Picture This: The 2024 GOP Dream Team

 

NEW YORK — President Joe Biden’s total collapse of leadership makes former President Donald J. Trump look better by the hour. Those who voted him out of office because they didn’t like his Twitter feed should burst with pride. They should be thrilled with what they bought with their lack of focus on public policy and obsession with personality quirks:

•A strategic, diplomatic, and humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan

•The erasure of the U.S.-Mexico “border”

•An attendant invasion by (so far) 1,035,352 illegal aliens — many of them with COVID-19 — on Biden’s watch

•A surge in homicides, assaults, and other violent crimes in Democrat-run cities

•The sudden and deliberate rejection of American energy independence

•The resurrection of 1970s-style inflation

•The imposition of society-splitting Critical Race Theory

•And much more — nearly all of it dreadful

If the November 2020 face-off were held today,Trump would trounce Biden 43 percent to 37 percent, according to an August 18 Rasmussen Reports survey.

“Among voters who say they voted for Biden in last year’s election, 12% now say they regret their vote,” Rasmussen explained via Twitter. “By comparison, only two percent (2%) of Trump voters now regret their vote.”

If Trump seeks the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, it almost surely will be his for the asking. I proudly will support him in that effort, especially after Biden’s Afghan mega-disaster confirms that having a reputed bully in the White House sometimes comes in handy.

But what if Trump, who will be 78 at the next presidential election, bequeathed the GOP standard to a new generation of Republican leadership? If so, visualize this 2024 Dream Team:

•President of the United States – Governor Ron DeSantis (R – Florida)

•Vice President of the United States – U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R – South Carolina)

•Secretary of State – Robert C. O’Brien (former National Security Advisor)

•Secretary of Defense – Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R – California) (House GOP leader)

•Secretary of the Treasury – Steve Forbes (Veteran free-market advocate; 1996 and 2000 GOP presidential candidate)

•Attorney General – John Yoo (U.C. Berkeley law professor; DOJ alumnus)

•Secretary of Veterans Affairs – John Ullyot (Former spokesman for VA and NSC)

•United Nations Ambassador – Dr. Monica Crowley (Conservative national security scholar and Treasury Department alumna)

•Director of National Intelligence – Ric Grenell (Former Acting DNI)

•Director of Central Intelligence – K.T. McFarland (GOP foreign-policy luminary)

•Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation – Ted Ullyot (Former DOJ chief of staff)

•Federal Reserve Chairman – Larry Kudlow (Legendary free-market economist)

•Director, Office of Management and Budget, Steve Moore – (Free-market advocate, economist, and scholar)

•White House Press Secretary – Candace Owens (Conservative firebrand)

•Speaker of the House – Donald J. Trump (45th President of the United States)

This line-up would generate America First policies while somewhat limiting the Left from foaming at the mouth over Trump’s eccentricities.

DeSantis is much like Trump — conservative, intrepid, and combative — but without the distracting Twitter blasts. He also is the highly successful and popular governor of Florida, which likely spins the über-swingy Sunshine State and its 30 Electoral College votes into the GOP column.

This likely would place the Republican nominees 11.11 percent of the way toward the 270 electoral votes that spell victory. This also would let Team GOP devote vital cash and talent to other battleground states.

Tim Scott’s Palmetto State is non-swingy. As reliable GOP ground, Scott’s home address adds little on the road to 270.

That said, if the Republican ticket includes a well-respected and accomplished black running mate — whose Reaganesque response to Biden’s State of the Union won widespread plaudits — the Democrats’ “Racism! Racism! Racism!” Klaxons will sound hollow, absurd, and laughable. And if the Democrats lose their “Republicans are racist” truncheon, they’ve got nothing.

Scott’s stirring personal story and presence on the ticket could win Republicans perhaps 15 percent of the black vote, just three points above the 12 percent that Trump won last fall. If DeSantis-Scott actively stump in black neighborhoods, and the GOP builds on Trump’s much-welcome outreach to black voters, Republicans reasonably could win at least 20 percent of ballots cast by black Americans.

