The Trump Counterrevolution Is a Return to Sanity

 

We are witnessing a historic counterrevolution after President Donald Trump’s victory, far different from his first election in 2016.

The orthodox and the supposed scripted future are now suspect. And they are likely to be dethroned—from the trivial to the existential.

Critics claim Trump has no mandate to stage such a counterrevolution. They argue that he did not win 51% of the popular vote or achieve a Reaganesque landslide in the Electoral College.

Yet all the initiatives he advanced and won on polled landslide public approval.

Despite being the target of Democrat lawfare for years, a defiant Trump promised to end an open border, massive illegal immigration, rising crime, and soaring prices. He pledged to slash government and its administrative state, terminate racial and gender identity politics, and restore deterrence abroad.

The people overwhelmingly wanted those messages but were waiting for an unorthodox messenger who would actually deliver them.

The Trump messenger reassured weary citizens that they were not crazy.

Instead, they had good cause to be sick of being talked down to by a media, academic, bureaucratic, and political elite that never earned nor deserved such self-appointed status.

The FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department, not the massive crowds at rallies, were the ones truly out of control.

President Joe Biden was really suffering from dementia, not those who said he was.

Criminals with weapons are as deleterious to society as law-abiding citizens deprived of them.

It is not a thought crime to believe there are two sexes—not three or four or more. No one should be forced to buy an electric vehicle, disconnect their natural gas stove, or submit to racial or gender indoctrination sessions.

Americans should speak their minds and write what they wish without worry of being censored, blacklisted, ostracized, doxxed, or shadow-banned—or jailed.

Campuses are not oases of tolerance, disinterested inquiry, and free expression. They instead increasingly became overpriced indoctrination centers that shred the Constitution and graduate indebted students who know less—but are far more biased—than when they enrolled.

Trump and his MAGA appointees promise to slash over a trillion dollars from the annual federal budget, disbanding entire agencies.

Is the objection that an ever-expanding government—$37 trillion in debt, running nearly $2 trillion in annual deficits—should keep growing?

Trump pledges to reform the Pentagon—ending DEI Pentagon commissars and revolving-door corporate generalship.

He vows to hold the 4-star class responsible for the catastrophe in Afghanistan and to reenlist soldiers who were driven out due to draconian vaccination mandates or woke intolerance. Trump envisions changing the entire system of military procurement.

Does the status quo object on the grounds that our military leadership has been winning our wars abroad?

Is the Pentagon currently awash in eager recruits?

Has it stockpiled a huge surplus of shells, bombs, and rockets?

Trump promises historic deportations of the 12 million who destroyed the southern border and surged in without health or criminal audits.

Trump vows to rescue swamped social services and stop crimes by illegal alien felons.

Is that really worse than the Biden administration’s original massive importation of millions of illegal aliens, empowered by drug-importing and sex-trafficking cartels?

Who are the culpable? Those flagrantly mocking and breaking the law, or those vowing to enforce it?

Trump says he will deter enemies without bogging America down in “endless wars”—and did just that in his first four years as president.

Is the current alternative preferable to convincing enemies that there are few consequences to their aggression, sandbagging allies like Israel, or feeding the war in Ukraine without any plan of either winning or ending it?

The Trump revolution is also cultural and social. Shared class interests have replaced race, ethnicity, and gender chauvinism.

Athletes of all races are no longer taking a knee in protest of America’s supposed systemic racism during the national anthem. Sometimes they celebrate their scoring by doing honorific Trump YMCA/golf-swing dances on national television.

Enlistments to help craft the Trump counterrevolution are not always predicated on degrees, conventional resumes, or past lengthy government service. Race and gender do not determine qualifications alone. Nor does class.

Common sense, successful lives outside of government, and a desire to end the current nonsense count instead as better prerequisites.

For Trump, party identification, titles, and traditional prestige matter less as he is surrounded by an ideologically diverse cadre, including Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Dana White, Tulsi Gabbard, and Joe Rogan.

