The SAVE Act: Donald Trump's Place in History Will Be Defined by Whether He Saves the Republic, Period.

Recently I wrote a piece that received some pushback.  I wondered if Donald Trump was making the same mistake as George Bush Sr. did when he broke his “Read my lips:  No new taxes” pledge. 

If you read my work regularly, you’ll notice a decidedly clear bias towards warnings of doom.  It’s not my default position that life is nothing but doom and gloom. On the contrary. I actually have a website that explicitly talks about how good we have things and encourages gratitude for the American entrepreneurs and inventors who made our lives possible. In a universe where most of history was characterized by scarcity, war, slavery and early death, most Americans today have relatively extraordinary lives. 

Everything we have today came about as the result of the hard work of generations of people who left us this legacy.  From the Founding Fathers leaving us the Constitution to Grant defeating the South to Rockefeller rationalizing energy to Jobs putting the Internet in our hands, everything we have in the 21^st century came from the efforts of countless numbers of long dead people, as well as, often, our own efforts.

To the degree that one can identify the elements that made the last 250 years so different from any prior period, it was the combination of the individual freedom, free markets, private property and limited government.  Those elements laid the foundation for a nation to spread across a continent, become an industrial juggernaut and become an economic powerhouse able to promote freedom and prosperity to billions of people around the world.

That anger sometimes reflected in my writing is because the government, over the last 50 years, has done virtually everything it can to undermine that success. On almost every front, government has gotten itself involved in areas where it has no place, no constitutional authority, and regardless of how ineffective, pernicious or downright harmful its actions are, nobody ever does anything about it. The borg like government, with its tentacles attaching to ever more elements of American life, and tightening its grip, is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  Look no farther than GDP growth. Below is a chart of average annual GDP growth by decade since 1950:

1950s: 4.2% 

1960s: 4.5% 

1970s: 3.2% 

1980s: 3.1% 

1990s: 3.2% 

2000s: 1.9% 

2010s: 2.4% 

2020s: 2.4% 

To understand how much of a problem that is, understand that in the 1950s computers were the size of a house and could do 5,000 calculations per second.  Today a computer fits in the palm of your hand and is literally billions of times faster.  Yet our GDP growth is almost half as much, but should be double.

If you want to know why, despite the fact that we are so much more efficient and have far better and more tools at our disposal, our GDP is half what it used to be, the answer is Government. Perhaps the only thing that has grown more than computer power over the last half century is government power. They have intruded on practically every single aspect of our lives, from mandating the ability to remotely turn off our cars to requiring those tags on your mattress to telling you the makeup of your neighborhood. And sadly, while they’re busy promoting the butchering of some children and the trafficking of others, they fail at the basic elements of government such as maintaining law and order, keeping our borders secure and not sending money to dead people. 

The tentacles of Government are everywhere, like a cancer that knows no bounds and for which there is no cure.  Of course, theoretically there is a cure for all of this: elections.  But the government has somehow managed to manipulate them so that regardless of who gets elected in either party, we basically get the same policies.  Sure, some things may change around the edges, but for the most part the Swamp reigns and nobody does anything about it. The budgets basically remain the same, the programs largely stay the same and the controlling elites basically rotate between government, NGOs and corporate boardrooms.    

And here’s where my piece talking about Trump betraying his voters comes into play.  I could spend my time showcasing the great things he has done, and he has done many, but I focus on the fact that if he doesn’t deal with the gun pointed at the head of the Republic, none of that matters. 

For Democrats cheating is simply their MO. Between importing new illegal voters, manipulating the voting apparatus, and fighting Voter ID, Democrats have basically wiped out GOP representation in New England despite the fact that 30-40% of the population in those areas are Republicans.  Democrats will destroy the Republic the next time they get power, and if Donald Trump doesn’t start acting like a leader with something to fight for, there won’t be anything left to fight for.

Once back in power, Democrats will kill that American goose.  They will manipulate voting rules to turn the country writ large into the dysfunctional cesspools they’ve created in Illinois, Maryland, California, etc.  They will expand the problems of San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, et. al. into the suburbs and eventually across the country. They will utilize every lever of government power to eviscerate the foundations of freedom that made the country great in the first place.

But it doesn’t have to be.  But unfortunately we’re watching Senate leader John Thune betray Americans on easily the lowest hanging fruit ever in American history, the SAVE act. You can say that Trump doesn’t run Congress or the Senate, which is true, but he is still the president with the largest soapbox on the planet, on an issue so powerful that even a majority of Democrats support it.  Trump should call on and or call out every GOP Senator who is standing in his way.  He should do rallies in their states and encourage citizens to reach out and sway them.  He should utilize every one of the substantial levers of power at his disposal to convince them to pass it. 

The reality is, the SAVE act (which isn’t perfect, as it currently doesn’t outlaw the insane policy of letting illegals have Social Security numbers) and its companion deportations, are where the tire hits the road relative to a free Republic. Literally, if we do not put in place guarantees for honest elections now, the country will be as blue as the California House delegation within a decade. 

The SAVE act is not sufficient to guarantee honest elections, but it’s a first step. As for my regular warnings of doom, I wish I could spend my time commenting on the new arch going up in Arlington or the new White House ballroom, but the reality is, those are of no real consequence.  If Donald Trump doesn’t focus on guaranteeing secure elections, neither will matter because both will end up as symbols not of a great hero who saved the Republic, but rather of the man who failed to save it when he had the chance. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA