America Has a Perfect Storm of Opportunity to Save Herself From the RINOs in the GOP

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was an attempt to deal with a problem that threatened to rip America apart, slavery. Although it didn’t address the underlying institution itself, it banned new states north of Missouri’s southern border from joining the union as slave states.

The delicate balance lasted until repealed by the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854.

Although not explicit, the Act potentially opened up all of the west to slavery. For the north this was simply untenable and the result was the creation of the Republican Party, which formed in 1854 in the midst of the debate.

Of course, both were basically band aids over the real trauma that was destroying the nation, slavery.

The Republican Party was essentially the combination of the remnants of the Whig Party and elements of other peripheral parties. Six years later Abraham Lincoln would be elected the nation’s first Republican president. The party would go on to dominate much of American politics for the next half century.

In 1854 the Republican party came about as the result of America finally having to face a cancer that had been gnawing at it’s core since its foundation. In 2025 it should die for the same reason.

The cancer today is not slavery in the literal sense, but it is slavery nonetheless. In this case it isn’t blacks being held in bondage because of the color of their skin, but rather citizens being held in financial bondage by politicians who have no problem entombing them in a debtor’s prison from which escape is impossible.

The Republicans had a perfect storm of opportunity in 2025. They had just taken back the Senate, they held the House and on January 20^th they took control of the White House. Not only that, they had perhaps the most motivated electorate in a century or more. The tens of millions of Americans who watched as the 2020 election was stolen and then suffered through four years of anti American and anti-common sense policies were ready to take back their country. And they did.

What’s more, this highly motivated electorate spent the first two months of the new administration watching as the Elon Musk led DOGE revealed the billions and perhaps trillions of dollars of waste fraud and abuse everywhere from the Treasury Department to USAID to the Pentagon and elsewhere.

With the new sheriff in town these voters expected that things were going to be different.

Not so much…

No, the Republicans, the party America hired to actually codify the savings and bring some order to federal profligacy showed themselves to be derelict, indeed borderline treasonous the first chance they were given. 

While we’re being told the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) is a good deal and it cuts spending, that’s simply a lie. Indeed it increases spending and adds trillions to the national debt.

In what seems like record time the Republican party has gone from the party leading America in a new direction to the Go Along to Get Along party. Indeed, coming to power with promises to cut spending, get the federal government under control and to slash deficits, they’re doing virtually none of that. America took the red pill and discovered that it was really a blue pill dipped in food coloring.

The BBB is nothing less than treasonous. It does nothing to address America’s existential threat: Federal spending and deficits. Today America’s national debt stands at over $36 trillion, or over 120% of GDP, the highest level on record. Of that $36 trillion, $29 trillion has accumulated since 2000, 24 years during which the GOP held the presidency for 12 years, the House for 16, the Senate for 10, and all three for 6. Regardless, the spending seems to always go up and the deficits continue to grow until today where every single American, from baby to centenarian, is on the hook for $102,000. That, in a nation where the average household income is $80,000.

And yet the Republicans, the party that’s supposed to represent financial responsibility has presented America with a budget that basically spends like a drunken sailor.

To put this in perspective, one merely needs to recognize that the Republicans had as their number one cheerleader for the last year the world’s richest and most successful man but with the presentation of this “disgusting abomination” they have made a literal enemy out of him. Addressing the Republican treachery head on, Musk suggested “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.”

Simply put, the Grand Old Party is grand no more. It is simply Democrat lite and should therefore sent to the dustbin of history.

Of course as we learned with Teddy Roosevelt and H. Ross Perot, third parties don’t work in the United States. The reality is, a new party doesn’t need to be started from scratch. Just as the GOP was built on the remnants of the Whig Party, a new party could be carved out of the decomposing husk of the GOP. Just look to how well that treacherous John Cornyn is doing down in Texas to understand how it’s possible to send swamp rats out to pasture.

And Elon Musk should lead this charge.  Although currently on the outs with President Trump, in reality the two have far in common than not. He should spearhead the creation of this new party, one where financial discipline is, if not the raison d'etre, is a core element beyond compromise.  And the DOGE team has given them more than enough to work with.  Much like Newt Gingrich did in 1994 with his Contract with America, Musk et. al. should build on the DOGE recommendations and put together a new Contract of items that most Americans can agree on and use that to eviscerate the RINO wing of the GOP. 

Most Americans don’t like thousand page omnibus bills that no one can read and fewer can understand.  This new Contract should promise single department bills written in plain English.  Americans don’t like seeing budgets that go up year to year with seemingly zero correlation to the agency’s success or failure.  This new Contract should propose zero based budgeting so that agencies and departments have to make the case for their spending every year or every other year.

These and other no-nonsense policies will no doubt raise the ire of virtually the entire Democrat party, most of the bureaucracy and of course the swamp Republicans.  But they would likely resonate not only with average Republican voters, but they would likely appeal to many of the non-deranged elements of the Democrat party who are simply exhausted with the status quo of dysfunction.  And now is the time, before it’s too late.

One hundred and thirty five years ago slavery was an existential threat to the survival of the United States and it took a war and 600,000 lives to defeat. Debt figures on an accounting sheet might not sound like an existential threat, but make no mistake, they are. Whether Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic or third century Rome, spending matters, deficits matter, numbers on an accounting sheet can eventually turn deadly. When this debt bubble bursts America will come apart at the seams and it will make the collapse of Venezuela look like a walk in the park.

But it doesn’t have to be. History doesn’t often pair a highly motivated public with the world’s richest man on the same side of an issue so clearly in need of fixing. It has now and we should seize the opportunity and take what little good that remains of the GOP and build upon it a new party that puts the needs of America above those of grifting, power obsessed politicians. That’s the kind of change Americans voted for.