The country no longer must apologize incessantly for its past or present but can move on—content that it need not be perfect to be better than all the alternatives.

The age of flashing pronouns, renaming iconic landmarks, statue toppling, trashing the dead, vandalizing with impunity the campus library, or spouting antisemitic venom is passing.

So, another name for the Trump counterrevolution is a simple return to sanity.

Universities Have a 2025 Rendezvous With Reality

 

Universities have suffered a cataclysmic decline in public approval and support.

A Gallup poll taken this year found that only 36% of Americans polled either expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—once the agreed-on touchstone to upward mobility.

Gifting to most universities has been down for two consecutive years.

There is zero intellectual diversity on most university campuses.

Speakers with conservative viewpoints are often either disinvited or shouted down—and worse.

The federally guaranteed student loan program is in shambles. Some $1.7 trillion in outstanding loans were taken out by half of all college students.

Nearly one-fifth are now not being paid back.

Marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership are all delayed by some 40 million indebted graduates, who can take decades to pay loans back.

The Biden administration demagogued the issue by illegally granting rolling student loan amnesties—to win votes just before both the midterm and general elections. That proposed debt relief would be covered by taxpayers, over half of whom never went to college.

The expansion of student loan debt roughly correlates with universities raising their annual costs higher than the rate of inflation—largely due to administrative bloat.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down the practice of using race and gender to adjudicate applications and hiring, universities are already seeking ways to circumvent the ruling.

Asian and white Americans for decades have been systematically, overtly, and supposedly with justification, discriminated against by ignoring or not requiring test scores and downplaying grade point averages.

Stanford University may be representative of these crises.

In the 2020 election, 94% of Stanford faculty voted for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket. Four years later, some 96% of all Stanford-affiliated donations went to Democrats during the 2024 election season.

Former Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried—parents of mega-Democratic donor and now imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried, and recipients of millions in gifts from their felonious son—were reportedly heavily involved in either bundling large left-wing campaign donations or offering legal advice to their son’s bankrupt and Ponzi-like business.

In 2023, a federal judge was shouted down at Stanford Law School, his lecture aborted and then hijacked—by a Stanford diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator!

Former Donald Trump health advisor and Hoover Institution scholar Scott Atlas in 2020 was censured by the Stanford faculty.

Yet subsequent events supported Atlas’s prescient warning that a complete lockdown of the country and the shutdown of K-12 schools would not only not retard the COVID-19 epidemic, but would cause far greater economic, social, cultural, and health damage than the virus itself.

Two recent attempts to lift that censure failed—in part because some faculty claimed—that to do so would empower the Trump reelection bid!

In contrast, Stanford professor Jeff Hancock, who founded the “Stanford Social Media Lab,” boasts he researches ‘how people use deception with technology.” Yet when liberal Minnesota officials wanted such “experts” to support their new law banning “deep fake” technology at election time, they called in the expert deception-detector Hancock.

However, the references Hancock provided to prove his support for the law allegedly never existed.

In fact, the lawyers who challenged his online expertise argued his sources apparently were invented by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.

Who will police the deception police?

Last academic year, anti-Israel Stanford students with impunity violated university rules and camped out for months in the free speech area, shouting and disrupting passersby.

A small group of students occupied and trashed the president’s office, and another vandalized historic campus architecture.

After Oct. 7, a Stanford lecturer was suspended for singling out and targeting Jewish students in his classroom.

A Stanford faculty committee on antisemitism recently concluded, “The most existential problem at Stanford is the emergence of a general atmosphere in which Jewish and Israeli members of the Stanford community are denied dignity and respect based on their Jewish identities, denied treatment and protection afforded to other minority groups, and afforded equal respect and inclusion only if they denounce Israel in various ways and forms.”

Can out-of-control universities reform?

The incoming Trump administration has floated a variety of tough-love remedies.

They include predicating hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants on campuses’ adherence to the Bill of Rights, taxing the income on universities multibillion-dollar endowments, and removing the federal government from the student loan business.

Recently, there have been a few hopeful signs that campuses are aware of the need to change.

At Stanford, a new president was hired, widely respected for his singular commitment to disinterested education and freedom of expression.

The SAT entrance exam is returning to many campuses and is still appreciated as crucial to most universities’ applications.

A number of partisan elite college presidents have resigned in disgrace.

So, hope springs eternal, even if it may be too little, too late.

After Biden Pardons Hunter, Trump Moves to Dismiss Hush Money Case

 

After President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, on Sunday, the legal team for President-elect Donald Trump made a request for Judge Juan Merchan to dismiss the hush money case. On May 30, Trump was found “guilty” on 34 felony counts in a sham trial held in New York City on hush money charges brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. What’s particularly noteworthy about the motion, from Monday, is that the second paragraph makes reference to the pardon of Hunter Biden.

Trump has filed his motion to dismiss the hush money case in Manhattan. It’s a 72-page document and the first mention of Hunter Biden’s pardon appears in paragraph #2.— erica orden (@eorden) December 3, 2024

The motion from Trump’s attorneys, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, who have also been tasked for key roles in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), uses the pardoning of Hunter to further argue that the case be dismissed. 

As that motion read early on:

Yesterday, in issuing a 10-year pardon to Hunter Biden that covers any and all crimes whether charged or uncharged, President Biden asserted that his son was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” and “treated differently.” Ex. 81.1 President Biden argued that “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.” Id. These comments amounted to an extraordinary condemnation of President Biden’s own DOJ. This is the same DOJ that coordinated and oversaw the politically-motivated, election-interference witch hunts targeting President Trump by disgraced Special Counsel Jack Smith, the other biased prosecutors in Smith’s Special Counsel’s Office (“SCO”), and others. This is the same DOJ that sent Matthew Colangelo to DA Bragg to help unfairly target President Trump in this empty and lawless case.

Since DA Bragg took office, he has engaged in “precisely the type of political theater” that President Biden condemned. Bragg v. Jordan, 669 F. Supp. 3d 257, 271 (S.D.N.Y. 2023). This case is based on a contrived, defective, and unprecedented legal theory relating to 2017 entries in documents that were maintained hundreds of miles away from the White House where President Trump was running the country. There are no “aggravating factors” here, other than those arising from DANY’s misconduct. Ex. 81. Thus, this case should never have been brought, particularly during a period when DA Bragg’s failure to protect this City from pervasive violent crime frightens, threatens, and harms New Yorkers on a daily basis. And this case would never have been brought were it not for President Trump’s political views, the transformative national movement established under his leadership, and the political threat that he poses to entrenched, corrupt politicians in Washington, D.C. and beyond.   

Wrongly continuing proceedings in this failed lawfare case disrupts President Trump’s transition efforts and his preparations to wield the full Article II executive power authorized by the Constitution pursuant to the overwhelming national mandate granted to him by the American people on November 5, 2024. Under Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) and related caselaw, DANY’s disruptions to the institution of the Presidency violate the Presidential immunity doctrine because they threaten the functioning of the federal government. Local elected officials such as DA Bragg have no valid basis to cause such disruptions, which also violate the Supremacy Clause. Consequently, the federal Constitution is an absolute “legal impediment” to further proceedings, CPL § 210.20(1)(h), and the case must be immediately dismissed.  

There were plenty of concerns about the case that Bragg’s office brought against Trump from the start, including when it comes to the role of politicized DOJ that the motion mentioned above, with Matthew Colangelo, formerly a top employee at the Biden-Harris DOJ, leaving to work for Bragg’s office and prosecute Trump.

While Judge Merchan has moved to indefinitely delay sentencing, as Townhall has been covering, Bragg’s office still stubbornly looks to hold onto the conviction by merely agreeing to a pause, as CNN noted in their reporting of such a motion to dismiss. 

