Newsom’s Rocky Month Shows the Risks of Running on Style Over Substance

 

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, and the presumptive front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary for 2028—I am biased because I’ve had to live under his tenure for six years—but I think you could make the argument he had the worst February of any major want-to-be candidate in modern memory, or surely the worst record of any governor in the last 30 days.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He has a new autobiography, and his problem there is he comes across as what he is: a child of privilege, a nepo baby, a person whose father was a close, intimate friend of Gov. Pat Brown, senior Gov. Pat Brown. He was a good friend and somewhat related to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and former Gov. Jerry Brown. And of course, he was subsidized and helped in his business venture by the Getty family and their mega-oil fortune inherited from their father, who created Getty Oil. So, he wants to dispel that image.

So, when he talked about how he just ate white bread or he had all of these problems growing up—he said he had dyslexia. We’ll get to that in a minute. But the idea that Gavin Newsom was somehow parallel to former President Abraham Lincoln in a log cabin or Vice President JD Vance just doesn’t work.

Then he went over to Munich, German Democratic Republic, because, you know, he’s a California governor. He doesn’t have any foreign experience, and he thought he was going to impress the Europeans with their shared dislike of President Donald Trump. But it was a disaster.

He said something about you shouldn’t wear knee pads. He’s a vulgarian. He really is. He can’t keep his potty mouth clean. I don’t think anybody at that type of serious discussion of foreign policy wants some upstart California governor to come over and talk about people being on their knee pads. I suppose that’s a reference for a sexual act of submission.

Then he’s had this social media team, and their theory is that Donald Trump—with his capital letters, exclamation points, personal ad hominem attacks—has upped his popularity. And therefore, he’s going to imitate Donald Trump’s style with capital letters, the same format, but he’s going to use a constant level of pejoratives that are obscene, almost pornographic. And then, therefore, he will outtrump Trump. He has a fundamental failing, everybody, and you know that.

You will vote for Donald Trump because of his record and his courage and breaking existing norms and taboos and trying to do things that no one ever did. Like close the border, stop crime, deal with the Left, the Department of Government Efficiency, deal with the Iranians, deal with Venezuela. And the tweets in which he describes that are attacks of Robert De Niro or—that’s something that you will tolerate despite, not because of, those tweets.

Gavin Newsom got it all wrong. He thought, well, Trump is doing well because of his tweets, and I’m gonna be outtrumping Trump. And the result is he’s unleashed this unfortunate character. I think he’s called Izzy Gardon. I don’t know how you pronounce it, but my gosh, they’re full of expletives.

He’s in a tweet war with Sean Hannity. He used the F-word. He used the S-word. They come out of the mouth of the governor of California like they’re nothing. He’s really debased the office. He’s got one of the most foul mouths, Gavin Newsom, and now you’re putting it, if I could use that archaic term, in print, in these social media, daily outbursts.

You know, there was a simple reporter, Susan Crabtree. She has a very good reputation. She works for RealClearPolitics, and getting back to dyslexia, she says, all of a sudden, you’re emphasizing dyslexia. But we would like to know when he was officially diagnosed with this medical condition. And his social media, Gardon, Izzy, said F off to a reporter, which didn’t go down well.

As far as dyslexia goes, it’s very hard to find him credible. Not that he doesn’t have it, but when he says, “I can’t read,” I can’t believe that’s true, because not too long ago, he bragged to us, I think, that he was reading a 260-page book in an hour and a half, as if he was a speed-reader.

And my gosh, anybody who is a governor of a huge state like California, a governor of any state, gets page after page daily in memoranda and policy papers and speeches. So, when he says he can’t read, it wouldn’t convince most people.

And why did he say that he couldn’t read? Because he’s flailing, and he wants to have some sympathy. I think that’s the reason.

The same thing—he wants to be a pseudo-poor boy. When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said you were historically illiterate, and Newsom again fired from the hip and said that Trump had no historical precedent or right to bring in federal troops, that’s happened five or six times in our history. Civil War draft riots; World War I veterans marching for their bonuses they didn’t receive; Rodney King riots, where then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell sent in, I think, 4,000 or 5,000 Marines on the order of then-President George H.W. Bush.

And so, Ted Cruz said, Gavin, you’re historically illiterate. And sure enough, he says, how dare you make fun of a person with a handicap because I’m—you’re saying that I’m illiterate because I can’t read. Of course, being historically illiterate means you’re able to read, you just don’t read history, or you would’ve not made such a blunder. And he confused that. Again, the subtext was, please feel sorry for me because otherwise I have no redeeming values as a candidate.

And then he made the faux pas of all mistakes. He got before an African American audience. And remember, every time a Democratic white elite gets in front of an African American audience, something happens. They either feel uncomfortable or they want to fake it like they’re somebody they’re not, or they’re condescending, or they—it just doesn’t work well.

Remember former President Joe Biden, when he wanted to attack former Sen. Mitt Romney. He said to a group of highly educated, professional blacks in the audience that Mitt Romney’s “gonna put you all [back] in chains.” He kind of did the accent. “Put you all in”—as if these capable people couldn’t protect themselves without Joe Biden. As if we were gonna go back to slavery.

When we had former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, remember, I tried so—“I didn’t come this far.” She was trying to imitate, I guess, the voice she thought Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman would’ve said, somebody like that. It was a disaster. Even former President Barack Obama, who’s half African American, always went into a different patois to condescend to his audience.

And that’s exactly what Gavin Newsom did, only it was worse because it was content, not just style. He was speaking very slowly and changed his cadence. But when he said to them, I am not—I’m just like you. Basically, I am illiterate, and I had a 960, and I’m not saying I had a 960 to make you out there in the audience have 940, that was an insult because he was saying to them: You are not very bright, and therefore, you should feel empathy with me because I’m claiming that I’m not very bright, but I really don’t believe it. And they don’t believe that he really meant that either. So, it was completely racist and insulting.

It’s up there with Joe Biden’s “Corn Pop” sagas, you know. Barack Obama’s the first black who’s clean and can articulate. It’s up there with his use of “boy” and “Negro.” As I said, all of these politicians have a checkered record when it comes to race, which is ironic because they pose as defenders of civil rights.

Finally, what’s the elephant in the room? All of what I talked about is a camouflage, a mask for the problem. And that is 300,000 people are leaving his state per year since he’s been governor. He’s taken paradise and turned it into purgatory. Whether it’s the fires, the high-speed rail boondoggle, the highest income taxes in the nation, the recent billionaires tax—it’s already driven $1 trillion out of the state.

We have the highest number of homeless people. We have one-third of all welfare recipients. We have the highest poverty rate, I think we’re 21% to 22%. We have no plans to assimilate a culture rate or integrate 27% of the population that was foreign-born. We have the highest number of illegal aliens. About one out of every three people that enters our now-bankrupt health system has diabetes. And Louisiana and Mississippi have higher test scores in their elementary schools than we do.

Add it all up, and he’s got only one campaign slogan. Gavin Newsom will have to run as “I want to do to the United States what I did to California.” We’ll see how that works out.

CNN Repeatedly Screws Up on Mamdani and 2 Muslims With Bombs

 On March 7, two teenaged Muslims were arrested for lighting and throwing improvised explosive devices at an anti-Islam protest outside Gracie Mansion, the home of New York’s Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

This provided the latest exhibit of how our elitist media seek to protect Muslims from the “Islamophobia” of conservatives. It’s fascinating that when the extremism and “phobias” run another direction—of Muslims being viciously antisemitic—it doesn’t outrage these people.

CNN has launched into an embarrassing week of false and insensitive coverage of these college-age jihadis. On Tuesday, CNN’s X account tweeted this narrative: “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather. But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs during an anti-Muslim protest outside of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home.”

Within hours, it had taken down the tweet, but it mirrored the lede of its original CNN.com article by reporters Taylor Romine and Gloria Pazmino. It inspired a wave of satires, framing the Lincoln assassination, Pearl Harbor, and other violent events into an idyllic frame.

Then, on Tuesday’s edition of “CNN NewsNight,” host Abby Phillip erroneously stated the bomb-throwers carried out “an attempted terror attack against New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani” while heading into a commercial break. She later apologized and blamed it on whoever put these words into her teleprompter.

CNN commentator Ana Navarro repeated this lie just moments later: “Supposedly some of these comments are as a result of the attempt against Mayor Mamdani in New York, who was raised Muslim, was he not?” He was, but he wasn’t targeted by these two Muslims.

On Wednesday, CNN reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere apologized on X after tweeting that Mamdani had messaged Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro last year, “a fellow target of political violence.”

Then there were overly vague allusions leaving the impression that Mamdani was targeted. Wolf Blitzer announced on “The Situation Room” on Wednesday: “Investigators are digging into the background of the two terror suspects accused of throwing homemade bombs near New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home.”

But according to a transcript search on Nexis, there’s been nothing on CNN about the vicious social media “likes” of Rama Duwaji, the mayor’s wife, celebrating the Oct. 7, 2023, mass murder in Israel, as reported by The New York Times on March 6. The only mention of her name came from Pazmino about the bomb incident: “I should mention that both Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the First Lady Rama Duwaji were safe. There were no injuries during this protest yesterday.”

