Following a Donald Trump Forged in a Crucible of White Hot Fire

 I first started writing a blog in 2009, after Barack Obama’s election. My first post, America’s Original Sin, addressed the then-nascent movement to disparage and denigrate America because the Founding Fathers didn’t have the foresight in 1787 to write a constitution that would dovetail with the mores of 21st-century snowflakes.

The title of my blog, Imperfect America, is followed by a quote attributed to the French philosopher, Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Our nation is a billboard-sized testament to that adage. Rarely have we seen perfect, but we frequently see good. And that’s the problem with leftists… They want to sacrifice good for the fiction of perfection.

While today it’s all the rage to dwell on America’s failures, it’s far less celebrated to talk about her triumphs. Although the left has been demonizing America since the sixties, it was after Bush won in 2000 that this tactic started to stick. The cancer of hate really took off once Obama became president. On college campuses, in elementary schools, on nightly newscasts, and in papers across the country, we were incessantly told that America was racist, sexist, homophobic and destroying the environment.

It was into this miasma that Donald Trump marched when he announced he was running for president. He saw the leftist cancer destroying the very foundations of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity while undermining America’s core civilization and setting the country up for a devastating collapse. And he willingly stepped into the breach to stop it.

The problem, however, was that rather than running as a Democrat, where all solutions come from an omnipotent central government, he was running as a Republican who sought to reduce government control and return power to Americans.

That was a bridge too far. From the second he announced, Trump found himself enduring a withering barrage of vitriol and venom unseen in American politics. The abuse came from Democrats, the media, social media and academia as well as the GOP establishment. What Trump endured was relentless. Yet somehow, he won.

(Full disclosure: I initially had concerns about Trump and wrote about them often, with one post titled: Sure, Donald Trump may shiv us... but the country can’t survive Hillary Clinton’s thugs.)

In the wee hours of November 9, 2016, it became clear that Trump would become the next president of the United States. It also became clear the Democrats were not going to take it lying down.

The Russia Collusion hoax started a drumbeat that would bedevil the president for the next four years, even after it was shown to be a Clinton crafted fiction the mainstream media parroted. Indeed, the New York Times and the Washington Post would win Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the fake story, and no, not because they exposed the lie but, instead, because of their vociferous and eloquent participation in it.

During his presidency Donald Trump endured extraordinary abuse and treachery, driven by the media and the Democrat party. The irony of the media’s hatred for Trump was that channels like CNN and MSNBC virtually owed their rescue from irrelevance to the Trump presidency, while newspapers slowed their decades-long declines with pages of anti-Trump rhetoric.

As bad as the media abuse was, it was nothing compared to the treachery of the apparatchiks in the government. When Trump tried to build his promised wall, he was blocked at every step. His efforts to make Bureau of Land Management employees live closer to the lands they regulated were pilloried for making the agency “less diverse.” Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, the NSC’s Ukraine expert, launched an impeachment when he lied about Trump trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, during the Covid “pandemic,” possibly the most economically destructive self-inflicted wound in human history, the two government-employed doctors Trump looked to for guidance lied to Trump and the country. Finally, in perhaps the greatest treachery of all, we learned that members of America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were actively working to undermine Trump in the election.

Worse, this orgy of Trump-directed destruction wasn’t just in Washington. The 2020 riots cost billions of dollars in damage, and brought chaos and bloodshed to cities across the country, all the while being spurred and supported by Democrats single-mindedly focused on defeating Donald Trump.

These attacks were relentless, every single hour of every single day and came from inside and outside of government. Yet somehow Trump managed to run the government well and campaign like the Energizer Bunny. In the end, it took a literal coup d’état to oust him from office.

And now he’s back—and the mainstream media, Democrats, the GOP establishment, bloggers, and erstwhile fans all insist that we’re supposed to abandon him.

Aside from the fact that the Democrats will demonize as a Nazi, racist, homophobe anyone who carries the GOP flag, the reality is that Donald Trump is a fighter for America unlike any president we’ve ever had. No one has ever had to endure the level of vitriol or withstand the relentless phalanx of persecution from every corner as Trump has.

