s a desire on both sides to have an armistice.

The sticking points is that the Constitution does not allow Zelenskyy without an assent from his parliament to give away land to a foreign interloper. And Putin does not think, at this point, he has ground down the Ukrainians enough or acquired enough of their eastern territory to justify the full hearty invasion that’s cost probably a million Russians.

But here’s what I want to get to, very quickly. There’s a lot of criticism of Donald Trump because he didn’t blast Vladimir Putin. I don’t quite understand that.

Just remember that during World War II, Josef Stalin had killed 20 million of his own people. He had invaded free Poland, along with Nazi Germany. He had attacked free Finland in 1939 and ’40 and then annexed 10% of it. He had helped Germany from Sept. 1, 1939, to June 22, 1941. He was our enemy. And then suddenly, and only when Germany turned on him, did he come to us. And we accepted that alliance on the principle that he was useful. And we gave billions of dollars in aid. Thirty percent of the wherewithal of Stalin came from the British Empire or the United States government.

So, you know, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with him at Yalta. He even called him “Uncle Joe.” This was a man who killed 20 million of his own people.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon went to China, and he tried to have a reboot of the strategic global order and play off Russia against China to the self-interest of the United States. But the point was, he sat down with the greatest mass murderer in history, Mao Zedong, who was responsible for 70 million people dead.

Was Donald Trump not to meet with Putin? Or was he to employ the vocabulary of President Joe Biden? “You’re a murderer. You’re a thug. You’re a criminal,” as Biden said of him. “And we’re gonna do whatever it takes.” Does he have support for that? For an unlimited blank check to Ukraine? No. So, he’s trying to get along with a killer in a way that past presidents have reached out to mass murderers.

The other thing is, very quickly, while there are the contours of a peace settlement, Donald Trump is not responsible for this war. He’s the most powerful man in the world. He wants to help Ukraine get a just settlement. He is working with the Europeans. He’s beefed up NATO. But remember this, in the last four administrations, Putin has invaded Georgia under President George Bush, they invaded Crimea and Donbas under President Barack Obama, they tried to take Kyiv under Biden. It didn’t go anywhere under Donald Trump.

Donald Trump was not the author of the failed “reset.” Remember the 2009 Geneva debacle, where Hillary Clinton pushed that “reset button” and we were supposed to be friendly with Russia. And basically, what we did is we said, “You should be democratic. You gotta be Western. You’re gonna have to have a liberalizing … ” Well, they didn’t back it up. So, they were loud but carried a twig, rather than spoke softly with a club.

Donald Trump had nothing to do with American diplomat Victoria Nuland and all of that earlier effort to put Ukraine in NATO and to interfere in the government of Ukraine. He had nothing to do with that. His children, he, none of them went over to Ukraine and tried to shake down the Ukrainian government to pour money into a presidential family, and then, as Joe Biden did, went over there and fired the prosecutor on threats. And he used our money to threaten the Ukrainians. He has no history of that.

He sent offensive weapons to Ukraine that Biden had embargoed. He was pretty tough on the Russians, in a way Biden never was. He said, “Don’t do the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Germany. Don’t do it.” He killed a lot of the Wagner Group. He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal. But he had no fingerprints on the Ukrainian war.

He didn’t say, as Joe Biden did, when he came into office, “Our reaction as America will be contingent on whether it’s a minor invasion.” Think of that. That was a green light to Putin, as was his suspension of offensive military arms to Ukraine.

So, what am I getting at? The summit was about what we could expect. Putin wants to win over America so that America will back off from Ukraine, and so it can get some more mileage westward and further deteriorate or erode or detrite the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian military is pretty tough. It’s hanging in there. It wants enough aid to leverage Putin. And between those two poles, there will be a DMZ.

And if there is a peace settlement, it will be the work—whether the Left likes it or not—of Donald Trump, the one world leader, among the three, that has nothing to do with this war. Didn’t start on his watch. It wasn’t a result of his policies. And it surely was not his responsibility that Vladimir Putin found himself inside Ukraine and threatening to destroy the independence of the Ukrainian people. That was not Donald Trump’s doing, but it may well be his doing to stop it.

Gavin Newsom’s $250M Redistricting Power Grab

California has been in the news recently because it’s going to have an unusual redistricting effort. That means we’re going to redraw the maps of our 52 congressional seats.

And we’re gonna do that, according to our governor, because Texas has been doing that. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom is running for president in 2028, so he wants to show that he is on the cutting edge of Democratic opposition to Texas.

But there’s a problem. Texas doesn’t have an independent commission—not that they’re really independent, but in theory, they are. They just gerrymander. And Texas has an underrepresentation of Republicans in congressional seats.

What I mean by that, if you look at the aggregate vote in Texas for the president or for senators or for the state Legislature, and you get an aggregate Republican versus Democrat vote, and then you see how many seats they have and does that percentage represent it? The majority—no, it doesn’t in Texas.

In fact, most red states, if the 50 states are ranked 1 to 50, do the number of congressional seats in this state represent the Republican or Democratic aggregate overall vote, as adjudicated by either state legislature races or statewide races, or the presidency or the senators? You can use different formulas, but they’re pretty much the same, that red states do not—not that they don’t gerrymander, but they don’t gerrymander as effectively. So, that’s why Texas is taking this action, to get parity.

But what Gavin Newsom is doing is very strange. He is undermining an independent commission. It’s been dominated by the Left, but he doesn’t even trust it. He’s not calling it back into session, necessarily. He’s calling a special session with a predetermined map created by Democrats to redistrict.

And here’s the problem. California, like most blue states, such as Massachusetts or Illinois, New York, they are already heavily weighed toward Democrats. Here in California, depending on what formula we use, about 38% to 40% of the state typically vote for a Republican ticket—state or federal. And yet, if you look at their nine congressional seats, that’s about 17%. So, they’re 20% to 22% underrepresented.

So, what Gavin Newsom is saying—“I’m gonna spend $250 million. And I’m gonna rush through the Legislature—dominated with supermajorities from my party—a bill to turn a proposition over to the people so they will vote to suspend this already gerrymandered plan and get a hyper one so that we are going to go from 17% of our congressional districts, probably down to about 8%. And we will have 8%, even though the state votes 38% to 40% Republican.”

So, the problem is he’s, A, challenging an independent commission that he used to praise; B, he’s taken overrepresented Democratic congressional districts and he’s trying to, even more, overrepresent them.

And he’s trusting that the people will not mind spending a quarter of a billion dollars to have this rushed election before the next year’s November, and then they will vote for it, and this will show that he is a fighter and on the cusp. But the national mood is against him because, as I said, most of the red states are underrepresented through gerrymandering, and most of the blue states are overrepresented.

