Category: Trump

After 2028

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So, everybody wants to know if all the redistricting for the race-based districts that is going on down south will offset the midterm disadvantage for the Republicans.  My guess is it will absorb the bulk of the blowout and the Democrats will take the House by a handful of seats.  Right now, they’re talking about the Senate being a toss-up.  If I were to guess I’ll say it’ll be a fifty-fifty Senate with Vance as the tie breaker and thus keeping the Senate for the Republicans.  So that deadlock means nothing substantive will be legislated for Trump’s last two years.  And that’s okay.  Executive orders will be the name of the game.

But what happens in 2028?  A lot of people are very pessimistic.  Personally, I’m optimistic.  Two years should be enough time for Trump to break Iran.  After the midterms I see him closing down the Straits of Hormuz for as long as it takes to bankrupt Iran and cripple China.  It won’t be pain free.  Iran will lash out and who knows how crazy they may get.  But I don’t think it will take two years to get them to give up their nuclear program permanently.  So, if he gets past Iran, I can see oil prices dropping drastically and that will have a profoundly positive effect on the economy.  Now what comes after Trump?

Let me take a pessimistic scenario.  Suppose everything goes wrong and the Democrats take the White House, Senate and House in 2028.  According to their leaders, they will nuke the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court and make all illegal aliens, citizens.  That will have the effect of providing them with a permanent majority in Washington.  That is what they say they’ll do.  But will they do it?

I think they know that if they do those things, they are effectively declaring war against the red states.  That is a very big deal.  And I think some of them are afraid that it will cause a permanent breach between the two separate constituencies that this country is composed of.  And I think they know if they’re the ones who do it, they will force the other side to give up on the normal way things are done in Washington and begin using “unconventional” tactics to prevent the federal government from destroying their states.  Now what this would exactly look like, I’m not sure.  But I suspect it will not all be “passive resistance.”  And eventually, this will bring about a permanent separation between red and blue states.

Some of this is already happening.  Businesses and high net worth individuals are leaving blue states and blue cities in droves.  The socialist mayors and governors are panicking because their budgets are in a shambles and the unchecked crime is frightening away the middle and working classes too.  So, we’re already seeing a separation begin.  If the Democrats flood the country with illegals, the red states are going to have to figure a way to prevent these invaders from harming their states.  And making that happen will cause additional friction between the feds and the red states.  And that is how it will escalate.  How will that end nobody knows but it will not look like one country anymore.  So, will they declare war against the red states?

Gerrymander for Me but Not for Thee

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I was watching a part of the PBS News Hour on YouTube.  Books and Capon were talking about gerrymandering.  Well actually Capon was away.  So, they found some big fat hen from the New York Times to squawk in his place.  Well, the upshot was that gerrymandering would lead to the “end of our democracy.”  Now to be fair Books said that the result of California following what Texas did was equally corrosive to democracy but he blamed Texas for getting the ball rolling.  And he wasn’t sad because the Virginia Supreme court shot down their gerrymander.  So, I guess you could say he was trying to be even-handed with his criticism.  I guess.

But the hypocrisy that both of these lefties commit is ignoring the fact that there are six states in the Northeast that are slightly more than 40% Republican voting and they have exactly zero Republican Congressional House Representatives between them all.  There are 15,430,000 people living in New England.  40% of that is more than six million people who are only represented by Democrats in the House of Representatives.  So, pretending that Donald Trump is responsible for gerrymandering the opposition out of existence is a joke.  The New Englanders have been perfecting this scam for decades.  What seems to be upsetting them is that between this initiative by Trump and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the racial gerrymandering decisions from the last century there is a real danger that Democrats might have a hard time keeping control of the House of Representatives even in midterm elections when Republican Presidents are in the White House.  And if that is the case there would be serious repercussions in the governance of this country.  And with the Democrat leadership announcing that they will eliminate the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court if they get back in power, it should be clear to the Republicans that there must be great fear on the Left about the chance that redistricting will shut them out of governance in the future.  So, packing the Supreme Court and giving citizenship to millions of illegals are their answers to the problem.

