Commentary: Trump Confronts Economic and Geopolitical Reality

Donald Trump

By the time this is published, everything may have changed, and that is to be expected. Throughout his career, well before and since becoming a politician, Trump has explicitly stated that he does not think it is always a good strategy to be predictable. And while markets love predictability, sometimes markets, and the systems propping them up, need disruption. This is such a moment.

Nobody should deny that the anxiety is genuine. An older friend of mine, well into his 70s, still working but ready to retire, is wondering how he and his wife will survive if their savings are wiped out. That’s true for all of us, but it begs the question: What if the painful restructuring we may be about to endure, and which may last for many years, is necessary to avoid an even worse fate?

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Commentary: America Made the Right Decision in Deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia Back to El Salvador

Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele

Illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 12 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Allegedly a member of MS-13, he was deported to El Salvador and has resided in El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center for more than a month.

Abrego Garcia’s case has become a cause célèbre on the Left, where Democrats and their open borders allies have peddled the story that he was “mistakenly deported.”

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Commentary: Bringing Back Manufacturing to America

Warehouse job

The impact that President Trump’s tariffs, whatever form they take, will have on U.S. manufacturing is unknown, and likely will be for several years. Hopefully, they will be the impetus for the manufacturing renaissance that the Trump Administration is banking on. But, one sure way to immediately boost our manufacturing base would be to reduce the cost of two inputs that are key to all manufacturers. No matter if your widget of choice is a sophisticated automobile or something as humble as a paper clip, all manufactured goods use both energy and transportation.

With the Trump Administration’s “drill baby drill” mantra, much is already being done to lower energy costs. Thus far the other half of the equation, transportation, has not gotten much attention. This is unfortunate. In 2023 American businesses spent over $1.5 trillion on the transportation component of the logistics equation alone – over 5% of GDP. When you purchase lettuce at a supermarket, a sweater through an online service or a bottle of Bourbon at a liquor store you are buying transportation. Transportation is an embedded purchase that no one really cares about. Except that it is an expense. Anything that can be done to reduce business expenses will make American manufacturers more competitive.

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Israel to Reportedly Discuss Complete Gaza Takeover with U.S. Officials

Marco Rubio

Israeli officials are reportedly set to discuss plans for a complete occupation of Gaza with U.S. officials, an Israeli official told the Times of Israel Sunday.

Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer plans to meet with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and other U.S. diplomats this week, with the Israeli Prime Minister’s office declining to expand on details of the meeting, according to the Times of Israel. Israel resumed military action against Hamas Mar. 18 after two U.S. proposals for hostage releases were reportedly shot down by Hamas.

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Commentary: Revive Nuclear Energy in America

Nuclear Energy

The United States used to be the undisputed leader in nuclear power and still has more operating reactors than any other nation, with 94 currently in service. But in the last 35 years, only one new nuclear power plant has been built in the U.S.—Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which only recently began commercial operations.

Meanwhile, 25 nuclear reactors are under construction in China, seven in India, four each in Turkey, Egypt, and Russia, and two each in South Korea, Bangladesh, Japan, the UK, and Ukraine. The nations of Argentina, Brazil, France, Iran, and Slovakia are all building one plant at present.

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Defense, Tech Leaders Warn AI Could Unleash a New Cold War

AI

In the latter half of the 20th century, global security hinged on nuclear deterrence — now a group of leading AI experts warns that advanced artificial intelligence demands a similar national security strategy.

Just as the specter of mutual assured destruction (MAD) once kept superpowers in check, the experts argue, the threat of a runaway AI catastrophe must spur a new doctrine of mutual assured AI malfunction (MAIM). In a new paper coauthored by Dan Hendrycks, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, the authors call for treating frontier AI development as an urgent national security priority on par with the nuclear arms race.

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Honda Reportedly Moving Production of a Top-Selling Car to U.S. amid Trump’s Tariff Threats

Honda Factory

Honda intends to move production of one of its best-selling car models to the U.S. from Mexico in an attempt to avoid potential tariffs, Reuters reported on Monday.