This would be curtains for Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, or virtually anyone else who carried the Donkey banner. And those same black citizens who pulled the Elephant lever for president might do so down ballot.

This development would be smashing for GOP candidates for Senate, House, governor’s mansions, and state legislatures. Democrats know this and are terrified by this prospect.

Their despicable defense mechanism: Push Critical Race Theory, cleave America along racial lines, scare blacks with spooky tales about white-nationalist bogeymen, and hope that this will send them screaming into Democrats’ evil arms.

Revolting.

Making Kevin McCarthy Defense Secretary would place a competent and poised leader atop the Pentagon. This also would reward and challenge him for his seven years of service as chief House Republican.

This also would create a vacancy that Trump could fill. The former president either could run for a safe seat in the House or simply get elected as speaker by a majority of House members, presumably Republicans.

There is no constitutional requirement that the speaker be a member of the House, although electing a non-congressman to that post would be unprecedented. No other ex-president has served as House Speaker, although Massachusetts voters elected former President John Quincy Adams to nine terms in the U.S. House, from 1830 to 1846.

This strategy would allow Trump to steer the DeSantis-Scott Make America Great Again agenda through the House.

Speaker Trump also could direct GOP House committee chairmen to investigate Democrat corruption and grotesque incompetence — from the finances of the Biden Crime Family to Biden’s reckless retreat from Afghanistan.

At long last, the House might get to the bottom of Obama-Biden-Hillary’s swap of uranium to Russia in exchange for $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation.

And America finally might learn which members of the Deep State broke the law in their deranged and demented attempt to persecute Trump as a Russian agent and portray his White House as a Kremlin outpost.

Speaker Trump also could leave far-Left House Democrats paralyzed with rage, every time he grabbed the gavel.

Just imagine how hard it would become for representatives Jerry Nadler, Ilhan Omar, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Maxine Waters to get out of bed in the morning knowing that they would have to watch Speaker Donald J. Trump preside over the U.S. House as a turbocharged Republican majority sent their socialist bills down to ignominious defeat.

Yes, please!

The Troubles with Biden’s Brain

 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York got a special Emmy last year for his nauseating daily pandemic press conferences.

So why shouldn’t President Biden win something this year from his Hollywood supporters for his series of wildly untrue Afghanistan speeches about the evacuation of Kabul?

How about something like a special Oscar for “Best Performance by a Confused American President in a Reality TV Series”?

Gov. Cuomo and his sickening ego had to step down, and his phony politically inspired award was revoked by the Emmy people because of the credible groping accusations by nearly a dozen young women who worked for him.

But unfortunately for our future, Biden continues to play the lead role in the Democrat Party’s long-running production of “The Decline and Fall of America.”

He’ll be reading his scripts from a teleprompter, refusing to take tough questions from journalists and pretending he truly believes the lies he’s saying for as long as his guardians think it’s safe to let him out of his basement.

Biden and his brain created a lot of trouble for his floundering administration and his nervous party earlier this week by declaring on TV that the evacuation of Kabul had been a spectacular success.

Unfortunately, however, the whole world, which had been watching in real time, had seen that the “Kabul Airlift” was a tragic screwup, and everyone but Jill and Hunter Biden could see that the Big Guy was either demented or lying, or both.CARTOONS | AF Branco View Cartoon

Everyone saw how Biden’s evacuation fiasco ended up killing 13 U.S. soldiers, stranding an unknown number of Americans and our Afghan allies and gifting the Taliban with tens of billions worth of U.S. military equipment to use or sell.

If the military had not sent in airborne troops to protect the Kabul airport during the airlift, there’s no telling how much worse Biden’s terrible plan would have been.