What Gavin wants to do is, he’s targeting Republican congresswomen and congressmen. And he thinks that he can redraw the districts and put two Republican incumbents in the same district. And then, one will either drop out or they’ll have to run against each other, and one will win, and they will be diminished by half. He doesn’t care about the 40% of his own state that won’t have any congressional representation. That’s not in his plan.

This is all the act of commission. But what is Gavin doing about the state? We’ve had 12 million people leave the state the last 10 years—12 million. These were people not on public assistance. These are the entrepreneurial upper-middle class. They’ve gone.

We have the highest electric rates in the country, over 35 cents a kilowatt-hour. We’re the highest except for Hawaii. We have the highest gas prices. And now we have this carbon fuel formula and this new inflation-adjusted gas tax. So, we’re gonna have the highest gas taxes and the highest actual price of gasoline. And together they’re going to go up to maybe $6 a gallon. But that’s not the end.

He has driven out—through hyper-regulation and bullying and berating oil refineries, we’re gonna drive two main ones out and we’re not gonna have very many left. And if that should happen, gas could go up to $7 or $8 a gallon.

Is he talking about Pacific Palisades? It essentially hasn’t been rebuilt, it’s completely in cinders. Why? Because of California regulations, environmental, social, equity, DEI—you name it. No zoning going on. A big fight that they want to take this beautiful Pacific Palisades historic neighborhood and have high-density, low-income housing in many areas, etc., etc.

Bottom line: Here is Gavin Newsom using four-letter words, expletives, boasting that he is going to attack President Donald Trump by spending a quarter-billion dollars to even make the notorious California congressional election map even more unfair as a reply to Texas, which is not—it’s not fair now. They may be doing something extraordinary, but they’re trying to get their congressional districts to reflect their party breakdown in their state.

And Gavin is doing this while he won’t address gas, he won’t address the flight of people, he won’t address the highest taxes in the nation, aggregate, he won’t address electricity prices.

And I just drove about 200 miles home today. I can tell you that if you get on the California freeways, such as they are, it’s taking your life in your own hands. They have been unchanged, essentially, since the 1970s, when the population was not 41 million, but about 17 million. So, the population has doubled and the infrastructure is the same.

And Gavin Newsom is doing what? He’s doing another performance art, wiggling his head, saying the F-word, the S-word, trying to dare Trump to stop him. All in performance art for his next presidential run.

Final observation: What he’s counting on is nobody looks at the price of electricity, the price of food, the price of housing, the price of gas, on the infrastructure, crime rate, etc. in California because he, more than any other Californian, as a Bay Area city council person, as a San Francisco mayor, as a lieutenant governor, and as a governor, has ruined the state. He took a natural paradise and he turned it into purgatory.

 

What the Left Gets Wrong About Trump-Putin Summit

 

Last week, President Donald Trump completed his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. They both gave, as I said earlier, brief statements for the press. No questions.

And then that meeting was met with a storm of criticism from the Left, from senators, congressman, and pundits. They said that he’d given in too much for Putin, Putin had dominated him, Putin was gonna do this to him and that. They kind of forgot the idea that Putin came to the United States soil, not vice versa.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Josef Stalin, called him “Uncle Joe,” the greatest mass murderer in Russian history. President Richard Nixon met with Mao Zedong, who is the greatest mass murderer in all of history and civilization.

But in any case, within, I don’t know, 48 hours, he had arranged for the major heads of state of Europe to fly all the way—without much notice—to meet with him, along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And they all were on the same page. They were all very complimentary. And they were, basically, sending a message to the world that a million and a half people have been dead, wounded, captured, missing on our European doorstep. And no one has an answer. And yet the Left still was angry about this.

And so, it begs the question, do you have any collective memory? The Ukraine war started when Vladimir Putin invaded the Crimea and Donbas under the presidency of Barack Obama. Remember the hot mic in Seoul, where he said, “Tell Vladimir that if he gives me space for my last election, I’ll be flexible on missile defense”? Do you remember that? He also invaded, as you remember, in President Joe Biden’s tenure. He tried to take Kyiv. He didn’t during Donald Trump’s four years.

So, I don’t know what they want. What does the Left want when they’re so critical of this rapprochement between Europe and the United States, and a collective front against Putin?

What do they want? Do they want more of the Biden policy? Just give them enough to keep fighting and dying with no end in sight? With no plan, either, for strategic victory or for a settlement or a negotiation. Do they have any compassion that—a million more? Do they want another three years of this Stalingrad?

So, they offer no constructive suggestions. No shadow government is saying, “This is what we would do.” This applies beyond, by the way, the Ukrainian war. It applies to illegal immigration, crime, and the tariffs. Just give us a constructive alternative. But instead, they don’t.

There was a point in this European delegation that met with Donald Trump where the president of Finland, Alexander Stubb, made a statement. And it was nonrecognized at the time, but it was very astute.

And he said, “I’m from a very small country. And we have an 800-mile-long border with Russia. And we were invaded by Russia.” He was referring to the Winter War of November 1939 that lasted until 1940. And what he was saying is, “We managed to survive by negotiations and deterrence. A mixture of the two.”

The message he was giving to Zelenskyy and the Europeans was his own country’s story. After Josef Stalin did what Vladimir Putin did and says, “I’m going to take over Finland,” and he invaded, the Finns, who were outnumbered 20-to-1, they put up a heroic defense. They probably inflicted half a million Russian casualties. They fought without parallel for November, December of ’39, January, February. And finally, they were slowly being ground down.

So then, the president of Finland said to Josef Stalin, “I will cut a deal with you. You can take and annex 10% of my country, but that’s it. We will fight you to the death if you try to take any more. We will lose, but we will inflict so much damage that you will be weakened with your partnership with Germany that might not last.”

And so, they did cut a deal.

What was the result? There was an independent Finland. It agreed not to join, in further years, the enemies of Russia and not to be an ally of Russia. It was like Austria or Switzerland. It retained 90% of its territory. Was it appeasing? No. It fought tooth and nail to get that deal. And it stopped Stalin from absorbing all of Finland.

So, President Stubb—who was a close friend of Donald Trump—said to this delegation, “We’ve found a solution.” And what he was really signaling to Mr. Zelenskyy is, if you can give up 10% to 15% of this disputed land that you have with Putin, however unjust it is, however unfair, however tyrannical Putin is, and then pledge to be a neutral country, with help from the West to deter further aggression, you can cut a deal and save your country.

And yet, given those negotiations, the Left was not sympathetic. And so, all I’m asking them is, please give us an alternative strategy. How long do you wanna fight? Who is gonna fight? How many deaths, wounded are you willing to incur to push Vladimir Putin all the way back to where he was prior to the invasion of 2014, when Barack Obama allowed him to come in? Just a question.

Otherwise, I think you should take the advice of Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, who offers a valuable lesson in how to deal with Russian aggression against a smaller power.

California’s Illegal Alien Sanctuary Policies Have a Body Count

 

over the last 20 years, I’ve noticed that it is not just that the California infrastructure has gotten much worse as the population has incrementally increased to 41 million people.

We have an infrastructure of the 1970s, when we had 20 million people. And now we have twice the number of people driving and the infrastructure is even worse than it was 50 years ago. And we may have somewhere around 100 million cars or 140 million cars, the estimates range, in California register.

But what I’m getting at is this: It’s very dangerous now to drive on California freeways. There are either two lanes or three lanes, maximum. And we’ve had a new trend where truck drivers will get in the middle lane, on a three-lane freeway, and just stay there. And then you have two lanes of solid truck traffic and only one lane—in the left, if it’s three lanes—for cars. The truck drivers seem not to be as respectful of traffic as in the past.

I bring this up because an illegal alien, Harjinder Singh from India, crossed over into the United States illegally in 2018. And he was ordered to leave. He ignored that during the Biden administration. He was issued a work permit that was revoked by the Trump administration later when it came in.

But that’s controversial, but what is not controversial? Singh, who could not read or speak English, essentially, could only identify one or two traffic signs, for some reason was given a work permit. But more importantly, he was given a California driver’s license, even though he was known to be an illegal alien and not proficient in English.

And California thinks that as the home of the most illegal aliens in the country—a state in which 27% of the people were not born in the United States and it has the largest sanctuary city infrastructure, where they do not comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to deport criminal illegal aliens—that it’s unique and it’s self-contained. It’s not. People that it grants licenses to or residence to, who are here illegally and are not familiar with traffic laws, they go all over the United States.

So, what happened this past week, Singh was driving a semi-truck in Florida, and for some reason he decided—a major thoroughfare—that he was just going to make a U-turn and cut across the divider and go in the opposite direction, in the middle of fast-moving traffic. And so, the inevitable happened. As he’s making this turn, his own camera shows him nonchalantly looking around as a car has no choice but to hit his semi-trailer. And two people were killed instantly. The third died in the hospital.

What was very disturbing was the expression on Singh’s face. It was calm. He looked around. It was almost as if, “Oh. I made a U-turn. Somebody hit my truck. I wonder what happened?” He didn’t get out and try to help anybody. He stood at the side of the road, finally.

But why was he driving? He was driving because California issued him a license when they knew he was an unlawful resident of the United States and he was not proficient in English, at least enough to be able to read rudimentary traffic signs and signals.

In other words, he killed three people. And he’s now charged with vehicular manslaughter because of the lax policy of California.

What I’m getting at is, when I drive, I see a lot of drivers like that. I don’t know what their immigration status is. I don’t know where they’re born. All I know is that there are so many trucks on the California freeway. The infrastructure is so poor and this generation of truck drivers does not abide by the prior courtesies and policies of previous generations of truck drivers. It makes driving in California an experience like “Road Warrior” or “Mad Max.” And the trucks dominate, sometimes, all the lanes for periods of time on California freeways. And more importantly, they drive outside of California.

So, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is in a fight with President Donald Trump—back and forth—who issued him a temporary work permit. But I think Gavin Newsom, who champions the cause of unlawful immigrants, is going to lose that argument against Donald Trump, who tries to deport them.

But more importantly, it’s beyond controversy. Gavin Newsom’s California issued this man a driver’s license. This man was not a U.S. citizen. He was not here legally, and he could not read or write English, apparently. And the wages of that, we found out in Florida, were the death of three innocent people. And no remorse. No apologies on the part of California or Gavin Newsom.

Bottom line: California is dangerous to itself, in a myriad of ways, but it’s also dangerous to everybody outside of California because its pathologies are not contained within its borders.

Democrats Betray Democracy to Stop Trump review

 

The Democrats have a new narrative, the Left in general does, that they are saving democracy from President Donald Trump. And that justifies “almost any means” necessary to achieve the end of destroying or preventing Donald Trump from governing effectively.

The problem with all of this is they are destroying democracy to destroy Donald Trump.

What do I mean? One of the issues that they are agitating is the redistricting of congressional districts in Texas and California now. And the general problem the Left has is, if you look at gerrymandering to make these jigsaw puzzle piece-like districts, the Left is way ahead of the Right. In other words, states that have proportions of 30% to 40% to 50% for Donald Trump do not have that level of representation in the Congress.

And there’s been sophisticated studies of gerrymandering. And it boils down to the Republicans are short some six to 10 seats in the House, based on the proportion of the national vote they have received.

The Democrats know that, but they’re angry about the Texas reapportionment and gerrymandering. And their attitude is: “We’ve already gerrymandered our states to the maximum. Don’t dare try to emulate us.”

James Carville said that they have to get tougher. That’s the new mantra: Gotta get tougher. Gotta get meaner. Sen. Cory Booker screams and yells and throws a fit about every three weeks in the Senate. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries picks up his baseball bat. There’s usually a video with “the squad” or representatives using the word “s—” or the F-word, kind of pornographic. Rep. Jasmine Crockett periodically calls Donald Trump names that can’t be repeated on air. But you can see the anger.

And now the new idea is that they haven’t been tough enough. They have been too tough.

There’s been three great scandals in the 21st century. The first was the Russian collusion hoax that was prompted by Hillary Clinton and facilitated by the Obama administration on its way out. That almost destroyed the Trump campaign, sabotaged his transition, and ate up 22 months of his first two years.

The second was the Biden FBI and CIA—but especially the CIA and the intelligence agencies—got 51 people, former intelligence authorities, to lie to the American people on the eve of the second debate to affect the 2020 election, and claim, falsely, that Donald Trump was lying about the laptop of Hunter Biden, that it was “fake,” that it was a “Russian production,” and Donald Trump then was colluding, again, with the Russians.

That was a complete lie. It was Hunter’s laptop. We know because the FBI had it in its possession and authenticated it.

And finally, the great scandal that the Democratic Party and the obsequious media knew that President Joe Biden was non compos mentis, he was not cognitively able to fulfill the office of the presidency. And they kept that from the American people, until they could no longer keep it, when he finally challenged Donald Trump to a debate and melted before our very eyes. Sort of like the Wicked Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.” He melted into a non-entity.

So, my point is, if you look at the Democrats, they have staged three great scandals to try to destroy the Trump administration and by extension, democracy.

They impeached Donald Trump twice. No one’s ever done that. They tried him as a private citizen. Nobody’s ever done that. They raided his home in Mar-a-Lago. That is a terrible precedent for an ex-president. No one’s ever done that. They tried to get him off the ballot in 25 states. No one had ever done that. There were two assassination attempts during the campaign. That had never happened before. They tried to debank him and make it impossible for Donald Trump to write a check, whether from Morgan Stanley or Bank of America, or any bank.

So, my point is this, when James Carville says, “We’re gonna get tough. We’re gonna get really tough. And we’re gonna let in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., to get four senators. Or we might have to pack the court to 13 justices,” I’m thinking, “Well, you always were going to do that.”