Well, we truly live in interesting times.  The war in Iran is threatening to make the midterms a blue wave but at the same time the gerrymandering in the South and elsewhere could counteract this.  And honestly, I don’t think there is any way to avoid these election oscillations back and forth but I do find it hilarious that the Democrats like to virtue signal their moral superiority when it comes to gerrymandering.  All it does for me is confirm just how dishonest they all are.  And it just makes me certain that there is no reason to think that we have any common ground with the Left.  They can justify any of their crimes by claiming they are the victims of fascism of one kind or another and by the end of their narrative we end up as the criminals who must be stopped “by any means necessary.”  Imagine that!

Lessons Have Been Learned

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Indiana’s Republican establishment legislators voted against a redistricting plan (seven of them).  Well Donald Trump backed primary candidates against them.  Read what happened.

President Donald Trump exacted revenge on Indiana Republican legislators who foiled his redistricting push last year in the state, backing challengers who unseated five incumbents in Tuesday’s primaries, NBC News projects.  One other GOP state senator who faced a Trump-endorsed opponent was locked in a tight race, while another survived.  The double-digit defeats of the five incumbents, some of whom are veterans of the Indiana Legislature, underscore the influence Trump continues to wield over the Republican Party, even as his approval rating among Americans broadly sags amid rising gas prices and the Iran war.

Regardless of mid-term elections and all the various Democrat howlings going on, this one instance shows that something fundamental has changed.  Fake conservatives are being exposed and targeted for replacement all over the red states and beyond.  And make no mistake, Trump legitimized this.  He was the one highlighting who was fake.  He called them out.  And now there are the beginnings of accountability.  Just as with Cornyn in Texas, fake conservatives are being challenged in Indiana and they will be targeted elsewhere.

Now this won’t be a clean sweep anywhere.  Even red states have pockets of progressivism, mostly around the cities like Austin in Texas and Salt Lake City in Utah.  There will always be exceptions.  But it’s encouraging to see leadership in Washington that calls out the fakes.

And with just a little luck, the recent Supreme Court ruling that condemns race-based gerrymandering will net enough seats in 2026 to hold onto the House of Representatives.  But if the Dems get the House back in 2026, we’ll survive it and more.  Trump is a powerhouse of annoying policies that will keep Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer screaming and crying for the next two and a half years.  And that is a long time.

And with just a little luck we can hope for a Republican president in 2028 and good things going forward.  And even if the worst occurs and the Dems control Congress and the White House, I feel that we have learned enough about what is going on to protect ourselves from the fallout.  We no longer have to pretend that we have anything in common with the Left and we will run our lives based on what will allow us to preserve the things that are important to us.  There won’t be any nonsense about meeting anyone in the middle.  Because there no longer is a middle.  There’s us and there’s them.  The things they say amongst themselves is poisonous and evil and shows you their true intentions and they have nothing to do with coexistence.  They intend to destroy us and all we can do is protect ourselves by every available means.

And we will.  We’re getting better at running our own states and excluding them from our communities and their policies from our lives.  There will be setbacks but we’ve learned a lot and we will move forward.  This I believe.

Industrial Strength Crazy

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So, another leftist tried to shoot Trump.  Well, we can stop making believe that the Democrats aren’t murderous sociopaths.  Of course, they all make the same perfunctory “Political violence is totally unacceptable” statement in front of the cameras but what they mean is, “Better luck next time.”

Well, things are going to get uglier from here on in.  So, this clarifies what the whole “No Kings” thing is about.  You see Caesar was assassinated because he was toying with the idea of wearing a crown and the Romans had fought a war against the Etruscans to put an end to the monarchy.  So, Trump is Caesar and that makes it logical that an assassin will step forward to “free” this country from its dictator.