It was Biden’s own wrongheaded military decisions as commander in chief and his diplomatic deals with the Taliban that turned our long-overdue exit from Afghanistan into a bloody, humiliating and historic catastrophe.

According to Biden’s twisted logic, America is supposed to be safer from terrorists now that the Taliban is in charge of Afghanistan.

Biden congratulating himself for “ending our forever war” and praising himself and his generals for the “successful” exit from Kabul is a sad joke.

It’s like the captain of the Titanic boasting that he got most of the lifeboats in the water without admitting it was his fault that his ship rammed into the iceberg in the first place.

The scariest thing about President Biden, though, is that no matter how dumb, incompetent or addled he is, it’s highly probable that his understudy, the still missing Kamala Harris, would be even worse.

The Democrat Party bosses, who obviously know this is true, have kept her so muzzled and out of sight of the media that I’ve heard reports her laughing face is starting to show up on America’s milk cartons.

But seriously, there’s nothing funny about what’s happened to Biden’s brain. It’s sad to watch it decline in public.

What Old Joe said about the success of the Kabul Airlift was so untrue, and so bonkers, even the Washington Post and most of the faithful Biden press choir (except diehards like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell) called him out on it.

David’s friendly advice to our poor president is, “Just turn the teleprompter around and let us read what you’re trying to say.”

Biden and his brain have become a serious problem for Democrats, who are terrified of being crushed in next year’s midterms and losing control of Congress.

I don’t want to help the Democrats hold on to their power for one more second, but a smart way to keep the president from saying things that hurt their chances next fall would be to listen to my good friend David Webb, the conservative talk show guy.

Biden's Casual Racism and Dementia

At some point you almost have to feel bad for the people who work for Joe Biden. Every single day, they go to work not know what they’re going to have to clean up today; what mess he’s going to create, or what stupid thing is going to come out of his mouth. Or whether or not what comes out of his mouth is even words at all. Then you realize those people are enabling this senile old fool in his quest to destroy the country and whatever thought you’d had to feel badly is replaced with contempt.

I’ve known lot of people who could, at any given moment, say something for which a lot of clean up would be necessary. Some were friends, others colleagues, and still some bosses. 

The friends “having a Biden moment” would just cause a rolling of the eyes, creating wonder over how someone seemingly intelligent could have a moment of abject stupidity, in public no less. All you can do in that situation is laugh and hope to be free of the splatter range should the stupidity lead to any drink being thrown. 

If they were colleague, the eye roll remains and is coupled with a sense of amazement that someone, unusually highly educated and accomplished, could be so obtuse on occasion. 

When they were my boss, my heart started racing a bit every time they’d approach a microphone or reporter…or constituent. While I wasn’t responsible for cleaning up after my friends or co-workers, it is your job (sometimes) to clean up after your boss.

My bosses for whom I was responsible for some level of clean up were, thankfully, pretty good, with only a few times between them when I had to try to repair anything they’d done. Working for Joe Biden has to be a bit like working for Mr. Magoo – drunk, during an earthquake – the sheer volume of destruction in his wake has no limitations.

Joe Biden is the worst kind of disastrous boss – the type who doesn’t realize how bad they really are. 

When most people, people with their mental abilities under their control, say something wrong, like calling someone the wrong name, we correct it almost immediately. “Hey, Bob, er, Tom, come here for a second,” for example. The President gets names, dates, events, or details of his own life wrong all the time and seems blissfully unaware of them much of the time.

He regularly gets the rank of his late son Beau in the Army wrong, and has not gotten the number of grandchildren he has right in at least the last year, alternating between claiming 5 or 6 when the real number is 7.

You can almost forgive that last one, he is a very old man and Hunter did father 2 kids inside of a year with 2 different women (while dating his sister-in-law), so some confusion can be understood. But blanking on people he nominated to Cabinet posts? Not acceptable.