You were gonna pack to 15. In fact, if you had not lost the House and Senate during the Biden administration, had you had a normal president that was in control of his mental and physical abilities, then you would have not only packed the court and not only, as you promised, let in two states, but in addition, you would’ve gotten rid of the Electoral College by the hook and crook of the national voter compact. And more importantly, you would’ve abolished the Senate.

So the problem, James Carville and Democrats, is that you have sabotaged democracy. And you’ve done things that no one has ever done before to an oppositional candidate, presidential transition, and president.

And now you’re furious because you’re on the 40% side of every issue that’s dear to you—from the trans issue to the border issue, to the crime issue, to the Green New Deal issue, to foreign policy. And you have no political power. You don’t have the White House, you don’t have the Congress, you don’t have the Supreme Court. And your institutional power—the media, academia, the foundation—they are under assault.

And so, you’re frustrated and you’ve created this completely false narrative that you have to get tough, and you’ve been very Marquess of Queensberry rules-like. In fact, the opposite is true, everybody. You have been the most vicious and the most abject subverts of democracy, all for the short-term gain of destroying Donald Trump. And now that’s boomeranging upon you. And you don’t like to see it happen to you—what you tried to do to Donald Trump.

And there’s a whole vocabulary, cross-culturally, for what is happening to you now. It’s called payback is a “blank,” karma, boomerang, do unto others as you should do unto you, only eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. But this is called retribution. And it’s fully earned for what you’ve done to democracy, as long as it’s legal and it’s necessary.

But you’re angry because you’re impotent, and you’ve created false narratives that Donald Trump is doing what you have actually done. And what is that? Destroying democracy.

Trump’s Counterrevolution Is Succeeding Beyond Expectations

 

We’re watching the greatest counterrevolution in some 90 years. We have not seen any president try to radically change the political calculus and the nature of government since Franklin D. Roosevelt did it, from the Left, during the New Deal of the mid-1930s.

And what do I mean by that? President Donald Trump closed the border. Nobody thought he could. He closed it. He has now deported over 100,000 criminal illegal aliens and 1 million have self-deported, of all statuses, who were here illegally.

He’s basically declared war on DEI. And he’s winning that argument. He has barred biological males from competing in women’s sports. He has full public support for doing that and he’s making enormous inroads.

The universities are rushing and competing with each other to cut a deal with Donald Trump, and to agree to not gouge the federal government on federal grants through their surcharges of way over 40% or 50%; to follow civil rights legislation, the Supreme Court, and not discriminate by race or gender, as they do in admissions, hiring, promotion, tenure; and to be disinterested and be fair and follow, as I said, free speech canons in the Bill of Rights on campus.

What am I getting at? Donald Trump is winning on all of these social and cultural issues.

Abroad, we see that Iran no longer poses a nuclear threat for the immediate future; that Israel’s enemies—whether Hezbollah or Hamas or Houthis—are in disarray or severely attrited; Iran is no longer a threat to the Gulf states or Israel, at least for the immediate future; and we see some progress with Ukrainian war.

People are angry about this counterrevolution for two reasons: It’s succeeding and it’s succeeding beyond anybody’s wild expectation.

Naysayers, The Wall Street Journal news page said we would be in a recession now, the tariffs would cause a trade war, and we would see the stock market collapse. The opposite has happened: $15 trillion of foreign investment promised and $300 billion in tariff revenue anticipated.

We don’t know the eventual effects of these new tariffs, but for now, all of our economists who predicted gloom and doom were wrong. All of our cultural critics who said the universities would be destroyed by Donald Trump, that he would arrest innocent people who just happened to forget to get a visa, and he wouldn’t go after criminals—they are wrong too.

So, people are angry about this counterrevolution because it’s working. But there’s another reason why they’re angry. He’s not addressing the symptoms, as he did in the first administration.

He doesn’t have people around him, as he did in the first administration—a Rex Tillerson; a Bill Barr, a good man, but Bill Barr was not on the MAGA agenda; Jim Mattis; people like “anonymous” Omarosa Manigault Newman—all of these people who thought that they knew better than Donald Trump and they would either stop what he was trying to do or reinterpret what he was trying to do.

In other words, he has a team that is devoted to his counterrevolution, and more importantly, to the symptoms of the progressive project.

The symptoms of the progressive project are not just the Democrats exercising power in Congress or holding the White House, it’s how they get that power.

And they get that power through PBS and NPR, now defunded; cable news and slanted network news, now under assault when they lie and defame and face court ramifications; the universities that indoctrinate people, now facing large fines, tax on their endowments, a renewed way of a new government attention toward student loans, $1.7 trillion program surcharges, as I said, and segregation on campus in dorms, graduation ceremonies. The universities are now under scrutiny. We’re seeing the Department of Education itself being questioned.

And I mentioned before, in addition to education and the media, Donald Trump is attacking the very idea that residency is synonymous with citizenship. That if you came here illegally, if you reside illegally, then you are eventually going to face a deportation—even if you have not been a violent criminal, and even if you haven’t been served with deportation papers.

So, what he is trying to do is tell the American people that the Left exercises power, even when they do not control government, any branch of government. And they exercise power, even though on most of the issues, if not all of them, their constituency is only 40%. The majority of the American people oppose their agenda.

And they do this through the bureaucracies, through the media, through the universities, through the popular culture. And these are the very sources that Donald Trump is asking them to reform. And the government is going to shrink. The government’s gonna get out of the media business. The government’s gonna take a hard look at universities who want and obtain federal funds.

And we’re going to see the counterrevolution, I think, succeed, with one caveat. We’re going to see in the next year a frenzy, a frantic, almost out-of-mind reaction from the Left because they know that if this counterrevolution succeeds, it’ll be very difficult for them to push down an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.

So, brace yourself. We’re looking at the resistance coming up to the counterrevolution, and it’s going to be fierce and unhinged.

The Real Issue With a University President’s Comments on Eliminating Whiteness

 

Recently, we discussed Dr. Luke Wood, the president of California State University of Sacramento, and a video that has been recently circulating in which he says he plans to “eliminate whiteness.” And there was a discussion whether whiteness is separate from or synonymous with being white.

And I suggested to you that this was a very deleterious and stupid thing to say, and it was divisive in a multiracial democracy. In other words, it’s like saying that your image in the mirror, you can destroy that. But it has nothing to do with you, the real person who is projecting that image. In other words, that’s just a reflection of who you are.

Whiteness, according to his logic, would be a reflection of people who are white. And he couldn’t explain that when asked to.

But he and his university were upset that there were things that I said to you that he thought were factually incorrect—three or four of them. I’d like to go through them. And because I talk to you without notes and I don’t read a script, I want to make sure that everything I say is accurate and factual.

