Trump and the Rule of Law

Ace of Spades links to this twitter thread by John Hayward.

John Hayward @Doc_0
This "rule of law" talking point is the most absurd example of NeverTrump and Democrat desperation yet. It's the nook-nook they're sucking on to get themselves past the disappointment of Impeachment Theater not only fizzling, but backfiring spectacularly.

By any objective standard, Trump is far less of a threat to the "rule of law" than Barack Obama was. In fact, the big reason the anti-Trump circus is squawking about "rule of law" right now is they remember how concerned conservatives were about it during the Obama years.

Obama's entire agenda was an all-out attack on the rule of law. When Obamacare crashed and burned, he was out there giving speeches where he told people to just ignore the broken law and promised not to prosecute them for it.

If anything, Trump is clearly the target of people who disdain the rule of law, using laws and administrative procedures to sabotage his administration. The proverbial Crazy Hawaiian Judge is the real threat to rule of law, not Trump. Abusive injunctions are a threat.

And Trump is clearly on the right side of the biggest single Rule of Law issue there is: immigration, citizenship, sanctuary cities, border defense. The Dems, ALL OF THEM, are sworn enemies of the rule of law and openly promise to undermine it as vigorously as possible.

Trump is also on the right side of the second biggest Rule of Law issues, free speech and gun rights. The enemies of those things are the ones declaring open war on the rule of law. The 1st and 2nd Amendment are inextricably linked in defining what the law means and how it rules.

And Trump spent most of his first term under attack by one of the worst abuses of the Rule of Law this nation has ever seen, the Russia collusion hoax and its attendant abuses of the FBI, FISA, etc.

No one willing to give "the Resistance" and Obama a pass on the Russia hoax can be taken seriously when they talk about the Rule of Law. They're just tossing around loaded political terms without any commitment to what those terms actually mean.

Worse, they're perverting the Rule of Law to mean "the rule of the permanent administrative state." The Rule of Law is meaningless, indeed inverted from its true meaning, if there are no laws to bind the administrative state, no accountability, no consequences.

Argue the merits of Trump's policies all you want, but let's stop this charade that he's some kind of unique existential threat to the Rule of Law. Every Dem running in 2020 is vastly more of a threat than Trump on his worst day. /end

Times have changed

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in National Review,

When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.

Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.

The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling Communist government.

Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.

China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists, and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.

...Trump’s Middle East recalibrations won few supporters among the bipartisan establishment.

But recently, Europeans have privately started to agree that more sanctions are needed on Iran, that the world is better off with Soleimani gone, and that the West Bank is not central to regional peace.

...Apparently, past U.S. administrations supposed that a paternalistic America would always be more eager to defend Europe than Europe would be to defend itself.

But then Trump again blew up more old assumptions.

NATO will now only survive if its members keep their word and meet their spending promises. An economically stagnant, oil-hungry, and top-heavy EU will have to make radical changes, or it will sink into irrelevance and eventually break apart.

Trump got little credit for these revolutionary changes because he is, after all, Trump — a wheeler-dealer, an ostentatious outsider, unpredictable in action, and not shy about rude talk.

But his paradoxical and successful policies — the product of conservative, anti-war, and pro-worker agendas — are gradually winning supporters and uniting disparate groups.

Read more here.

"Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness."

JB Shurk writes in American Thinker,

Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness. He has exposed both major parties as socialist globalist cults more concerned with government health care and foreign nation-building than a policy for American freedom. He has exposed how free trade can never be free when based on slave labor. He has exposed how the silent destruction of towns across the Midwest came not from China's comparative advantage, but from American companies' use of slavery by proxy. He has redirected investment away from Wall Street and toward Main Street for the first time in over thirty years and has unleashed three decades' worth of pent up entrepreneurial energy in the very towns long deemed dead. He has questioned how the federal government can have any legitimacy if it fails at enforcing its very own immigration laws.