Reporting from The Hill also includes a statement from Steven Cheung, who served as communications director for the Trump-Vance campaign and will have such a role in the incoming administration. Trump’s lawyers also laid out other arguments in favor of dismissing the case:

Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson and incoming White House communications director, in a statement called the new brief a “powerhouse motion” that “provides every possible chance for Judge Merchan to do the right thing and end what remains of this charade immediately.” 

“Wrongly continuing proceedings in this failed lawfare case disrupts President Trump’s transition efforts and his preparations to wield the full Article II executive power authorized by the Constitution pursuant to the overwhelming national mandate granted to him by the American people on November 5, 2024,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in the filing. 

When it comes to the suggestion that Bragg’s office focus on a “renewed opportunity to put an end to deteriorating conditions in the City and to protect its residents from violent crime,” it’s worth reminding that there’s been a serious mishandling of priorities. In addition to the rise of hate crimes in New York State, especially New York City, Bragg’s office meanwhile prioritizes targeting political opponents like Trump and heroic figures like Daniel Penny, who has been charged for the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man who was terrorizing people on the subway. 

The legal cases against Trump have been failing, though those who brought such charges against him still look to be holding on in many ways. Special Counsel Jack Smith has dropped all of his cases against Trump, though he did so without prejudice so that they may still be theoretically brought back. He is also looking to finalize a report for Attorney General Merrick Garland to release.

Joe Biden is a genius.

 

OK, he’s actually a doddering old fool who can’t remember his own name half the time, but we know he has moments of lucidity here and there. We also know that he wanted a second term and his fellow Democrats pushed him to the side. Why he would be shocked that the party that uses “old white men” as a pejorative wouldn’t really be behind an old white man is beyond me, yet he apparently was.

From the moment he stepped aside, though, Biden seemed bound and determined to scuttle Kamala Harris’s nomination.

Sure, it may have been gaffe after gaffe – or, such as when he said Harris had been intimately involved in economic discussions just as she was trying to distance herself from Biden’s economic policies, he might have actually thought it would help – but over a month ago, I commented how it looked just like he was trying to sabotage her.

I’m not saying that Biden is actively trying to sabotage Harris’s campaign without looking like he was.

I’m just saying I can’t think of that much he’d do differently if he were actively trying to sabotage her campaign without looking like he was.— Tom Knighton (@TheTomKnighton) October 30, 2024

Plus, despite everyone calling Trump “literally Hitler,” what did Biden do immediately after the election? Have Trump come on over and have a nice sit-down chat with him, something you don’t do with someone who is considered the most evil man to ever live reincarnated.

Then we have the Hunter Biden pardon.

You’ve heard all about it by now. You know what was said, what Biden’s “reasoning” was, and how he’d repeatedly claimed that he would do no such thing, only to turn out that he lied yet again.

But in that same moment, he set a precedent that President-elect Donald Trump can now use as he wants. The problem was that the prosecution was political? That can be said about pretty much every January 6 defendant. Trump could pardon them all, and over a broad period to make sure they couldn’t be prosecuted for anything else later on.

Others have been prosecuted because of their affiliation with Trump. Steve Bannon, for example, or Roger Stone. While Bannon has done his time and it was only a misdemeanor, it would send a signal how he’s running things. Trump held off in pardoning Stone last go-around because it would be a political liability, but that’s not as true today as it was in 2020.

Honestly, from the moment when he left the campaign trail, Joe Biden has done so much that has benefitted Trump that it’s hard for me not to look at some of it and wonder if he was really just trying to hurt the Democrats.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He’d been a good Democrat for decades, working his way up the food chain and finally making it to the top, only to have his party turn on him. If that were me, and I were actually lucid enough of the time, I’d probably think about ways to get back at them without being too obvious.

Of course, that all assumes there’s enough of Biden left to actually be that calculating. I can’t rule out that his handlers are resentful of being ousted with the old goat, so it might be them working through Biden, but that feels a little too tin-foil hat for me.