So, let’s review what California State University of Sacramento has sent to The Daily Signal and me to ask for a correction.

The first thing they said is, “California State University, Sacramento, also known as Sacramento State, is the only public university in the world’s fourth-largest economy. It is not in the same city as UC Davis.”

Two problems with that. I never said it was in the same city as UC Davis. I am a fifth-generation Californian. I can assure you, I know that UC Davis is in Davis, and Sacramento State, if I could use that term for CSU Sacramento, is in Sacramento. What I said was that it is “near” UC Davis. I think the adverb and adjective “near” is pretty accurate for UC Davis’ relationship with California State University of Sacramento. They’re only 20 miles apart.

But this is even more disturbing, when he said, “California State University of Sacramento, also known as Sacramento State, is the only public university in the world’s fourth-largest economy.”

There are 23 CSU universities. In other words, there’s 22 state colleges other than Sacramento State. And there’s nine Universities of California that are public universities. Sacramento State, in other words, is not “the only public university in the world’s fourth-largest economy.”

Maybe he meant it’s the only public university in Sacramento, that is the capital of the fourth-largest economy. But that’s not what he wrote. And that is not a correction of what I said.

He said, “Dr. Luke Wood has been president of Sacramento State since July 2023.”

I said, in fact, “about a year.” I’m not sure that “about a year” is that off from two years. It could be about a year. It could mean over a year. But I don’t think that’s a serious mistake.

The third is, he said, “Dr. Hanson said that Wood was at UC San Diego, when in fact he was at San Diego State.”

I confess that I confused San Diego State University and the University of California at San Diego. And I want to make that correction.

And finally, “Wood coined the term ‘racelighting,’ not ‘blacklighting.'”

I used the term “blacklighting.”

“The interview referenced in your video is several years old as well. Wood has since addressed the heavily edited clip on his X account. You can read his comment here.”

Two things. That’s a distinction without a difference. If you label something he is saying, when he’s talking about getting rid of whiteness and he says that he has developed or has embraced a theory called “racelighting” and I term that “blacklighting,” I’m sorry I didn’t use the specific term, but essentially, it’s the same.

He’s suggesting that people adopt a particular vocabulary, syntax, and messaging tailored only to black people, so that they don’t feel harmed or second-guessed. Or, in other words, they deserve a special discourse that’s not accorded to other minority groups or white people.

And he’s upset that he said that he co-founded racelighting and not founded it, as I said. Again, another distinction without a difference.

He seems to be upset that he gave an interview, he says, in 2017, and then it has been reposted, to which I replied on July 29, 2025. I didn’t say that this was dated in 2017. I was replying to a recently appearing video. And that’s exactly what it was.

Apparently, Dr. Luke Wood—I think his full name is Jonathan Wood. Jonathan Luke Wood is upset because he gave an interview in which—and it was not sliced and diced. There’s a long segment of 30 seconds or so. And you can see it, that segment has not been edited, when he says he wants to “eliminate whiteness.”

The problem is that he’s on record saying it. It resurfaced. People saw it. And it spread like wildfire over the internet. Hence, my attention to it and my discourse to you about it.

But I can’t help it if Dr. Wood has said things in his past that seem to be racialist and divisive, and that now he is a president of a major California State University campus that’s multiracial, and he has a responsibility to all different groups to be disinterested and treat people as people, in which race is incidental, not essential to whom they are.

And yet, nevertheless, he suggests that he’s not responsible, I guess, for saying what he did because he said it in 2017 and it’s been reappearing, most recently, in clips. He hasn’t challenged that he didn’t say it. He’s addressed that he thinks he could have added context to it. But nevertheless, he said it.

And nevertheless, I think that it’s really dangerous to have a president of a major public university in California—in which, again, we are a multiracial society—to engage in such racially divisive language, whether he said it in 2017 or he said it today, or whether he said it on July 29.

What he needs to say is, “I don’t believe that I’m going to eliminate whiteness. I don’t have any particular grievance about white people or the projection of their culture, if I think that is what it is.”

In other words, Dr. Wood, I suggest you just calm down and instead of trying to attack people who represent your views fairly—and by the way, the corrections here had mistakes as well. So, it is hard to offer a correction for a correction that’s false.

But I think it would be far wiser of you to just say, “I spoke out of turn. I do not want to eliminate whiteness. Whiteness is a vague term that I will not use anymore. It’s polarizing and it has no place on a campus in California, much less coming from a president of that campus.”

few reasons i want to be Australian

 

Few Reasons:

1. America is successful and successful entities are usually hated by the losers.
2. America produces a lot of losers because a rich country leads to bad parenting more often than a poor one and since they are rich they have the time and money to be hateful pricks.
3. America welcomes a lot of losers because people that make a country worse are among the first ones that want to escape the consequences of their mistakes and since there is no selection of who can come in (actually there is and the system makes it easier for those who don’t respect the laws)
4. America is not homogenous and all the diversities are easily exploited by powerful people to divide and conquer.
5. America post WW2 development and economy has destroyed nuclear family and neighborhoods, there is no social trust, there are no common goals and belonging to a location and culture. Everyone is atomised and selfish.
6. The previous point and the lack of social safety net in case things don’t go well in life, leads to the production of high rates of mental illness and anti social behaviors. There is too much mental illness in America.
7. People that hate America have been in control and let to be in control of Universities and Mass Media for decades.
8. Employers only want me for 17 months or way less all for 10 hour. I stand up for hours without sitting down. Americans see sitting down as a form of laziness, but all foreign citizens sit down.
9. nobody visits me anymore
10. activities cost money
11. There is no girlfriend for 40 years or no woman interested in dating or hanging out. They look for 6 pack, 6 figures, and 6 foot!

MAGA agonistes

 

The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and his eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.

Although only partially implemented during Trump’s first term, maga policies nevertheless marked a break from many past Republican orthodoxies, especially in their signature skepticism concerning the goal of nation-building abroad and the so-called endless wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, that tended to follow. But like all counterrevolutions, there were intrinsic challenges in the transition from simply opposing the status quo to actually ending it.

There was a promising start during Trump’s first administration. Corporate interest in a porous border to ensure inexpensive labor was ignored; immigration was deterred or restricted to legal channels, and the border was largely secured. Deregulation and tax cuts, rather than deficit reduction, were prioritized. Selective tariffs were no longer deemed apostasies from the free market, but acceptable and indeed useful levers to enforce reciprocity in foreign trade. Costly middle-class entitlements were pronounced sacrosanct. Social Security and Medicare were declared immune from cost-cutting and privatization.

This “action plan to Make America Great Again” went hand in hand with an effort to transform the Republican Party. What had once been routinely caricatured as a wealthy club of elites was reinvented by Trump as a working-class populist movement. Racial chauvinism and tribalism were rejected. Race was to be seen as incidental to shared class concerns—notably, reining in the excesses of a progressive, identity-politics-obsessed bicoastal elite. Athletes who in 2020 had bent a knee to express outrage at “systemic” racism were in 2024 celebrating their scores by emulating Trump’s signature dance moves.