And here’s the thing…he didn’t need to. Trump was a billionaire already. Trump was already feted by politicians and media around the world. He already had a beautiful family, spectacular homes, and his own plane! No politicians in American history had more to lose when they decided to fight for the American people than Trump did. Usually, politicians go to Washington as middle class and leave millionaires. Trump, however, had literally billions of dollars to lose, but he took on the Swamp anyway.

Now, after enduring seven years of abuse for his defense of American freedom, prosperity and farmers and truckers and little guys of all shapes and sizes, he’s once again stepping up to do battle.

You may not like Donald Trump, and there’s much to not like. He’s arrogant, he’s petty, he’s defensive, and he can be cruel. (Those attributes can just as much be applied to Barack Obama.)

Unlike Obama however, Trump doesn’t try and pretend he’s something he’s not. He’s a crude, brash New Yorker who speaks his mind and gets things done. He knows how to fix things and wants to fix America with strong borders, energy independence, limited government, a robust economy, and individual liberty… All of the things the Swamp fought him on and the very things Joe Biden has undermined.

Donald Trump circa 2022 is still imperfect, but he’s been forged in a crucible of white-hot fire and has emerged even more focused than before on making America great. So, yes, while there may be brilliant lights on the horizon, I think I’ll take a pass and stick with the guy who got out of his Bentley and ran through a gauntlet of machine gun fire into the burning mess of Democrat America in order to save the eagle stuck inside.

Trump may tell off-color jokes and may not always be the best judge of character, but he can take the heat, and his North Star has always been prosperity and security for the American people. Given the literal evil the Democrats are seeking to impose on America, I’ll happily follow him into the fire.

2022: Democrats Brought a Gun to the Election Knife Fight While the GOP was Busy Deciding Which Loafers to Wear...

What was supposed to be a red tsunami last week turned out to be a ripple.  It didn’t take long for the GOP establishment place blame:  Donald Trump!

It couldn’t be because Mitch McConnell decided to spend $10 million supporting the treacherous Lisa Murkowski against the state’s GOP nominee, rather than in Arizona, Georgia or Michigan.  No, it was Trump.  It wasn’t Kevin McCarthy’s embarrassing attempt to recreate Newt Gingrich’s successful “Contract with America” that galvanized America and brought the GOP 54 seats in a year with 2.99% inflation, with his facile “Commitment to America”.  No, it was Donald Trump. It wasn’t that McConnell’s August derision of MAGA candidates claiming the party lacked “candidate quality” while his handpicked Colorado senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea went on to lose by 13 points, 3 times as much as Oz lost by in Pennsylvania.  No, it was Trump.

Despite the GOP establishment’s desire to pin their failure on 45 and his supporters, the truth is, this failure has numerous causes. 

Needless to say, the GOP establishment is at the top of the list.  They failed to embrace the candidates of their own party or execute a compelling national campaign that focused on the kitchen table issues of inflation, crime, immigration and parental rights.  In reality 2022 was the single best landscape for a GOP wave in modern times, but rather than focus America’s attention on those issues we had Lindsey Graham threatening Vladimir Putin and sending $50 billion to Ukraine while McConnell and John Cornyn were busy selling out the 2^nd Amendment. The leaders of the GOP are grifters more interested in the perks of leadership than winning, and it showed on November 8^th.

Beyond the incompetence of the GOP leadership there were two other issues that drove the election outcome.

Believe it or not, abortion, the third rail of American politics, was one.  The Wall Street Journal has a fascinatingly comprehensive analysis of voting patterns, looking at dozens of criteria.  One question asked “Which one of the following would you say is the most important issue facing the country?” and compared the voting patterns from 2018.  Of the nine issues listed: Economy, Healthcare, Immigration, Abortion, Crime, Climate change, Foreign policy, Covid and Guns, four had no change measured because the issues didn’t even show up in 2018.  Of the remaining five the Democrats lost support on four by an average of 6%.  One they didn’t:  Abortion.  Of the 9% of voters who said abortion was the most important issue, fully 78% of them voted for Democrats, a 57% increase over 2018. That essentially translates into about 7% of voters.  The GOP did an abysmal job addressing the issue of Abortion.  They allowed the media and Democrats to paint the GOP as extremists who wanted to force little girls who’d been raped into having babies. 

