Will Trump Be Julius Caesar or Augustus? 2026 Is His Last Chance to Crush the Deep State and Save America

It's not often life gives nations real second chances when it comes to the big things, but in America’s case it did. My only hope is that we don’t squander it… or to be more precise, I hope Donald Trump doesn’t squander it. The 2026 midterms are less than a year away, that makes what he does in the next six to eight months monumentally important. 

The bottom line is, does he want to be consequential or just well known?  Julius Caesar is easily one of the most well-known men in history, but was he really that consequential? The truth is, no. We know more about Caesar than any other Roman not because he changed the world, but because he was a genius of propaganda and wrote prodigiously – and well – about his exploits. The reality is, Caesar was just another Roman general – albeit a great one – caught up in a century of internecine wars between men seeking to control the Republic. Augustus, his adopted son – who is far less well known in history – was far more consequential, having transformed the Republic into an Empire that would arguably last another 1500 years. 

Is Donald Trump going to be Caesar or Augustus? Is he going to be a president who rearranges the deckchairs on the USS Titanic and simply slows down her eventual collision with the iceberg or is he going to steer her through the treacherous waters and bring her out safely on the other side?

When he won re-election last November I was certain that after enduring 8 years of what is easily the most vitriolic abuse any American politician had ever endured, he was going to return to Washington and metaphorical heads were going to roll.  Indeed, he ran on the idea of destroying the deep state.    

Now, a year after the election, I’m not so sure. While I applaud most of his moves on immigration, particularly his recent move to temporarily cease all immigration from 3^rd world countries, there are two elements that cause concern.  One is his support for the H1B visa program. If there are jobs that can’t be filled by Americans, then bringing in foreign workers who have the necessary skills makes sense for keeping American industry productive.  But that’s not what’s happening. Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily Indians, are being brought in to supplant American workers companies would generally have to pay more to keep or hire.  There is no shortage of American STEM workers, there are merely trillion dollar tech, consulting and other companies who simply want to bolster the bottom line by paying foreign workers lower wages. Sadly, Trump defends the program virtually every chance he gets.  Add to that his allowing half a million students / spies from Communist China to remain at American universities and one begins to wonder whose payrolls Trump’s advisors are on. 

Another area where Trump has not met expectations is taking on the leftist cabal that brought the nation to the brink of disaster over the last decade.  From Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton and the army of anti-American traitors who worked against Trump, his allies, and the American people, Trump should establish a task force with the specific purpose of investigating every single member of the government or NGO and every financier who had anything to do with Russiagate as well as the coup / coverup of 2020 and the resulting J6 persecutions.  Americans know what happened, we watched it in real time. Molly Ball crowed about it in TIME magazine, we read about it in Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged, and later we followed as Emerald Robinson pulled string after string… but what we don’t have, and need, is the entire case of the treachery laid out in black and white, and then see the guilty tried and punished.  As we all learned in the OJ trial, juries can’t always be trusted, but at a minimum the information should be laid out for the American people to see so that they can vote accordingly. The recent arrest of the DC pipe-bomb suspect and Kash Patel’s announcement that it was based on information the FBI sat on for 4 years tells us that the information is there, it just takes an administration with sufficient courage to expose it. 

Hand in hand with allowing that treachery to go unpunished is the fact that Trump has not put his shoulder into ensuring the passage of the SAVE act. Indeed, New England, which is about 40% Republican, has 21 House seats and 100% of them are Democrat. That’s not good.  Democrats win by cheating.  Period. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require Voter ID, proof of U.S. citizenship and outlaw most mail-in voting. Strong-arming Congress, which the GOP theoretically controls, into passing SAVE would do more for saving the Republic than almost any other thing he could do. If Trump wants to maintain GOP control over Congress and have any chance of fixing the country, he needs to fix the voting system now, because we know the second the SAVE act is passed there’s an army of treacherous federal judges who will seek to derail it.

Which brings us to the last critical issue, the Judiciary. Since 2015 federal judges across the country have acted as the rear guard for the Obama plan of “Fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into a leftist nirvana. From nationwide injunctions to throwing out cases to seeking to exercise Executive power, the federal judiciary has become untethered to the Constitution. The traditional way such overreach is addressed is that cases make their way through the appellate process where SCOTUS may or may not eventually rectify the problem. But that system breaks down as a viable solution when fast approaching elections that decide the direction of the government are concerned. Congress must act to address this judicial overreach. 

As such, Trump should work with Congress to utilize their Article III powers to fix this.  I’d suggest two possible avenues: 

1) Congress abolishes the entire judiciary below SCOTUS and remakes it with a far more limited and constitutional judiciary.

2) Congress sets up a separate parallel federal court channel that would deal exclusively with election and Executive power related issues so that they can be argued in a timely fashion and be resolved long before they become moot.

Decades from now Donald Trump is going to be remembered.  The question is, will he be remembered as a celebrity president who attracted a great deal of attention and simply slowed the collapse as the nation calcified into a failed dystopia driven by big government and big spending, or is he going to be remembered as an heroic, mythic figure who fought back the leftist tide and put America back on firm, limited government, Constitutional footing, giving her a real opportunity to survive another 250 years?  I guess we’ll see…

DOGE, the Big Beautiful Bill and the 'Rich Men North of Richmond

 I was under the illusion that with Donald Trump back in charge and the wind at his back Washington Republicans might actually take off the gloves and say eff-it and take on the swamp.  With the failures inherent in the Big Beautiful Bill, it appears I was wrong.  I don’t blame Trump. This abysmal betrayal of the American people was written in the halls of Congress… 

The Republicans in Congress talk a good game, but when it comes to actually doing what they say they’re going to do, it turns out they’re really snake oil salesmen. Not that this is new.  Remember when they ran on killing Obamacare throughout Obama’s presidency then bungled it when Trump became president?

We’re now watching that same treachery play itself out in real time, and it involves the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that just passed the House. This monstrosity ostensibly does a number of good things.  It extends Trump’s 2017 taxes that were set to expire, it increases spending on border security and apparently it cuts federal support for Planned Parenthood.  All of these are good things… but they’re the equivalent of trying to save the Titanic by emptying water over the side one bucket at a time while a thousand gallons of water pour into the hull every second. 

What this bill doesn’t do is cut spending nor cut the deficit.  Indeed, it puts the deficit on overdrive, just as interest rates on government debt seem to be heading upward. The president’s advisor Steven Miller (who is one of the smartest guys in Washington) pushes back, by pointing out that Reagan’s tax cuts weren’t balanced by spending cuts.  True, but then Reagan didn't have, if I remember correctly, a national debt 125% the size of the GDP that needed to be serviced.

A small part of this problem has to do with the calendar.  The writing of this budget began back in December after it became clear the GOP would have both houses but before they were technically in complete control.  As such, this Frankenstein started being put together long before DOGE started showcasing exactly how dysfunctional the federal government is.  But that’s no excuse.  It’s been over 4 months since the Elon Musk managed vehicle started highlighting problems.

This One Big Beautiful Bill Act demonstrates exactly why the federal government is as screwed up as it is. They say that you can’t turn around a ship on a dime, and that’s true.  But there’s a difference between turning on a dime and setting a course, full speed ahead, for the closest iceberg. 

This bill literally adds $2.5 trillion to the government’s debt and runs a deficit larger than Biden’s last one!  At the same time it basically allows the government to go on, business as usual.  There are no major cuts to spending.  There are no elimination of departments.  There is no substantial paring of regulation.  There’s basically the same budget compiled by the Democrats, RINOs and the administrative state every year with infinitesimal changes except for the taxes.

This bill doesn’t reflect the will of the people, it reflects the will of the establishment and the swamp. 

If Congress really wanted to fix the budget they’d take to heart many of the recommendations and revelations from DOGE, as well as codify much of what Trump has done or tried to do via Executive Orders. Hell, it doesn’t even eliminate the Department of Education, something Trump explicitly ran on. 

This bill cuts $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden’s attempt to get everything, including the kitchen sink into the budget, including green energy, social spending and taxes on the rich.  Four billion sounds like a lot until you understand that the IRA is a $1.4 trillion boondoggle. 

The reality is, 2/3 of the federal budget, fully $4 trillion out of $6 trillion is wealth redistribution.  Even if you argue that Social Security isn’t that, which is mostly true, and remove it, you’re still looking at almost half the federal budget being wealth distribution of one sort or another.  How much of that is waste, fraud and abuse? 

Elon Musk had initially suggested that he thought $2 Trillion could be cut from the budget. He lowered that target to $1 Trillion and in the first 4 months of the year DOGE has done a yeoman’s job and cut $170 billion of waste. And that’s with just 100 people on staff and facing a bureaucracy of literally millions who scheme and obfuscate at every turn in order to maintain the cash pipeline.  Imagine how much a DOGE team of 1,000 could do!

But more than actual cuts, DOGE recommended things like personnel cuts, cutting green energy subsidies and of course cutting regulation.  But relatively little is actually being codified in law. That’s despite the fact that 67% of Americans support DOGE cuts of at least $1 trillion, 77% support looking at the entirety of the budget to find savings and 78% support cutting spending to balance the budget.  Indeed, so little is being cut that Elon Musk has announced that he will be stepping back to refocus his efforts on his companies and playing a much smaller role in political spending.    

Inspired by promises to cut spending, taxes and regulation, MAGA voters powered Republicans to win the White House, take the Senate and retain the House. They had the richest and possibly the smartest man in the world not only on their side, but knee deep in funding them, getting them elected and working around the clock to ferret out corruption and fraud in government. Plus, every day seemed to shine more light on the corruption of Democrat / swamp machine.  As a result of all of this Republicans found themselves the beneficiaries of the most passionate electorate America may have ever seen. They were on top of the world.  And what did they do with all of this momentum? Worse than nothing, they gave us Democrat lite.

No major regulatory cuts.  No major cuts to wealth redistribution programs. No departments and few programs actually eliminated. No reining in of the imperial judiciary seeking to derail Trump at every turn.  No, rather than listen to voters and take a sledgehammer to the twin albatross of regulation and spending they use a dull putty knife to create the illusion of actual progress.

Of course we all know why nothing ever changes in Washington. Politicians go to DC and most get sucked into the Georgetown cocktail party scene grift, into being invited to pontificate on Sunday morning shows and give speeches to groups of deep pocketed donors from industries over whom them hold a sword of Damocles.

The fact that Donald Trump didn’t care about any of that, wasn’t swayed by any of that is one of the things that made him so appealing. That’s the reason MAGA put him back in the White House…

Unfortunately for the country however, the GOP in Congress is led by swamp weasels Mike Johnson and John Thune, and Trump is Gulliver to their Lilliputians. They have no real interest in upsetting the grift applecart despite what America wants.  They put America First lipstick on a Business as Usual pig and call it progress.  If the GOP loses Congress next year, look no farther than its leadership.  Like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnel before them, they are more interested in the trappings of leadership than actually solving America’s problems. Rich Men North of Richmond indeed.

Joe Biden Has Picked Up the Nazi's Handbook, and He's Not Trying to Burn It...

Most people know about the Nazis and WWII and the Jews. A century later however what many people don’t realize is that the Nazis didn’t start out as the merchants of death they became.  They started out as anti-big business, anti-middle class, anti-capitalist and anti-Communist with only a relatively tangential focus on anti-Semitism.  For all of their efforts in the first decade of their existence the Nazi party attracted few adherents.  It was only in the early 30’s when they began to gain real traction, using the economic ruin brought on by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression to gain power. While nationalism and anti-Semitism were always part of their agenda, it was the post war economic disaster that was the golden ticket for a party who argued the Germans were suffering under the boot of oppression.  The Nazis promised to remove the shackles of Versailles, reenergize the German economy and as a result in 1932 they won the largest number of seats in the Parliament.  Leveraging this position Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933. 

Once in power, the gloves came off.  The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was used as a premise to target political opponents and curtail civil liberties.  A month later Parliament passed the Enabling Act which allowed the cabinet to make laws with no parliamentary oversight.  In June of that year opposition parties were outlawed and in December the lines between party and government were erased.  In January of 1934 the last vestiges of opposition was eliminated when states lost their voice in government.  So in a period of less than two years the Nazi party went from a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the government and the people of Germany.  It was then that they unleashed their heretofore relatively subdued anti-Semitism.  From boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation via the Nuremberg laws and finally, the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that if we asked any German in 1932 would it be OK to gas and murder Jews, they would most certainly have said no. But within two years Jews would officially be defined as a different, inferior race, had their political and economic freedoms curtailed and within a decade millions would be dead. 

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came…” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public. 

And so it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would like you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade.  For just over two years we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold in the United States like it’s never held sway before.

Consider the following: 

In the summer of 2020 Democrats rained hell down on American cities and citizens, by allowing and encouraging and funding urban terrorists to destroy private and public property, attack citizens and the police and kill dozens of innocent victims. 

In 2020 and beyond, after years of watching Democrats assail our election system, when anyone questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election they were branded as anti democratic conspiracy nuts and accused of supporting insurrection.

The relatively small riot that occurred on January 6^th 2021– primarily involving those who questioned the 2020 election outcome – was labeled an insurrection and hundreds of citizens who had been welcomed into the US Capital or standing on its grounds were arrested, labeled as terrorists and thrown in solitary confinement for months without charge or bail.  At the same time there are a number of provocateurs who seem to have been involved about whom the FBI is stunningly disinterested.   

Illegally politicizing the Department of Justice, for the following 18 months the Biden administration and Democrats used the pretense of the “insurrection” to harass, intimidate, arrest and jail members of the former president’s administration, legal team and supporters.  This harassment eventually led to the unprecedented step of the Justice Department and the FBI raiding the home of the former president and future presidential contender. 

Beginning in 2020, in response to the Corona virus, states and municipalities across the country (mostly run by Democrats) instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced the shutdown of schools, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or the damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were seen as enemies of the regime and were subsequently silenced as the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and deplatform them.  

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger and then proceeded to coerce private enterprises to enforce said mandates.   Questioning that policy or non acquiesce with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime and livelihoods were threatened and destroyed.

Inserting themselves into the localist of government activities, school boards, Americans who stood up and voiced their opposition to their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or accused of being racists because of the color of their skin have been branded as terrorists by the Justice Department.

All of this threatening, intimidating and jailing of the opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech last week where he stated:  Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. This was not a campaign speech, this was the President of the United States addressing American citizens… and he called 71 million of them terrorists.

Which brings us back to Germany in 1932.  Just as the Nazis used their toehold on power to take total control of the government and methodically use that government to first slander then marginalize then cleave from society the hated Jews who were said to be less than human, the Democrats have used their control over the media, local governments and federal agencies to take over the federal government and are now using that government to slander and marginalize and cleave from society the millions of Americans who disagree with their leftist agenda. 

And these are not just idle words, Joe Biden is the head of the United States government, with all of its resources at disposal, telling 71 million Americans they are a threat to the nation. And in case anyone missed the point, after having just passed a law to hire 87,000 new armed IRS agents, the administration hired Nikole Flax, who worked with Lois Lerner at the IRS when it was targeting conservatives during the Obama administration, to run the new division.   So Joe Biden and the Democrats have just created the largest armed police force in the nation and set as its leader someone associated with the targeting of their political opponents.  Joe Biden’s words are not just words… they are threats. He paints his political opponents as extremists and then exhorts his supporters to “confront” them.  “We’re all called by duty and conscience to confront extremists who put their own pursuit of power above all else.”

None of this means that by 2025 we’ll have concentration camps filled with emaciated conservatives, but it’s not like there’s no precedent.  But unlike the Germans after 1932, Americans still have the opportunity to do something about this, to make their voices heard, to change the course of history.  This November in all 50 states there will be elections, and in most there will be a Democrat on one side and a Republican on the other.  In every single case, whether for dog catcher, governor, senator or any office in between, they should pull the GOP lever.  The GOP is far from perfect and their candidates and representatives are at times questionable, but at the end of the day, they are not Democrats.  They are not the party that is taking the country down the totalitarian path that wrought so much damage and spilled so much blood in the last century.  No, Republicans may be flawed, but voting for them will likely not be fatal to the Republic.  The same can’t be said about Democrats.

Donald Trump: Not Exactly A Presidential President

American Presidents are supposed to be well spoken, articulate, magnanimous and carry themselves with a grace that makes them look natural on the cover of TIME magazine or standing next to the Queen of England.  They’re supposed to get along with the Washington press corps, titans of industry and play their role in the Kabuki theater of Washington DC power where Congress, the Executive Branch and the bureaucracy play their assigned roles and business continues largely unchanged from one administration to the next.

None of that applies to Donald Trump. He’s brash.  He’s arrogant.  He’s a narcissist.  He’s petty.  He’s vindictive.  He makes rash decisions and somehow is never responsible for stumbles that land at his doorstep, even when he’s the guy in charge… Donald Trump is practically no one’s idea of what Americans would traditionally call “Presidential”. 

Barack Obama on the other hand was the consummate “Presidential” president.  He was well spoken, genial, and got along well with the media, bureaucrats and foreign leaders.  Barack Obama, by all accounts carried the imprimatur “Presidential” quite well.  It was the actual presidenting that he was so bad at, which demonstrates with crystal clarity that the perception of one’s abilities and one’s actual abilities are not the same thing…

Donald Trump was a bull in a china shop of a President.  Or at least that’s the way the media, Democrats, academia, Hollywood and establishment Republicans painted him.  And that’s the key to understanding Donald Trump... knowing him through his enemies.  Voltaire said:  “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." That prayer very much applies to Donald Trump.  His enemies are ridiculous.  They are failures at virtually everything they touch.  From destroying American schools and cities and the military, Democrats have made themselves beyond ridiculous in the eyes of anyone other than their fellow travelers.  Journalists have destroyed journalism as the majority of the media in the United States today is nothing more than a mouthpiece for Democrat talking points.  And higher education has become a cartoon into itself, with its focus on safe spaces for sparing the feelings of little snowflake rather than preparing young adults for the real world that exists beyond their ivory towers.  

And the mortar that keeps all of that ridiculousness and more together is the regulatory state.  The regulatory state is the font from which most power in the United States flows.  The power to regulate gives politicians the power to print money… both for themselves and their friends.  There’s a reason 7 of the 10 richest counties in America – out of over 3,100 counties – are located in the DC metro area.  From cushy government jobs to high paying lobbying gigs to flashy TV news hosting positions to bylines at self important newspapers, wielding power or influencing it or reporting on it is what makes Washington so desirable.  A perfect example of that was on display when hundreds of USDA employees decided to quit their jobs in DC rather than move out into the heartland when the Trump administration decided to place offices where regulators and researchers would be closer to the farms and farmers within their purview. They quit because they knew that Washington is where the power is, where the money is, where the influence is and where the prestige is. 

President Trump knew that that regulatory state was a rope around the neck of freedom, prosperity and America.  That’s why he needed to be vilified, attacked and eventually stopped.  Many people ask how some Republicans could stand by and watch as the president from their own party was attacked and disparaged as Donald Trump was. The answer is simple, establishment Republicans don’t really care about party, don’t care about effective government, and don’t care about their constituent's rights.  No, they care about only one thing:  Power.  If they could be out of office and watch government spending and influence slashed vs. be in office and watch government power grow, they would choose the latter every single time.  Go along with Democrats and they get to keep their invitations to Georgetown parties, their sponsored junkets to exotic and sophisticated locales, their regular Sunday morning talk show slots, cushy jobs for their families and of course the promise of a lucrative parachute if they ever find themselves defeated. Rein in government?  "No chance!"

It was into this well oiled machine of money, power and favors that Donald Trump sought to throw a wrench.  It was this “You scratch my back I scratch yours” Rube Goldberg government contraption that Donald Trump sought to overturn.  It was this "Go along to get along" understanding where Washington thrives by stealing citizen’s money and freedom that Donald Trump sought to expose.  And that is why he had to go.

Donald Trump opened up a schism in the United States unlike anything we’ve seen in 150 years.  He didn't do it by demonizing black people or brown people or Muslims or gays or soldiers or any of the other things the cabal of Democrats, media, and Never Trumper Republicans said.  In reality, Donald created a schism by reminding Americans that the nation is indeed blessed, that while flawed, America is the greatest nation in history and that fundamentally, Americans and America are good.  Donald Trump put the spotlight on working Americans… on factory workers and entrepreneurs and problem solvers rather than on the self important politicians and media personalities. This schism is based on power, not race.  

In four years Donald Trump did for America what he did forWollman Rink 30 years before.  After years of failure and millions of dollars wasted by the city government on the Central Park skating rink, Donald Trump renovated and opened the rink in a matter of months and under budget. In a similar way, after years of disparagement, Donald Trump made America great again. He showed that Americans that they could get back to work. That they could grow jobs and drive prosperity.  That they could lead on the world stage by embracing, not apologizing for, American values.  In other words, Donald Trump showed America that Americans can still accomplish great things, drove home the idea that it was the American people that made the country great, it was the ideas the Founding Fathers left us that made America great and it was our freedom and opportunity that made America great.  But most dangerously of all, Donald Trump reminded Americans that America’s greatness and prosperity do not come from government, they exist despite government.  And that could simply not be tolerated by the swamp, hence the four years of roadblocks, vilification and eventually a stolen election.  

Is Donald Trump a politically dead canary at the bottom of the American mineshaft of freedom or is he a phoenix ready to soar once again and lead the nation to even further greatness?  Who knows? Even today, after Trump emerged from his second impeachment victory his ridiculous enemies are seeking to bar him from Arlington, ban his name from schools and post offices and demonize, stigmatize and marginalize his supporters.  

Whatever Donald Trump’s future, one thing is for certain, his legacy is alive and well in the hearts of the 75 million American voters who remember a time when patriotism was a virtue, who understand that it’s possible for a nation to be flawed but fundamentally good, and perhaps most of all, recognize that America is the land of opportunity for every single person.  He may not be what the elite consider a very Presidential President, but he reminded us that it’s our people who make America great, our Constitution that makes her great and our freedoms that make her great despite the swamp's assertion to the contrary. He stood up and unabashedly proclaimed that America was and is a good nation, a great nation, and a force for good... and we believed him.  Whatever he chooses to do, we proudly carry the American flag and enthusiastically support his MAGA agenda... and we're not going anywhere.