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA

Donald Trump’s Lost Honeymoon

As the west was seemingly spinning off its axis of common sense, it was the relief of a lifetime when Donald Trump prevailed in 2024.  Suddenly the world that had been turned on its head was going to be set right again. We were going to have an actual border again. Men weren’t going to be allowed to play in women’s sports.  Freedom of speech was going to be a thing again. DEI was going to be fading in the rear-view mirror rather than a roadblock to merit and success.   

On most of these things the President has been rock solid. But, sadly there are troubling circumstances nonetheless. 

One is highlighted by Democrat Jamie Raskin’s warning to countries who work with the Trump administration: "If and when we come back to power, and we will, we are not going to look kindly upon people who facilitated, to use the word of the day, who facilitated authoritarianism in our country. That's an assault on our Constitution and our people," Raskin is essentially threatening those who work with the Trump administration with consequences when Democrats returned to power.

That promise showcases one of the fundamental problems with the Trump 47 administration:  Executive Orders. The problem with EOs is that they are not laws, and therefore are susceptible to reversal by the next guy who sits in the Oval Office.  (One that should have been but never was is JFK’s Executive Order 10988, which allowed federal employees to unionize.)

Trump has issued Executive Orders addressing issues from immigration, energy, education, keeping men out of women’s sports and more.  They’re great, but unfortunately Congress is not turning those EOs into laws… which means that the next time Democrats steal the White House, all of those can be immediately repealed, which is exactly what happened with Trump 45’s EOs. Has he learned nothing?

Another area of concern has to do with rouge judges.  Trump has faced an unprecedented number of nationwide injunctions and insane court orders.  These have included everything from immigration to federal waste and fraud to transgender surgeries to men in women’s sports. Trump is allowing himself and his agenda to be hamstrung by Obama and Biden activists.   Axios even wrote a piece titled “Lower courts' growing power over the president”.  President Trump just passed his first 100 days, what’s commonly called the “Honeymoon” for a president where he has the momentum and usually the greatest chance of getting legislation passed.  But this administration is not doing that, in large part because the GOP party is full of RINOs and lawmakers are too busy grandstanding or sucking up to donors by introducing over 5,000 mostly pointless bills and resolutions, 95% of which will end in the shredder. 

Given that the GOP House is led by a guy with a pathetic 75% Liberty Score, the filibuster gives Democrats a veto over pretty much anything and the Supreme Court is led by swamp dweller, Trump has few good options.  But few doesn’t mean none. This is probably a bad quote to showcase given the circumstances, but it fits.  After a Supreme Court ruling that went against him in 1832, President Andrew Jackson may or may not have said about the Chief Justice, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

In that same vein, Trump should simply ignore the lower courts’ injunctions that go beyond the specific participants in any case.  Judges have no Constitutional power to make nationwide injunctions and Trump should act accordingly. Force Congress to come up with a solution.  And for those who cry that Trump would be doing something unprecedentedly unconstitutional… not so much. Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase even though he believed he had no Constitutional power to do so.  Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, FDR forced internment of over 100,000 Japanese American citizens, Obama weaponized the IRS to target his opponents and invented DACA while Biden bragged about defying the Supreme Court after they rejected his cancellation of student loans. And there are others.

The reality is, the judiciary is running a coup d'état and if Trump doesn’t end to it soon, his legacy will be failure and the collapse of the Republic.

While the judiciary is the most critical issue, there are still others that must be addressed.

Trump must charge and make examples out of the people behind the persecution of the J6ers and the members of his team who were targeted, like Mike Flynn. Trump has taken more abuse from more sides than any president in American history. They’ve indicted him, they’ve charged him, they’ve sued him and they’ve literally tried to kill him twice – that we know of.  And they did all of that once he was out of office and had spent his entire term in office struggling against the swamp – both across the aisle and in his party.  These people targeted not only Trump, but the Constitution and the Republic.  If not addressed, it will happen again.  

Then there are two more issues: The Epstein list and election fraud. 

We were promised throughout the campaign that the Epstein list was a top priority.  It’s clearly not, as we’ve just been told that the White House doesn’t know when it will be released. That’s after we were told there was an issue with national security.  There should be nothing that involves a blackmailer pimp selling access to children that should impact national security.  It doesn’t matter if that list includes politicians, generals, justices, or anyone else. If someone is on tape doing anything worthy of blackmail with children, they should be exposed, tried and convicted.  If the list never sees the light of day, particularly after Epstein and his primary accuser committed “suicide”, then the public will know for sure that the rich and powerful – including politicians – are not held accountable, regardless of their transgressions.  That is not a message a nation struggling to bring back law and order needs.

Then there is the Democrat’s using every dirty trick in the book to create circumstances where they can steal elections, and that includes ActBlue, the money laundering scheme specifically designed to illegally funnel untraceable money to Democrats. If Trump doesn’t fix the integrity of American elections, the country will quickly become California, a single party nation utterly unmoored from reality, common sense and quickly devolving into a dystopian nightmare which will beget a civil war. 

Donald Trump was elected to fix America.  He can’t do that so long as the people who broke it are still free and in positions to keep him from doing so. No one is talking about rounding up anyone simply because they’re Democrats. No, but those who used their positions to illegally thwart Trump from executing his Constitutional duties, used their offices to illegally destroy the lives of opponents, and those who stole the election in 2020 must be held to account. It must be done publicly, transparently, and constitutionally.  But most of all, it must be done.

If Americans see that the government is no longer constrained by the Constitution and that we’ve devolved from a nation of laws to a nation of men, then their willingness to be governed by said Constitution will evaporate. Anarchy and tyranny are the antipathy of a Republic, but that is ahead if Trump doesn’t demonstrate that no one is above the law, even government officials. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

The Borg of Uncle Sam...

I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school, but nonetheless WW II was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history.  It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school I had a better grasp of world events and we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba.  Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time it was a U.S. Navy training / support station and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro. 