After Mamdani’s victory last November, Pazmino did a puff piece celebrating Duwaji as “the first Muslim member of Gen Z to become first lady of New York City.” Behind the scenes, she “advised Mamdani on how to better use social media.” Oh, really?

This week, CNN was posting partisan attacks, like this one from political reporter Aaron Blake: “The GOP’s increasing blind eye to anti-Muslim bigotry.” That’s pretty funny, considering CNN’s blind eye on the celebration of genocide inside Israel. Blake even cited Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, mocking Mayor Mamdani for eating rice with his hands, saying, “Go back to the Third World.”

CNN should find it more outrageous that someone would celebrate the slaughter on Oct. 7 than mockery of the eating habits of a Ugandan American. But that’s not how CNN rolls. Its Islamophilia led it into a cascade of Fake 

A MAGA Split Over Iran? What MAGA Split?

 

There’s a lot of talk about a Make America Great split among Trump supporters, and this originated here in context with the Iranian war. I’m speaking on a Monday, the 10th day of the war. And there’s talk in the air that the MAGA base may desert President Donald Trump because, after all, MAGA’s credo was no optional wars in the Middle East.

That came out of a disgust with the 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan and the skedaddle from Kabul that left billions of dollars of weapons, and, of course, the 8,000-plus dead and more casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan war. But this is different.

This war is only conducted by air, and there’s certain characteristics of it that we haven’t seen before. It’s a top-down war.

We are targeting the leaders, not the military rank and file. We have been taking out, along with the Israelis, 50, 60, a hundred scientists, generals, mullahs, political leaders to decapitate, not try to organically destroy the entire Iranian military.

Second, they were all part of negotiations. We were negotiating with Iran and gave them a lot of options. Just don’t fund your terrorist proxies. Don’t create a bomb, knock it off. And they didn’t want to do it. It’s just like the prior Iran strike last year, where we gave them another option.

It’s very different. You can’t really change a regime, we’re told, if you don’t have ground troops. But maybe there’s something different about the modern age with the sophisticated satellite imagery and reconnaissance, that you know where individual people are by their GPS footprint, by their cellphone communications.

And then you couple that with these highly sophisticated missiles and drones where you can actually take something through a window and dispatch somebody at a meeting. We’ve never quite seen that before.

So, you don’t really need a sniper to take out a toxic Hitlerian-type of leader.

The other thing is that Donald Trump pretty much knows there’s three alternatives that we’ve talked about before. And none of them really require ground troops.

The most desirable obviously would be to get an interim government, maybe former dissidents, get expatriates back, depose the mullahs so that there are—or people in the army, depose them, and then you have elections. That would be wonderful, with the problem solved.

Or you could find somebody within the apparatus, the theocracy that was a dissident and felt that he had military backing, and he would, you know, pick the Venezuela solution. Sort of what we see in Venezuela. We’re not going to nation-build.

The worst scenario is not all that bad. We say stew in your own juice. You know, we mow the lawn and we can do it anytime we want.

We can come back in and destroy your new navy, your new missiles as long as we have a president, post-Trump, who’s willing to do that and ensure that they don’t become nuclear again, or they don’t build another missile fleet. And that’s reflected, getting back to my original point, in the MAGA so-called dissidents.

If you look at polls, and there were some released by CNN, Donald Trump has 87% support among Republicans. That is much higher than Joe Biden had among Democrats or even Barack Obama had among Democrats. And when you look at the MAGA base, the people who identify themselves as Trump Conservatives or Trump MAGA people, the support for the Iran war is over 90%.

And now why? How could that be, when they have told us that there’s a widespread civil war among the MAGA people? That’s what the Left is saying. But when you look at the people who are objecting, you know, it’s the Steve Bannon wing, the Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, maybe Megyn Kelly, I don’t know.

And they’re saying that this is contrary to the MAGA philosophy of no optional wars. It would be if we insert ground troops, and we’re there for months.

I mean, if we end up bombing, as Barack Obama did, in Libya for seven months without congressional authority, one of the last things he did while in office was to bomb Libya, then that would be another matter.

But nobody has ever seen a war in which one side destroyed the entire air force of the enemy, the entire navy of the enemy, and has got pretty much 90% of its ballistic missile arsenal nullified and probably 85% of the drones and decapitated the entire command and control of the military. And now is looking at secondary targets where maybe Revolutionary Guard headquarters and regional areas, but there hasn’t really been any American losses of equipment.

We’ve had, tragically, seven people killed. But tragically and terribly as that is, in a war of 10 days with being that kinetic, it’s very rare to see such few casualties.

I mean, we’re looking at the Ukraine war. There’s been 1,200,000 Russians killed and probably another two million wounded, probably three or 400,000 Ukrainians. So, this isn’t comparable to what we’ve seen.

And I think the president understands that there is a deadline. And the deadline is going to be met. And the deadline consists of we do not want this war to drag on with the midterms coming up. And he wants to pivot back to the economy.

And the people on the MAGA base who are saying that the party is split in two, they don’t really have a constituency, as the polls, I just told you, illustrate.

They’re loud, they have audiences, and they make points that, you know, you can consider. But they don’t represent a constituency, at least not yet.

On the other side, this sort of, on-to-Cuba, Lindsey Graham wing of the party, I think that after Venezuela, which we didn’t lose anybody. We lost some wounded people that were hurt, but we have a Venezuela solution of a strong person there that will be an improvement over Nicolas Maduro and might lead to elections.

But we’re not going to go on the ground and insist that we’re going to create Carmel, California, in Venezuela.

And we have, as I said earlier, three choices and they’re all preferable to what’s there now in Iran, how the war in Iran ends.

And so, after that, I think the president will say, I’m going to concentrate on making sure that the Western Hemisphere is free, and it’s not captive to the cartels, and it doesn’t kill Americans.

And obviously Cuba might be a concern, but there’s no need now to go into Cuba or to bomb Cuba to do any of that. It’s falling. It’s dying on the vine. And the more pressure we apply, insidiously so, not kinetic or dramatic, it’ll soon, I think, deteriorate to a point where there’ll be a change of government.

But that’s something in the future.

Right now, I think the MAGA base and the Republicans are sticking with Trump because they don’t see oil prices spiking. They don’t see the economy in danger, and they don’t see the war dragging on for months and months like the Libyan fiasco or the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What we’re looking at instead, I think, is a spectacular achievement of getting rid of the two worst governments that we were dealing with in Venezuela.

And if we don’t get rid of the one in Iran, at least it’s neutered or nullified so it doesn’t have the clout to subsidize terrorists, and it doesn’t have the wherewithal to threaten us or our allies in Europe, in the Middle East.

More importantly, the Gulf states are now openly hostile or at war with Iran, and they will not be subsidizing Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis to the same degree they were in the past, and Iran won’t be doing it at all.

I think people have absorbed that, and now it’s time, I think, to think of the midterms and if they can, they being the Trump people, can overturn the historical trends that the in party usually loses the first midterm, dramatically loses seats in the House and Senate. And maybe they can avoid that by having good economic news.

And with the deregulation, the tax cuts, the energy development, the foreign investment, the interest rates coming down. I think there’s a good chance by June or July, as I’ve said earlier, the economy will be strong and he can point to the foreign policy successes, and that is reflected in the overwhelming support that the recent polls show for the Trump agenda.

While Some Allies Hesitate, Israel Is Already in the Fight Against Iran

 

There’s been a lot of talk in connection with the ongoing Iran war about our allies. Specifically, people are suggesting that Israel has an inordinate role to play in our decision to attack the theocracy in Iran.

And there’s even posters going around of Israeli puppeteers and we’re the puppets, which is kind of ironic when we’re a country of 340 million people and Israel is tiny at 11 million, and they, of course, don’t direct American foreign policy.

But before I get to Israel, I’d like to talk about our other allies. Here we are in an existential fight with Iran, and remember, it’s a 47-year war.

They have attacked our embassies in Beirut, Kenya, Tanzania. They blew up our Marines, 241 deaths in Beirut. We’ve had Khobar Towers. They killed people. They’ve sent assassination teams all over the world. Killed a lot of Jewish people in Argentina. They tried to kill former national security adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and President Donald Trump.

It’s not true that they only killed 600 Americans with shaped charges. I think most people in the military that were acquainted with that … It’s more like 1,500, and thousands were maimed. And it was not just in Iraq. It was also in Afghanistan.

In other words, they sent shaped charges into the hands of Islamic militants who used them in a variety of ways, specifically IEDs, to kill Americans.

That went unanswered as well.

They’ve taken hostages. They killed 41 Americans, their surrogates, Hamas did, on Oct. 7. Of the 1,200 Israelis that were butchered—men, women, older people—41 were American citizens.

I could go on, but we’ve been in a 47-year war with this country since its birth in 1979.

And remember, it was birthed on one fact: It took over the American Embassy and took our diplomatic personnel as hostages. That was never really replied to.

And now they have bragged in the negotiations … They had an out. They had an out. Just don’t make a bomb. Don’t keep giving 50 million a month to Hezbollah, 50 million to Hamas, or 50 million to the Houthis. Just don’t do that. And they wouldn’t do it.

