Tag Archives: donaldjtrump

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Daily Broadside | Finally, a Defense of Trump’s Amazing Presidency

Daily Verse | Revelation 9:16
The number of the mounted troops was two hundred million. I heard their number.

Wednesday’s Reading: Revelation 10-13

Wednesday and we’ve hit mid-week already and the Left has already peaked with hyperventilation about “Let’s go Brandon.” It’s mind-numbingly absurd, yet there’s undoubtedly a method to the progressive madness that we seem to be surrounded by.

Into the cyclone drops a book by Peter Navarro, one of President Trump’s three senior staffers who stayed with him all the way from the election in 2016 to the end of his first term in 2020. In his memoir, In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year, Navarro reveals the disloyal staff Trump surrounded himself with, who ultimately became his undoing.

In Bruce Bawer’s review of the book he writes,

Mike Mulvaney, acting chief of staff, was a neverTrumper. Economic advisor Gary Cohn (now vice-chairman of IBM) “never saw an American job he didn’t want to offshore in the profane name of supply chain efficiencies.” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross operated on “transactionalist Wall Street DNA.”

Navarro, who’d earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, was brought aboard by Trump to deal with the China trade situation and build up U.S. manufacturing. He supported full instant tariffs to wipe out China’s trade advantages. But the White House was packed with people who passionately opposed tariffs and were uncomfortably chummy with the Chinese. Jared Kushner? A “panda hugger.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin? The “second coming of Neville Chamberlain” and as a “Judas” who’d made millions in Chinese business and who “simply couldn’t believe” that the PRC “posed any economic or military threat to the United States whatsoever.”

When virus deaths mounted in China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s second-in-command Stephen Biegun, who’d been Ford Motors’ “offshorer in chief” to China, opposed a travel ban because he feared it would offend Xi. Living outside the Beltway but also exerting an outsized anti-tariff influence in the West Wing was the “Billionaires’ Cabal” – whose membership ranged from Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn (both heavily invested in Macao casinos) to Steve Schwarzman and Larry Fink.

He goes after Faux-chi, too, saying that “Fauci conspired to keep the first of the COVID vaccines from being unveiled until after the November 2020 election – the goal, of course, being to deprive Trump of electoral victory; as a result, tens of thousands of Americans were robbed of their very lives.”

But he also gives some insight into what happened with the Bat Flu response:

Trump has been widely criticized for the slowness with which his administration recognized the seriousness of COVID-19. In fact, according to Navarro, the fault lay not with Trump but with many of his advisors. Larry Kudlow publicly pooh-poohed the virus. Mark Short did a lousy job as head of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force. Navarro, for his part, corralled U.S. business leaders into helping combat the pandemic. Among this book’s heroes are FedEx CEO Fred Smith, who, while fiercely opposed to Trump’s trade policies, readily provided planes to ship desperately needed testing swabs from Italy to six U.S. cities. Other corporate good guys include Honeywell, UPS, and Pernod (which shifted its factories on a dime from making booze to producing sanitizer). Among the bad guys: GM, which, it will be remembered, had to be forced to manufacture ventilators. Worst of all: Big Pharma.

Finally, he gets at the 2020 election:

After the shock of the 2020 election loss, Navarro was also shocked by the defeatism of many of his colleagues. When Rudolph Giuliani insisted on challenging the results, many White House officials accused him of “grandstanding”; after Rudy was put in charge of that initiative, Jared Kushner and others tried to foil his efforts. Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell complained that she’d warned GOP bigwigs since May 2019 about the Democrats’ plans to steal the election, but had been ignored. Meanwhile one major inside-the-Beltway law firm after another passed on representing Trump in his vote-fraud case – such being “the hardball Globalist Swamp reality of Washington, D.C.”

Voter fraud was scarcely in Navarro’s wheelhouse. But just as he’d switched from trade to COVID, now, confronted by apathy and duplicity all around him, he felt compelled to throw himself into the job of “definitively answering the question of whether the election was in fact stolen.” Poring through mountains of material from the four states under dispute, he concluded that the election had been “stolen beyond any shadow of a shadow of a probabilistic doubt,” and wrote a report to that effect.

Unfortunately, others who were expected to serve the cause failed it spectacularly. Lawyer Sidney Powell, who kept making extravagant claims on TV about election fraud, never produced any proof, thus making the whole effort look bogus. Attorney General Bill Barr also proved a crushing disappointment. But the greatest betrayal was that by Mike Pence, who on January 6, acting in his role as President of the Senate when that body met to certify the November 3 vote, could quite legitimately have paused the certification to give state legislators time to investigate claims of fraud. Instead Pence ended up, in Navarro’s words, being “the Brutus most responsible both for the final betrayal of President Trump and the unceremonious burial of electoral integrity.”