In the late 80’s after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany and our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans and they killed an American officer while I was there.  I don’t remember all the details but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission and the East Germans said he was spying.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history.  It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WW II to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, America was the good guy, trying to do what’s right.  It’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however, that everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything.  In college (of course) I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed but my words fell on deaf ears.    

So now we are here 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy. 

Some time ago it dawned on me that for most of my life I had given the government the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite. 

In college I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lindon Johnson and according to it LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters he wanted to help solve long standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes, people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous, if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself. 

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the borg of American government has taken. In the 21^st century we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.  Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education.  The education of children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children.  The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs and ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians. This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not.  Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning?  How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States.  It’s literally become the opposite. From funding prosecutors who release violent criminals into American communities and funding leftist thefts of elections while quashing of free speech internationally, to funding the invasion of our country and undermining the Bill of Rights, the American government has become the enemy within. 

If nothing else, Donald Trump and DOGE should be applauded for exposing what so many of us felt for so long but could never quite put our fingers on. 

Somewhat like learning that there is no Santa Claus, in the back of my mind I’m a bit wistful for that feeling of inner peace I had when I used to think of the country and the government as a single inherently good entity. While I think the former still is good, the latter, not so much, and I was late to the party in internalizing the idea of a difference between the two. For me Uncle Sam was America and the government combined.  Sadly, the Democrats weren’t under that illusion, and their recognizing the dichotomy long ago gave them decades to brainwash their constituents and hide the inner workings of their machine in plain site, behind countless official looking government seals and compassionate sounding NGOs.

Despite what the Democrat / bureaucrat borg has wrought, I firmly believe America remains a great, if imperfect nation and I remain convinced that taken as a whole throughout most of her 250 years, the county and the government have been mostly on the right side of history.  To the degree that that’s no longer true for the government, I’m glad we’re at a point where much of its malfeasance and malevolence is being exposed. It will take a long time and a lot of courage on the part of Republican politicians to fix this situation, but at least it’s being exposed before it’s too late. We’ll see in the next two years if the GOP has the courage necessary to actually set a course for bringing government back under the control of the citizens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee & Thomas Massie have their work cut out for themselves… Hopefully they’ll get some help along the way. 

Donald Trump and Elon Musk: The New American Patriots

Donald Trump and Elon Musk, two men who have the world at their feet are risking everything for America.  They don't have to, but they do.  Not so different than some others about 250 years ago.

Rush Limbaugh used to talk about a story his father told about the signers of the Declaration of Independence:  “Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were at one time or another the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his pledged word. Their honor, and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.”

The story had something of a resurrection in the early 2000s and was often shared in various iterations on social media. Not surprisingly, a minor industry emerged seeking to “fact check” them.  An example of such is this from Snopes, which first began fact checking them back in 2005: 

“Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died.

It is true that five signers of the Declaration of Independence were captured by the British during the course of the Revolutionary War. However, none of them died while a prisoner, and four of them were taken into custody not because they were considered "traitors" due to their status as signatories to that document, but because they were captured as prisoners of war while actively engaged in military operations against the British.”

Snopes concludes that the piece they reviewed (not the Limbaugh piece) was “Mixed” in its accuracy. They’re right. Accuracy matters. Particularly in matters of importance. They then add something that backhandedly drives home the basic premise: “So great is our need for simplified, dramatic events and heroes that even the real-life biographies of the fifty-six men who risked their lives to publicly declare American independence are no longer compelling enough.” This is the theme that most of the gotcha fact checkers miss and indeed, largely ignored by those who seek to debunk the audacity of what those 56 did… They were committing treason.  They knew they were committing treason.  They knew the penalty for committing treason was hanging.  And, yet, they did so, risking everything they had. 

What’s more, they weren’t committing treason against just some random monarch with a few colonies to protect.  No, they were committing treason against the most powerful nation on the planet whose navy dominated the seas and whose reach stretched across continents and oceans. 

Whether they ended up dying of old age as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams did – on the same day, exactly 50 years from the date of the Declaration of Independence, July 4^th, 1826 – or died during the war itself, as nine of the signatories did, all 56 of them knew they were risking their fortunes, families and their lives if they signed that document. And they did it nonetheless.

Today there are millions of Americans ready to sign a new Declaration of Independence from the tyranny America has become. Tyranny you say? 

The American government in 2024 is far more tyrannical than the British government under King George III ever was.  And it’s not even close. With over 88,000 laws and rules passed by the federal government just between 1995 & 2016, today it’s almost impossible for the average American to get through a single day, nevermind a single year or life without breaking a law.  In his book Three Felonies A Day civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate suggests that American commit three federal felonies every day without even knowing it.  And that doesn’t include the countless state and local laws or authoritarian fictions tyrants create. 

From a different perspective, consider this:  In 1880 there were 30,000 prisoners jailed in the United States, out of a population of 50 million, for an incarceration rate of .06%. Today there are 1.6 million prisoners of a population of 350 million, for an incarceration rate of .45%, and if one counts the additional 3.4 million others in the system – i.e. probation and parole, which were essentially nonexistent in 1880, you get a justice system control rate of 1.45%.  Are Americans somehow 25 times more criminalized today than they were 140 years ago or are there simply more crimes for which they can be convicted? 

As any conscious person knows, it’s the latter.

Which makes what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, simply extraordinary.  While there are millions of Americans who would be willing to sign a new Declaration of Independence if it came to it, those two are trying to avoid having that be a necessity.  And they are risking everything in order to make it so.

Trump, unlike most politicians (presidents and members of congress alike) has actually lost money since becoming president, to the tune of $1.6 billion!  From the moment he announced he was running for president and continuing until this very day, the swamp has used propaganda, lies and lawfare to hamper him winning the White House, stonewall him while he was serving in it and today trying to keep him from winning again. Beyond that treachery, he was shot in a bungled assassination attempt and had at least one more thwarted. 