Whatever one’s opinion on abortion, the fact of the matter is that absolute bans on abortion are  unpopular virtually everywhere in America and even within the GOP fully 1/3 of the party disagrees with them.  This was probably a lost cause from the beginning, but in an extraordinarily contentious election the GOP leadership should have done a better job addressing the issue.  With the leak of the Dobbs the GOP should have known that the Democrats were going to come after them with lies like the one surrounding the little girl in Ohio raped by the illegal alien or the prospect of birth control being outlawed, and prepared. But they didn’t.  Indeed, you had the buffoon Lindsey Graham pitching the issue of passing a nationwide ban. Dobbs didn’t ban abortion or outlaw anything, but it didn’t matter because the GOP didn’t have a plan to address the issue, and it showed at the polls.

All of that however is incidental to the real reason the GOP failed:  Voting rules, starting with early voting and mail in balloting.  By the time Dr. Oz and John Fetterman met in their debate on October 25^th 635,000 of the state’s 5 million voters had already voted, 460,000 of them were Democrats, 320,000 more than Republicans. That number is significant given that post debate fully 82% of viewers said that Oz won the contest and he lost by a only 225,000 votes.  That of course is before even considering the fraud potential inherent in mail in voting. Mail in balloting (and in particular universal mail in voting) and ballot harvesting essentially provides Democrats with a mechanism to fabricate votes as well as harvest hundreds of thousands of votes from nursing homes, college campuses and other high density locations. Then there’s the fact that Pennsylvania doesn’t require voter ID and officials seem to have been involved in electioneering on election day itself.

Oz was a less than perfect candidate to be sure, but the cards were stacked against him… indeed they were stacked against whoever the GOP nominee was. Democrats learned in 2020 that they could use voting laws to manipulate vote outcomes in their favor and it certainly worked in Pennsylvania. 

Out in Arizona Kari Lake and Blake Masters, both outstanding candidates are enduring an endless demonstration of Democrat guile hidden behind a façade of incompetence. Similarly, but not surprisingly, out in Nevada – a state with universal mail out balloting and no voter ID – Adam Laxalt is slowly watching his lead disappear as time drags on. As Tucker Carlson discussed on his show on Thursday, election decision delays equal Democrat victory 77% of the time, something Dino Rossi can attest to from his 2004 loss for governor in Washington, Norm Coleman after losing his Senate seat in Minnesota in 2008 and of course Donald Trump in 2020.

To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the election rules, stupid!” and that’s something the Democrats have mastered that the GOP has relatively ignored. The Democrats finding their perfect storm of opportunity in Covid, thwarted many GOP attempts to maintain Constitutional limits on voting impropriety. The Democrats used Covid to pass unconstitutional and easily manipulated voting rules and have fought attempts to rescind them. Democrats brought a gun to the election knife fight while the GOP was busy deciding which loafers to wear… But we’re told it was Donald Trump’s fault.

At the end of the day the reality is that the GOP failed.  The extraordinary thing is they did so in the worst economy in 40 years with a highly unpopular president and 75% of the population feeling the country is on the wrong track.  They did so despite winning the popular vote by 6% vs. losing it by 8.4% in 1988.  That’s a shift of 14%, yet still they floundered.  In addition, in looking at the WSJ chronicled Gender / Age / Race dynamic, the Democrats lost ground in every single demographic, bar none… EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. But somehow couldn’t live up to expectations and it’s Donald Trump’s fault.

Voting rules are set at the state level as dictated by the Constitution, which means Democrats can do what they want in states they control.  And why would they change a system that lets them cheat and win?  They won’t, unless forced, and the GOP needs to figure out how to do that.  My guess is the best solution lies in the courts focusing on the 14^th Amendment and possibly the Voting Rights Act. Whatever the solution, Stalin’s adage holds true “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” Until the GOP figures out how to fix the voting rules, they’ll be losing and eventually they won’t have Donald Trump to blame.