The major automaker decided to shift production of its next-generation Civic hybrid car to Indiana, three anonymous sources told Reuters. The news comes after President Donald Trump on Feb. 1 imposed 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico alongside 10% tariffs on imported goods from China in an attempt to stop deadly drugs and illegal migrants coming into the U.S. from the countries.

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Commentary: Misremembering Pearl Harbor

Most Americans once were mostly in agreement about what happened on December 7, 1941, 80 years ago this year. But not so much now, given either the neglect of America’s past in the schools or woke revisionism at odds with the truth. 

The Pacific war that followed Pearl Harbor was not a result of America egging on the Japanese, not about starting a race war, and not about much other than a confident and cruel Japanese empire falsely assuming that its stronger American rival either would not or could not stop its transoceanic ambitions. 

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Poll: Almost 30 Percent of Democrats Think America Better off If Trump Had Been Assassinated

Donald Trump

In a shocking display of how vitriolic U.S. politics has become, more than a quarter of Democrats believe America would be better off if GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump had been killed during one of the two assassination attempts on his life, a new survey revealed Wednesday.

The new poll of 1,000 registered voters taken by veteran pollster Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Institute after the second assassination attempt against Trump on Sunday at a Florida golf course revealed that 17% of voters say it would have been better for America had Donald Trump had been killed last weekend.

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Barack, Michelle Obama Warn Democrats Election Will Be Close: ‘Work Like Our Lives Depend on It’

Barack Obama

Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama urged Democrats at the party’s convention Tuesday night to rally around presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her vision for the future, warning that the election will be close.

“Together, Kamala and Tim have kept faith with America’s central story, a story that says we are all created equal, all of us endowed with certain inalienable rights, that everyone deserve a chance, that even when we don’t agree with each other, we can find a way to live with each other,” the former president said, referring to Harris and running-mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

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Commentary: President Biden – A Single Point of Failure for America

Joe Biden

On Sunday, President Joe Biden made the appropriate decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race amid pressure and a soft coup attempt from Democrats. While dropping out, Biden, our sitting commander-in-chief, hid in Delaware for almost a week without being seen by the American people, prompting “proof of life” demands. Unfortunately, this past week is not the first time this has happened before – Joe Biden has been missing in action for the last four years as our country has been falling apart around him.

As a retired Navy SEAL and former Marine, I’ve had the honor and duty of serving this country in some of the most challenging and dangerous situations imaginable. Our missions demanded precision, adaptability, and unwavering leadership. Any failure, any gap in our planning or execution, could cost lives. That’s why it is deeply troubling to see the current state of leadership under President Biden, who has become a “single point of failure” as our commander-in-chief. His weakness continues to put America in grave danger as our enemies seek to capitalize from America’s missing leader.

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Commentary: America Doesn’t Need Federal Homeschooling Standards

Home Schooling

Some of you may remember that four years ago this week I debated Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet who called for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling. The online event was hosted by the Cato Institute and drew thousands of participants, including many homeschooling families who were incensed by Bartholet’s proposal.

Now, Scientific American is joining the crowd of busybodies eager to constrain a family’s right to raise and educate their children how they choose. “The federal government must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in home­school­ing across the country,” read a recent editorial in the magazine.

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Commentary: Bob Iger, DEI, and Wokism Broke Disney’s Trust with America

Bob Iger Disney

There is something of a subculture on YouTube of armchair analysts and commentators, WDW Pro, Valliant Renegade, and ClownfishTV, to name just three (beyond traditional financial websites like CNBC and Seeking Alpha), who track every cultural, corporate, programming, and financial move of The Walt Disney Company, previously one of America’s most iconic and trusted companies. Note: I used the past tense in describing The Walt Disney Company. It is no longer one of America’s most trusted brands, and it’s about to lose its iconic status.

How did this happen?