Musk, while still the world’s richest man, has seen governments around the world target his businesses and threaten to put him in jail for his purchase of Twitter and his defense of free speech. Indeed, just last week California blocked one of his companies, SpaceX, from more launches from the state specifically because of his tweets. 

And why is that happening?  Because like the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, Trump and Musk recognize that the American government has become a tyranny.  They recognize the government has become bloated, inefficient and stultifying to American freedom and prosperity while at the same time its fellow travelers in the media, finance, pharma, academia, etc. – have become wealthy and above the law.

The duo not only recognize that tyranny, they’re telling American citizens they’re going to destroy it. Trump promises to eliminate the Department of Education while Musk wants to help slash government by 80%!  For the cabal of government apparatchiks and the sundry hyenas who feed alongside them on the body politic of America, this is a declaration of war.  It threatens their very existence. And it must be stopped, whatever it takes.

Which is exactly what makes what Trump and Musk are doing so brave. Neither man needs to become embroiled in politics to live a life of luxury or provide one to their progeny. Indeed, both have knowingly and willingly put their fortunes and their lives in the crosshairs of the most powerful tyranny in all of human history.  That is the kind of courage that animated the creation of the greatest republic in human history.  That’s the kind of courage that inspired men from 13 separate colonies to put their differences aside and to fight for freedom. Ideally the courage of these two modern day patriots will inspire citizens across America’s 50 states to utilize the ballot box to save the nation those 56 founders bequeathed to us. One Declaration of Independence should be enough.  Hopefully we won’t need another. 

2024 Is 1800 All Over Again, Because Free Speech Is On The Ballot

Sex, sexual ambiguity, race, incompetence, war mongering and foreign interventions. While those are familiar issues in 2024, they’re merely echoes of earlier times… like the election of 1800!

The presidential campaign of 1800 was the sequel to the first truly contested American presidential election in 1796 and featured the same two primary players.  John Adams won and Thomas Jefferson lost and became vice president – the only time in history that’s happened.

Although friends, the men became viscous rivals – although never actually campaigning themselves – and the campaigns were as brutal as any seen in modern times. 

With the French Revolution still ravaging our first ally, their ambassador openly advocated for the Francophile Jefferson, seeking to defeat Adams who was thought to be considering war with France. At the same time the Federalists – Adams’ party – tried to paint Jefferson as potentially getting the US into a war with Britain. 

Four years later the campaigns became far more personal and far more viscous. “Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.”

Perhaps most consequentially as it relates to the election of 1800 vs. that of 1796 was the 1798 passage of the Sedition Act, part of what’s commonly referred to as the Alien and Sedition Acts.  The Sedition Act essentially targeted Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson’s party) editors and made it illegal to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing…with intent to defame the…government” To demonstrate how partisan this law was, the Federalists, who controlled Congress, wrote it to expire on March 3^rd 1801, so that it wouldn’t be available to the Democratic-Republicans if they prevailed in the election.

Ironically, the law, which was intended to help Adams and targeted Jefferson supporters didn’t have the desired effect at all, and Jefferson won.  It’s interesting, that John Adams, one of America’s primary Founding Fathers, sought to undermine the Constitution the first opportunity he got.  Indeed, he understood that the Constitution itself was little more than a piece of paper, telling the Massachusetts Milita:  “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” While the law was highly controversial and was enforced only sparingly, it stands as a monument to the reality that Americans must be vigilant in the protection of the right to free speech.

Which brings us to Democrats in the 21^st century.  Everywhere we go we see limitations on free speech from campus speech codes to hate speech legislation to schools coercing teachers to use “correct” pronouns.  And government interventions are almost never productive. Take “hate speech” where the feelings of victims are elevated above the rights of speakers. Does it change the opinion of the speaker? The person towards whom (if any) the speech is directed?  Not usually. If the premise is that government can protect “victims” from hearing speech that offends, where does it stop?  Must blacks be protected from discussions of IQ differences based on race?  Must whites be protected from being characterized as racist? Facebook recognizes 56 different genders.  Are Americans going to be forced to learn all 56 pronouns so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings? 

As if all of that was not bad enough, COVID and the 2020 election opened a Pandora’s Box of speech restrictions. The Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media, the intelligence community and the Healthcare Industrial Complex spent years seeking to ban speech with a different perspective of the official narrative. Doctors who wanted to talk about alternatives were suspended while videos opposing “lockdowns” were deleted and those mentioning “vaccine misinformation” were banned.

Then of course there was the election. This was easily the single most treacherous use of government to quash speech in American history.  Between the 51 liars from the Intelligence Industrial Complex claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation to the social media companies being coerced (it didn’t take much) into banning stories about it, no other effort at censorship ever turned an American election as this one did. 

This is where 1800 and 2024 may, and indeed should, converge.  In 1800, Americans were so disgusted with the Sedition Act that they handed the Federalists a defeat from which they would never recover. They lost the presidency. They lost 22 of their 60 seats in the House and as a result lost their majority. In the Senate they lost 4 of their 7 seats that were up and would lose their majority two years later when they lost 6 of their 9 contested seats. Other than a minor uptick when opposing the War of 1812, the party would remain on life support until finally being dissolved in 1828.

Essentially the Federalist Party’s attempt to eliminate the 1^st Amendment so galvanized the American people that it signed its own death warrant.  The Democrats’ attempts to obliterate the 1^st Amendment should generate the exact same result. And if anyone had even a remote notion that somehow that was not the Democrats’ plan, they need only look back two years when Biden created the Disinformation Governance Board.  That short lived board was, far more than the Federalists’ Sedition Act, a tool to regulate virtually every aspect of American life by a leviathan government that knows no bounds.

The bottom line is, free speech is at the core of American culture, indeed western civilization itself.  From Copernicus and Galileo questioning an earth centered universe to Matt Walsh asking What is a Woman, and virtually everything in between involves speech of one sort or another. Free speech, questioning one another and exchanging ideas are the bedrock of growth and liberty, both individually and as a society. 