Not one Nobel laureate imagined this American renaissance of GDP and stock market surge, record-low unemployment, wage growth, and low inflation in one bubbling cauldron. It took a change agent. Not one foreign policy mandarin suggested unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of the American oil man in order to destroy our enemies' power over us permanently. It took a change agent. Not one State Department official questioned why the United States was still subsidizing Europe's generous socialist welfare system seventy years after WWII. It took a change agent. Nobody wondered why we were enriching China at our own expense and preparing for a world where a communist dictator would lead. It took Donald Trump.

Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness. He has exposed both major parties as socialist globalist cults more concerned with government health care and foreign nation-building than a policy for American freedom. He has exposed how free trade can never be free when based on slave labor. He has exposed how the silent destruction of towns across the Midwest came not from China's comparative advantage, but from American companies' use of slavery by proxy. He has redirected investment away from Wall Street and toward Main Street for the first time in over thirty years and has unleashed three decades' worth of pent up entrepreneurial energy in the very towns long deemed dead. He has questioned how the federal government can have any legitimacy if it fails at enforcing its very own immigration laws.

The world has noticed. It is Donald Trump to whom Nigerian Christians turn for survival from Islamic terror. It is Donald Trump who has strengthened Israel by keeping promises his predecessors lacked the fortitude to see through. It is Donald Trump whose name is often whispered by freedom-fighters in Venezuela, whose American flag is respected by regime protesters in Iran, and whose image is waved by thousands demanding freedom in Hong Kong. Nobody clamoring for freedom is waving pictures of Angela Merkel in the air, but in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a photoshopped image of Donald Trump as Rocky Balboa is easy to find. At a time when the German chancellor argues for limiting free expression, those people most desperate to escape China's yoke see the American president as the only fighter who might help set them free. He is our American president, but he belongs to the world now, too.

Read more here.

"Someday, the world will stand back and applaud Trump for his canny and farseeing statesmanship."

In American Greatness, Roger Kimball writes in part,

The disaster of Flight 752 took place in the context of the liquidation of the terrorist mass-murderer Qasem Soleimani last week by the United States on the order of President Donald Trump. But that courageous and far-seeing act itself took place in the context of Iran’s decades-long assault on American and, more broadly, on Western institutions that promote a culture of tolerance and religious freedom.

The fact that many U.S. news outlets and Democratic politicians instantly coalesced around Soleimani as a “revered” military leader tells us what great inroads Stockholm Syndrome has made among American elites. Hence references to Soleimani as “General Soleimani” in headlines and such, and hence the video-clips on endless loop supposedly showing a nation in mourning over the loss of a beloved leader and “martyr.” One New York Times reporter really went to town, comparing Soleimani’s death to that of Martin Luther King, Jr.

All that is part of the anti-Trump static that is the background noise of life in the elite redoubts of the United States circa 2020. The real story in Iran, however, is revealed not by the manufactured spectacles of grief and mourning for a man who had terrorized the Iranians who had protested against the atavistic theocratic regime but the scenes of protest breaking out all over Tehran and elsewhere in response to the destruction of Flight 752 and, not incidentally, in response to the brutal, bloody, and jihad-obsessed mandarins who have held Iran in their clammy grip since the malignant absurdity of Ayatollah Khomeini. We’re all used to the Iranian chants of “Death to America.” What we’re hearing now, however, are chants of “Death to the regime after all these years of crimes.”

Last week, Donald Trump eliminated one of Iran’s most potent emissaries of death and destruction. All the beautiful people huddled together and wailed that Trump had just “destabilized” the Middle East (had it been stable beforehand?), that his “unilateral” action was illegal, counterproductive, immature, that, ultimately, he may have started World War III.

That was then. Now it looks as though he may have sparked the great unraveling of theocratic totalitarian control in Iran. And this just in: the Iranians apparently have just arrested the British ambassador. Arrested. In civilized countries, if there is an issue with a diplomat, one expels him. In civilized countries. But this is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Someday, the world will stand back and applaud Trump for his canny and farseeing statesmanship. I do not assert that that recognition is coming any time soon. But come it will.