More often than not, when confronted with his failing mental capacity, Biden does what other dementia sufferers do: become angry.  Joe has always had a short and nasty temper, add to that the forgetfulness of dementia and you have the perfect recipe for a dramatic scene every time he speaks.

Under those circumstances you see why his staff chooses not to correct him, and wouldn't want to set him off. That’s why advisor and former Congressman from Louisiana Cedric Richmond sat silently as Biden referred to him with the racist term “boy” during a recent conference call about hurricane Ida. 

“We’re waiting for a few more people to get on, but we’re going to get started, if that’s OK with you all,” Biden started. “I’m here with my senior adviser and, um, boy who knows Louisiana very well, man. And New Orleans. Cedric Richmond.” If a national Republican had called a black man “boy,” there would non-stop riots until they resigned. You haven’t seen that because no national Republican is that stupid. The President of the United States is.

Were this a one-off, we could write it off as a simple mistake. But Joe Biden has several careers worth of causal racist comments and cracks in his wake, what’s one more? Richmond knew who he was taking a job with, just like everyone in the White House knew what they were signing up for. So when I said you “almost” feel bad for them, I meant not at all. They, almost more than Joe himself, are inflicting this damage on the country. Anything that makes them miserable is just karma.

 

Does Biden Want to Destroy America?

 

President Biden said he would bring America back. No, the Taliban is back. In little more than seven months, he seems to be doing everything he can to bring America down.

A guest on Dan Bongino’s radio show asked a question that demands an answer—If Biden wanted to destroy this country, would he do anything differently than what he has been doing? By looking at some of his policies and decisions in his first seven months, it could be argued that President Biden and his administration seem committed to destroying America as a beacon of freedom, law and order, and opportunity! The list of evidence keeps growing:

If you want to destroy America, open our Southern border to all who want to come in.Instead of continuing the work of his predecessor to secure our Southern border, Biden has opened America to unprecedented numbers of illegal aliens, M13 gang members, drug dealers, and potential terrorists from around the world. Even illegal immigrants with COVID have been welcomed and transported to states throughout the country at American taxpayer expense. Thankfully, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has revived Trump’s “Stay in Mexico” policy, but implementation requires Mexico’s cooperation and that’s far from sure.

If you want to destroy America, do everything you can to end our energy independence.While giving his stamp of approval to Russia’s oil pipeline to Europe,President Biden has sabotaged President Trump’s progress in securing energy independence, He has halted construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline, closed drilling on federal lands, and is working to revive our support for the Paris Climate Accord that promises to dampen our country’s economic growth for years to come. He has called for electric cars without adequate plans to establish charging stations that can sustain the mass use of such vehicles.

If you want to destroy America, stoke the fires of racial hatred in an already divided country.President Biden has legitimized and supported the teaching of critical race theory and white privilege. Instead of unifying our country, he’s fueling a new racism that sees every white citizen as a privileged racist. We need another Martin Luther King Jr., not a Black Lives Matter movement that feeds racial hatred, demands reparations, encourages racial segregation, and fuels racial mistrust. The progress America has made in civil rights is in danger of being reversed while fracturing our country across racial lines.

If you want to destroy America, allow crime on the streets to go unpunished.President Biden and his Democratic colleagues continue to rail about Trump’s supposed January 6^th ‘insurrection” even when the FBI has found no evidence supporting such allegations of a planned breach. At the same time, he remains silent about the real “insurrection” on the streets of many of our major cities. Democratic district attorneys are failing to prosecute low level looting, destructive rioting, and even arson. When you do not hold criminals responsible and set them free, crime is rewarded. Even worse, President Biden wants to take guns away from responsible citizens while not protecting citizens from crime on the streets.

If you want to destroy America, keep calling for lockdowns and strict mask guidelines. Under the guise of protecting Americans from COVID-19, President Biden has defended economic lockdowns, unproven mask requirements, and restrictive requirements that have closed many small businesses forever and cost Americans jobs. What’s worse is some Democratic leaders don’t even consistently follow the very requirements they institute. Such hypocrisy undermines respect for leaders and the laws they create.

