Trump’s Second Term Gains Momentum as Economy Soars, Borders Tighten

We’re at four months now in the new Trump second administration. And a strange thing has happened.

If you look at the polls, after diving for President Donald Trump with the announcement that he was going to subject certain countries to high tariffs—which panicked the stock market. Now, the stock market’s almost recovered, or has recovered, all of its lost. It went down a little bit when Trump said he was going to continue the tariffs, to force the European Union to have reciprocal treatment toward the United States.

But nevertheless, Trump in the RealClearPolitics averages—which to be fair, have a preponderance of left-wing polls—is still only about a point, point and a half down. But in other polls, Rasmussen, he’s either even or he is a couple of points ahead. And yet, all of the media and all of the major organs on the Left, but even in the center and Right—The Wall Street Journal, to take another example we’ve discussed—they have been uniformly negative.

So, how in the world is Donald Trump—and Donald Trump has not been reticent. He has tweeted all sorts of things about, you know, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift and Canada—things that were very controversial. How can he be almost equal and much higher than he was at his first term at this time? And the answer is twofold.

No. 1 is what he’s doing. Every time people say we’re headed for a recession or his trade war is gonna tank the economy, data comes out. This week, it was the corporate profits were unusually high, strong. It came out that we’re not in a housing recession, that housing sales are steady. Inflation is down. Energy prices are way down. Economic growth is up. Joblessness is down. So, that is one reason.

The second is Donald Trump has been touring the world. And you can call it mercantilism but essentially, the Trump doctrine is we’re not going to get into optional military engagements on the ground anywhere and we’re going to have our relations be transactional. So, even our enemies—to the degree it’s even possible—we’re gonna try to find some mechanism by which we can stop wars. Maybe rare earth mineral corridor in Ukraine or maybe we’re dangling an end of sanctions for Iran—I don’t think that’s going to work.

But the point is people appreciate the idea that Trump, first, is trying to exhaust peaceful avenues before he uses force. And he’s trying to address the theater wars that former President Joe Biden left him in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The economy is strong. The border is 99% closed. We’ve gone from over 150,000 entries down to less than 8,000, in many places fewer. The wall is going to be continued. The Border Patrol is increased. The deportations, despite the court orders, continue.

So, the things that he’s doing are very popular, especially to the working classes: black, white, Hispanic. They like cheap gas prices. They like news that there’s going to be $8 to $10 trillion of investment and new jobs and assembly manufacturing in the United States. They like the idea that we’re cutting unnecessary funds for government and we’re not touching Social Security. They like the idea that Trump is trying to reduce taxes on the middle class in terms of Social Security or tips. But there’s another facet. And that is not Trump, but the people who despise Trump and are attacking Trump.

When the electorate looks at that and they say, “Well, Trump—I like everything he’s doing but I don’t like what he said about Canada. It just kind of bothers me.” Or, “I don’t like him lowering himself to attacking Bruce Springsteen, in kind.” Yes. But what is the alternative?

Well, the alternative is the Left is glorifying a murderer, Luigi Mangione. And the campuses will not, cannot, do not want to stop the antisemitism. So, we see foreign guests with masks on who continue to use violence and vandalize our campuses. Now we have two wonderful Israeli citizens who have been murdered. And doesn’t seem that anybody in the core base of the Democratic Party is objecting at all.

This comes on the heels of attacks on Tesla. This comes on the heels of this strange Democratic reaction to Trump, where they use almost pornographic language: “s—,” the F-word. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz can’t give a speech without either comparing Trump to Hitler or calling him some pejorative.

The result of all this is when they look to the Democratic alternative, there is no alternative. There’s no explanation why they opened the border. There’s no explanation, opposition to what Trump is doing. Why aren’t they saying, “We like an open border. Stop it, Donald Trump”? They’re not even doing that.

They’re not presenting any positive, constructive alternative. There is no shadow government. There is nobody in the Democratic Party that is popular. Not Tim Walz. Not former Vice President Kamala Harris. Not Sen. Chuck Schumer. Not even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Especially not Rep. Jasmine Crockett. I mean popular to the American people in general.

And so, when you add the fact that the economic news is pretty good and there’s a lot of initiatives on the horizon—peace initiatives, foreign investment initiatives, trade initiatives. And when you look at the people around Trump—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—they’re very good. And when they go before Congress, they’re calm, they’re rational, they’re data-driven. The Democratic senators who press them and inquire of them and mock them are usually poorly prepared, hysterical, angry, and make fools of themselves.