The Fundamental Transformation of a Nation - Barack Obama's "Gift" to America

Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform America.  He tried…  We can look at the politicization of federal agencies under his watch, at victimization becoming a virtue, at the intrusion of government into American’s health decisions and we can look at the damage his Justice Department inflicted as they coerced cities around the country into “consent decrees” that neutered police forces.  There is of course much more, but in reality the most fundamental transformation for which Barack Obama is responsible has nothing to do with his time in office. 

The backlash against the leftist policies of Obama brought us the unabashed patriot, Donald Trump.  But by the time Trump was inaugurated the cancer of 8 years of Obama had done their damage and much of the federal government had become fully engaged members of the cult of progressivism.  From the fiction of widespread white supremacy, to environmental extremism to LBGTQXYZ fanaticism to the open borders lockstep, leftism was now baked into much of the government ruling America. 

Trump shocked the world and stepped into a Washington that more resembled a swamp of vipers than the seat of a functioning government.  The leftist cabal – including a wide swath of those government workers – spent 4 years seeking to derail the plans of the dually elected president of the United States.  This treachery culminated in November of 2020 when the government colluded with the media and social media to execute a coup against the sitting president under the guise of “The most secure election in American history”. 

And it is that coup with which Barack Obama achieved his greatest success in “transforming” the United States; it gave us Joe Biden.

As bad as everything Obama did while in office, nothing he did compares to Joe Biden. Since being installed as president, Biden has done an insane number of things that simply make no sense from a rational perspective.

Literally the first thing he did was reduce the amount of energy available to Americans. He cancelled completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline which would have brought more Canadian oil. Soon thereafter the administration threw up roadblocks to domestic oil production both offshore and on federal lands.  First they curtailed new leases and “reviewed” existing ones.  Later, when they backed off a complete ban, they instituted a virtual ban, which included increases in fees and other elements to make extraction more expensive for energy companies and everything more expensive for Americans.

Next his administration propelled mandates for the untested vaccine that swept across the country which saw Americans subjected to restrictions on travel, shopping, employment and more. Nationwide tens of thousands of firemen, police, teachers and even Navy Seals lost their jobs and incomes because of vaccine mandates for a virus with a survival rate of above 99.9% for almost everyone.  Building on that lunacy the Biden CDC recently issued a recommendation that states require Covid vaccinations for school children despite the fact that the survival rate for ages 0-19 is 99.9997%. So this administration would have seventy five million American children vaccinated with a medicine that has had no long term testing and where the long term effects are, by definition, unknown. This is part and parcel for an administration with so little regard for children that it supports the castration and mutilation of children who are not old enough to vote or to drive, often without the knowledge or consent of their parents. 

Then of course there is the economy. With the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act Biden poured trillions of dollars into the economy and drove inflation to levels not seen in 40 years. Everything, from energy to housing to food to clothing… virtually every single thing Americans use has gone up in price since Biden became president, often by giant leaps.  As a consequence Americans are fighting to stay afloat financially, with 60% worse off than they were a year ago and a staggering 40% of businesses missing their rent payments in October. 

As if making Americans less prosperous wasn’t enough, Joe Biden has made the world less safe. In August of last year the Pentagon exited Afghanistan in such haste that it left behind literally tens of billions of dollars of weapons for the terrorists now running the country to use as they please.  Not content to arm one just one terrorist government, the administration pushed to reopen negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal.  Then there is Russia and Ukraine. Early on in the conflict when the sides were close to an agreement to cease hostilities Biden sent his puppet Boris Johnson to scuttle the negotiations and as a result the world is the closest it has been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

All of this has changed America, and not for the better. But while rising prices and forced vaccinations may change American behavior, they don’t rise to the level of transforming the country.