Despite intense resistance from the media, the Democratic Party, and the cultural Left, the first Trump term enjoyed success in implementing many of these agendas. After losing the 2020 election—in which nearly 70 percent of voters in key swing states voted by mail-in ballot—Trump left office without a major war on his watch. He had overseen a period with 1.9 percent annualized inflation, low interest rates, steady economic growth, and, finally, after constant battles and controversy, a secure border with little illegal immigration.

Yet during the succeeding four-year Biden interregnum, the world became far more chaotic and dangerous, both at home and abroad. Biden’s general agenda was to reverse by executive order almost every policy that Trump had implemented. And while Trump was successfully reelected in 2024 after reminding voters that they had been far better off under the maga agenda than during Biden’s subsequent shambolic tenure, the changed conditions in 2024 will also make implementing that agenda even more difficult than after Trump’s first victory.

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

Second, in the 2024 election, Trump won a record number of Hispanic voters (somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, depending on how the term “Hispanic” is defined) in one of the most dramatic political defections from the Democratic Party in history. While voters’ switch to Trump can be largely attributed to the deleterious effects of the Biden-Harris open border on Hispanic communities, schools, and social services, no one knows what, if any, might be the paradoxical political effects of the mass deportation of many within these same Hispanic communities.

Will Hispanic voters continue to resent the ecumenical nature of illegal immigration across the southern border, which now draws millions from outside Latin America? Will they wish to focus primarily on violent criminals while exempting on a case-by-case basis Mexican nationals, many of whom have kinship ties to Hispanic U.S. citizens? In sum, no one yet knows the political consequences of deporting all—or even 5 to 10 percent—of the Biden-era illegal aliens, given their unprecedented numbers. Even if polls tell us that 52 percent of Americans support “massive” deportations, will that number still hold true if they eventually include friends and relatives or entail five or six million deportations?

Trump’s fiscal policies pose similar known unknowns. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised a number of large tax cuts to various groups. For example, eliminating taxes on service workers’ tips might cost the treasury in excess of $10 billion a year. Trump’s call to make tax-free the incomes of police officers, firefighters, veterans, and active-duty military personnel would translate into at minimum a shortfall of $200 billion a year in federal tax revenue. Another $200 billion in annual revenue would be lost if, as promised, Trump once again allowed state and local taxes to be deducted from federal income taxes. Some $300 billion per annum would also vanish under Trump’s proposals to cease taxing hourly overtime pay. Other promises to eliminate taxes on Social Security income, cut corporate taxes to 15 percent, or reextend his 2017 tax cuts could in toto reach $1 trillion in lost federal revenue per year.

The 2024 yearly deficit was projected at about $1.83 trillion. So how would Trump reach his goal of moving toward a balanced budget if all the promised tax reductions were realized, with a yearly loss of at least $1 trillion in revenue added to the nearly $2 trillion currently borrowed each year? No one knows the precise increase in annual revenues that will accrue from greater productivity and economic growth due to Trump’s deregulatory and tax-reduction agendas. Furthermore, how much income can be expected from proposed reciprocal tariffs on foreign imports? And how much will realistically be gained in savings from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency and their promise to cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget?

So far, Trump’s proposed radical tax cuts are quite popular, mostly transparent, and often detailed, while the commensurate massive reductions in federal spending are as yet none of the above. The political success of Trump’s tax and spending reductions will hinge on the degree to which he can eliminate massive unpopular waste, slash useless programs, increase federal revenue from targeted foreign tariffs, and through incentives grow the size and incomes of the taxpaying public and corporations—without touching sacrosanct big-ticket items like defense, Social Security, and Medicare. It bears noting that no prior administration has been able to cut the annual defecit while also massively reducing federal income taxes.

Trump has also promised a radically new and different cohort to run his cabinet posts and large agencies. In his first term, Trump’s agenda was stymied by both his own political appointees and the high-ranking officials of the administrative state. Starting in 2017, they saw their new jobs as either warping maga directives into their own preferred policies or colluding to block a supposedly unqualified and indeed “dangerous” Trump. Almost monthly, his cabinet heads or agency directors—John Bolton, James Comey, John Kelly, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Christopher Wray—were at odds with their politically inexperienced president.

Anonymous lower-ranking officials routinely claimed to the media that they were internally frustrating Trump initiatives and leaked embarrassing (and possibly fabricated) anecdotes about their president. One supposedly high-ranking Trump official known as “Anonymous” —later revealed to be a rather low-ranking bureaucrat named Miles Taylor—began a New York Times hit piece, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” He further boasted of how appointees deliberately tried to sabotage Trump policies and executive orders.

But paradoxes also arise from Trump’s 2024 remedies for this earlier internal obstruction. Given this past experience, only genuine outsiders appear immune to the compromises and careerism endemic among veterans of the administrative state. And yet such would-be reformers often lack the insider knowledge, expertise, and familiarity with the government blob needed to reduce or eliminate it.

The radical growth in the federal government, the surge in entitlements, the increases in regulations and taxes, and the soaring deficit and national debt were overseen by so-called experts in the bureaucracy as well as by traditional politicians on both sides of the aisle. In response, would-be reformers have talked grandly about the dangers of unsustainable national debt, the interest payments that now exceed $1 trillion per year, and the need to rein in nearly $2 trillion in annual budget deficits. But few, especially in Congress, may be willing to cancel the sacred-cow programs that have enriched their constituents, provided jobs for millions of Americans, and offered high-paying revolving-door billets for retired politicians and their staffers.

For example, the general public, liberal and conservative alike, acknowledges vast waste and wrongheaded procurement at the Pentagon. Auditors quietly grant that massive subsidies and corporate welfare to pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, and crony-capitalist wind- and solar-energy companies are near scandalous. An increasing number of voters now believe that the government needs to get out of the business of guaranteeing student loans that are nonperforming, stop funding boondoggles like high-speed rail, and dismantle the vast dei-commissar system at government agencies.

Yet those most familiar with these programs are their beneficiaries. And those who could most effectively discontinue them are precisely those who perhaps could least be trusted to do so. Therefore, outsiders are needed, even or especially those without the degrees and résumés customarily required to run these huge government entities.

Trump’s cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth, for example, a decorated combat veteran who wrote a book on the Pentagon’s pathologies, is by conventional standards unqualified to be the defense secretary. He is not a four-star officer, former Fortune 500 ceo, or prior cabinet official. Unlike his two predecessors, however, he would not revolve into the office from a post at a defense corporation with huge Pentagon contracts.