Add it all up: Things are going pretty good in the country. Donald Trump is a whirlwind. He’s staging a counterrevolution. And most of the issues that he’s trying to undo of the progressive project, the public supports him.

And his Democratic opposition—four months into his tenure—has still completely lost its mind and not only does not offer an alternative agenda, but personally, emotionally, psychologically puts people off. They do not like the way that they’re talking. They do not like the way they’re acting. And they don’t like them in general.

The Quiet Economic Boom of Trump 2.0

 

The Trump budget is making its way through the Senate. And people on both sides of the issue of fiscal sobriety are arguing because the Biden deficit, which is somewhere between $1.9 trillion and $2.1 trillion, doesn’t seem to be radically reduced, given the DOGE cuts are offset by not cutting other programs that came in under Biden.

The Build Back Better and New Green Deal—all of that stuff is not radically cut. And more importantly, there are some tax cuts—things like taxes on tips, the SALT state tax deductions—that suggest that either there won’t be this sizable budget deficit reduction, as promised by the Trump administration, or it won’t occur until later on, or it could get bigger.

But there is a wild card here. And consider that in March through April, all the way into May, we had some monthly data. And income—real income—is substantially up. So is the savings rate. Energy prices are down. The inflation rate came in at April at 2.1%. The economy, according to the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, will not grow at 3.8%, but it could, they think, at an annualized rate of 4.6%.

That’s critical, because in a $33 billion-plus economy, if you get two or three points of additional economic growth, then obviously, you’re going to have more federal revenue. It could be $200 or $300 billion more.

Also, people discounted the Trump tariffs. They said, either one of two things would happen. They would either, and believe it or not, they said the trade deficit might increase because of retaliatory tariffs that would increase faster than ours or decrease trade. But we might be in a recession.

And yet, when you look at the April data, the $160 billion monthly trade deficit has been halved. It’s incredible. It’s almost like the story on the border: That we went from 10,000 people a day to virtually nobody.

So, what does all this mean? We saw these gyrations in the stock market. We read The Wall Street Journal every day: recession, slow growth, market uncertainty, trade wars, recession, but if you actually look at the data, two things pop out at you.

The economy is doing very, very well. And a lot of it is the expectation of the things that are in process. The $10 trillion of foreign investment. The extensions of the tax cuts. Incentives for investment in the new budget. And so, this is completely unknown territory. If Donald Trump were to get—as Ronald Reagan did in the first half of 1984, he got up to an annualized rate of 7%. Especially in the latter part. If he were to get 4.6% or 5%, then this mythical idea that we all discounted, that you can grow your way out of deficits, it wouldn’t quite be realized but it would really help. And that $1.9 to $2.1 trillion deficit could go down substantially.

All of us never believed supply side will solve the problem. It won’t solve the problem without physical cuts and discipline. But it will do a lot for the economy.

And this is emblematic of this first mysterious four months of Donald Trump, when people said that Donald Trump could shut the border down, nobody believed him.

When people said that he could deal with the universities, and then Harvard had a lot of exposure, violating the Supreme Court’s rulings, not reporting Chinese and Middle East money, overcharging the government. And yet, all of this exposure that’s happening on the campus is enlightening the American people about issues they didn’t think was possible, just in the first 120 or 130 days of this administration.

So, what’s the bottom line? What am I getting at? There are revolutionary—maybe counter-revolutionary—developments going on at the border, going on with the universities. But especially with the economy. It’s being rebooted. It’s being redirected in ways that economists are not even able to figure out because we haven’t done this before. And the net result might be that we’re going to make progress, both in the expansion of the economy and through growth in federal revenues and cut down these deficits.

How the ‘Pravda-Like’ Press Distorts the News

 

So much has been said about the media, the mainstream media, the legacy media. There’s not really much to add because we all know that it’s not really a disinterested media but it’s kind of a Pravda-like propaganda organ. I’ll give you a few examples.

More recently, when Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House, the president of South Africa, did you see the word “ambush”? It was in every mainstream paper, every left-wing website, every radio—NPR, PBS, CBS, MSNBC. It’s like the Democratic operatives issue a Pravda-like order and then these mindless people just say, “Okay, today’s talking points are…”

He met President Donald Trump. He wasn’t really surprised that Trump was going to confront him because he bragged that he was gonna confront Trump. There was no secret place. It wasn’t a sudden, unexpected attack from a secret place—the definition of an ambush. Yet, it was ”ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush.”

And when some questions arose about the visit, it was just typical. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, fielded a question from an NBC journalist. She was very angry because Donald Trump mentioned to President Ramaphosa, “See this picture of a thousand graves.” She said, “Well, he was lying. There weren’t graves.” And the press secretary replied back, “They were commemorations.” Each one of those crosses represents a dead South African who was murdered by virtue of his race. And she said, “Yes, but it’s not…”

So what they were arguing about—NBC—was semantics that Trump had improperly—and he had improperly—confused “grave” with “cenotaph,” a cenotaph. That’s “kenos” in Greek, meaning “empty.”

So, these crosses were not on top of a dead person but they represented a dead person. But NBC was so fixated on embarrassing the president that they didn’t even want to discuss the fact that there were a thousand crosses and they did represent individual lives destroyed because of their race. But she just wanted to make the point that you could nullify all of that and excuse it by saying they were not graves but cenotaphs. And there you have it.

So lately, we see it everywhere. And we had the tragic killing of Yaron Lischinsky and his fiancee, Sarah Milgrim, the two Jewish diplomatic workers in Washington. And what was interesting about it—I’ve been reading the mainstream media accounts. So, Elias Rodriguez goes in there, shoots—empties a gun—21 times, murders this wonderful couple, and then he yells, “Free Palestine.”

And they just can’t resist. They have the description of the shooting. They mention who he was. They don’t mention the left-wing groups that he worked with or the funding that came from places like the MacArthur Foundation that funded groups that he used to work for. Or they don’t mention the fact that his father attended Congress as a guest of a Democratic congressman.

But they do do this: About eight, usually about eight paragraphs down, they say, “And tensions rose because of the Israeli assault on Gaza and the thousands of deaths.” In other words, they’re trying to contextualize the murder by saying that this person was driven to it in the manner, perhaps, like Luigi Mangione, who shot the UnitedHealthcare executive. In other words, there’s always a contextualization.

And when you start to add all of this stuff up, it all is in an atmosphere of Jake Tapper co-authoring this “Original Sin” book when he was one of the principle people who promulgated the idea that former President Joe Biden was completely fit and anybody who questioned it—Lara Trump was a good example—he demonized and tried to destroy on national TV. Now he’s gonna make millions saying, “I didn’t do it. They did.”

And it’s an indictment of the Biden circle, who knew that he was cognitively challenged. We knew it. I shouldn’t even say they knew. Everybody knew it. But they were prevented from commenting or they were demonized if they did comment by the media and by the Biden team.

And this is on top of the fact that the media never even looked at the released records. They never even asked a question—as they did of Donald Trump’s cognitive abilities. They never said, “Did he have a PSA test?” Trump, it’s on his medical records. Former President Barack Obama did. They didn’t ask any of these things.

And now they’re trying to say, “We were hoodwinked.” No, you weren’t hoodwinked. You were operating in the same fashion you did to promulgate the Russian collusion lie that you never apologized for, the laptop disinformation lie that you’ve never apologized for, the 51 intelligence authorities that you never apologized for, the partnering of the FBI with social media to censor the news before the 2020 election that you never talked about.

This is a pattern. And it won’t stop with this. And the result is you wonder why, whether when you look at liberal polls or liberal media, nobody has any confidence anymore, nobody trusts you.

Don’t you understand that when you say, “Ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush,” or you ask questions that don’t even get to the point, just a matter of semantics, we know what you’re doing? You’re trying to gin up momentum, enthusiasm for a cause, a left-wing cause that 50% of the population just doesn’t support.

Trump’s Message to Putin: You Blew It

 

here’s been a new development, a new phase in the Ukraine war.

I know we’ve talked about it before, but more recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin has escalated his attacks. Not so much on the battlefront per se, but on civilian targets that he is hitting with missiles and drones as far west as Kyiv. And this has solicited an angry response from President Donald Trump.

I think the subtext of Donald Trump is:

Well, wait a minute, Vladimir. I have sort of told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to ask for so much and be willing to have a ceasefire. And we have a deal in the works. And now you’re kind of fouling it all up.

And the deal was, pretty much, you’re gonna get the Donbas and Crimea and institutionalize it. And we’re gonna get some kind of arrangement to arm Ukraine, but it will not be officially in NATO. And somewhere where the battle line is today we’ll have a ceasefire. And then there will be an economic zone of rare minerals. It’ll be kind of a tripwire. And out of that general framework we can have a peace conference and hammer out the details.

But now you’re doing this escalation that’s kind of fouling up my dreams of solving the problem that I inherited from former President Joe Biden.