To my mind this confirms the theory that the Left has weaponized their radical fringe.  In addition to the three Trump shooters there is recently the Charlie Kirk assassin and the various transgender school shooters that have plagued us in the last few years.  This will be a very dangerous time for people on the Right and strategies to deal with this environment should be planned.

I think one of the better actions would be to continue eliminating as much federal money from reaching NGOs and other avenues that allow abnormal people to exist at the fringes of society.  Also, the crackdown on Antifa and Antifa-adjacent organizations is absolutely essential.  These organizations are where the most dangerous ideologues are concentrated and provided with support and direction for their malice.

I think the Justice Department should publicize the fact that left-wing radicals are the most dangerous criminals currently operating in the United States and that a concentrated effort will be made to identify the leaders of this movement and hunt down the foot soldiers that have been radicalized based on their social media statements.  That will rile them up and should be a good way to get a few of them to pop their heads up out of the sand.

But as I said, cutting off their funding is key.  This latest psycho was from California.  And California is hemorrhaging money at a phenomenal rate.  The Silicon Valley tech bros are scattering to Texas and Tennessee as fast as they can and the next governor may turn out to be a Republican just because the budget has become unworkable and they need a villain to take the blame when the state union pension plans have to be raided.  So, if the federal funds are effectively shut off the crazies will have no one to pay for their cross-gender hormones and intersectional studies tuition payments.

But there may not be a cure for what’s going on.  The Left has a lot of lunatics and if they try very hard, they will kill some of their enemies.  The question seems to be will American voters punish the Left for allowing its crazies to become assassins.  That is the real question that will be answered in the mid-terms.  If I were Trump, I’d play this thing out in the public square and tar the whole Democrat party with the psycho label.

The SPLC bankrolls the KKK

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This week the Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud for paying white supremacist groups very large sums of money to play boogeyman for the Left.  Now, these weren’t undercover FBI agents they were real nazis and Klansmen who were among the leaders of these organizations.  And it was understood that they earned this money for providing the SPLC and other leftist organizations with talking points against conservatives and the Right in general.  And this has been going on for decades.  All the biggest outrages, like the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottsville, were included in the events that garnered funds from the SPLC for KKK and nazi groups.

Well, it’s official.  All the conspiracy theories that have been floating out there for years about false flag/color revolution operations by the Left and the Deep State were true.  If the SPLC was doing this just imagine what else is out there.  I imagine if the FBI could find the destroyed records, they would have proof that their own agents have done plenty of the same things for years.

But it is nice to see that while we still control the federal government some of the most outrageous frauds against the right will be exposed and punished.  The SPLC has one of the worst reputations for mischaracterizing conservative organizations as hate groups.  Last year they put Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA on their hate list and I’m sure that was one of the contributing factors in Kirk’s assassination.

I think it would be wonderful if the SPLC can be bankrupted and its leaders prosecuted both civilly and criminally to the fullest extent of the law.  People like this do untold damage and contribute to the degrading of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

It should be interesting as this develops to see what famous “nazis” turn out to have been on the payroll of the SPLC.  I’m sure many of us remember some of the more flamboyant “leaders” of far right from years gone by, that always seemed to cause more damage than progress for conservatives.  There may be a lot of answers to why every time a conservative moment arose some particularly idiotic leader seemed to surface and discredit the movement with a moronic statement or stunt.

This was something that I remember the ZMan used to speculate about.  For the most part he thought these people were just useful idiots who wanted the attention and gladly acted out the part of boogeyman de jour.  I’m sure this news would not have shocked him but it probably would have explained a number of specific characters and incidences from recent history that conveniently allowed the Left to use their Right-Wing White Supremacy narrative to demonize conservatives in all their favorite left-wing media sources.

Well, good work Kash Patel and the rest of Donald Trump’s Justice Department for exposing this organization for the fraudulent hate group they actually are.  I hope they get torpedoed this year and not later.

Building Ramps and Singing Spirituals

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So, where are we today?

Eric Swalwell, the Democrat congressman who was running for governor of California has dropped out of the race and resigned from Congress after allegations of date rape and sexual assault have been levelled against him by four separate women.  Ah, the Democrats the party of feminism.  Amazing how these things only happen when they want someone to drop out of a race and he refuses.  Up until now Swalwell was best known for his vehement attacks on Donald Trump and for an incident where during an interview on an MSNBC television show he farted so loudly that microphone picked it up magnificently.  Eric we hardly knew ye.  Farewell!

So, the peace talks between the Trump administration and the Iranians have broken down so Trump has said he will take over the Straits of Hormuz.  Now, how dangerous is this situation?  I can’t even imagine something not going terribly wrong.  So, Trump is going to try and break the Iranians by cutting off all their oil money by blocking the tankers heading for China.  This is a hardcore tactic.  I guess it could work.  I’m sure we’ll know pretty soon how this is going to end up.  Good luck Mr. Trump.  You will need it.

Trump is in a war of words with the Pope.  Well, this one’s easy.  I’ll back Trump.  The last couple of popes don’t seem to be infallible.  I’m not sure they were even Christians.  More like the kind of atheists they turn into bishops in some of the trendy denominations.  But I don’t think Trump should waste his time fighting with him.  It’s a waste of time.

Well, we’ve reached the warm weather here this week.  Today and tomorrow will both break the eighty-degree mark and I’ve turned off the house’s heating system for the summer.  Of course, if the weather gods go berserk and send us one last Polar Express that will have to be reckoned with but we think we’ve paid enough for oil this year.  And today I saw a good-sized butterfly fluttering around in the air.  And since the forsythia and the daffodils are both exploding in yellow bloom, I guess it makes sense for some insect to be pollinating them.  And finally, the raspberry leaves have burst from the ground all over the patch where I cut down the canes in March.  From what I can see this will be an even better sized crop than last year’s excellent results.  I’d say that the 10-10-10 fertilizer worked exactly as recommended.

We’re still waiting for Camera Girl’s pond liner to arrive from Home Depot.  It’s two days late and somehow “delayed” less than thirty miles away.  What can I say, Home Depot is not Amazon, that’s for sure.  When it arrives, I’ll bring out the shovel, pick, giant pry bar and wheel barrow.  I’m hoping there’s no ledge where she wants it to sit.  But knowing what I do about this property there will be a few monster-sized boulders below the surface.  Well, I’m sure there’s at least a few drops of ancient Egyptian blood in my Mediterranean ancestry so I’ll bone up on ramp building and practice singing spirituals.  Happy Wednesday!

02APR2026 – This’N’That

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So, Trump gave his war update.  Well, he’s still the king of hyperbole.  Everything is the biggest and the greatest.  All the damage to Iran is total and catastrophic.  And he went through the length of all the wars the US has fought in from WWI on and after mentioning how many years each of these wars lasted, he said that this war has been going for only one month.  And then he said that it will only take another three weeks to finish bombing Iran into the “stone age.”  Hmmm.

I hope he’s right.  I don’t think staying in Iran for more than a few more weeks is going to help us.  The financial damage will start to build up.  And the chances of large-scale casualties keep growing.  At this point if there is no interest on the part of the Iranian population to rise up against their government by armed insurrection then there isn’t a realistic way of ending the current regime that doesn’t involve an American ground invasion.  So, blast all of the targets we can find and then declare victory and step back to our Middle East bases and block Hormuz and let the Iranians and the Chinese do without their money and oil respectively.  In the meantime, the Europeans can buy Venezuelan oil (at an elevated price of course) and do without their cheap Chinese crap for the time being.

I saw that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the psychiatrist in Colorado who was practicing conversion talk therapy on LGBTQ adolescents versus Colorado’s ban of the procedure.  Now that is interesting.  That’s going to cause a lot of problems in blue states for sure.  Good for the Court.

Now Trump is going to visit the Court during its consideration of whether his executive order banning citizenship to the children of illegal aliens (so-called birthright citizenship) is forbidden by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  I wonder if Trump will request to address the court during these procedures or whether he just wants to show solidarity with his legal team defending his executive order.  Reading the news sites they all stress the fact that the initial questions from the Justices seemed extremely skeptical of the administration’s justification for the executive order.  Well, of course the news sites are.  They all lean to the Left and so they exhibit their preference in every way they can.  But I’m not pessimistic about our chances.  It’s pretty easy to see that the 14th Amendment was enacted to handle a very specific class of people, the former slaves and their descendants.  How this would be relevant today is not in any way clear.  Following the obvious intent is simple and if the Justices use logic, they can easily see that this intent does not extend to the children of people breaking the law by illegally entering this country.  Of course, I may be overly hopeful about the courage of some of the Justices but I’m willing to hold onto my optimism until the decision is handed down.

Well, that’s enough for now.

Struggling Back from the Abyss

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Anyone over the age of fifty knows that things are devolving in the western world.  European societies (including places like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are degenerating from the competent, affluent and intelligent places they were even twenty years ago into mediocre (at best) struggling third world backwaters.  The reasons are manifold but essentially the powers that be have intentionally worked to undermine the institutions and practices (merit-based career advancement, standards based educational advancement and preferential employment of American workers) that made an advanced civilization possible.

It seems that the damage is pretty severe.  In many areas of the country young people educated under the lax standards are functionally illiterate and without skills that would make them useful employees.  But at the present there are attempts to bring manufacturing back to the United States and efforts to deport illegal aliens and curtail legal immigration.  But it leaves us with the question as to whether this degeneration of society will be reversed and how?

The way I see this is that improvements will be a local phenomenon and will be tied into state policies to arrest and reverse these problems.  And in order for improvement to grow it will require a two-pronged effort.  State government will have to enforce educational reform that verifies progress through standardized testing and state and federal agencies must work to ensure that qualified Americans can find good jobs in their state.  Places like Florida, Texas and Tennessee are taking the first steps to attract jobs to their states.  Low tax rates are encouraging businesses to leave places like the West Coast and the northeast and provide job opportunities for Americans.  Florida has made a start at reining in the woke madness that has descended on public schools and colleges and restore them to their proper mission of providing learning for Americans who want to work in a modern nation.  And right now, the Trump administration is deporting illegals from red states without the battles that occur in places like Minnesota and California.  Put these conditions together and what I expect to see is normalcy begin to return to red states first.

I read somewhere recently that Mississippi has shown marked improvement in the test scores of public-school children and I wonder if the conservative nature of that state’s population in comparison with other parts of the country might be part of the reason.  But in general, I expect that what will eventually happen is states that encourage merit-based rewards and have an America first policy to job creation and cooperate with immigration control will eventually become noticeably better places to live than the woke areas that have already become hellholes like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland.

Of course, if the Democrats get back into power in Washington, they will do all they can to degrade these other locations by reopening the borders and preventing red states from targeting illegals.  But I still think we may already be witnessing a bifurcation in the kind of society that will be seen in America.

Trump and Iran

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So, I feel like I’ve been down this road before.  I remember when George W Bush said we had to go into Iraq.  And I was gung-ho.  We’d blitz Saddam and drag him off and then give Iran the same treatment and the world would be peaceful and quiet from then on.  And we’d do it by remote control like some big old video game where everyone comes home in one piece and that would be the end of that.

Well, that’s twenty plus years ago and we’re all a lot older and wiser now, I thought.  So, what the hell does Donald Trump think he’s going to do with this Iran thing?  Iran is bigger and uglier than Iraq was.  Sure, half of its people hate their own government and are celebrating the bombing of the Republican Guards and the death of Ali Khamenei.  All of that sounds great but when the missile launchers and the other long-distance weapons have been neutralized but the bad guys are still the ones with all the machine guns killing civilians what happens then?  Are we going to send in the Marines?  And what happens when the body bags start coming home?  That would be the end of the Republicans for another decade.