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Commentary: Preserving Family Values and the Family Itself Are Critical Factors in this Election

family

by Lee Rizzuto   In today’s political discourse, conversations about saving our nation and its future are increasingly common. Key issues such as border security, increasing crime, economic stability, and rising inflation dominate headlines. However, amidst these pressing concerns, there is a critical, yet often overlooked, issue that demands our immediate attention. Ronald Reagan famously said, “The family has always been the cornerstone of American society.” We are witnessing in America, a systematic erosion of that cornerstone. Family values are defined as the principles which allow one man and one woman the opportunity to marry, have children, and earn a living to pay for the care and raising of their children – in short, family values are laid out early in our nation’s founding – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Across America, there is a palpable sense of concern as these core principles are under threat. Divisive ideologies that preach blatant falsehoods have infiltrated our communities, our schools, our homes, our minds, our children’s minds.  A man cannot become a woman and vice versa – a biological truth, yet one that is treated as bigotry by those seeking to destroy the cornerstones of society. Those spreading these falsehoods…

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Commentary: America Leaving NATO Would Be Good for Itself and Europe

NATO

Donald Trump resumed his role as the “wise fool” in recent, off-the-cuff remarks about NATO. He suggested that free-riding NATO members who do not pay their fair share might have to fight Russia on their own. National security hawks and Trump’s media enemies responded with lots of pious talk about our sacred NATO obligations. Joe Biden even said Trump was “un-American.”

Trump is not the first to suggest NATO partners should pay their fair share. But unlike his predecessors, he is willing to employ some leverage to make it happen. The real dirty secret here, as evidenced by how long this situation has gone on, is that enabling the Europeans to neglect their own defense is a feature and not a bug of America’s dominance over the NATO organization.

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Commentary: The Way Another Newsom Recall Effort Helps America

Gavin Newsom Meeting

California isn’t as bad as millions of people outside the state have been led to believe. No, not every downtown street is awash in homeless drug addicts, schizophrenics, and predators. No, not every retail shopping district has crumbled under the onslaught of brazen shoplifters and smash-and-grab gangs. And despite almost every major “news” network in the nation pretending that an allegedly unprecedented onslaught of bomb cyclones is literally washing the entire state into the Pacific Ocean, overall California still has the best weather in the world.

Nonetheless, California is broken. Even if you aren’t one of the millions of Californians who doesn’t have to step over syringes and feces day after day merely to walk your children to school or get to work and back, and even if you aren’t one of the hundreds of thousands of business owners who no longer has a business or one of their employees who no longer has a job, California is broken.

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Commentary: The Cancelled Black Harvard Professor Who Found No Racial Bias in Police Shootings

Roland Fryer Junior

Unless you have lived under a rock for the last four years, you will be very familiar with the claim that black Americans are disproportionately victims of police shootings compared with their white counterparts.

But a nearly eight-year-old study challenging this narrative is enjoying renewed attention thanks to a recent high-profile interview of the study’s author, African American economist Roland Fryer, by journalist Bari Weiss of The Free Press.

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Commentary: Democrats are Hitting the Panic Button over Biden’s Mental Fitness

Joe Biden

In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter delivered his infamous “malaise” speech in which he laid out all the daunting challenges facing our nation, the president said that America was suffering from a “crisis of confidence.”

Fast-forward 45 years and our country is once again facing a crisis of confidence, this time under the failed leadership of President Joe Biden.

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Commentary: The Elite One Percent Behind the Cultural Civil War

American Flag

Scott Rasmussen has done America an enormous service. He and his team have identified the driving forces behind the destructive radicalism which is pushing us into a cultural civil war.

While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.

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Commentary: America Can’t Afford Never Trump’s Nihilism

Ron DeSantis

It was a wise decision for Ron DeSantis to end his presidential campaign when he did. There would have been no point in prolonging a bitter and divisive primary battle when Trump has clearly won already. By endorsing Trump, DeSantis opened the door to repairing some of the damage from what turned out to be a disastrous career move. And he did the right thing for the country by signaling to his supporters that it was time to unite and focus on ending the Biden regime.

Unfortunately, just a day later, DeSantis took a gratuitous swipe at Trump. It was chum for many of DeSantis’ hardcore supporters, who remain full of spite after months of back-and-forth with the MAGA “cult.”