Many of those who most bitterly attacked Ronald Reagan back when he was helping to precipitate the demise of the Soviet Union now sing his praises. I predict that, sooner or later, such people and their heirs will be singing the praises of Donald Trump, too.

Unfortunately, the oblivion that wraps historical and political stupidity in blinking impunity will also extract any toll of responsibility from those future cheerleaders who denounce Donald Trump today. It is all part of the human comedy, distracting, amusing even, when approached with sufficient cynicism. It is not, however, agreeable or edifying.

Read more here.

It is all about economics (and Trump)

This morning in the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance has a report on

The Brexit Deal, The EU, and the North American Trade Aspect…

Read it here.

Staying ahead of the critics

President Trump invited our military leaders and their spouses to dinner at the White House tonight. Before the dinner, he and the military leaders spent time with the press. Of course, the first question was about Syria. Sundance has the full transcript at the Conservative Treehouse. Trump did not mince words. Neither did he mince words on the second question, which was about the second "whistleblower."

Trump is fighting a culture war

In Town Hall, Victor Davis explains that President Trump is engaged in an all-out culture war against progressives.

Certainly, Trump's agenda of closing the border, using tariffs to overturn a half-century of Chinese mercantilism, and pulling back from optional overseas military interventions variously offends both Democrats and establishment Republicans.

Trump periodically and mercurially fires his top officials. He apparently does not care whether the departed write damning memoirs or join his opposition. He will soon appoint his fourth national security adviser within just three years.

To make things worse for his critics, Trump's economy is booming as never before in the new 21st century: near-record-low unemployment, a record number of Americans working, increases in workers' wages and family incomes, low interest rates, low inflation, steady GDP growth and a strong stock market.

Yet the real source of Trump derangement syndrome is his desire to wage a multifront pushback -- politically, socially, economically and culturally -- against what might be called the elite postmodern progressive world., it appears to Victor Davis Hanson that President Trump is engaged in an all-out culture war against progressives.

... new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.

An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.

No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.

Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media -- especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

For all the acrimony and chaos -- and prognostications of Trump's certain failure -- a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.

In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller's bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.

Some of the most prominent Trump haters -- Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff -- either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.

Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred, he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.

In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.

Read more here.

"Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer."

Victor Davis Hanson is always essential reading. He writes in American Greatness,

Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.

Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.

No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.

Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war.

Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtue signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals.

He foes on to write truths about defense budgets of NATO countries, the myth of China's inevitable dominance, the myth of Palestinian refugees, the myth of the veritable end to U.S. manufacturing and heavy industry, the myth of our oil reserves drying up, open borders, and so much more.

Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.

Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup was abnormal.

Read more here.

The tragic hero (Trump) can't quite fathom why his success is never given the proper recognition."

VDH warns that if we back off a little bit, then that's a victory for the censors!

Even Fox News has crumbled under the censorship wave. Victor Davis Hanson was told by a Fox producer, "They won't let you on unless you submit in advance in writing an outline of everything you are going to say!"

What the Trump candidacy and election hath wrought

An excerpt from JJ Sefton's Morning Report:

The end of another crazy week and almost the end of March. With all of the insanity swirling around us, if you step back and survey the cultural and political landscape of America (and the two are virtually intertwined in this day and age) from a high level, the picture presented is abject chaos. All of it emanates from the Democrat-Left-Media-Academia Complex and is catalyzed by a single entity that day after day proves to be a force of nature: President Donald J. Trump.

Look what his candidacy and even election have wrought. The dropping of whatever fig leaf of a pretense of objectivity the media may have had, the exposure of what has come to be known as a Deep State of both political appointees and bureaucratic lifers within our national law enforcement and intelligence communities who conspire and, er, collude, with one another and even foreign entities to abuse their power to subvert the will of the people and steer the nation to an unnatural globalist destiny. Then, having failed to sabotage the election to install their hand-picked figurehead (Hillary couldn't drive a Hoveround let alone an agenda), they used phony opposition "research" that no one believed, attached it to an intelligence file and used that as a pretext to smear the President-elect as a foreign agent who stole the 2016 election.