What occurred to me was that maybe the CIA and Mossad can funnel guns to the people who want to get rid of the Islamic State.  If they have enough actual men who are willing to go head-to-head against the Republican Guards then a small team of trainers from these intelligence agencies could stand up a credible force within Iran to overwhelm the Islamic State with the help of targeted aerial attacks from the Israelis and Americans.  But is that really going to happen?  I’ve read that Mossad is already on the ground in Iran and has been for years.  That explains how they’ve been able to sabotage things like the Iranian nuclear program and Hezbollah’s cell phones.  Maybe they really will be able to topple this regime in the next few weeks.  It’s definitely possible and Israel has an existential reason for wanting the Iranian regime to disappear.  If the Islamic State were toppled tomorrow, Hezbollah and Hamas lose their paymaster and greatest ally.  Most of the violence in the Middle East loses its sponsor.  Without the mullahs it’s even possible that Lebanon could become a normal country again.  And a peaceful and prosperous Iran would change the whole balance of power in the Middle East and might even stabilize the whole region.  Think of the amount of misery that would disappear from that tortured region.

Well, those are all the good words I can think of for a situation that is fraught with peril.  I just hope Trump knows exactly what he is doing and what to do in every one of a thousand scenarios that could happen in that insane corner of the world.  When I think of all the possible ways things can head south very fast and very badly It makes my head ache.  Okay, Khamenei is dead.  Good.  Now what?

SOTU Speech 2026

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SOTU Speech 2026

Trump had his State of the Union address.  I heard it was very long so I fast forwarded through the cheering and rigamarole.  What I heard was very good.  Trump highlighted the improvements to border security that have shut down illegal immigration and has curtailed the trade in fentanyl.  He talked about the fraud that was going on up in Minnesota with the fake daycare centers.  He talked about bringing down inflation and increasing foreign investment in the United States and then he had a bunch of feel-good stories like the US Men’s Olympic hockey team and he had stories of victims of crime caused by illegal aliens.  And he mocked Ilhan Omar and her cronies for their lack of patriotism and he criticized the Democrats for stalling his legislation and refusing to fund the government.  And he placed the blame for the problems that he is fixing squarely at the feet of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

I think he checked off all the right boxes and he spoke well and with humor.  I saw a report on CNN that showed that his speech was well-received by Americans and that after listening to his speech they thought that the country was on the right track by two to one.  Good.

I guess comparing this to Biden’s awful speeches and even Trump’s first term this was a very good effort.  It may have been a little long and there may have been a few too many guests but many of these people were worthy of having their stories told.  And Trump did a good job of portraying the humanity of these individuals who deserved to be acclaimed.

So now he has a little less than three years to make a difference in how this country runs.  And he only has until November when he’s guaranteed a Republican congressional majority.  It is my opinion that he needs to craft a real legislative agenda that will allow him to use those three years to the fullest.  I think he should push the Senate to abolish the filibuster and pass a republican platform including an actual budget for the first time in decades.

Many people object that if the filibuster is eliminated that the Democrats will ride roughshod over our country the next time, they get control of the White House and Congress.  I don’t think it matters.  They’ve done so much damage already that we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t give ourselves the tools to start fixing things now.  This is the opportunity to make things happen.  Three years of the White House in control of an agenda that the Republican Congress should enact will be plenty enough to fix a lot of the damage that has been done to this country.

Well, now I’ve said what I’d like to see happen.  Instead, we’ll get to see what really happens.  But give Trump his due.  He put on a very nice show and he tooted his horn justifiably and now he will have to pull a bunch of rabbits out of his hat to keep the Republicans in charge of the Congress.