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Commentary: Only Citizens Should Vote in America

Voting

The next step in radically changing America is now underway. City officials in our national capital plan to allow non-citizens to vote next year. 

President Joe Biden let millions of illegal immigrants cross the border. Then he bussed them to Washington DC. The city’s Democratic machine now wants to let them vote – knowing they will almost certainly vote Democrat for all the support and assistance.

This policy is a clear threat to American nationalism.

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America Is Undergoing a Massive Population Shift

Family Moving

Democrat-run states are still losing population, new Census Bureau data reveal, a development that could have electoral implications when the government reapportions congressional districts in 2030.

Oregon, California, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, all states with Democratic governors and Democrat-controlled state legislatures, lost between 0.01% and 0.52% of their population between July 2022 and July 2023, according to the Census Bureau. Left-leaning states experienced similar declines in the lead-up to the 2020 Census, which led to them losing seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College, an outcome that could occur again in 2030 if current trends persist.

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Commentary: With ‘White Christmas,’ Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby Helped Make Christmas a Holiday That All Americans Could Celebrate

Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin was a Jewish immigrant who loved America. As his 1938 song “God Bless America” suggests, he believed deeply in the nation’s potential for goodness, unity and global leadership.

In 1940, he wrote another quintessential American song, “White Christmas,” which the popular entertainer Bing Crosby eventually made famous.

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Commentary: Biden Is Not the Democrats’ Biggest Problem

Biden Bidenomics

President Joe Biden is not the Democrats’ biggest problem; they are. The greatest misperception in the 2024 presidential race is that Biden is causing Democrats’ poor performance. On the contrary, Biden is an effect. The real cause is that Democrats are wildly out of touch with America.

Biden’s bad polling numbers are well known. According to Real Clear Politics’ Dec. 18 average of national polling, Biden’s job approval rating is 40.8–56.0 percent; he trails former President Donald Trump in a head-to-head rematch 43.7 to 47.2 percent, and his favorability rating is 39.4–56.0 percent.

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Commentary: American Globalists’ Motivation

It is too easy, and dangerously misleading, to examine the most controversial globalist policies combined with America’s most obvious weaknesses and conclude that American power, and the future of globalism is in jeopardy. In both there is nuance and hidden strength. Understanding this ambiguity offers both hope for the future and a clearer sense of what choices face Americans today.

It is important to recognize that while other Western Nations from New Zealand to Sweden are participants in globalist policies, and that globalist theories may have originated from Europe, the influencers and institutions turning them into policy and pushing them onto the rest of the world are almost all American.

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Commentary: Birthright Citizenship Puts America in Jeopardy

Today’s challenge, game show Jeopardy-style: “They have a particular status in common: Anwar al-Awlaki, Yaser Esam Hamdi, the twin daughters of El Chapo, Chinese children born to US surrogates, and children born in the US to illegal immigrants.”

After seeing the first two names, a contestant would probably be preparing to hit the button to answer something like “What is Islamic terrorism?” – until they finished reading the entire list. The last item would clinch it, and then the fastest button-pusher would confidently offer the politically-correct answer: “What is birthright citizenship?”

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Commentary: Five More Stupid Things the Left Demands You Believe

It wasn’t the last column in this space — that one took a detour because somebody had to address the manifest awfulness of Nikki Haley — but the one before that introduced you, dear reader, to what might become an ongoing series.

Because the Left in America is now built on the failed proposition that magical thinking, the imagination of a human race that acts nothing like the current one does, can reflect reality if only enough time, money, and effort (and blood, because it always comes down to blood) are poured into the mix.

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Commentary: The Meaning of Thanksgiving Can Save America

Thanksgiving, according to Britannica.com, has come to “has come to symbolize intercultural peace, America’s opportunity for newcomers, and the sanctity of home and family.” This definition captures the ideals, more relevant than ever, of one of America’s favorite holidays. But these ideals are threatened, because America’s mainstream institutions have either rejected them, or have created an environment where they are no longer possible.

This is immediately obvious with the “woke” doctrine of race-based oppressor and oppressed, now promoted by academia, the media, entertainers, politicians, and corporations. Maybe the fellowship of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians is mostly fable, cruelly debunked by history.