Then again, the difference between “established fact” and “conspiracy theory” seems to be about six weeks, so anything’s possible.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal Hands Trump Some Good News

 

In a move that’s sure to be good news for the incoming Trump administration, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government does in fact have the authority to carry out deportations, even if local officials object. The case actually comes from the first Trump administration, as The Center Square reported on Monday.

As the report explained:

At issue is an April 2019 executive order issued by King County Executive Dow Constantine, which directed county officials to prohibit fixed base operators on a county airfield near Seattle from servicing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flights used to deport illegal foreign nationals.

Constantine’s order prohibited King County International Airport from supporting “the transportation and deportation of immigration detainees in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, either traveling within or arriving or departing the United States or its territories.”

The airport is located next to a major ICE-Seattle base of operations.

The Trump administration at the time sued, arguing Constantine’s order violated the Supremacy Clause’s intergovernmental immunity doctrine and a World War II-era Instrument of Transfer agreement allowing the federal government to use the airport in King County.

A district court agreed, ruling in favor of the federal government. King County next appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the district court’s summary judgment that the order violated the Supremacy Clause and the Instrument of Transfer agreement.

The panel also held that the federal government had Article III standing to sue and “had two related concrete and individualized injuries.” The first is “the inability to conduct the charter flights – which has increased ICE’s operational costs – constituted a de facto injury that affected the United States in a particularized, individual way” and “an imminent risk of future injury from the Executive Order.”

The second is the federal government’s injuries “were fairly traceable” and “are likely, as opposed to merely speculative,” as a result of the order. Were there no order, “an FBO would resume servicing ICE charter flights,” the court notes.

Constantine’s order violated the intergovernmental immunity doctrine because it “improperly regulated the way in which the federal government transported noncitizen detainees by preventing ICE from using private FBO contractors at Boeing Field, and on its face discriminated against the United States by singling out the federal government and its contractors for unfavorable treatment,” the court held.

Reporting from The Seattle Times also noted that Kings County will not further appeal the decision, with a spokesperson mentioning in part that the county “will of course follow the court’s dictates.”

King County is one of those described as a “sanctuary city,” but the days of sanctuary cities being able to get away with covering for illegal immigrants are likely coming to an end. Even better news for the incoming Trump administration is that, as The Seattle Times also mentioned, a district-level federal court issued a similar ruling last year. 

The Ninth Circuit covers the more western states in the country, which are also among some of the most liberal and include many sanctuary cities when it comes to immigration. 

Not only will King County be “follow[ing] the court’s dictates,” but it looks like they’ll be eating plenty of crow as well, given that they hoped to be “leading the way,” as The Seattle Times noted: 

In 2019, under the first Trump administration, Constantine issued an executive order seeking to block the federal government from using King County International Airport (the formal name for Boeing Field) for flights deporting immigrants.

The order targeted private companies that fuel and maintain planes at the airport, ordering that future leases between the county and the companies would prohibit deportation flights.

At the time, county officials said it was likely the first attempt anywhere in the country by local officials to block ICE deportation flights, and they hoped to be “leading the way.”

“Deportations raise deeply troubling human rights concerns which are inconsistent with the values of King County, including separations of families, increases of racial disproportionality in policing, deportations of people into unsafe situations in other countries, and constitutional concerns of due process,” Constantine’s 2019 executive order said.

Tom Homan, named last month to be President-elect Donald Trump’s border czar, has made clear that there will be mass deportations of illegal immigrants. He has also repeatedly made clear that local officials are not to stand in his way, as was recently the case with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (D), who threatened to stop deportations.

“He’s willing to go to jail. I’m willing to put him in jail,” Homan said, which led Johnston to soon after admit that he regretted his remarks.

Polling from CBS News, including before and after the November election, shows that a majority of Americans favor plans for mass deportations. Last week’s poll from The Economist/YouGov also showed that a majority or plurality of Americans across several demographics approve of Trump’s plan to build a border wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and that they believe he’ll actually carry through with such plans.