And Trump is kind of exasperated. He said, you know, Vladimir’s acting “crazy.” The Left went kind of ecstatic. And they said, “See, see, see, see. Trump finally came around to our point of view. He now agrees with us. It was all Putin’s fault. And he stopped appeasing Putin. And now he’s gonna follow our lead.”

I don’t think that’s quite what’s actually happened. What Trump is really doing is saying to the world:

If we had followed your lead and put pressure only on Vladimir Putin, we would’ve never got a deal because the Russians would be seen as sort of sympathetic to parts of the world. And they would’ve said the United States was too pro-Ukrainian. But I came in and was willing to give him a chance. And now the world sees that he doesn’t want that chance. And the world sees that he’s blowing a deal.

The next question is: Why would he do that? Why would Vladimir Putin pass up a deal?

And I think the answer is that he has to account for a war that he preempted and started that was designed to take all of Ukraine by decapitating Kyiv in February of 2022. Fast forward, there’s probably 1.5 million dead, wounded, and lost—on both sides—and climbing. But the majority of those losses are Russian. There’s probably 1 million dead Russians, wounded Russians, or missing Russians.

And Vladimir Putin—although he is a dictator with absolute power, no dictator is quite with absolute power—he has to account, informally, to a complex of oligarchs, wealthy oligarchs, bureaucrats, high-level bureaucrats, and the military. And there is a point in which he has to show that what he has done in Ukraine is worth 1 million dead, wounded, and missing. And he thinks he’s not there yet.

In other words, he’s going back to them and saying, “Only Vladimir institutionalized the acquisition of the Donbas and Crimea. Which, by the way, I got for you in 2014. And now there’s no question that they’re part of Russia. Only Vladimir got Ukraine out of NATO. Only Vladimir advanced 40 to 60 miles westward from the Donbas and Crimea.”

And I think he thinks that complex that I just mentioned as saying, “You mean you basically didn’t give us anything you. We had the Donbas. We had Crimea. We were already pushing a little bit westward. We knew they were Ukraine. Europe didn’t want them in NATO. United States didn’t want a NATO. So, what did you really give us, Vladimir? You’re not far west enough. Now, you go back over there and you’ve got to justify a million casualties. And there’s not much on the battlefield.”

So, I think what Vladimir Putin thinks is that he’s going to continue the war; continue the terror campaign; get greater concessions from the Europeans, the Americans, and the Ukrainians; and move the battle lines a little bit to the West.

And I think he’s sorely mistaken. He’s misreading Donald Trump. Because the reason he did not invade in 2017 and 2021—of those four recent administrations, that was the only one he did not. He did not invade during Donald Trump’s administration. But he did invade a neighbor during former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden’s tenure.

In other words, he saw—in a way that he does not see now—that Donald Trump is very unpredictable and very erratic, in some ways, that it’s beneficial in the making of foreign policy.

And if he continues to go westward or continues to have this terror campaign, I think he will see that Donald Trump will be able to hold his MAGA coalition together and continue to arm Ukraine. And the Europeans will continue, probably, to arm them as well. And this, the quagmire, will only escalate. And he will not be able to knock Ukraine out of the war and it will be increasingly difficult for him to justify any continuation to his constituents.

If I was Vladimir Putin, I would cut a deal today. And then I would resume natural gas and oil shipments to Europe, I would open the economy back up, and I would tell the Russian people what you did.

I don’t think it would be quite accurate, but you could tell them: “Only because of me, Crimea forever is where it belongs, in Russia. The same as Donbas. And I stood up to the West and said, ‘No NATO.’ And I won this war.”

And that’s a lot better—it’s not a good scenario, but it’s a lot better than another Stalingrad or Verdun or Somme for the next two years for Russia.

The Lasting Damage of the George Floyd Riots

 

This week was the fifth anniversary, May 25, of the tragic death of George Floyd.

It seems that it just happened but it was actually five years ago. And almost everything that has transpired after that in terms of racial relations has been disastrous. And now, maybe at the end of five years, we can look back with a little bit more circumspection and see what actually happened.

George Floyd was a career felon. He was in the process of trying to pass off counterfeit bills. He was reportedly under the influence of severe, powerful drugs, perhaps fentanyl, in addition. He may have been suffering from post-COVID-19 syndromes. He had a heart condition. One of his prior felonies was putting a gun to a woman’s belly in a home invasion.