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Commentary: The Department of Defense Needs to Defend Our Border

Thomas Friedman recently said something interesting: “The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.”

The humiliation and guilt do not seem universal. Our military and defense leadership do not seem to feel any responsibility for the border crisis. They certainly feel no shame for this egregious and ongoing insult to American sovereignty. For them, the military is reserved for events around the globe, even though most of these far-flung campaigns have only a tangential relationship to actual American security.

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Commentary: Immigration Is Transforming the Country for the Worse

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

In the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel earlier this month, a lot of commentators were shocked and angry to learn that a lot of young people did not support Israel and that many had sympathy for Hamas.  This shift in public opinion differs greatly from older Americans.

Not only is Generation Z anti-Israel, but it is generally anti-capitalist, anti-military, anti-empire, and many have declared their unwillingness to serve if America resumes the draft.

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Commentary: America Doesn’t Know How Many Hamas and Hezbollah Terrorists Have Crossed the Southern Border

When then-FBI Director Robert Mueller testified in the House Judiciary Committee on May 9, 2012, Republican Rep. Elton Gallegly of California asked him about the threat of terrorists entering the United States by crossing the Southern border.

“First of all, as it relates to the Southwest border,” said Gallegly, “do you see any growing evidence of al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization working to exploit our border with the attempt to launch another terrorist attack on our own soil?”

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Mental Health Issues on the Rise in America

Several new studies show that mental health issues are rising in America, contributing to an overall decline in the quality of life, as well as an increase in premature deaths.

As reported by Axios, a study was published last week in JAMA Health Forum, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association, saw that in overdose deaths in the United States from 2000 to 2021, a key factor was the education levels of the victims.

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Commentary: Public Spaces Are in Decline

Former Trump official William Wolfe recently lamented the neglect steadily encroaching his local grocery store. “Let me tell you: I’ve never seen stores in such bad shape as they are now,” he wrote. “No one staffing the main check out lines, massive line for the self check outs, stores messy, items unstocked. … It’s like watching a country decline in real time.”

Wolfe’s tweet resonated with many Americans, garnering interactions from nearly 1 million people. Here were two of the responses: “I said nearly those exact words today to my husband when I came home from my local Kroger market” and “The fall of an empire happens gradually, and then all at once.”

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Commentary: The Continuing Cultural Revolution

Christopher F. Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is a landmark study of America’s radicalization since the 1960s. It is a carefully constructed work full of insights, which confirmed for me the conclusions that I had reached while studying some of the same topics. Rufo shows convincingly that certain radical thinkers, most of whom were American born, affected deeply and perhaps irreversibly American institutions starting in the 1960s. This study clearly avoids an interpretive perspective that I have repeatedly mocked, exemplified by those who pretend that American culture and politics were generally sound up until quite recently, perhaps until the point when LGBT enthusiasts turned from gay marriage to gender transitioning.

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Commentary: American Public Says Biden Is Not the Leader America Needs to Fix the Country

A giant new poll delving deep into the public’s views on President Biden, Former President Trump, the U.S. economy and their own economic situation reveals a people deeply unhappy with the direction of the country under President Biden. 

First, the latest CBS News/YouGov poll shows Trump beating Biden by one point 50% to 49%. While that’s well within the margin of error, other recent polls have shown Trump beating Biden by as many as six percentage points in the past three weeks. Whatever the metric, Trump is polling significantly better now than he was at any time in 2020, and that has Democrats worried.   

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Commentary: Interest Rates Are Soaring, Raising the Alarm for a Painful Reckoning for America

Someone with a million dollars of credit card debt probably wouldn’t celebrate if his interest rate skyrocketed. Yet some analysts are touting rising interest rates on America’s trillions of dollars of long-term debt as a good sign for the U.S. economy.

Are they right? Are rising long-term interest rates a good thing? Certainly not for anyone looking to secure a 30-year mortgage at two-decade-high rates. And certainly not for the federal budget. Not when America is sitting on $32.7 trillion in debt.

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