Any party which, in contravention to our 1^st Amendment, seeks to crush free speech in order to accumulate or keep power should by default, be destroyed, and in 2024 that is the Democrat Party. Democrat constituencies, whether gays or blacks or Jews or Muslims or crazy cat ladies should be wary of feeling secure just because they are part of the “majority”.  As New York mayor Adams discovered this past Wednesday, it doesn’t matter how strong your Democrat bona fides are, if you cross the leadership you will be targeted. Now imagine what they can do to average Janes and Joes who stray from the plantation. 

America is at a critical point in her history.  The choice we make in November will send a message for centuries to come, just as did the election of 1800. Do we value free speech or not?  Soon we’ll know if Americans of 2024 understand the importance of our most important right to the degree they did 224 years ago…

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

Lessons For America from the Emperor Aurelian

Sometimes history is history, sometimes history is a harbinger and sometimes history is current events. The story of Roman Emperor Aurelian is all three…

Aurelian took power in 270 AD.  The previous 35 years had been nothing short of a disaster for the Empire on a variety of fronts. 

The trouble began with the (well deserved) assassination of Commodus in 192 AD.  Always a force to be reckoned with, from that point forward the army required ever increasing bribes to remain loyal. Not surprisingly, the power of the army increased accordingly. 

At the same time, the treasury had been reducing the amounts of silver and gold in Roman coins for centuries, creating a ticking timebomb of inflation. 

What is known as the Crisis of the Third Century began in earnest in 235 AD with the assassination of Severus Alexander.  At that point the Roman map was about what it had been when Augustus, died in 14 AD, basically everything surrounding the Mediterranean.  When Aurelian took over in 270 the Crisis had hit its nadir and the Empire was a fractured disaster.

By the time Aurelian became Emperor at the age of 55, he had spent 35 years in the Legion.  Born in modern day Serbia, Roman citizen Aurelian would join the Army at the age of 20. In short order he would prove his mettle as a brilliant calvary commander and would over his career come to command increasing numbers of men, eventually commanding the entire army under Emperor Claudius II. 

Upon Claudius’s death Aurelian’s troops would proclaim him Emperor.  After a short battle with Quintillus, the Senate’s choice, he would prevail and take control of the Empire.  The empire he inherited was a far cry from the one Augustus had left. By 270 a huge swath of the western empire, encompassing today’s France, Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Germany and the UK had basically been carved off into a rival, the Gallic Empire.  In the eastern end of the Mediterranean a crescent of land stretching from Egypt, the most valuable province in the Empire, to modern Turkey had become the Palmyrene Empire, run by one of antiquity’s most powerful women, Queen Zenobia. Making matters worse, in addition to the empire being fractured, what was left was regularly under siege from barbarians on all sides.

This is the empire Aurelian found himself leading.  He began his reign by expelling various barbarian tribes from northern Italy. Next he went to the Balkans and crushed the Goths. But, there is no rest for the weary. 

Over in the formerly Roman aligned Palmyra, now the Palmyrene Empire, Queen Zenobia (Acting as regent for her son, Vaballathus) was seeking to convince the Romans to recognize Palmyrene independence. To demonstrate her power she cut off the Egyptian grain supply in 272.  The result was not the one she had hoped for.  Aurelian made his way east and easily defeated her. The next year he would take back Egypt and it was during that period that the city of Alexandria was burned and along with it what is said to have been the greatest library in history.

With the east in order Aurelian headed for the west to crush the so called Gallic Empire and bring it back into the Roman fold. Unlike the east however, Aurelian brought the west back with relatively little bloodshed. He secretly negotiated with the “Gallic Emperor" Tetricus to defect to his side and made him a Senator. Although a battle ensued, it was short lived as no one involved was interested in fighting a battle when both leaders were on the same side. 

By 274 Aurelian had reunified the Empire and had implemented policies to fix two of the most important domestic issues, the corruption at the Mint of Rome (and others) and the grain dole system.  Mike Duncan, the host of the extraordinary History of Rome podcast calls Aurelian the Sandy Kofax of the Roman Empire, not the longest reigning emperor, but the most dominant while he was there. For the five years Aurelian ruled, he was virtually unstoppable.

But as a man, he was stoppable. In one of the great ironies in world history, Aurelian was assassinated in 275 by officers of his Pretorian Guard. Despite the fact that the Guard’s raison d'être is to actually protect the emperor, this murder wasn’t particularly unusual, but in this case, it was the result of a lie.  Aurelian was a strict disciplinarian and one of his secretaries worried he’d be punished for telling a minor lie. He thus forged a document claiming Aurelian was planning to execute a number of his officers. Fearing for their lives these “accused” officers killed Aurelian. They soon discovered they were victims of a ruse and killed the secretary, and very possibly met similar fates themselves. 

So, we have an empire that’s coming apart at the seams, where government employees are corrupt and are demanding more and more money and power be handed to them.  We have an empire where inflation is rampant and the citizens are addicted to government giveaways.  We have an empire whose borders are being breached by countless invaders. Then a competent man steps in to take control and try to fix the problems.  He begins to right the ship, and he’s killed by corrupt officials.

Much of this kind of sounds like America today.  Many of the problems of the Crisis of the Third Century in Rome mirror those in America today.  Indeed, just as the Pretorian Guard was known for auctioning off the diadem and murdering emperors, we’ve seen the FBI and the CIA conspire to destroy presidents, something they’ve been doing for at least half a century and may have had a hand in killing one president.  Our borders are being overrun, 30% of the government’s spending is on welfare, we’re being spent into oblivion and not enough Americans want to join the military so the Pentagon is turning to immigrants. 