But while all of this was going on, the one thing that they did not count on was that Donald J. Trump punches back. Twice as hard, and right in the throat. And the harder he fought back the more shrill and nakedly partisan were the voices from the Democrats, Media and NeverTrumper Coup-Cuck-Clansters, which fomented incidents of violence and intimidation against ordinary people and political leaders. The other thing it did was touch off an internecine war within the Democrat Party between the pseudo-stealth Socialist old guard and the naked, in your face Shining Path Maoists. Suddenly, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity, open borders, actual infanticide, killing field-level ludditism and the setting alight of whatever fragments of our Constitution and heritage remain in a Reichstag fire made by the Up-Talk-Brown-Shirt-Brigades was mainstream and playing all over the nightly news like a Sunday night Disney movie. This cannot be playing well in Peoria.

And all of this is happening because of the election of Donald J. Trump. But make no mistake; Trump himself is not really the cause of all this. Or at least, he is just half of the equation. The other half is a sizable number of Americans having lived through and survived the 24-year period from 1992-2016 - especially the last 8 - understood full well that something was wrong with the nation. Trump merely articulated the rage and more importantly the promise that something could and would be done about it.

Read more here.

Trump, North Korea, and China

Do you know where President Trump will be tomorrow? Hanoi, Vietnam! Sundance reports in the Conservative Treehouse,

The majority of the political engagements between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un will take place in the overnight hours. Vietnam is 12 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern time.

President Trump is in Vietnam for his second summit with Chairman Kim. The two men first met last June in Singapore, a summit that was the first person-to-person contact between leaders of the U.S. and North Korea. The structure of the visible public engagement is to reach an agreement where North Korea will give up its nuclear arsenal and enter the economic world of peaceful nations.



Those who follow China and North Korea closely see a much bigger, non-discussed geopolitical effort and engagement. Within this dynamic a more complex objective is to rescue Chairman Kim from the clutches of oppressive generational control by Beijing, China.

Chairman Xi does not want to give up control and President Trump is leveraging full U.S. economic pressure upon China to break the grip. Technically, President Trump is on the most complex, challenging and historic hostage rescue mission; and the entirety of world’s media cannot see it.

Tough? No doubt!

"He wants to get to yes. They want to stay at no!"

"Collusion:" "between the American media and the open borders Democratic Party!"

"There are elephants crashing around in the forest!"

I apologize for linking to a story written in March, but it is one that I missed, and maybe you did, too. James Rosen writes in the Examiner,

...the academic scholarship published since 1977 has documented in exhaustive detail how the critical wings of the Nixon White House, the National Security Council, the covert operations unit dubbed “the Plumbers,” and Nixon’s campaign arm, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, were all infiltrated by rival power centers in the capital and exploited for intelligence. The people burrowing in came from the military, the intelligence community, and the news media (reports that the Soviet Union also placed moles in the Nixon White House have not been confirmed).

Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee and later President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, never spoke explicitly of a Deep State. But he alluded to it once, in suitably cryptic terms. Reeling from his discovery that the Pentagon had spied on Nixon, and struggling to grasp the large role of the Central Intelligence Agency in Watergate, Baker said: “There are elephants crashing around in the forest.”

The instrument the military men used was the JCS-NSC liaison office, housed in the Executive Office Building and run by a pair of admirals. The late Melvin Laird, the longtime Wisconsin representative selected by Nixon to run the Pentagon, told me in a 1997 interview that before becoming defense secretary in January 1969, he had observed the chiefs building what was, in literal terms, a covert intelligence capability against the White House.