Nevertheless, when he tried to pass this counterfeit bill, the store owner called the Minneapolis police. They tried to arrest him. He resisted arrest. He was a very big man. And then Officer Derek Chauvin, who was supposedly an expert in techniques that were institutionalized by the Minneapolis Police Department, unfortunately, put his knee on George Floyd’s neck. And there were varying autopsies. One said that killed him. Another one, perhaps, said it didn’t.

But nevertheless, the expression on Officer Chauvin’s face was frozen into eternity. And that sparked the idea that he was a white policeman conducting a typical murder of an unarmed black suspect. And what followed was near mayhem.

Officer Chauvin, remember, was convicted of second- or third-degree murder. He was sentenced to 20 years. His appeals have run out with the Supreme Court. He’ll be in prison probably for much of his life. George Floyd, of course, died at the hospital or on the way to the hospital.

And what happened immediately was this huge riot, five years ago. Unlike the Jan. 6 riot, this thing went on for the end of May, June, July, August, September. Remember, former Vice President Kamala Harris said it wasn’t going to stop, nor should it stop. It’s going to keep going to Election Day. She said that, of course. Then later, when called on it, she said she didn’t mean the violent aspect.

But violent aspects there were. There was $2 billion in damage. There was a police precinct burned to the ground in Minneapolis. There was a federal courthouse that was burned. There was a historic St. John’s Church—across from the White House—that was torched. A mob tried to go into the White House grounds and reach the president.

But even more serious than all of that, we were coming off COVID-19. People had been in a lockdown. There had been a national quarantine. And their news was from the television in an isolated situation in their own home with no human interaction.

So, these riots were kind of an expression of breaking out. And more importantly, they were subject to rumor, suspicion, lies. And one of the great lies was that George Floyd was iconic or emblematic of young black men, middle-aged black men that were systematically being killed while unarmed by the police. That was not true. The Washington Post even said it wasn’t.

That year there were only 18 black males who were stopped by the police in the entire population of 340 million people. This year there were only 10. It was proportionate to the number of people by race who were stopped by the police, 11 million or 12 million each year.

Professor Ibram X. Kendi and professor Robin DiAngelo, or journalist DiAngelo, they created this idea of systemic racism. And you had to be racist in an anti-racist fashion. In other words, the only way to deal with this systemic racism was to be pro-black.

And what followed then was a defunding of the police. It caused a huge spike in crime. I think 20,000 murders in 2020. The Black Lives Matter group was energized. And now as we look back at it, the architects of that movement have ensconced with the money. It has collapsed. The women that were in charge have, apparently, embezzled the money or taken it. They have nice homes. But it’s an inert group.

It had a lot of other deleterious effects. Universities trying to get in on the virtue signaling and performance-art caring dropped the SAT. They dropped the comparative ranking of high school GPA. They dropped meritocracy. They started really enforcing DEI, in the sense of loyalty owes—you have to show us that you’re loyal to the concept of DEI, that you’ve done something for it, or we’re not going to hire you. And the universities then went into something that we could call repertory admissions.

Fast forward five years, looking back, and looking at all the damage of the downtowns in America—many of them that were destroyed. Today they have not recovered, in many cases. Look at the intense dissension and acrimony and racial relations that related to it. Look at the universities who were chastised by the Supreme Court for using race in a racist fashion in admissions. They’ve been discredited. And the people who capitalize on the death of George Floyd are, for the most part, discredited.

And the country now is learning its lessons. It’s trying to find a sober solution, a reaction. I think they’re trying—we’re trying to come to a conclusion. Why in the world did we go completely collectively insane? And the result of that is we don’t think the quarantines were a good idea. They were more injurious to the country than was COVID-19 itself.

We don’t think and we know that the police should be defunded. Much less are they attacking black unarmed males. Just the opposite is happening.

We look at the career of professor Kendi, he went through $45 million at Boston University for an anti-racism center. And apparently, the money was squandered. I mentioned the BLM squandering.

So, we’re getting back to the idea that, when you use race in any fashion, for bias or preference, it’s racist. It doesn’t matter what professor Kendi says or it doesn’t matter about the reactions to the death of George Floyd, it’s racist.

As far as George Floyd is concerned, had Officer Chauvin not had that expression on his face and had he lifted his knee up when George Floyd said he couldn’t breathe, this entire catastrophe probably could have been avoided—or maybe not because there were people who were looking for an occasion like this to spread mayhem and to recalibrate race relations in the United States into what they would call anti-racism. Which means it’s permissible for someone who considers themself a victim to be a victimizer. If you think you’re a victim of racism, then you can use racial preferences yourself with impunity.

In any case, it was a sad chapter in American history.