The story of Aurelian is a story of hope.  Not for him, obviously, but for America.  He demonstrated that an empire in decline doesn’t have to acquiesce to its own demise.  A crumbling nation can be rebuilt, a listing ship can be righted, a disappearing culture can be resurrected.  What it takes is leadership, a man willing to challenge what might be called “the new normal’, a man who reveres the culture and civilization that made the nation great in the first place.  Donald Trump is just such a man.  Aurelian was feared by the corrupt officials because it was clear he revered the Empire and everything he did was to bring it back to its former glory.  Donald Trump is hated by the corrupt and power-hungry Swamp because he loves America and most of the things he does are an attempt to make her great again. 

Because his reign lasted only five years, Aurelian rarely finds his name in the pantheon of the greatest emperors. That’s unfortunate, because he almost single handedly reversed the collapse of the Empire, which would go on to survive for another two centuries after his assassination. 

Donald Trump finds himself in a similar position, facing a nation in decline and in danger of collapse. Let’s hope that he can successfully and safely bring America back from the brink.  If he does, then America may lead the world for the next two centuries as it did for the last two. That just might get him on Mount Rushmore. 

Follow Me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA,

The Swamp fears Donald Trump, With Good Reason

As we all know, Democrats and the Swamp hate Donald Trump.  They probably hate him more than any president ever.  Those elites, including celebrities, journalists and politicians used to love Trump, with thousands of them smiling and taking pictures of him over the years. But not anymore.

All of that changed in 2015 when he decided to run for president.  It wasn't that he was running for president that made him enemy number one, but rather because he was running for president as a Republican.

But of course being a Republican wasn’t always the polarizing factor that it became in 2015 and beyond.  Sure, the media disliked Bush and McCain and Romney, but they were OK because they were all within the acceptable limits of what could be tolerated and controlled.  Trump was and is something altogether different. 

To understand why he was and is different, look at the people at the heart of the Swamp, the government.

Nancy Pelosi, is 84 years old with 47 years in politics & government, a Political Science major with no experience in the private sector.

Chuck Schumer, 74 years old, 49 years in government, a lawyer with no private sector experience.

Hakeem Jeffries, 54 years old, 17 years in govt. A lawyer with no private sector experience.

Joe Biden, 82 years old, 50 years in government, a lawyer with zero private sector experience.

Bernie Sanders, 83 years old, 53 of which were in politics and government, a Political Science major who held a smattering of odd jobs prior to joining government.

Adam Schiff, a 64 year old lawyer who’s spent 38 years in government with zero private sector experience.

Pete Buttigieg, 42 years old, 12 years in government, a Political Science major who spent 3 years working for consulting giant McKinsey & Co. mostly working with NGOs and corporations.  He was in the Navy and did a stint in Afghanistan.

AOC is a 35 year old Econ and International Relations major who’s spent 8 years in government and whose private sector experience is that of a bartender.

Gavin Newsom, a 57 year old Political Science major who’s spent 27 years in government and who in 1992 was brought in by his friend, Gordon Getty, as the co-founder of PlumpJack Winery in Napa, California.   

Elizabeth Warren, a 75 year old lawyer who’s spent 30 years in government and has zero private sector experience.

And it’s not just Democrats…

Mitch McConnell is an 82 year old lawyer who’s spent 50 years in government and never held a private sector job.

Kevin McCarthy is a 59 year old MBA who worked in government for 37 years and sold sandwiches out of his uncle’s yogurt shop while in college.

Paul Ryan is a 54 year old Political Science and Economics graduate who spent 28 years in government before retiring to become a lobbyist in 2019.  He was a waiter and fitness trainer in college.

So there you have it, of the dozen or so most powerful people in American government & politics, only one has any real experience in running a business (Newsom) and that business was funded by one of the richest men in the world at the time.  But somehow they’re the ones making the laws that increasingly impact the businesses that employ every American, and indeed the lives and communities of every single American.   

For these people, government is virtually everything in life.  For most of them, they know nothing about the private sector, the thing that powers America.  They know nothing about running a business, creating jobs, meeting payroll, and perhaps most importantly, doing all of those things while risking everything and while trying to abide by a stultifying labyrinth of ever changing government regulations from an endless array of agencies. 

None of them, aside from Newsom, has built anything of any consequence.  They have no experience of what it’s like to be in business, where 86% of employed Americans work, run a business or be an entrepreneur, the economic fount of America. For most of their adult lives none of them had to worry about the solvency of their next paycheck. Their healthcare plans and those of their families and their employee’s families weren’t resting on their success.  They’ve not had to worry about selling enough products or services in order to keep the lights on, the employees’ paid and fresh product on the shelves or services in the pipeline.  Worrying about and conquering those pressures are what created America’s prosperity. Those are the things that fund the paychecks Americans pay taxes out of that the government turns around and redistributes.  Those are the things that make most Americans’ lives better than those of almost every person in human history. It’s those things, not government…and the people arrayed against Donald Trump have virtually no experience with any of it.

But Trump, he has it in spades.  He’s built giant hotels in the midst of economic turmoil.  He’s done so having to deal with unions, mafia, government regulators, contractors, competitors, bankers and more.  He’s built hotels, golf courses, casinos, apartment buildings, communities and more around the world.  He owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.  He was a founding member of the USFL, a competitor to the NFL.  He was the star and producer of the Apprentice, the business focused reality show that averaged 14 million viewers per episode for its first six years.  Sure, Trump’s had failures, bankruptcies and lots of lawsuits, but you don’t accomplish anything without risking those outcomes.  He’s failed plenty of times, but he’s succeeded far more often.  He’s created companies that have made millions of paycheck deadlines, that have fed tens of thousands of families and have generated billions of dollars in revenue. 

Donald Trump accomplishes things.  Not only without government, but usually in spite of government.  Maybe the best example of this is his renovation of Wollman Rink, a project that had languished for six years in the hands of the NYC government, who wasted $13 million working unsuccessfully on the project.  Trump completed it in a matter of months, and under budget. And that’s what scares them the most. The Swamp cannot afford to let Donald Trump, on the world’s biggest stage, show Americans that they don’t need government to succeed, that problems can be solved without government “help” and to demonstrate that many times, government is actually the problem. If you’re in the government business, that’s a bad thing because as anyone who’s ever picked up a history book knows, Americans, when unshackled from government regulation, can do extraordinary things. And once they’re reminded of that, all bets are off. 