By December 1971, the White House Special Investigations Group, a covert unit called the "Plumbers" formed to plug leaks of classified material to the news media, had uncovered the activities of Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, a stenographer and courier detailed to the JCS-NSC liaison office. After intensive polygraph examination, Radford admitted to having stolen some 5,000 classified documents in 1970-71 from White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and his aides. He'd even rifled through Kissinger’s briefcase while he slept on his official airplane. Radford admitted having passed top-secret documents, via the liaison office, to Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer.

...the CIA’s inspector general reported in 1975, after Nixon had resigned, that CIA agents had been placed in “intimate components of the Office of the President.”

...Why would these institutions have wanted to spy on Nixon? Mitchell had a theory. As he told Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup (1991): “It was his [Nixon’s] personality and his mode of operation that did him in.”

...In the political donations made by Mueller’s staff lawyers, federal filings show, more than $62,000 went to Democrats, only $2,750 to Republicans.

Nixon would have understood. Seven of the top eight lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force had served under Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. In the early 2000s, again using FOIA, I became the first researcher to mine the WSPF's 10,000-page archive: 10,000 pages in all. And while those papers did not contain the kind of sophomoric invective for the incumbent that would later characterize the Strzok/Page texts, the WSPF archive captured the prejudicial bias the Watergate special prosecutors harbored toward their prey.

As Trump surveys the political landscape of 2018, he too can be forgiven for imagining that the Deep State, or something like it, exists. Like Richard Nixon, our 45th president took the oath of office keenly aware that influential figures in the military and intelligence communities deeply distrusted him as an accused colluder with a foreign power, as someone who was not “one of us,” and as a man many said was psychologically unfit for the presidency, whatever voters thought. Both saw their inaugurations marred by rioting. Both would stand eternally accused, whatever the evidence, of capturing the presidency through collusion with a foreign power, and thus be stripped, by media elites that despised them, of all legitimacy. And like Nixon, Trump has been subjected, from the inception of his presidency, to unprecedented leaks of classified material to those elites.

In all this, with the various Russia investigations still unresolved, their ultimate discoveries and outcomes unknown, Trump would do well to internalize the central lesson of Watergate, and perhaps thereby avoid some of the many self-inflicted wounds that Nixon committed during his own death throes against entrenched forces. This lesson Nixon articulated in the final minutes of his presidency, in the maudlin and meandering farewell address he delivered to the White House staff in the East Room on Aug. 9, 1974, shortly before boarding the helicopter that whisked him away from power.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Read more here.

"Obama relieved Mattis as commander of CENTCOM without so much as a phone call, a factoid typical of Obama's disdain for the military, its missions, and its heroes."

In the American Thinker, Daniel John Sobieski reminds us,

...Iran is the head of the snake. Syria and ISIS are the tail. Strike at the head, and you kill the snake. President Trump is doing that by nixing Obama's nuclear deal and reimposing sanctions, including prohibitions on Iranian oil exports. That, arguably, is a better way to deal with a very real threat than chasing random jihadis through the Syrian desert.

Critics of our Syrian withdrawal forget that under President Trump, American-backed forces liberated the ISIS capital of Raqqa. They forget the hundreds of Russian mercenaries killed in clashes with U.S. forces. They forget the cruise missile strikes against Syrian targets under the nose of Vladimir Putin. Trump's moves in Syria were hardly under a white flag.

Obama, by contrast, didn't want to win anywhere and waged his own war against the U.S. military, purging it of generals, admirals, and commanders who dare to talk of victory. President Obama began a military purge not dissimilar to those routinely conducted by third-world despots, with the goal of eliminating voices that might oppose his withdrawing from the world stage. ...Obama relieved Mattis as commander of CENTCOM without so much as a phone call, a factoid typical of Obama's disdain for the military, its missions, and its heroes. As Investor's Business Daily editorialized:

[W]hat has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture. We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham. He was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi[.] ...

From Breitbart.com's Facebook page comes a list of at least 197 officers that have been relieved of duty by President Obama for a laundry list of reasons and sometimes with no reason given.