But changing the demographic makeup does.  And this is where Joe Biden is fulfilling Barack Obama’s goal.  He invited essentially anyone willing to make the trip to come to the United States by telling them that they would not be detained and they would be able to get healthcare.  Not surprisingly, millions of people from impoverished nations crossed the border into Club Biden.  Since Biden became president it’s estimated that more than 5.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border.  And that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands or millions who crossed and were never seen by the Border Patrol in the first place. 

There is something called “replacement theory” which Democrats label as a conspiracy theory amongst racist whites. It’s not that.  As Tucker Carlson demonstrates in a piece from earlier this year, replacement theory isn’t a right wing conspiracy theory at all, but rather a plan Democrats have spoken about for years.  As they will tell you, the goal is to outnumber the mostly white, American born population with people who look and think differently.  Not surprisingly the way they accomplish that is by inviting in millions of people from countries that rarely share American mores and values. 

To put that 5.5 million plus people in perspective, that’s more people than live in 28 out of the 50 states, it’s more people than South Carolina, Oregon, Oklahoma and Connecticut individually or Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware and Washington DC combined!  It’s also more than the population of every single city in America other than New York.  Every single one… 

At this rate by the end of Joe Biden’s first term as many as 15 million new illegal aliens could be here, all of whom need healthcare, schooling, food, shelter and clothing, provided free of charge by American taxpayers already struggling to put food on the table, fuel in their cars and keep a roof over their heads.

That is a fundamental transformation.  Once those 15 million people get to vote Republicans will never win another election and America will become San Francisco.  But “they’re not citizens” you say, and they can’t vote.  Given the current state of affairs and the Democrat’s fading allure among actual Americans, how long do you think before that changes?  Remember, these are the people who told us that gay marriage was all they wanted but are now telling us men can have periods and allowing hospitals to do unnecessary mastectomies on girls without their parents’ knowledge. 

We are on the cusp of a real, fundamental transformation of America.  There are however those who want to move the country back in the direction of sanity.  Hopefully when all of the counting is done tonight - or tomorrow or next week or next month or whenever - they will have been elected and the Democrats will have been sent packing.  

Collapse of Civilization: Lessons Voters Might Take From Roman Britain

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” said George Santayana. He could well be describing modern leftists, careening back into the dark ages of post-Roman Britain.

At the end of the 2^nd century AD Britain was a fully developed province of the Roman Empire.  It was as Roman as any city in the Empire. While still largely rural, Roman Britain developed towns and cities that mirrored those found in Italy or North Africa and connected them with a spectacular roadway. They had majestic villas, sprawling estates, baths, plumbing and of course aqueducts.  The Romans brought industrial sophistication to mining, unprecedented architectural capabilities and improved agriculture.  The province was awash in imported goods from around the Empire: Wine from Gaul, olive oil from Hispania, pottery from North Africa, and philosophy teachers from Greece; all the while exporting precious metals, agricultural products, shellfish and salt across the Empire.

One of the extraordinary things about the Roman Empire was the unprecedented, widespread prosperity it created from the Pillars of Hercules to the Levant and virtually everywhere in between. While there had always been a market for fine goods such as silk and porcelain and exotic foods, the Romans brought those goods to the masses. By building roads, ports, transportation hubs and funding the trade necessary to support the Legions, the Romans drove economies of scale and created a mass market for goods that had formerly been available only to the rich but had become inexpensive across the Roman world.  In doing so they created a cosmopolitan empire so thoroughly Roman that people from what are today Morocco and Britain and Germany and Israel likely spoke some version of the same language and would have found familiar products available regardless of where they were in the Empire.

Back in Britain, three hundred years after Caesar first invaded the untamed island in 55 BC the province was a sophisticated, shining example of all of the Empire had to offer. It was not to last however… In less than a century after the Romans abandoned the island for good in 410 the population collapsed, the economy collapsed, cities became ghost towns or disappeared and chaos reigned. Londinium, whose population peaked at 60,000 in the 2^nd century, dropped below 20,000 and saw more than 75% of its buildings dismantled with the materials carted off into the countryside.

In less than a century Roman Britain went from a rich, flourishing cosmopolitan province with bustling urban centers and goods from across the known world to an economic and cultural backwater where modern architectural, plumbing and farming techniques seemed to have disappeared along with most of the import of goods. 