The last time Trump was president he said he was going to drain the Swamp.  He didn’t. The truth is, he had no idea how deep or wide the Swamp was and is. Most of us didn’t.  Now he does and now we do.  This time he’ll be under no illusions about what he’s up against, and ideally, will act accordingly.  The Swamp knows that. They see the writing on the wall. And it terrifies them.

Just Living Your Life... Under the Watchful Eyes of the Swamp

 “A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”  Writing in 1928, John Shedd wasn’t really talking about ships. He was talking about life.

Years ago, my girlfriend and I went to see a movie.  What we saw, I’ve no idea, but I do know we had a terrible time, and it had nothing to do with what was on the screen and everything to do with what was going on in the theater. People were yelling at the screen, talking to each other, and smoking. My girlfriend mentioned the smoking, and I said that if that was the only problem we encountered, we’d be lucky, as I’d recently witnessed a bloody knife fight between two girls over a baby-daddy in a nearby theater.

I mention this because when you think your life may be in jeopardy, it’s hard to enjoy entertainment, and enjoyment is the whole point of movies. Movies require your buy-in for success, you must turn off reality and connect with the characters.

If you can’t do that, you can’t enjoy the movie. If you’re worried that someone’s going to pull a gun or set the place on fire, you’re going to be too busy scanning for danger to become engaged with what’s on the screen. You’d end up doing little more than wasting your time and money.

Just as movies require your buy-in and focus for success, so too does life. And that’s a problem with 21st-century America and the always-on-everywhere swamp. The danger is not so much that Big Brother is watching and trying to control our every move. He/it doesn’t have to. Our knowing that the state could be watching or listening is enough. It’s called the “Chilling Effect”, basically the government doing something that chills citizens’ willingness to exercise their constitutional rights for fear of reprisals.

Think about it this way: If you think it’s tough to enjoy a movie when you’re worried about what’s going on in the theater, imagine how difficult it would be to write a compelling, engaging movie with a critic holding a club looking over your shoulder the entire time. Well, that’s you trying to live your life.

How different would the script of your life be if you knew your every word might end up as part of some government dossier? How much could you embrace freedom and focus on having fun, sowing your wild oats, finding your passion, or risking failure to pursue some crazy dream if you were constantly wondering what some government bureaucrat with the power to throw you in prison or destroy your business or take away your kids might think? And that’s true even if you didn’t do anything illegal.

And that’s the problem. Since 2013’s Snowden revelations, we’ve known the government is actively collecting reams of data on virtually all of us. Back then, even the NY Times called it a “Threat to Democracy.” The government, against virtually the entire Bill of Rights, has and currently is looking at everything Americans do. (Want to see how much data they collect? Click here.)

Knowing our government is actively looking at emails, phone calls (or “just” our metadata, as we were assured), as well as our online surfing and purchasing habits, sends a chill down your spine. With 350 million people in the country, they’re probably not looking at you…but they might be.

And it’s not just the government. While, yes, it is the FBI, NSA, IRS, and other agencies in the alphabet soup of the state, it’s also Facebook, Google, Apple, and AT&T. It’s also the banks. Maybe the most relevant example of the banks is JP Morgan Chase—a company that recently paid $290 million to victims of Jeffry Epstein for empowering the pedophile—recently closing down the accounts of a prominent vaccine skeptic after closing the account of a religious freedom nonprofit last year. This follows a since derailed plan by MasterCard and Visa to track gun and ammunition purchases.

“But they’re private companies!” That’s technically true, but also false. They may be private but they’re often coerced by the government to do its bidding. What’s more, there’s often a revolving door with government officials that makes explicit coercion unnecessary and government service quite lucrative for potential regulators.

And so back to the life you’re living…

How comfortable are you going to be doing or saying anything that might cause the federal government (or state or local) to put you on some watchlist? You ask yourself “Should I wear this MAGA hat to that school board meeting, or should I wait until my building permit is approved?” “Should I write that blog critical of my senator, or should I wait until my nonprofit application is approved?” “Should I post pictures of my kids at the range, or should I wait until my bank approves my mortgage application?”

The reality is, citizens silencing themselves is a far bigger problem than the government censoring them. (Just think how unfunny “comedy” is today with the censorious woke scrutinizing every joke.) How many journalists or bloggers have avoided writing something or “toned it down” because they were worried they’d pay some price for offending the wrong bureaucrat?

It’s not just the words not spoken or the stands not taken that are the problem. It’s the fact that energy must be spent considering them in the first place. Living a successful life is challenging in the best of circumstances. Getting everything from an education to a job, starting a company or finding the perfect spouse and raising good kids. All take a lot of effort to do successfully, but the question is, how much harder would they be if you had to divert X% of your focus to constantly wondering what the consequences on them be if you exercised your First or Second Amendment rights?

Sure, you could simply keep your head down and not bother, but as we know from Fahrenheit 451, that actually harms society. And, even if you tried to keep your head down and go about your way, there’s no guarantee you aren’t going to end up on the wrong side of a government vaccine policy or tripped up by a school board’s constantly evolving “pronoun” policy.

At the end of the day, living a good life takes work and can be challenging, that’s particularly so in a free society. But it’s the freedom of ideas that the advancements of society, whether advocating for a legislative check on a monarch’s power, proffering a sun-centered system, or filibustering for a Bill of Rights. There’s a reason the US and the West have led the world in the growth of prosperity and advances in science and mathematics, and that reason is the freedom to exchange ideas, good and bad and otherwise.

