"There's trouble everywhere you look!"

In the Epoch Times, Michael Walsh writes in part,

...What’s needed now is willpower at the top to seize the moment. Donald J. Trump was elected not because enough Americans fell in love with him personally, but because he was the apparent antithesis to what they despised most: the spiteful Hillary Clinton; the relentlessly anti-American Democrats, with their sordid history of slavery, segregation, sedition, and secularism; the GOP junior wing of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party (PBFP) of Poppy Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John “Comity” McCain, Willard Mitt Romney, and all the other prominent Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan who have consistently betrayed foundational American principles in their pursuit of power.

The big question around Washington right now, however, is this: Has the president thrown in the towel on re-election? Few could blame him if he did. His soaring economy and patriotic “Make America Great Again” message were sabotaged by his spectacularly ill-advised decision to turn the economy of the United States over to two unknown doctors, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, and to fall right into the tar-baby trap of holding daily press conferences with a politicized and medically ignorant media whose animus against him remains unbounded. As a Napoleonic official remarked of the execution of Louis Antoine de Bourbon: “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.”

Indeed, it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. But Trump has had to battle against hostile outside forces from the beginning of his presidency: the Flynn sandbagging by a rogue FBI; “Russian collusion,” a Russian-backed disinformation campaign knowingly disseminated by the “red-diaper baby” media and the president’s mortal enemies in Congress; impeachment over something to do with a phone call to the Ukraine; the Chinese Communist Party virus, conveniently hatched in a Wuhan lab/wet market and consciously spread throughout the world around Christmastime for maximum impact in November 2020; a recrudescent Black Lives Matter movement (founded in 2013), awaiting a just-right white cop-black victim narrative to rekindle racial animosity while ignoring the horrific black-on-black death toll in places like Barack Obama’s Chicago.

The president, however, has not helped himself. From the start, the politically inexperienced Trump relied on a small circle of advisors regarding personnel matters, chiefly including his daughter Ivanka and her hitherto undistinguished husband, Jared Kushner, whose father Charles, a New Jersey real estate mogul, pleaded guilty in 2005 to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions (to Democrats), and did time in federal prison. Around 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the pair is known as “the Democrats,” and it is they who consistently push Trump to the left.

The early appointments were disastrous: milquetoast Reince Priebus as chief of staff; Texas oilman Rex Tillerson as secretary of state; Scott Pruitt at the EPA; H.R. McMaster as the National Security Advisor; the comically inept Anthony Scaramucci as head of the terminally incompetent White House comms shop for less than two weeks; even Jim Mattis, the tough-talking, no-victory general and former secretary of defense also flamed out, and after his firing, has violated the Marine Corps tradition of never speaking ill of civilian leadership.

In the meantime, Trump managed to purge his most loyal MAGA troops, including Stephen K. Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Michael Anton, and Rich Higgins (the latter two at the National Security Council), to satisfy the in-house demands for “moderation.”

Is there still time to pull things together? The mood around Washington says no, but then when has official Washington been right about anything since 1945? Meanwhile, the North Koreans have just blown up their negotiating station on the border with South Korea, and the Communist Chinese are involved in a shooting war with India. There’s trouble everywhere you look.

Here’s what Trump must do, and right away:

Stop the violence in the streets—by any means necessary, as the Left likes to say.

Regain control of the blue states, including their “sanctuary cities.” Nullification of federal laws was settled by Lincoln and Grant in 1865.

Remember that, according to the Constitution, every federal court below the Supreme Court is a creature of Congress, and thus subject to congressional jurisdiction. Presidential directives should not be countermanded by lone federal judges.

Campaign hard for the House. Abolish “ballot harvesting.” Save the Senate, if possible, but be prepared to go it alone for at least the next two years.

Lay down clear policy for the Defense Department and make American resolve regarding China, North Korea, and the Middle East clear to the rest of the world.

And most important: unite the country around its foundational principles, and focus Americans on the future, not the past. The most important chapters of our history are yet to be written.
We have five months. Over to you, Mr. President.

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