So, here we are in a war, and now we’re blaming many people in the United States, Israel, as the instigator.

But I’d like to talk, as I said, about our other allies.

First, Spain has already announced that we could not use the NATO base near Gibraltar—a key base that governs traffic in and out of the Mediterranean. We cannot use it for operations against Iran.

In other words, they’re saying that they don’t want any part in this war, and you the United States cannot use this base, which is supposed to be for NATO operations. And NATO has been on the record criticizing Iran and saying it should denuclearize.

This is kind of ironic.

Spain did the same thing, if you remember, in 1986. It told President Ronald Reagan, if you’re going to hit Libya, you cannot fly over our territory from bases in England. I think it cost them about 2,500. France did the same thing. Can’t fly over the Iberian Peninsula—2,500-mile detour for us to do that. They’ve been very vocal that they will not meet their 5% armament. They have barely, I don’t think they’ve quite met the 2% unless they did it recently.

Then we turn to France. France has already said from the very beginning that this was a dangerous war and basically wanted no part in it.

The most surprising though is the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom, under Prime Minister [Keir] Starmer, has said that they cannot use that key base for long-range bomber operations in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. England has always allowed us to do that, but they said we can only use it for defensive operations.

What does that mean? What does it mean when you fly into Iran to stop them from shooting missiles at the Emirates or Israel? That’s an offensive operation? It was incoherent. And then, in addition, it decided it would keep away from … It wouldn’t really weigh in.

And then when it had a base in Cyprus that was hit, or was going to be hit, targeted, then all of a sudden, the U.K. said, well, we’ll send one destroyer. But we’re not even able to send it for the weekend because we don’t want to pay overtime pay.

What’s going on with our allies?

Does Mr. Starmer remember the 1982 Falklands Wars? Remember, Falklands. Argentina took it. Britain wanted to go halfway around the world. They didn’t have the wherewithal to do it.

We didn’t really want to offend Argentine, even though that was a dictatorship in Latin America, we were trying to create a solidarity in our backyard.

The dictatorship in Argentina was reprehensible, but not as reprehensible as the Iranian dictatorship.

And what did we do? Al Haig, our secretary of state, said we should triangulate. Reagan said no. Give them 2 million gallons of gas. They’re out of gas. They’ll be stranded. Give them satellite reconnaissance. Give them 200 Sidewinder missiles. Give them anything they want. If they lose a carrier, you give a United States Marine carrier and give it to them.

It was just a blank check to Margaret Thatcher.

Do they forget that? Because they’re going to remember it because we’re not going to do that again in extremis from what they have done.

Germany. Well, no need to talk about Germany. Chancellor [Friedrich] Merz was in the White House. He kind of had a hangdog look. He had a hangdog look because a week or two earlier, into a huge crowd in Germany, he was trashing the United States and Trump himself.

Then we get to Israel.

Besides that Israel is the only democratic consensual government in the Middle East that has been a lifelong friend of the United States that has provided essential intelligence to us about our enemies and the people who have been killing us, such as Hamas on Oct. 7 and Hezbollah for 40 years, we haven’t replied to them effectively.

We’ve sent some battleship shells under Reagan. We’ve done a few things. But they are the ones that have taken out our enemies.

And by the way, it’s very rare for the United States to have a capable ally. Israel is capable.

I’ll give you one example. If you count all of the planes that are ready to fly, jet fighters that Britain has, Israel has more. A lot more. A hundred more.

If you count all the planes that France does—200. Israel has 300.

If you count the planes that Germany has, 150, Israel has 300.

What I’m getting at is the so-called big powers of NATO themselves, with these huge populations of 80 million, 60 million, 55 million, they don’t have the air capability that tiny Israel does.

And right now, they are fighting side by side with us, and those 300 planes are being used every day to take out the ability of the Iranians to do what? Fund the people who’ve killed Americans—Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis. Make sure they do not send missiles toward Europe.

Remember Barack Obama? He gave missile defense away in 2012 in Seoul in that quid pro quo with the Russian government. That missile defense was aimed at protecting Europe from a potential ballistic missile attack from where? Iran.

In conclusion, we have a very strong ally in Israel. It’s one of the most capable countries in the world.

And we have some unreliable allies in our formal alliance. We should remember that before we start making accusations that the Jews or the Israelis are pulling the strings of American diplomacy and military decision making.

Iran Is Merely a Chess Piece in a Much Bigger Game

 

Let’s get real about what this latest iteration of the until-now endless Iran War is all about. There’s no imminent threat. That assertion is a pacifier to the weak-kneed and timid. Last June, we set the mullahs back years in their quest for nukes. They have a metric butt-load of ballistic missiles, rockets, and drones, but they weren’t going to fire them off unless we attacked them. After seeing Sulemani turned into sushi, and their nuclear weapons program neutered like a Bulwark job applicant in one fell swoop, they weren’t about to restart throwing fists as long as Donald Trump was in the White House. Note that the word is “restart,” not “start,” as the cynical liars and historical illiterates insist. We didn’t start this war. The pagan freaks started it 47 years ago when they took our people hostage, and continued it when they killed our Marines in Beirut, our embassy workers, our Air Force folks at Khobar Towers, our troops in Iraq, and so on and so on. They started this war; we’re merely finishing it.

But why are we finishing it now?

It’s simple. Donald Trump is resetting the entire global gameboard. He’s playing 4-D chess, with the Fourth Dimension being time. This is the long game, and we finally have a president playing to win.

And it’s not all Iran. Iran is merely one piece of a much bigger whole. Understand how momentous this undertaking is. President Trump is changing the world as we have known it for the last 50 years – scratch that. Make that the last 80 years. When he is finished – which comes after many of our major foes have been finished – the world will look very different, and we will be back on top as the undisputed unipower in a unipolar world. When this is done, Donald Trump will be the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan; it’s something to be tied with the Gipper, who reset the board by defeating the Soviet Union without a shot (at least, without an acknowledged shot between Americans and Russians). From what’s happening in Europe to what’s happening in the Middle East, and elsewhere, Donald Trump is changing the game. He is no longer kicking the can down the road. He’s going to kick the tails of our enemies (and, figuratively, our allies)by changing how the United States does business.

How has the United States done business for nearly a century? It has restrained itself and allowed itself to be restrained by others. Until now, it has never fully flexed its muscles. After World War II, the United States was a megapower. Yes, the Soviets had nuclear weapons, and that put them sort of on par with us, but they never had the strategic reach that the United States had. The Soviets could never move a half-million Americans and their heavy combat equipment to the other side of the world, then move it all into another country and wipe out its entire army (the fourth largest in the world) in 100 hours. I was part of that during Desert Storm. Nor did the commies have the economic power we had. As a reserve currency with an economy that dwarfed everyone else, we were it, the man, A-number one.

But we never used our power to its full extent. We were restrained. Part of it was voluntary. Our morally misguided ruling elite believed that, at some level, America was unworthy of its power and not trustworthy to wield it. They counseled restraint, and so we restrained ourselves. We allowed the Vietnamese communists to drag a war on for decades that we could have won in a year. We didn’t bomb Hanoi or mine its harbors (where the Soviet arms came in) until Christmas 1972. And when we did, we had a peace treaty by March 1973.

Of course, our trash foreign policy establishment and cultural left screamed about that. How dare Nixon do the thing that would win the war? After they got rid of Tricky Dick in the first iteration of Russiagate, they betrayed our South Vietnamese allies and let the North win – as our elite felt it should.

In Europe, we agreed to pick up the tab for defending Europe to get our allies back on their feet after WWII. That continued until Trump drew the line. The allies chose degeneracy, weakness, and to spend the money they saved, thanks to Uncle Sucker picking up the tab, on welfare and Third World invaders. Similarly, we never used our economic power. We gave trade deals that screwed our own producers to our allies – and others – to grow their economies. And we allowed ourselves to be restrained by international law, a mythical construction pushed by European globalists who were less interested in right and wrong than in making their lilliputian move by tying down the United States of Gulliver with rules and norms that bound only us.

Trump is not playing any of that. While the convoluted explanations and fake moralizing that attempt to justify hobbling the United States and preventing it from exercising its full power in the defense of its interest may appeal to the elite, normal Americans – of whom Trump is an avatar – don’t buy it, especially nearly a century after World War II ended when we nuked Japan (have you noticed how mad they get that we used that power to save hundreds of thousands of American lives?).

We took out Venezuela because it has been an enemy for a couple of decades and a thorn in our side, cooperating with our other enemies. We will soon take out Cuba for the same reason. No, they did not launch an overt attack at us lately for the same reason Iran didn’t. They are weak, and we are strong. So, what better time to attack? The usual suspects are making hilarious arguments that it’s wrong for us to attack weaker countries, as if this were some playground where we’re trying to steal their lunch money. Only an idiot fights fair; hitting them while they are weak, before they fix their defense systems, replenish their missile stocks, and build a hot rock is the best time to hit them.

It's another made-up “norm” that no one ever voted on that exists solely to restrain the United States from leveraging its power to promote its interests. When Iran goes, that deprives Russia of a key arms partner and lets us get our hands around China’s throat because the CCP’s oil comes largely through Iran. If you want peace, support regime change in Iran so we can control the fossil fuel spigot. China can’t invade Taiwan as long as we can turn off the gas.