Getting the most out of life, like enjoying a movie, depends on the ability to focus on the task at hand without fear for your safety as you do so. As the surveillance and control leviathan of the swamp grows, doing so becomes ever more difficult. Now might be a good time to start supporting candidates who vow to dismantle it before it dismantles what’s left of our freedoms.

Code Red: Life Lessons from Colonel Jessup and Donald Trump

Movies can sometimes be something of a Rorschach test in terms of how one views the world. Like Rorschach tests, they can sometimes leave an observer scratching their heads. As an example, my top 10 movies are probably, in no particular order, Gladiator, Tombstone, Braveheart, LA Confidential, Valley Girl (The original masterpiece with Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage, not that terrible remake!), Lost in Translation, Galaxy Quest, Trading Places, Love Actually and maybe Titanic.

I’m not sure what that list says about me, particularly the inclusion of Valley Girl, but I’m sure some psychiatrist somewhere could say there’s something to be taken from it. The one thing I can observe from my list is that most of my movies have a good guy vs. bad guy conflict, which is of course not a surprise coming from a guy who writes a lot about politics.

Sometimes however in movies, as in life, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy isn’t quite clear. For example, there is A Few Good Men, set in Guantanamo Bay, near the end of the Cold War. The bad guy in the movie is Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup, and the good guy is Tom Cruise’s Lieutenant Kaffee. For those unfamiliar with the 30 year old movie, basically a Marine dies in his bed after being abused by his fellow Marines under indirect orders from Colonel Jessup. Two Marines are charged with his murder and the courtroom drama plays out demonstrating that Colonel Jessup was actually the guilty party.

For those unfamiliar with Guantanamo other than as a political football, it’s an American base on the south eastern end of Cuba. It’s been a permanent American base since the end of the Spanish American war in 1903. It’s about 50 square miles of concrete and mostly brown grass sitting on two sides of a bay and surrounded by a ring of mountains. Christopher Columbus actually spent the night there! I grew up there and it was a spectacular place to be a teenager, with beaches, a golf course, year round baseball, outdoor movie theaters and spectacular scuba diving, all under the glow of perfect weather almost every day.

Of course the resort like experience I had as a kid was ancillary to the actual function of the base itself. The base was surrounded by a fence separating it from Cuba proper. The fence was buttressed by a zone of land mines, with ubiquitous red and yellow triangles warning of the danger of passing a certain point. When I lived there, and the period covered by A Few Good Men, America was in the midst of the Cold War, with Cuba being essentially the front lines, with occasional shots being fired across the no man’s land and the fences being peppered with watchtowers on both sides.

While Guantanamo wasn’t West Berlin, it was always theoretically under threat, and as such the Marines prepared to defend it if necessary. A Few Good Men deals with Marines training to defend the base, and one of those marines was the late PFC Santiago. Apparently PFC Santiago was a subpar Marine who the Colonel felt needed some encouragement from his fellow soldiers to become a better Marine. In this case that encouragement involved what they call a “code red” which is essentially a blanket party, a form of extrajudicial punishment meted out by fellow soldiers / Marines etc. when one of their number is negatively impacting the group.

Usually such punishment is not fatal, but in the case of PFC Santiago, it was. Two privates were charged for the murder but Tom Cruise’s Lt. Caffery is called upon to defend them and eventually places blame on the shoulders of Jack Nicholson’s COL Jessup.

What makes this movie so remarkable is the speech that COL Jessup gives while on the witness stand:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.

We use words like "honor," "code," "loyalty." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I would rather that you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don't give a DAMN what you think you're entitled to!”

One can’t help but see the seething rage coming from the despicable Jessup. You can’t help but feel the disdain he had for Santiago and Cruz’s Caffery. He’s a dinosaur from a forgotten age.

Now, most certainly, Jessup is a son of a bitch for throwing those two young Marines under the bus, but on the bigger picture he’s 100% right. While Santiago’s death was a tragedy, it probably would have saved lives. America needs warriors on walls, America needs men who are willing and able to pick up guns and fight and kill to protect the nation, and often that is a dirty, messy business, including the training that goes into making doing so successfully possible.

When you reread that speech it appears that Jessup could be talking to every snowflake, every Democrat, every Antifa coward and every BLM mark in America circa 2023! In the movie of course he’s not interested in Kaffery or anyone else thinks of him. He’s not interested in getting invited to their cocktail parties. He doesn’t care that their noses are turned up at him. He’s interested in one thing, protecting the country. Sound familiar?

Donald Trump can be a son of a bitch. But unlike almost every other politician in America, he understands that the country is stricken with a cancer of wokeness and is paralyzed by a bloated bureaucracy staffed by self important and avaricious apparatchiks. And how did he come to understand this? He lived it. Like Jessup, Trump was responsible for actually doing things, building things, getting things accomplished, and he didn’t have the luxury of pontificating and making idle promises about fixing things. What’s more, he cut his teeth in the rough and tumble world of New York real estate, one inhabited by pernicious unions, predatory mafia and political kingpins wielding confiscatory regulations, yet somehow  he turned his father’s millions into a multibillion empire.

Donald Trump is far from perfect, particularly as it relates to personnel, but at a moment in time when half the politicians in the country want to destroy the Republic and the other half promise to fix it, only to punt when they get the opportunity – i.e. ending Obamacare, building a wall, cutting spending, etc. – the country needs a leader willing and enthusiastic about tearing asunder the Swamp that is destroying America. The country needs a revolution to stop the collapse into tyranny and it would be far better to have someone from the inside take a wrecking ball to the fascist state the Uniparty has built than from the outside. The first will result in lots of hurt feelings and lighter pocketbooks on the part of thousands of functionaries while the second will turn the country into a war zone. I’d prefer lots of unemployed apparatchiks to American cities looking like Beirut.

Trump, like Jessup, may be a grotesque figure to many, but there are times when that which makes one grotesque to the people in charge is exactly what is necessary to protect a nation.  This is one of those times.