The fbi nominee Kash Patel has a lengthy record of government service in Congress, the executive branch, and legal circles. But he also is a fierce critic of the fbi and was once himself a target of agency monitoring. Indeed, Patel wrote a book about fbi misadventures, incompetence, and political weaponization. He promises to move the agency outside of Washington, D.C., and to end its political contamination—which has earned him fierce opposition from within the bureau and its congressional and media supporters.

In rejection of the Republican establishment that obstructed him in his first administration, Trump has often opted for anti-big-government picks who were once Democrats or who otherwise emphatically reflect the populist nature of the new Republican Party, such as Tulsi Gabbard (National Intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services), Dr. Marty Makary (Food and Drug Administration), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (National Institutes of Health), or Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Labor).

In sum, while it is not impossible for reformers to emerge from the status quo, it is precisely those “unqualified,” “firebrand,” or “dangerous” outsiders without “proper” experience in government, without prestigious degrees and credentials, and without sober and judicious reputations within the bureaucracies (indeed, they are sometimes the very targets of the agencies that they are tasked to reform or end) who are most immune to being compromised by those bureaucracies.

But it is abroad where the implementation of the maga agenda will be most severely stress-tested, particularly regarding China, Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East. Trump’s first term was neither isolationist nor interventionist. He loathed nation-building, but he also ridiculed the appeasement strategies of prior administrations. Recalling the Roman military commentator Vegetius’s famous aphorism si vis pacem, para bellum (If you desire peace, prepare for war), Trump’s strategy in building up the nation’s defenses and reforming the Pentagon was not to fight elective ground wars or to democratize foreign nations, but to avoid future conflicts through demonstrable deterrence.

A good example is his first-term experience with radical Islamists in the Middle East. On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration killed by drone the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani near the Baghdad airport. Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath. After the Trump cancellation of the Iran deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases in Iraq and Syria—most of which, ironically, Trump himself wished to remove.

A few days after Soleimani’s death, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike of twelve missiles against two U.S. airbases in Iraq, assuming that Trump had no desire for a wider Middle Eastern war. Tehran had supposedly warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks, which killed no Americans. Later reports, however, did suggest that some Americans suffered concussions and that more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed. Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East, while restoring deterrence that prevented, rather than prompted, full-scale conflicts.

Yet in a second Trump administration, such threading of the deterrence needle may become far more challenging. The world today is far more dangerous than it was when Trump left office in 2021. The U.S. military is far weaker, suffering from munitions shortages, massive recruitment shortfalls, dei mandates, and dwindling public confidence. The State Department is far less credible, and America’s enemies have been long nursed on Biden-era appeasement. Four years ago, for example, no one would have dreamed that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians would become casualties in a full-scale war on Europe’s doorstep.

Indeed, an inept Biden administration crippled U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters. In March 2021, Chinese diplomats brazenly dressed down newly appointed Biden-administration diplomats in Anchorage without rebuke. The debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the greatest abandonment of U.S. arms and facilities in American military history. Six months later, an observant Vladimir Putin correctly surmised that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would likely face few countermeasures from a now humiliated and unsteady United States.

In late January 2023, the meandering and uninterrupted week-long flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the American homeland seemed to exemplify the general disdain enemies now held for the Biden administration. Indeed, foreign foes assumed that there would be few Western consequences for their aggression, at least during a window of opportunity never before seen—nor likely to be repeated.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists, followed eagerly by a ragtag mob of Gazans, stormed into Israel. They murdered, tortured, raped, or took hostage some 1,200 Israeli victims, sparking a theater-wide war against Israel instigated by Iran and its surrogates.

The serial Houthi attacks on international shipping intensified to such a degree that the Red Sea joined the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean as virtual no-go zones for Western shipping, given the absence of visible American and nato deterrents. By autumn 2024, Iran had launched five hundred missiles, rockets, and drones at the Israeli homeland, with the United States loudly enjoining de-escalation and restraint on our Israeli ally.

By year’s end, tens of thousands of North Korean combat troops were fighting with Russians on the Ukrainian border. And by late 2024, the combined Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, and missing had passed one million, in the greatest European charnel house since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.

All these foreign wars and quagmires pose dilemmas for maga reformers. Again, Trump was not elected to be a nation-builder, globalist, or neoconservative interventionist. Conversely, he is no isolationist or appeaser, on whose watch the world would continue to descend into the chaos of the past four years. Yet Trump in 2024 is much more emphatic about the need to avoid such dead-end overseas entanglements, or even the gratuitous use of force that can lead to tit-for-tat entanglements. That caution may obscure his Jacksonian foreign policy and wrongly convince opportunists to test his frequent braggadocio and purported deterrence credentials.

In this regard, Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as vice president and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, along with Tucker Carlson and the once-Democratic pacifist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as close advisors—
coupled with his announcements that the hawkish former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley would not be in the administration—may be misinterpreted by scheming foreign adversaries as proof of a new Trumpian unilateral restraint.

The Republican Party is now the party of peace, and Trump the most reluctant president to spend American blood and treasure abroad in memory. Trump broke with previous Republican interventionism largely because he damned past American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars while they distracted from an unsustainable national debt, a nonexistent southern border, and a floundering lower-middle class. Similarly, it is no wonder that the public often sees the use of force abroad as coming at the zero-sum expense of unaddressed American needs at home. Moreover, a woke, manpower-short military has disparaged and alienated the working-class recruits who disproportionately sought out combat units and fought and died in far-off Afghanistan and Iraq.

Recently, however, even as President Trump’s inner circle emphasized a stop to endless conflicts, Trump himself in November 2024 warned Vladimir Putin not to escalate his attacks against Ukraine. Yet that warning was followed by massive Russian air onslaughts against largely civilian Ukrainian targets—and further threats of tactical nuclear weapons deployed against Ukraine. Trump also instructed Hamas and Hezbollah to cease their wars against Israel, and advised the former to release the hostages, Americans particularly—or else.

Vladimir Putin no doubt took note, but he also may have wished to encourage America’s enemies to test Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric against his campaign’s domestic promises to mind America’s own business at home. So, is there a way to square the circle of neither appeasing nor unwisely intervening?

Trump will have to speak softly yet clearly while carrying a club. For the first few months of his tenure, his administration will be tested as never before to make it clear to Iran and its terrorist surrogates, as well as China, North Korea, and Russia, that aggression against U.S. interests will swiftly incur disproportionate and overwhelming repercussions—in order to prevent wider wars that eventually might require the use of much larger forces.

Ukraine is, paradoxically, a case study of both the dangers of American intervention in distant foreign wars and the consequences of being regarded as weak, timid, and unable or unwilling to protect friends and deter enemies. The cauldron on the Ukrainian border, as already noted, has likely already caused between 1 and 1.5 million Ukrainian and Russian casualties, soldiers and civilians alike. There is no end in sight after three years of escalating violence. And there are increasing worries that strategically logical and morally defensible—but geopolitically dangerous—Ukrainian strikes on the Russian interior could escalate and lead to wider wars among the world’s nuclear powers. Joe Biden’s post-election decision to allow Ukraine to launch sophisticated American missiles deep into the Russian homeland was met by further Russian warnings of escalation to the use of
nuclear weapons.