Imagine the world that Donald Trump and his team imagine. The Europeans will start paying their own checks; maybe getting their allowance cut off will encourage them to get serious about preserving their culture. Even if they don’t, the fact that Trump did not even bother inviting them into the Iran fight shows they are totally irrelevant as far as actual power goes. We will have the Americas free of communist subversion for the first time since JFK shamefully wussed out at the Bay of Pigs, which additionally helps us domestically on drugs and immigration, while providing new markets for what we manufacture. In the Middle East, the regime that is the main force for destabilization in the region will be replaced by people who do not chant “Death to America!” and we can finally end the ‘forever wars” we hear so much tiresome whining about. We will never face a coterie of seventh-century savages with The Bomb atop a ballistic missile that can reach Kansas City – could you imagine that, because it was in the cards if the “adults in the room” had their way?. And Russia and China will have the military option taken off the table – no oil, no war. Then, when the delusion of conquest has dissipated, we can build a peaceful relationship.

Trump loves peace. That’s why he has gone to war. But more than that, he has totally rejected the perpetual cycle of failure and defeat that allows our enemies to persist for decades when we could have brushed them off our shoulders like dandruff. If you want peace, support Donald Trump and this war. If you want war, support the pinkos, traitors, half-wit podcast bros, and libertarians who support “peace.”

Trump's Way of War

 

War is the use of arms to settle differences – tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material – between organized groups. It is unchanging. The general laws of armed conflict stays immutable, given the constancy of human nature.

However, the manner in which war is conducted remains fluid. New weapons, tactics, and strategies elicit counterresponses in an endless cycle of tensions between defensive and offensive superiority.

That said, has President Donald Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America's foreign enemies?

We saw glimpses of it during his first term, when he eliminated Iranian general and terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani and ISIS terrorist grandee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In the former case, he preferred hitting the cause rather than the effects of Iranian terrorism in Syria and Iraq, while making it clear that he had no intention of striking the Iranian mainland and entering into a tit-for-tat "forever war."

In large part, he was successful. Iran never quite replaced the venomous Soleimani. And despite tired threats, its performative art responses did not kill any Americans, and they were seen by Trump as venting and not worth a counterresponse.

In the case of the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump likewise went after the catalyst of ISIS terrorism. But he also bombed ISIS into near nonexistence in Iraq, since, unlike Iran, it lacked the financial and material resources of a state sponsor of terror, and it had no independent ability to make weapons or finance its terrorism.

In 2018, Trump probably killed more Russian ground troops (more than 200?) than America had during the entire Cold War, with his furious response to the Wagner Group assault on a U.S. Special Operations base near Khasham, Syria. Yet the defeat of Russian mercenaries also led to no wider conflict.

In these three cases, Trump successfully portrayed his antagonists as the unprovoked aggressors, employed overwhelming force to eliminate them, and declared them one-off occurrences with no need to punish the ultimate source or sponsor of the aggression with further force, and he was largely successful in limiting subsequent attacks on American installations.

In Trump's second term, he widened his doctrine of "preventative deterrence" with operations to remove Venezuelan communist strongman Nicolás Maduro, along with two separate bombing campaigns against Iran.

While the second Iran operation is now in progress, it may resemble the earlier two in a number of facets.

Trump again portrayed Venezuela and Iran as unpunished past and present psychopathic aggressors. He went after Maduro, whom Biden had largely ignored, for his past of exporting gang-bangers and criminals across the Biden-era open border and for using Venezuela's cartel connections to profit from American deaths.

As for attacking Iran, Trump cited the theocracy's past terrorist attacks on Americans and U.S. allies, its effort to assassinate Westerners, and its unwillingness to abandon plans to create a nuclear weapon.

What, then, are Trump's new ways of conducting war?

1. Geostrategy

Always behind these seemingly unconnected events – and other nonkinetic moves like warning Panama about Chinese intrusions – strategic concerns loom. The common denominator is usually isolating China from strategic spaces, allies, and oil – and Russia in a lesser sense.

Loud and terrorist, but ultimately impotent, proxies of strategic enemies – Cuba, Iran, Venezuela – are preferable targets. They are not just easily identified enemies given their past anti-American violence; they are also targeted because their demise offers a global display of the weakness of their distant patrons and underwriters.

2. Wars of reckoning

Trump always frames his interventionism as reactive and long overdue. It is a sort of "reckoning war" for previously overlooked crimes that his predecessors had ignored but are often seared in the American mind. "Preemptive" or "preventative" wars, these strikes may be. But Trump himself avoids the baggage that those adjectives of aggression convey in the collective American memory.

3. War among negotiations

Trump's way of warmaking is usually an extension of ongoing negotiations (e.g., over Iran's nuclear weapons or Maduro's subsidies to terrorists and drug trafficking). So, during discussions, he offers various exit ramps to his adversaries and publicly laments the possibility of violence.

Meanwhile, American naval and expeditionary assets show up and amass to ramp up the pressure. Trump does not wait for negotiations to fail, but usually offers a deadline to his adversaries. And then he simply informs his advisors of the point at which the enemy has no intention of seeking a peaceful settlement. A strike follows.

4. The culpable apparat

Trump prefers top-down war. That is, he starts his attacks by targeting the enemy apparat, not its lesser henchman. The aim is both to disrupt its command and control and to separate an enemy leader from a population deemed not necessarily culpable.

His enemy counterparts – al-Baghdadi, Khamenei, Maduro, Soleimani, the Wagner Group – are widely regarded as odious, which strengthens his prophylactic or reactive action. For all the boilerplate, even Trump's enemies do not gain empathy since their antiwar activism becomes inseparable from the de facto defense of a rogues' gallery of deposed and hated killers and thugs.

5. No to nation-building

There is no nation-building. Trump sees the U.S. as responsible only for lighting the fuse of revolution, then giving the oppressed the chance of something better if they do not miss their chance at regime change and working with the Americans.

6. No boots on the ground

There are few ground troops involved – no chances for an Abu Ghraib misadventure, or humiliating skedaddles from Kabul, or maimed Americans from shaped-charge IEDs.

It is much harder for targets to kill Americans in the air and on the seas. And because there is zero investment in occupying a country and hands-on rebuilding of its institutions, casualties are kept to a minimum. Trump equates deploying a larger ground force in the Middle East with imbecility.

The weapons of choice of Middle East Islamists and terrorists – IEDs, sniper rifles, suicide vests, sudden rocket salvos – are far less effective, given America is fighting its sort of war with overwhelming firepower, technological advantage, and mobility in the air and on the oceans.

Trump prefers overkill to shock and awe, or using minimalist forces. Still, visuals are important. The point is not just to demolish the opposition but to do it with overwhelming redundancy as a global revelation of America's assets, especially for viewing by the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans.

7. Exit strategy?

There is an exit strategy of sorts, partly rhetorical and partly real – but usually arbitrarily declared by Trump himself. He alone starts the shooting and stops it according to his own definition of when the war begins and ends. The enemy has a vote, of course, but Trump frames the conflict in ways that lessen his say.

Because a transactional rather than ideological Trump holds few grudges, he can announce after taking out Iran's nuclear facilities in summer 2025 that he wishes to "Make Iran great again!"

Or he praises the Venezuelan people and professes to restore their oil industry to its proper profitability and transparency – even as he storms their presidential palace. If the enemy refuses to give up, Trump assumes it eventually will. He has endless patience, both to pound it by air and sea and then, at any moment, praise the defeated and declare the hostilities over.

Critics counter that, without regime change – that so often requires ground troops – rotating the faces of the current Venezuelan or Iranian government will not result in a radical change in the targeted nation's behavior.

8. No to internationalism

Trump cares nothing for the UN's condemnations, given its own moral bankruptcy and lack of credibility. For action outside Europe, he does not really consult NATO and much less the European Union. He assumes all three will follow a predictable script: initially critical, then tentative as the tide of battle turns, and finally either praising Trump's success or eager to get in on itself.

Nor does he worry much about veiled threats from Russia or China. He is careful to consult a key few in Congress, but cares even less that the American Left opposes anything he does. Or rather, he expects their Pavlovian resistance and considers their shrill outbursts and street theater public relations as pluses and the stuff of future campaign ads.

9. Deterrent displays

Trump uses his strikes as global reminders of American prowess. He showcases the USS Gerald R. Ford mammoth carrier, the largest warship in the history of conflict.

Media maps of American naval assets cover four disparate seas surrounding the Iranian theater – the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean – and derive from Pentagon press releases.

New weaponry is showcased – whether it's a mystery sonic boom weapon at Maduro's presidential palace, a new fleet of kamikaze drones in flight to Iran, or a monstrous new carrier.

10. American self-interest

Trump will not act unless the public can be apprised of American self-interest, and, in a cost-benefit calculation, there is a good chance of success. He has no interest in liberating and rebooting another Iraq and Afghanistan, since their oppressed populations may hate the infidel Americans as much as they do their own oppressors.