If you want to destroy America, allow congress to pass reckless deficit spending creating government dependence and rampant Inflation. President Biden is supporting drastic increases in government spending. Inflation rate has already increased to 5%, hitting the citizens who are already struggling to make ends meet. No wonder they are demanding more support from government and limits on evictions. There are jobs available, but the costs for housing, food, and gas for their cars is going up beyond what they can afford with the jobs available. Biden is doing all he can to make socialism appear the only answer possible.

If you want to destroy America, establish the federal control of elections.At a time trust in our elections is at an all-time low, President Biden has fully supported the federal takeover of our elections from the states. Biden’s supported “reforms” literally outlaw states from requiring verification of citizenship. By expanding the times and ways you can vote without increasing necessary controls will just ensure further opportunities for cheating and creating more distrust in our elections. 

If you want to destroy America, project military weakness and failed leadership in times of crisis.President Biden’s poorly planned military withdrawal from Afghanistan has resulted in unnecessary deaths of our soldiers, citizens, and Afghan allies. By going it alone, he earned the criticism and condemnation of some of our best allies. By failing to expedite withdrawals before initiating the military departure, many have been left stranded at the mercy of Taliban rule. His failure to get critical military systems and equipment out has equipped potential enemies. The strengthened Taliban rule has once again provided a haven for and emboldened terrorists eager to attack America. The death of 13 American soldiers by two ISIS suicide bombers is but a foretaste of terrorist attacks to come.

In short, those of you who voted for President Biden, this is all on you. Yes, you may not have liked President Trump’s brash attacks and egotistical tweets. But by voting for Joe Biden, you took down a President who projected no-nonsense strength and resolve in making America strong. He unleashed the economy to record levels curtailed only by the pandemic. He was quick to free big pharma to produce vaccines to counter the COVID threat. Instead of begging for oil, he created energy independence. He lowered taxes on all Americans and small businesses. You traded an amazing future for weak leadership, uncertainty, and growing chaos for our country and our world. New elections cannot come soon enough to stop the downward American spiral Biden’s presidency has unleashed.

Impeach or Court Marshal Pres. Biden

 

The debacle in Afghanistan is still unfolding, but it is already one of the signal disasters of American history. It’s usually premature to assess contemporary events in history’s light, so it’s a sign of just how bad things are in Kabul that I — a historian — am ready to put it alongside the Bay of Pigs, the Fall of Saigon, the Black Hawk Down incident, and 9/11 itself in the list of era-defining American humiliations. It’s bad enough that it’s happening – what’s worse is that we chose it.

And it’s not an aberration for our unmoored American federal government regardless of who occupies the White House or controls Congress. Confronted with a whole summer of insurrectionary violence in American cities, it can’t seem to bring itself to guarantee public order. Confronted with angry citizens overrunning the very seat of its rule on Capitol Hill, it can’t seem to defend itself. Confronted with a metastasizing narco-state threat in Mexico, and a historic crisis of human trafficking overwhelming national borders, it can’t seem to do much but watch.

Yet when confronted with states organizing in blocs to execute tasks reserved to itself — the so-called “Western States Pact” comes to mind, as do the various states sending forces to the U.S.-Mexico border — the federal government seems strangely passive and inert. Perhaps that’s to the good.

It’s tempting to look at unforced errors like this in isolation, just one episode among many. We shouldn’t. The truth is that Afghanistan is part of a larger pattern. Pull the camera back a bit, and the picture becomes more disturbing than even the grim images from Kabul’s beleaguered airport. The incompetence on display in that country is just the latest episode of blundering from a federal government that increasingly cannot do anything it should.