Many on the right wish for Trump immediately to cut off all aid to Ukraine for what they feel is an unwinnable war, even if that cessation would end any leverage to force Putin to negotiate. They feel the conflict was egged on by a globalist Left, as a proxy conflict waged to ruin Russia to the last Ukrainian soldier. These critics see the war as conducted by a now undemocratic Ukrainian government, without elections, habeas corpus, a free press, or opposition parties, led by an ungracious and corrupt Zelensky cadre that has intrigued with the American Left in an election year. Preferring negotiations that might cede Ukrainian territories already occupied by Russia for guarantees of peace, they point to polls revealing that less than half of the Ukrainian people are confident of a full military “victory” that would restore the country’s 1991 borders.

In contrast, many on the left see Putin’s invasion and the Right’s weariness with the costs of Ukraine as the long-awaited proof of the Trump–Russia “collusion” unicorn and generally perfidious Trumpian Russophilia. They judge Putin, not China’s imperialist juggernaut, as the real enemy. And they discount the dangers of a new Russia–China–Iran–North Korea axis. To see Ukraine at last defeat Russia, recover all of the Donbas and Crimea, and destroy the Putin dictatorship, they are willing to feed the war with American cash and weapons—again, to the last Ukrainian.

Trump vowed to end the catastrophe within a day by doing what is now taboo—namely, calling up Vladimir Putin and making a deal that would do the seemingly impossible and entice Russia back inside its pre-invasion borders of February 24, 2022, thus preserving a reduced but still autonomous, and even secure, Ukraine. How could Trump pull this off?

Ostensibly, Trump would be following the advice of a growing number of Western diplomats, generals, scholars, and pundits who have reluctantly outlined a general plan to stop the slaughter. But how would the dictator Putin face the Russian people with anything short of an absolute annexation of Ukraine, after wasting a million Russian casualties?

Perhaps, after the deal, Putin could brag to Russians that he institutionalized forever his 2014 annexations of the majority-Russian Donbas and Crimea; that he prevented Ukraine from joining nato on the doorstep of Mother Russia; and that he achieved a strategic coup in uniting Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea in a grand new alliance against the West and particularly the United States, with the acquiescence if not support of the nato member Turkey and an ever more sympathetic India.

And what would Ukraine and the West gain from such an example of the Trumpian “art of the deal”? Kyiv might boast that, as the bulwark of Europe, Ukraine heroically saved itself from Russian annexation, as was envisioned by Putin in the 2022 attempt to decapitate Kyiv and absorb the entire country. Ukraine was subsequently armed by the West and fought effectively enough to stymie the Russian juggernaut and humiliate and severely weaken the Russian military—to the benefit of nato and EU nations. Trump might then pull off the agreement if he could further establish a demilitarized zone between the Russian and Ukrainian borders and ensure EU economic help for a Ukraine fully armed to deter an endlessly restless Russian neighbor.

What would be the incentives for such a deal, and would they be contrary to the interests of the American people or antithetical to the views of the new Republican populist-nationalist coalition? First, consider that if Trump were to cut all support for Ukraine, it would likely soon be absorbed by Russia. The maga Right would then be blamed for a humiliation comparable to the Kabul catastrophe. Indeed, the fallout would likely be worse, since the situation in Ukraine, unlike the Afghanistan mess, required only American arms, rather than lives. In contrast, if the conflict grinds on and on, at some point the purportedly humanitarian yet pro-war Left will be permanently stamped as the callous party of unending conflict, and seen as utterly indifferent to the Ukrainian youth consumed to further its endless vendetta against a Russian people who also are worn out by the war.

Both Russia and Ukraine are running out of soldiers, with escalating casualties that will haunt them for years. Russia yearns to be free of sanctions and to sell oil and gas to Europe. The West, and the United States in particular, would like to triangulate with Russia against China and vice versa, in Kissingerian style, and thus avoid any multi-power nuclear standoff.

Trump wants global quiet in order to increase and stockpile American munitions with an emboldened China on the horizon. He will inherit a U.S. military budget dangerously exhausted by wasteful procurement of overpriced systems like the F-22 aircraft and the littoral combat ship, by cuts in training for troops and maintenance of ships, and by massive aid to Ukraine and Israel. Accordingly, Trump prefers allies like Israel that can win with a few billion, rather than those that continue to struggle after receiving $200 billion, as Ukraine has done.

Last, Europe is mentally worn out by the war, and increasingly reneging on its once-boastful unqualified support for Ukraine, as it hopes the demonic Trump can both end the hated war and be hated for ending it.

The same challenge of forcefully dissuading bullies while avoiding exhausting wars will confront Trump in the Middle East. To restore deterrence, Trump will have to put the Houthis on notice that their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea will earn them something more deleterious than the Biden administration’s passive deflections of shore-to-ship missile attacks. That passivity has so far cost the Unites States about $2 billion in munitions without achieving tangible results.

Iran, of course, is at the nexus of Middle Eastern tensions. Both fear of Tehran’s missiles and the Biden administration’s opposition paralyzed the Abraham Accords. Iran supplies all the terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—that have attacked Israel since Trump’s departure. Accordingly, Trump will likely lift American restraints on Israel, supply the necessary heavy-duty ordnance should it wish to retaliate against Iranian attacks by taking out Iran’s nuclear program and oil-export facilities, and deter Russia and China from intervening to help their client Iran.

In sum, to ensure that there are no theater-wide conflicts in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe and beyond, Trump will have to use disproportionate force to dispel the image of the United States as indifferent to aggression due to fears of costly intervention.

The maga revolution that will now ensue in the four years of Trump’s second and last presidential term promises to remake America in ways only haphazardly realized four years ago. In Trump’s favor this time around are his past years of governance and his knowledge of the sort of opposition he will now face—after two impeachments, five weaponized civil and criminal court cases, repeated efforts to remove his candidacy from state ballots, two assassination attempts, and three brutal presidential campaigns.

The failed Biden years—the entrance of twelve million illegal aliens through a deliberately opened border, wars abroad, inflation, and soaring crime—helped propel the most spectacular political resurrection in American political history. The backroom Biden removal from the Democratic nomination, the subsequent listless Harris campaign, and the ever more radical trajectory of the increasingly unpopular Democratic Party have all put Trump in a far more powerful position than when he entered the presidency in 2017 or when he left office in 2021.

Trump’s success in resetting the United States will hinge not merely on outwitting the desperation of his enemies, but also on navigating the paradoxes of implementing his own maga agenda.