Trump saw Bagram Air Base as fortifiable, strategically located, and defensible, and thus in the U.S. interest, but certainly not so the graveyard of empires or the gender studies program at the university in Kabul.

It is no accident that both the targets, Venezuela and Iran, have oil, offering the wherewithal for the liberated without the U.S. having to fund their own restoration. Flipping petro-dictatorships that were proxies under the aegis of China and Russia weakened both.

What Trump says and does are sometimes divergent. Funding Ukraine weakens Russia, which is in the U.S. interest, so Trump finds ways to keep the arms coming mostly without commentary. Letting Israel take care of business and jumping into the war to humiliate Iran last summer unleashed forces that destroyed the Assad regime in Syria – and finally got Russia out of the Middle East.

The present conflict over Iran is the greatest challenge that Trump has faced in either of his two terms. But given his past record, there is a good chance that he will eventually rid Iran of its theocracy – the fleeting hope of the past eight presidents.

For five decades, the Iranian street and its unhinged theocracy scared silly the Middle East with its "Death to America" chants, its promise to destroy the Zionist entity, its brag of going nuclear, and its often overt warnings to rip apart the Sunni-dominated Gulf.

But Trump, with help from Israel, finally revealed the theocracy to be a Keystone Kop kleptocracy. The mullahs screamed "Death to America!" but it was Trump's America that finally brought death to them.

Another Iran Quagmire Might Mean Big Losses for Republicans in the Midterms

 

We’re coming up on the fourth day of war in the Middle East since the United States attacked, along with Israel, the theocratic government in Iran. What is the status of the conflict as I speak, and what will be some possible outcomes? What would be ideal in the Trump administration’s view?

I think you all know that. It would be something along the following lines: a couple of more days of targeted strikes on the Iranian theocratic leadership. The Revolutionary Guard would encourage the people who went out a million strong just a few weeks ago and were slaughtered, this time, they would not fear a diminished government.

And they would take control, storm the political residences, the political meeting places, the political key points of the Iranian government, mass outside them, and you would see some kind of plane come in from the United States with a shah’s son or maybe the interim government in from Paris would fly in and you would have a coalition government.

And then everybody would rejoice. The United States would be popular, and there would be a normalization in the Middle East. And then of course there would be retribution for the murders in this government, committed not just against the United States and Europe and Israel, but against, primarily, the Iranian people.

How do we gauge the pulse of that intended, or desirable, result?

Well, at some point, the Iranians have a finite supply of arms. They have thousands of missiles, we’re told. They had a navy, they had an air force, but they are up against over probably about a thousand jets of various countries, mostly Israeli and the United States, and they are expending a lot of their ordnance attacking almost every Arab country in their vicinity, as well as Cyprus and Israel, and attacking the United States Navy.

And so, they have a finite supply of missiles, drones, and airplanes, and they’re being attrited, demolished, destroyed every day, and they’re not being replenished. You can’t get into Iran. You can’t fly into Iran to give them more arms.

So, they have a finite supply while their enemies do not. That’s very important. And more importantly, what would end the war in their favor would be something like the Iraqi War or the Afghan war. In other words, they would have to kill hundreds or thousands of Americans or Israelis to create public backlash to a degree that would force the leadership to back off.

Or they would have to accomplish stunning strategic victories, maybe blow up the facilities right around the Straits of Hormuz and blockade it somehow. Blow up some ships, make it impossible for 20% of the world’s fossil fuels to get out. That doesn’t seem—they don’t seem to have the wherewithal.

Each day, as I said, their stock of weapons and stock of leaders is diminishing, and there’s no way to resupply it. That’s how we lost in Vietnam. The Chinese and Russian governments were supplying either across the border or at the Port of Hai Phong. And that’s why we didn’t win in Afghanistan, because there was an open border with Pakistan, and that’s why we had trouble in Iraq.

Syria was transferring weapons into Iraq. But this is different. We can isolate the entry and exit into Iran with air power, and we have done that pretty well.

One of the key indicators of the pulse of this war will be the Iranian people. And this is under controversy. People are in disagreement.

When you see your infrastructure go up in smoke, do you say, “Well, I like the Americans, but now they’re starting to blow up apartment buildings, and I don’t know who lives in there. Maybe they’re members of the regime, but that’s gonna cost all of us. And, you know, my third cousin is actually working for Rafsanjani or something. And he’s not all that bad”?

Or will it say, “Thank you. These are the people who butchered us. And when you take them out and you take their infrastructure out, it empowers us, and we’re gonna hit the streets pretty soon”?

Nobody knows that answer. A lot of people opine upon it, but we’ll have to wait a few more days to see what the pulse of battle is.

And what are the attitudes of foreign peoples and nations and countries? The Europeans have been very circumspect. The British government, the French government, at first said they were worried it was dangerous, or they supported the idea, but they didn’t want to have the United States use, in the British case, Diego Garcia.

I think what you’ll see with the British, the French, the Germans, the NATO powers, the EU, it’ll be pretty predictable from past wars.

In other words, number one, they will express guarded optimism and guarded support and then hedge. And then watch the pulse of battle. Put their finger in the air and say, “Who is winning? Is the United States gonna stick around this time?”

If the pulse of battle favors the United States and Israel, then they will climb on and say it’s deplorable what the Iranian government is doing. They attack neutral parties. And then finally, we’ll send some of our assets in kind of a ceremonial performance art fashion.

We might send some French jets or British jets, park them in Oman, park them in Kuwait, and say, “We’re protecting the oil producers of the world against Iranian aggression.” And that’s about it. There won’t be any sizable help, and there won’t be any sizable obstruction. It’ll be rhetorical, and it will be based on whether they think we’re winning or losing.

Russia and China. Russia lost a client with Bashar Hafez al-Assad’s destruction in Syria. He fled to Russia, but Russia didn’t do much to help him.

They didn’t send in a fleet. They didn’t send in convoys of aerial. He had no popular support. But more importantly, Russia’s lost over a million dead, wounded, and missing in Ukraine. They have lost the majority of their tanks. Their air fleet is vastly diminished. They’ve lost oil customers.

They are broke. Their gross domestic product is now almost 50% invested in munitions, but the munitions are being wasted at an astronomical rate. There are maybe 20,000 Russians as well. Dead, wounded, or killed each month. They are in no position to help Iran.

How about China? We just have to go on past behavior.

Did they threaten us over Panama and say, “You leave the Panamanians alone. We cut a deal with them. We have a right to station Chinese Communist-controlled companies at the entry and exit of the canal.” No, they did not.

How about with Venezuela, Mr. Maduro. They said, “How dare you? This was one of our clients. We had inroads into Latin America. Our Silk Road, our Belt and Road project was good for Latin America, and we have a unique relationship.”

No, they didn’t. They didn’t. They’re not going to do anything.

Getting back to our Trump way of war, there was a strategic subtext to all of these incidents that I’m enunciated. And it’s to isolate and weaken China’s influence, especially in the Western Hemisphere, especially in the Middle East, and snap the Europeans back into action.

Finally, what will be the domestic reaction to this war? That will depend again on whether it’s successful.

I don’t want to be too cynical, but as I think I’ve told you once, during the April 2003 invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled, and people were screaming and yelling in jubilation, Iraqis among them, 90% of the American people polled that they supported George Bush’s demolishment of the Hussein government and the liberation of Iraq.

Fast forward to the 2006 midterms, where the Republicans took a shellacking, and support for the war was below 50%. And when George W. Bush left office, he had only about 30% support, and there were only 20% supporting the war.

Did the aims of the war change? No. Maybe a little bit more on nation, but what changed was the cost: 4,000-plus dead, many more wounded, trillion dollars. And for what? An ungrateful Iraqi people, it seemed to us, who now were hand-in-glove working with our arch enemies, the Iranians.

So, you have to be very careful about the polls.

Americans will, by a small majority, want the liberation of Iran if it’s quick, if it doesn’t cost Americans a lot of blood and treasure, and if people around the world pat us on the back for liberating Iran.

If we get stuck in a quagmire where we have to have ground troops, and we get into the hundreds of American dead, it’ll be a disaster for the Republican Party in the midterms.

And finally, what happens with a MAGA base?

And I’m talking about the people who identify with the former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Fox anchor Tucker Carlson, some of the more fringe people like Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens or Steve Bannon—the MAGA people, America First, they have been loudly critical of this war in every aspect.

The problem is that part of that criticism has been gloom and doom, and they have predicted it’s not going come out well, or they have predicted that it’s really not in our interest, or that President Donald Trump is a captive of Jewish influences.

All of that does not resonate with a majority of Republicans that support Trump. It doesn’t resonate with the independents.

The Left finds that as sort of a useful idiocy that they can glom onto internal criticism of Trump, but otherwise they have nothing in common with the extreme MAGA base.

So, I don’t think that that will be a hindrance or a brake on operations, except as I just said, if the casualties climb, if we have to put in ground troops, if there is a falling out between us and some of our allies, if the anti-war movement ramps up and takes its fumes, takes an accelerant, I should say, from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement demonstration, the “No Kings” demonstration, the Tesla demonstration and really gets going as it did during the Second Gulf War. Then we could have some problems with the Trump administration’s conduct of war.

I don’t see that yet, and I think there’s a good chance that we can still see a vastly weakened Iran within a month, a triumphant United States.

And the $64,000 question will be, who will be in charge of Iran? And that is very important because you do not—we went twice into Iraq. This is the second time we’ve gone into Iran. You don’t want to go in a third time.

So, it would behoove Donald Trump to find a magical solution of removing the theocratic government, putting a benevolent government in its place without a lot of American blood and treasure, and that’s a hard thing to do.

Trump Laid Out America’s Comeback While Democrats Sat Silent

 

We had the State of the Union, as we all know, on Tuesday. I think all of us were a little apprehensive when we were told it would be the longest State of the Union. I happen to have watched Bill Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union address.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate nowWe had the State of the Union, as we all know, on Tuesday. I think all of us were a little apprehensive when we were told it would be the longest State of the Union. I happen to have watched Bill Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union address.

I think it was an hour and 28 minutes. President Donald Trump was, depending where you start the actual measurement of the speech, I think it was about an hour and 48, 50 minutes. Twenty to 25 minutes longer. Bill Clinton’s was considered kind of a disaster. It was too long, and it was just what the Emperor Augustus called res gestae. Just a recap of all the good things he’s done.

So when I heard that, I was a little upset, but when you looked at the actual speech, he got what he had to cover, the bullet points on the economy. And there are many. I mean, inflation the last three months is way below 2%. And he inherited, remember, a five-point, I think it’s a 5.4 average inflation rate under Joe Biden.

It was 21 aggregate inflation over four years divided by four, and gross domestic product was very strong. It was much stronger than people had anticipated. Job growth is not only strong, but it’s U.S. citizens for the vast majority of the new jobs that are created. Interest rates are down.

All of that … gasoline, as he pointed out. In a place in Iowa, it’s under $2. It doesn’t apply to here to us in California. We’re going to be seeing six, seven, and eight this summer because we drove out two large refineries that will be leaving California.

Nevertheless, he got what he needed to say at the very beginning, and then it wasn’t really a State of the Union address. It was more of a variety show. It was an interview when he brought all of these tragic cases of these people.

And they all had one thing in common: whether it was the family that was impacted by the illegal alien truck driver, or it was to show how so many people had been patriotic, or the sudden entry of the hockey team, or the tragic killing of the Ukrainian immigrant on a train.

It was all to show you two things: that we’re a wonderful patriotic country, and the policies of the Democratic opposition had caused, in some cases, these tragedies. And then the Democrats thought they were going to be very, very cute by boycotting. I don’t know. They said 73 or 74, but maybe only 60 actually boycotted.

They wouldn’t stand for any applause, no matter what the topic was, or no matter whether they agreed with it, and they were going to have alternate realities in reply to Donald Trump’s speech. And they were all a disaster, to be quite frank.

Gov. [Abigail] Spanberger of Virginia, she’s added all these taxes. She’s taxing anything that moves or breathes, and she’s talking about her affordability record. I think it was mostly about her.

She thinks, I think, that [Gavin] Newsom, [Kamala] Harris, [Pete] Buttigieg, they’re not viable candidates, and somebody like herself, a dark horse, might emerge in 2028. I don’t think she is. It wasn’t a very inspiring speech.

Sen. Alex Padilla, his reply was incoherent. It was basically that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has no business enforcing the law. I don’t know Spanish all that well, but when I can understand a lot of what he was saying, then he must not be speaking the Spanish that most people do, because I could understand a lot of it, and it seemed incoherent to me.

Then there was at the National Press Corp some weird alternate venue where people dressed up in costumes, and they were screaming and yelling and frogs and giraffes, and … Joy Reid. It didn’t make any sense at all.

And then, the final thing is they didn’t understand Donald Trump. The longest speech in history would mean what?

That they were going to come on Eastern time at 11 o’clock or even 11:30 by the time they got going? So, nobody really heard what they were doing. And when they did have a chance to see and hear them during the actual address, they wouldn’t even stand up for the poor girl who was maimed and tragically disabled by the illegal alien truck driver.

They wouldn’t stand up for the Ukrainian mom who was there, who was lamenting the horrific murder of her child. They wouldn’t stand up for anything.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, when they talked about outlawing stock, insider stock trading, she looked like she was mummified. It just wasn’t a good look for any of them.

And the polls reflected that. More people thought it was good, very good, or moderately good than bad. About two-thirds of the people liked it. Even some of Trump’s favorability ratings, the Trafalgar poll had him coming up over 50%. So, what shouldn’t have worked at that length worked actually quite brilliantly.

And there’s something about the Democratic Party, whether it’s Rep. Al Green with a sign that he had and disrupting the speech or Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib that are screaming “KKK” and “liar.” We used to think that when anybody disrupted a State of the Union, it was terrible.

And the last time we really saw a disruption was Al Green tried to break the cadence of Trump. Then, of course, we had Nancy Pelosi in the first term, who tore up the State of the Union address on national TV. Nobody quite ever would ever do that again. So, my point is that the Democrats really look like they are.

It’s not that they look bad, it’s just that when you look at their field, Gov. Gavin Newsom, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], Pete Buttigieg, there’s no one there.

And so, Trump really did pull off something that no one anticipated, that he was going to speak for nearly two hours. And yet, it was a lively variety show with points of triumphalism and happiness and abject sadness.

But, to finish, the Democrats thought they were so smug, but they had no idea what was coming. When he asked everybody to stand if they thought that they would prioritize American citizens over illegal aliens, they thought, “I’m not going to give this person the benefit of ever agreeing with it.” True, they didn’t.

But to the American people, the 50 million or 60 million who watched, it wasn’t about Trump. It was just to reiterate that the policies under Biden were something that they didn’t approve of anymore because they were very unpopular. And what did they do? They sat down.We had the State of the Union, as we all know, on Tuesday. I think all of us were a little apprehensive when we were told it would be the longest State of the Union. I happen to have watched Bill Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union address.

The New Democratic Socialist Party Is a ‘Graveyard of Bad Ideas’

 

 There’s a lot of opposition to the Trump counterrevolution. There’s talk of a Democratic resurgence.

But before we write off the Republicans—and
I’m very confident. I think they’re gonna do well in the midterms, for
reasons I’ve outlined before. Do we really want the alternative

Because I think the way to characterize the new democratic socialist
party is it’s sort of a graveyard of bad ideas. That is that, especially
in the Obama administration and in the post-George Floyd period, we
were told that there were new paradigms, new exegesis, new protocols,
agendas that were going to be lasting and permanent, and change America
for the better.

And they have been tried under former President Joe Biden, and they’ve been found wanting. And I think they’re mostly, now, relegated, as I said, to the boneyard, maybe, of bad ideas.

One of them was this idea that a previously small minority of people
that suffered from gender dysphoria—maybe 0.001% of the population—was
actually a huge group of oppressed peoples, in the manner of the civil
rights plight of African Americans or Latinos. And therefore, we had to
recognize separate restrooms for trans people. Boys—biological men, I
should say, competing in female sports. And we just went whole hog
I think all of us at work, all of a sudden, one day, we woke up and
people were listing their pronouns. I haven’t seen that recently

Anyway, we were told there was this large stealthy constituency of
oppressed trans people and that they had innate grievances against the
majority. And they were quite big.

I don’t think people bought into the idea that there are more than
two biological genders. The rest, I think, as a recent Czech diplomat
lectured former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Munich, Germany, the rest are socially constructed.

Nor did we really look at the effect of biological males competing in
sports, especially contact sports—that can be volleyball or things like
boxing—the effect of a biological male on female sports, and the
fairness, or I should say unfairness, of it.

And of course, the transitional surgery, the effect on hormones. The
Left had been so careful to warn us about Big Pharma and the medical
industry and unnecessary procedures, and yet they were very
undiscriminating and just kind of approved whole-hog the idea that you
can make these radical surgeries on young teenagers and give them very
dangerous drugs—steroids and hormones, antidepressants. And I think now
we’ve seen the result of it. And it’s not gonna recur.


Open borders were another bad idea. And we had 10,000 people coming
across the border. I think the iconic turning point was when Alejandro
Mayorkas, the former Biden homeland security secretary, was standing on a
podium and saying at the border, “The border is secure.” And you could
see thousands of people coming in—10,000 a day, 10 million to 12 million
over four years.

I don’t think anybody realizes the enormity of the task to find those
10 million to 12 million. They added to a pool of 20 million, giving us
30 million illegal aliens. And we had another 20 million people not
born in the United States that were residents. Some were citizens, some
were legal residents, some were on student visas.


But the point is, we have 53 million people, 16% of the population
wasn’t born here, without any idea how to assimilate, acculturate, or
integrate them into the body politic.

So, I think the idea of open borders, as Secretary of State Marco
Rubio pointed out in Europe, is a dead letter. Nobody’s gonna come back
and say, “We have to let in another 10 million or 5 million.” It impacts
the poor. It swamps our social welfare network, as we’ve seen with
500,000 criminals. It spikes our crime.