Most of the people living on the island in the middle of the 4^th century probably assumed, like much of America in 2022, that the advances of civilization move only in one direction, upward.  They expected to continue to enjoy inexpensive food and pottery and clothing from elsewhere in while selling their wares in return.  The government would continue to provide protection and would maintain the ports and roads that facilitated trade. 

When those things didn’t happen life in Britain became a far darker experience.  Cities disappeared, warlords set up fiefdoms and invaders came from seemingly everywhere. Farming techniques were lost, building techniques were lost, trade collapsed and citizens were forced to become self sufficient as numerous petty would be “kings” set up trade and travel barriers and goods from the Continent became scarce.  The opposite of economies of scale and free trade took hold and Britain became far less prosperous as goods became more expensive, countless products and varieties of products simply disappeared and staples had to be produced locally.

It’s here where Santayana’s missive becomes relevant. Given that the history of post Roman Britain so clearly demonstrates the fragility of civilization’s advances, we might want to pay attention.  The reality is, our world, far more tenuously than the Britain of 1700 years ago, is but X bad decisions away from an agrarian, subsistence economy with no electricity, no gas, little trade, few economies of scale and most certainly no security or safety. 

Go through a day and see how many things we rely on that we couldn’t replace if a disaster occurred.  Imagine a blackout.  How many things would that loss of electricity impact?  Not only the lighting in our homes, but the refrigerators, phone chargers, garage door openers as well.  Outside our homes there’s even more: Elevators.  Gas pumps. Plumbing.  Street lamps & stop lights. Virtually everything in a hospital. Cell phone towers. Police switchboards and dispatches. Train signals and countless other things.

Then there’s the social aspects of such a crisis.  Rules and laws would go out the window, and it wouldn’t take long. During the New York City blackout of 1977 crime surged, with looting, vandalism and arson rampant (over 1,000 fires were set) while police arrested 3,776 people in the largest mass arrest in the city’s history.  The chaos cost over $1 billion in today’s dollars, and the lights were off for less than 24 hours!  Now jump forward to the BLM / Antifa riots of 2020 and the defunding of police.  Not only was there chaos and mayhem, there were murders, assaults, and rapes nationwide and communities literally burned to the ground. Then there is the mass looting and random violence that has occurred since 2020 and seems to be growing worse every day… and through all of this we still had electricity!

Of course electricity is only one element of what keeps our society civilized.  There’s gasoline, there’s trade, there’s what used to be a widespread respect for the rule of law.  Imagine no diesel fuel.  Trucks wouldn’t be able to deliver food and store shelves will go bare.  You probably have enough food in your kitchen for your family to last a few days or maybe a week at most. Then what? Are you going to grow wheat on your windowsill or in your backyard?  Is the neighborhood stray cat going to be your family’s next meal? Do you have a cow for milk? Not to mention medicines, building materials, gasoline for your car… the list of goods delivered via diesel is endless. 

One of the downsides of trade, division of labor and economies of scale is that most of us are dependent on others to provide for us those things we don’t produce for ourselves… which is to say, almost everything.  Our society is based on a trade system where we get paid to do some things and we pay others to do the things we don’t. It’s a well oiled machine… until it’s not.    

And that’s the point.  The climate alarmists who want to do away with fossil fuels have no concept of the ramifications of that folly. The equity cultists who want to eliminate the police and “reform” the justice system don’t care about the consequences of that absurdity. 

Just as the razor thin layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth sustains life on earth, our modern society thrives thanks to plentiful, inexpensive energy and a respect for the rule of law.  Inexplicably, those are the two primary targets of the Democrats who are currently in charge of wide swaths of the United States.  Indeed Californians regularly endure the absurd manmade disaster of rolling blackouts while Illinois is about to essentially decriminalize crime.  Neither is necessary…

When Americans step into their well lit, safe and private voting booths on November 8^th they’d do well to think of those 5^th century Britons who were about to careen into a darkness from which it would take almost a millennia to emerge, and vote accordingly.