Okay, maybe Mattis was saying things Trump didn't want to hear about tactics and strategies, but we have only one commander-in-chief at a time, and the one we have now is trying to rebuild the military, so we can win wars, not letting the military atrophy while generals who want to win are purged.

We have not only ISIS jihadis to worry about. We have the Iranian nuclear threat, an expansionist China with sub-launched nuclear missiles capable of hitting U.S. cities, and a belligerent Russia developing hypersonic missiles we might not be able to stop as it negotiates with a crumbling Venezuela to base its nuclear-capable bombers on an island not far from Caracas.

So chill out, Chicken Littles of the left and right. There is an adult in the room. His name is Donald J. Trump.

Body language interpreting!

Have you seen this body language interpreter on YouTube? Last week's Oval Office meeting with Trump, Pence, Schumer, and Pelosi provides a good opportunity for body language interpreting!

"the equivalent of upending the tables of the moneychangers in the temple

JJ Sefton on Trump's meeting yesterday with "Schemer" and "Palsi."

...anyone who has any doubts whatsoever on this President and his steadfastness, sincerity and commitment to the American people should be disabused of that notion here and now. Second, this is not just politics for Trump. I believe that he believes that national sovereignty and secure borders are essential for the survival and prosperity of this nation. Third, this guy is a fighter. By him rejecting the standard political model of Republican/conservative evil and Democrat/Leftist good and throwing their bullshit, hypocrisy and insanity right in their faces - Queens accent and all - is the equivalent of upending the tables of the moneychangers in the temple and setting a new paradigm for future politicians on our side to do the same (please G-d).

Read more here, including his links to important reads of today.

Does President Trump deserve our respect?

David Gelernter writes in the Wall Street Journal,

...what I see on the left is often plain, unconditional hatred of which the hater—God forgive him—is proud. It’s discouraging, even disgusting. And it does mean, I believe, that the Trump-hater truly does hate the average American—male or female, black or white. Often he hates America, too.

...Granted, Mr. Trump is a parody of the average American, not the thing itself. To turn away is fair. But to hate him from your heart is revealing. Many Americas were ashamed when Ronald Reagan was elected. A movie actor? But the new direction he chose for America was a big success on balance, and Reagan turned into a great president. Evidently, this country was intended to be run by amateurs after all—by plain citizens, not only lawyers and bureaucrats.

Those who voted for Mr. Trump, and will vote for his candidates this November, worry about the nation, not its image. The president deserves our respect because Americans deserve it—not such fancy-pants extras as network commentators, socialist high-school teachers, and eminent professors, but the basic human stuff that has made America great, and is making us greater all the time.

Read more here.

I STILL Like Trump!

Guest post by Suzann Darnall

When all is said and done, I still like President Trump. Is he perfect? No. Is he making things better for Americans? Yes. In my book, that is ‘nough said!

More importantly might be the following question: could he make things even better if his own party would support him? Absolutely!!! So, if conservatives wanna be upset about things not going as well as they’d like, don’t blame President Trump! Instead, look at who is refusing to work with him as he strives to Make America Great Again. Much of the blame can be squarely laid on the swamp monsters of the dark lagoon known as Washington, DC.

We really need to make sure we get as many Republicans into office as possible. Then we need to make sure they realize we sent them to do a specific job. That job is to help Make America Great Again. So far as I can see, President Trump seems to be the only one who is actually taking steps in that direction. Therefore, I say we should all follow his plan and help him accomplish his Make America Great Again goals. Hope all y’all agree!!!

Let’s vote in November like there is no tomorrow! ‘Cause if we do not give President Trump the tools he needs to Make America Great Again, we might soon see the sun set on our “shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” Donald Trump may well be the closest we ever get to another Ronald Reagan. Let’s not lose him before he achieves the most he can do for America. So, remember, every vote will count as we strive to fight against government corruption and election tampering. We well and truly might be fighting for life as we know it!!!
Suzann blogs at WoolyMammoth.org