Another one is the idea that we’re gonna live in a United Nations
utopia and you really don’t need a deterrent military. Europe went down
that path after the end of the Cold War, 1991, all through the ’90s and
the new millennium. They disarmed. Germany went from having the biggest
army in NATO to having one that wasn’t really an army anymore. Europe,
despite its $20 trillion gross domestic product and despite its 500
million-plus population, is totally disarmed.

We ourselves let our defenses lax under Biden. I think everybody sees
now, after the Iranian nuclear threat, what China’s up to, what Russia
is doing in Ukraine, that you have to deter your enemies. And that
requires a strong defense budget.

I think, as well, we owe—we’re getting into the trillions of dollars.
And we’re anticipated to get to, in the next decade, I don’t know, it
could be $40 trillion in debt. It’s not sustainable. The interest on the
debt, right now, is larger than the defense budget. Europe is suffering
the same malaise. But the idea of modern monetary theory—the Left told
us—or that since we are loaning the money to ourselves and bondholders,
it’s turned out to be bogus.

The fact is we ran up all of this debt because the Fed, during the Obama and first Trump administration and the first Biden administration,
kept interest rates low, so we borrowed billions, trillions of more
dollars, at rates as low as 2% or 3%. And now the rates came up. And we
saw what a catastrophic idea that was when we have to service it

I don’t think anybody’s gonna make the argument that we need more
socialist entitlement programs funded by borrowed money. If you borrow
the money and it’s unsustainable, you only have three choices: you can
default on it and ruin the nation’s credit rating, you can confiscate
money, or you can inflate your way out of it.

There’s a fourth, but I don’t see Europe, yet, learning that lesson:
You can grow your economy and get greater revenues. That’s what we’re
trying to do in the United States.

Fifth, finally, very quickly, I think diversity, equity, and
inclusion has sort of been exhausted. It’s showed not to be unworkable,
that is, how do you determine who is a victim and part of the
victim/victimizer binary, historical grievances? If you’re Latino or
black or Asian, do you prove that somebody was mean to you? Your
great-grandfather was a slave—great, great. It’s very hard, if you’re
one-quarter white, half-Asian, one-quarter Latino, what particular group
are you?

It was an emphasis on superficial appearance, contrary to the content
of our character. It was on the color of your skin. That didn’t work
out too well. It gave people exemptions, and it said that, I,
psychologically, if I make a mistake or I don’t work hard or I wanna
apply to Harvard, but I don’t have the SAT scores or the grades of other
people, I should get that. Or if I’m in a pilot training program or I’m
a surgeon and I don’t quite make the standards, there’s other criteria,
kinda like the Russian commissar system, where if you were
ideologically pure, then you were given exemptions from performance.

And so, I think we now see that DEI is disruptive, it’s
discriminatory. And I think, after experimenting with this under the
guise of affirmative action, but especially, the last four or five
years, people are sick of it. It’s incoherent. And it’s dangerous. It’s
dangerous. It puts people in key positions in the economy, where life
and death matters, and they are promoted or assessed or retained on
criteria other than mer


And so, we can sum up by saying there’s four or five things that went
full-bloom, full-blast under the Obama and Biden administrations. And I
think President Donald Trump
and this counterrevolution were able to show the American people that
the trans fixation, the open borders, the idea of being pretty much
disarmed, deficits—I call it deficit socialism—and DEI didn’t work out


There was a laboratory United States that tried these things, and it
hasn’t worked. And Europe, I think, would agree that it has to follow
the same pathway of reform or it’s going to end up a Third World
country.

Preventive or Preemptive? The Pros and Cons of a Potential US Strike on Iran

 

President Donald Trump is positioning the largest naval and air forces with submarines off the coast of Iran—in the Persian Gulf, in the Mediterranean, in the Red Sea—that we’ve seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And there are pros and cons about striking Iran.

We’re not at war with them right now, so this is what we would call either a preventive war, long-term threat, or a preemptive war, that there’s a short-term threat that has to be precluded by the use of force.

It’s very controversial, and we don’t know whether he’s going to pull the trigger or not. He said help was on the way when the protests were maximized. Anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 people, estimates say, were killed. Those protests are now—we haven’t seen much of them, given the mass death and murder on this awful regime of some, it’s getting nearer, as you know, a half-century, 46 years.

So, what are the pros and cons of what we’re doing? Does he have to go to Congress to get a declaration of war? No. No more than the Obama administration had to do when they bombed Libya, for example. But there are pros and cons, and let’s go through the pros first.

It has been the dream of eight presidencies, going back to Jimmy Carter, all the way to Donald Trump, to have some type of regime change.

There’s one exception, Barack Obama. He had a harebrained scheme, remember, that he was going to empower Iran. He had the Iran deal. He brought in $400 million at night on pallets to give them money that had been sanctioned. He lifted the sanctions. So did Joe Biden. The idea was to balance off Israel and the Arab countries with a Shia revolutionary country. And then that would produce creative tension, I suppose, that Obama thought he would adjudicate.

But other than that, every president has wanted an end to that anti-American regime. They have killed more Americans than any terrorist organization, probably as much as ISIS or more than ISIS, given the use of shaped charges in Iraq. So, that makes sense that you’d want to get rid of it.

You would also, in this cat-and-mouse game that we played for 20 years about Iranian nukes, it’s a given that anytime they sign a nuclear nonproliferation deal or they give someone their word, it’s not going to happen. They can’t be trusted. They’re a revolutionary, ideologically driven, not rational regime. But it would be very good if they didn’t have the ability with their hypersonic missiles or their other ballistic missiles to hit Europe or our allies in the Middle East or even, at some future date, us. So, you could end that project for good.

They’re in remission now, thanks to our prior bombing missions, but we haven’t ended that threat. It’s existential as long as the regime is in. It would be a moral thing, as I said, 10,000 to 30,000 protesters were murdered. Their bodies were not even given back, in some cases, to their families, secretly buried.

And this regime, as we speak, is hanging people, executing people. It’s a rogue regime. And the moral case is strong to help out the protesters, and there might be a chance that Donald Trump could time his attack with a second wave of protests.

It would also stabilize. Everybody thinks it’s going to destabilize the Middle East. It would probably stabilize the Middle East. And with the source of funding for Hamas, for the Houthis, and for Hezbollah completely cut off, those terrorist organizations may die in the vine, and the Arab countries might feel more secure that they could cut a deal according to the Abraham Accords with Israel.

But there are cons. Let’s make no mistake about it. When you park 200,000-ton displacement carriers, one in the Persian Gulf and one in the Mediterranean, those are big targets. They’ve got some of the best air defenses in the history of naval warfare. They have a fleet of accompanying ships. Hopefully, their air arms could take out the ability of the Iranians to hit them with either drones or missiles, but it’s not a sure thing. And they’re big targets. And we’ve got about 5,000 Americans on each one of those carriers, and they’re a $13 billion, $14 billion investment. So, that’s a great risk.

The midterms are coming up in November. Most presidents are very wary to take on an optional military engagement when there’s so many unknowns up in the air, and it could either sink the Trump administration’s prospects in November or, if he was able to displace and get rid of this horrific regime, the first of, as I said, eight presidents to be able to do that, that would be quite an achievement, it might help him in the midterms.

He has another problem. That is the MAGA base. The MAGA base is neo-isolationist. He campaigned in 2016 and 2020 against so-called forever wars, optional military engagements, especially in the Middle East. In the past, he’s been able to square that circle by limited engagements. In other words, the taking out of the Wagner Group in Syria, the killing of Qasem Soleimani or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or the bombing of the nuclear facilities. They were all finite, very short, solved the problem. Bombed ISIS into oblivion. Said he was going to bomb them, he did.

This is a little different. There’s not so easily an endgame here because this is a huge country and it’s got a very ideologically fervent population.

There’s another thing, too. The protesters themselves, we think, are pro-Western. They want to bring back the shah, but we’re not sure of that.

So, if you’re a protester and they killed 30,000 of you and you’re afraid to go back out and you’re sitting in your apartment and you see bombs raining, and they’re not going to be completely accurate, and take my word for it and your word for it, these Iranians know how to do Hamas and Hezbollah-like tactics. Their missiles and their command and control will not be in something that says a secure bunker. They will be near hospitals. They will be near mosques. They will be near schools. They will be, as we saw in Lebanon, in residential areas. So, there will be collateral damage.

Will the Iranian public have the long-term view that that’s in their interest, or the short-term view and turn on the Americans?

These are all pros and cons, but ultimately, Donald Trump will have to make that decision. He’ll have to make the decision pretty quickly because you can’t just take those many naval assets and stick them halfway across the world. In terms of deployment, wear and tear on the machinery, deployment time, etc., there is a window. And the window is probably about another six weeks. He’ll have to make that decision.

We have the Olympics. You would not want to strike during the Olympics, apparently. He’s got to worry about the Israelis. On the one hand, they want the regime gone. On the other hand, the last time they exchanged missiles and attacks with Iran, they were getting very low on anti-ballistic missile defense weaponry. So, we don’t know quite where their stocks are now.

Finally, what should Trump do? I’m not going to advise him. I don’t have the expertise or the knowledge to advise him. But I do think that he might want to have a brief press conference or address to the nation, five minutes, not detailed, just say that we are facing an existential threat for nearly 50 years with this country. It’s killed thousands of Americans in Iraq and Lebanon. And it is a human rights abuser. It murders its own people.