The national government as envisioned and established by the American Founders has just one purpose, succinctly set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “to secure these rights.” Since then, Americans have come to expect federal governance in Washington, D.C., to fulfill an array of roles. For most of American history, it did a credible job of meeting those expectations. Americans of my parents’ generation, for example, reasonably expected the federal government to successfully defend them from enemies abroad and secure law and order at home. They expected it to meet the challenge of public health crises, and run an efficient immigration system. They expected it to assert a monopoly on national authority, and to promote and defend a common American civic narrative.

They expected these things because it routinely delivered on those expectations. No longer. Suddenly, catastrophically, the recent past reveals that the federal government in Washington D.C. cannot be relied upon to do any of these things.

It’s a shocking realization for Americans who grew up secure in the promise of American governance. It’s less shocking for those of us who have been watching the erosion of civic order for some time. For the past half-century, the defining phenomenon of American civics has been the collapse of institutional trust. Americans who used to believe in the mediating institutions of society, from the presidency to the Elks Club to the U.S. Postal Service to organized religion and beyond, no longer do. That isn’t because the people have failed the institutions. It’s the other way around. The only institution that survived the generational collapse in popular trust was the military. It remains to be seen whether the blundering end to the Afghanistan war changes that. My guess is Americans will continue to respect and admire the men and women who choose to serve — and cast an increasingly skeptical eye on a class of generals and admirals who haven’t delivered a definitive American wartime victory in over 30 years.

In the 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has Bill Gorton ask Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” comes the answer, “Gradually and then suddenly.” The diminishment to impotence of the federal government is like that. We’re in the “suddenly” phase now. One moment you’re a citizen of a well-running republic. The next moment you see that the federal government seems unable to fulfill its most basic responsibilities. Confronted with aggressive attacks on the common civic narrative that is the prerequisite for any national existence, it can’t seem to do anything but capitulate to the attackers. Confronted with the very same people who attacked America on 9/11, it can’t seem to figure out how to avoid yet another humiliation at their hands.

If the federal government can’t win a war, can’t preserve law and order, can’t secure its own seat of governance, can’t control the border, and can’t defend the idea of America, then what can it do? Well, it can collect taxes. It can also guarantee lucrative employment for a class of elite mediocrities who will never endure consequences for their growing list of failures. As I write this, the president is reported to have refused to fire anyone for the Afghanistan disaster. That isn’t because the buck stops with him; sacking someone would just be, as Axios reports, “tantamount to admitting a mistake.”

Beyond Calls to Resign, Republican Members Are Also Aiming to Censure Joe BidenIt’s hard to blame President Biden. If the administration admits one mistake, where will it end? Its list of mistakes is long, and acknowledging them all would constitute an existential threat.

The most serious mistake we Americans now confront is our toleration of them. It’s time to stop. We as a society long ago lost confidence in these institutions, and the institutions are at fault for it. When we see thousands of Americans trapped in Kabul by fanatical tribesmen, and the Chief Executive of the United States asserting his powerlessness on national television, we know something has gone profoundly wrong. We also know this is a culmination, and it’s up to us to determine what comes next.

Yet now is no time for despair. As Chesterton reminds us, “Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.”

The bad news is the crisis in America’s federal government. The good news is we have plenty of working and responsible governments in our states. In that light, the way forward isn’t to wait for Washington D.C. to be fixed, or to hope that President Biden develops the personal maturity to admit error. Our hope is in turning to the states, and demanding they step up where the federal government has stood down.

It’s a tall order. But, to paraphrase Thatcher, there is no alternative. As Washington D.C. abdicates its duties, governors must take the helm. What this looks like in the specifics varies from state to state. No state will be able to set Afghanistan right, for example. But are states able, singly and in concert, to do things like control the border? Can they guarantee law and order? Can they bring common sense to public health? Can they defend our common civic faith and narrative? Can they “secure these rights”?

They can — if they choose to. The time for choosing is here. For Austin, and Tallahassee, and 48 other state capitols, the paralysis of D.C. is a call to act.