And it’s very important, given its key role in controlling the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% to 30% of the world’s oil passes every day. And more importantly, the price of oil will depend on it as well.

And here are the dangers and here are the advantages, and I’m going to make my—it doesn’t have to be that explicit, but he needs to give some information to the American people.

‘You Owe Us’ Is the Mantra of the Left

 

person 1: Two things that came together for me. One was [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s 9.5% increase in the property tax for New Yorkers, but not that alone. I’m sure our audience has read about that. But I was looking at Power Line. I always like to give a shout-out to them because they have some great articles, and they were comparing New York State’s budget versus Florida’s budget.

And they came up with, well, it’s only half at the state level. So, I thought, well, let’s look at the city level, New York City versus Miami. And while the billions that each of them has to spend is not meaningful in and of themselves. So, for example, New York City’s budget is $127 billion while Miami’s is only $3.4.

But that being said, per citizen, what has to be paid into these cities? And so, for Mamdani, each of his citizens has to pay $14,431 in for his budget. And in Miami, it’s just half of that, at just under $7,000 per citizen.

person 2: And it’s more disproportionate because in New York, the number of people who are actually paying taxes is a much smaller percentage than in Miami.

He inherited the city that was this blue-chip financial market, this cultural, financial capital of the world, and the first thing he did was raise spending by $11 billion.

Second thing he did was prove that he couldn’t get the trash or the snow off the street during the storm.

Third thing he did, it was very hard to find an appointee who somewhere in their dark history had not issued or written something antisemitic.

All he does is smile and try to be … basically, his message is: I’m not Lenin, and Trotsky or Stalin. I’m the nice, happy-faced communist, and you’re going to like me, and you’re going to like my communism. We’re all going to get along.

I mean, if you’re in New York, if you’re in California, you got a choice.

If you’re in California and this billionaire tax passes, and you’ve got to come up with $50 million, you’re going flee. If you’re in New York, and they’re going to raise your property tax on these multimillion-dollar buildings, you’re talking what could be $20 or $30, $40, $50 million more a year, then you’re going to flee, get out.

If you don’t, they’re just going to keep doing it. They’re going keep targeting you because they have an idea. I don’t think people realize that.

The socialist mind … I knew a lot of socialists in the universities and some friends of mine, and they always think … The whole core of socialism is, I work hard, and no one knows how I suffer at my job as a nurse, as a farmer, whatever. And I believe in the labor theory of value.

Why is it that when Victor had a Ph.D. but he was pruning vines, he was only making $4 an hour—I was for three years—and then all of a sudden, five years later, he is an academic, and he is sitting in between classes and having coffee and he’s making $50 an hour. That’s not fair.

And so, they don’t think about supply and demand, expertise, education, nothing. And somebody would say, “Well, when Victor was pruning vines, a lot of people could not only prune them, they could probably prune them better.”

When he was teaching a particular Greek literature class, and they thought that was an important class to offer. Questionable, but that’s what they said. Very few people could do it. They don’t accept that.

And so, they run on this envy that we work hard, and we get up, and we do things, and therefore we should be compensated. And that’s what a socialist is, and they’re going keep raising taxes.

The other thing about it is, when they raise taxes, they don’t ever say thank you. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, even former Sen. Dianne [Feinstein], they’re all wealthy, but they never said, “We want to thank the people in California that are the 1% that are paying 50% of the income tax.”

And by the way, the 50% of the income tax in California, there’s only about, I don’t know what there is, 250 billionaires? They usually pay capital gains tax. They pay at about, I don’t know, 28%. The people in that 1% of Californians are highly compensated professionals and small businesspeople who make a million or two million, three million dollars, and then they get hit with a 13.3% tax rate, plus their federal plus Medicare.

So, they’re paying 55% of their income and nobody ever says, “Thank you for doing that, you people, we have a very skilled elite that allows us to have this huge budget.” They don’t. The attitude is always, “They have to. They have to pay more.”

I remember in 1991 there was a fiscal crisis in California and the state was broke.

Well, it’s always broke. It always has a deficit, but this was a really bad deficit. So, they decided to go after all state agencies, and one of them was the California State University system. In the past you always could lay off part-time lecturers. But then they got the idea, we exploit those people so well. We pay them so little that by laying them off—we really reduce about 40% of our classes, which are big money earners. And they don’t cost us anything. We exploit them. No benefit. But the ones that really are the high-priced assets, if you’re going to go after budget cuts, are the tenured full professor, top step in fields that we feel are not essential.

I disagreed with that. So they started laying off Russian professors, classics professors—I was on leave that year—dance professors, which was bad. It was really bad. But when you listen to them, and I knew them very well, they’d say, “Well, these people can pay. Why aren’t we taxing more? Why don’t we raise taxes?”

I said, “We already have the highest income tax.” Well, they have a lot of money, or they wouldn’t be able to pay what they do. But they never made the connection that their job was dependent on somebody being willing. So, they had just contempt for the people that were already paying their salaries.

And some of these classes had three and four people in them. But it was just outrage. It was never, “Why don’t we cut our expenses and save the taxpayer?” It was always, “Ah, they owe us. They owe us.” And that’s the attitude of the Left.

Obama's Latest Interview Is an Unbelievable Rewriting of History

 

Former President Barack Obama continues to make the podcast rounds as he joined Brian Cohen in what could only be labeled as one of the most insufferable interviews available on the internet. Obama managed to do what he does best: pretend to take the moral high-ground while having ruthlessly targeted anyone politically opposed to him.

Obama was always the master of this. He’d do something nakedly political and accuse everyone who opposed it of being “political.”

“Stop being political and pass my law that destroys American healthcare.” https://t.co/UQtYJ2EE51

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) February 15, 2026

Obama jumped onto the leftist talking point of the Democrat Party being the party of unity, while the Republican party has a monopoly on divisiveness, anger, “us/them” style of politics, and almost laughably equating the Left to Bad Bunny’s recent profane halftime performance that nearly no one in the United States could actually understand.

OBAMA: “The other side does the mean, angry, exclusive, us/them, divisive politics. That's their home court. Our court is coming together.”pic.twitter.com/9Ph6hxHzUz

— Brandon Straka #WalkAway (@BrandonStraka) February 14, 2026

“That’s their home court,” Obama said. “Our court is coming together. A great example, it wasn’t political, Bad Bunny’s halftime show.”

Of course, by “unity” he means when his running-mate labeled his opponents as racists who would work to reinstitute slavery. Or how about the “basket of deplorables" line from his would-be successor, Hillary Clinton? It seems almost daily that we hear of a leftist politician calling ICE officers Nazis.

I guess he forgot when "his side" called the other side Hilter, Nazis. etc -- or maybe he just doesn't think that is divisive https://t.co/aNALwZEqNn

— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) February 15, 2026

Barack Obama was the most divisive president in modern American history. https://t.co/lzZaONJADj

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) February 14, 2026

Obama normalized and weaponized the idea of “if you disagree with me, you are evil and want people to die.”

He set the table for the us/them politics we have today.

But he also has the self-awareness of a blind squirrel so what can ya do. https://t.co/FlZlt4nMuQ

— Matt Whitlock (@MattWhitlock) February 15, 2026

The lunacy doesn’t end there. Obama also took shots at President Trump, alleging that Trump has harassed and intimidated states who didn’t vote for him, and claiming that he would have never done the same.

.@BarackObama: "When I was president, I suppose I could have simply unilaterally ordered the military to go into some red state and harass and intimidate a governor there or cut off funding for states that didn't vote for me... but that is contrary to how I think our democracy is… pic.twitter.com/MACkwm8Fmd

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) February 14, 2026

It’s hard to break down just how absurd this statement is. Trump has only had to conduct these large-scale operations in sanctuary cities who are openly and flagrantly defying federal law, and because the Democrat-run states Trump desires to withhold funds from are engaged in billions of dollars of fraud.

Obama also seems to think that he never used his government power to target political opponents after making a claim that is a complete rewriting of the work of his administration. It seems rather hard to forget that the IRS targeted Tea Party aligned groups for increased scrutiny, with James Comey running cover for their political activity, among the countless other activities his administration got up to. Does the Steele Dossier even need to be mentioned? The number of cases are simply too vast to write about.

Obamacare was literally written to threaten to cut off funding for states that wouldn't vote for Obama's policies. There were multiple Supreme Court cases on this! That was the organizing principle of the stimulus, too. That's before we even get into suing nuns or running guns to… https://t.co/MMHryax464

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 15, 2026

He literally sued nuns. https://t.co/JC9kBICagG

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 14, 2026

Obama went after the Sisters of the Poor in court, authorized a drone strike on two American citizens without due process, was running guns to Mexican cartels, and oversaw surveillance of Fox News, the AP, and CBS News https://t.co/zuTNexdhZJ

— Sean Agnew (@seanagnew) February 15, 2026

The good news for conservatives is, that if they have resorted to trotting out Obama to try to clean up their mess, you know that we are winning. If it weren't for him and his ego, Donald Trump would have never come down that escalator and ushered in a new age of conservative governance.