I don’t know much about Peter Navarro, but this book seems like it would be a good read … especially regarding the 2020 election which was, without a doubt, rigged (i.e. stolen) to favor the Democrats.

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Daily Broadside | A Counter-Resistance Must Come to the Masses

Daily Verse | Obadiah 15
“The day of the Lord is near
    for all nations.
As you have done, it will be done to you;
    your deeds will return upon your own head.”

Welcome to Wednesday, friends. Now that striped pants are back in fashion, I’ll have to fight my dog to get mine back.

I hadn’t read much of Angelo Codevilla’s work, but did recognize his name when it was announced that he’d died at age 78 after being hit by a car a couple of days ago. Several opinion writers and bloggers shared their sadness over his death and their estimate of him as a ‘great and good’ man. Many of them also linked to influential articles that he’d written, proclaiming that,

It is hard to overstate the importance and brilliance of Angelo. If you only knew him by his many books and columns (including this 2015 piece he wrote for Power Line on Trump’s significance and prospects), it would be sufficient to establish his greatness. But he was also at the storm center of key aspects of American intelligence and foreign policy going back more than 40 years.

The sense of significant loss piqued my curiosity, and I clicked through several of his articles. One of them, “Clarity in Trump’s Wake” struck such a chord with me, that I want to encourage you to read the entire thing. It’s a long treatise on what he says is now “a classic oligarchy” that rules America and how that oligarchy came to be.

The reason the article resonates with me so powerfully is that he shades with clarity the contours of our current predicament that we all know is there, but can’t precisely put our fingers on. Here is how he starts:

Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to the Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court discounted that. By refusing to interfere as America’s ruling oligarchy serves itself, the court archived what remained of the American republic’s system of equal justice. That much is clear.

In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.

Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.

Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.

In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s rules flow from the people through their representatives. In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts’ claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions.

In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.

The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our predicament is its only virtue.

Oligarchy had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016 election posed the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not. Consolidation was very much “in the cards.” But how that election and its aftermath led to the fast, thorough, revolution of American life depended on how Donald Trump acted as the catalyst who clarified, energized, and empowered our burgeoning oligarchy’s peculiarities.

After explaining how the amalgamation of politics and corporations had slowly built the oligarchy, Codevilla explains the significance of Donald J. Trump.

By 2015, the right side of America’s challenge to the budding oligarchy was inevitable. Trump was not inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had begun posing a thorough challenge to the “stakeholders” most Americans disrespected. Candidate Trump was the more gripping showman. His popularity came from his willingness to disrespect them, loudly. Because the other 16 Republican candidates ran on different bases, none ever had a chance. Inevitably, victory in a field so crowded depended on when which minor candidate did or did not withdraw. There never was a head-to-head choice between Trump and Cruz.

Trump’s candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being. Since Cruz’s candidacy represented the same threat, it almost certainly would have drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty narratives could have been made up about him out of whole cloth as easily as about Trump.

But Trump’s actual peculiarities made it possible for the oligarchy to give the impression that its campaign was about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws, and truth itself.

He then goes on to explain how the Peking Lung Pox gave the oligarchy the vehicle they needed to increase their power over the average citizen and eventually leveraged it into gaming the 2020 presidential election.

Only in a few one-party Democratic states was universal vote-by-mail established by law. Elsewhere, especially in the states sure to be battlegrounds in the presidential election, mail-in voting was introduced by various kinds of executive or judicial actions. Questions of right and wrong aside, the Constitution’s Article II section 1’s words—“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”—makes such actions unconstitutional on their face. Moreover, in these states—Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—the counting of votes in the most populous counties is firmly in the hands of Democratic Party bosses with a well-documented history of fraud.

To no one’s surprise, the 2020 presidential election was decided by super-majorities for the Democratic candidate precisely from these counties in these states. Yes, Trump’s percentage of the vote fell in certain suburbs. But Trump received some 11 million more votes in 2020 than four years earlier, and nearly doubled the share of votes he received from blacks. The Democrats’ gain of some 15 million votes came exclusively from mail-in ballots, and their victory in the Electoral College came exclusively from the supermajorities piled up in these corrupt counties—the only places where Trump’s share of the black vote was cut by three-quarters. Did people there really think so differently?

And then this:

The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.

Perhaps most important, they do so without thought of how a war against at least some 74 million fellow citizens might end. The people in the oligarchy’s corporate components seem to want only to adorn unchallenged power with a reputation for “wokeness.” For them, causing pain to their opponents is a pleasure incidental to enjoying power’s perquisites. The Biden family’s self-enrichment by renting access to influence is this oligarchy’s standard.

As I said, it’s a long but powerful article. I’ve given you a taste of small portions of it to whet your appetite for the whole thing. It confirms your worst fears about what has happened in America — we are no longer a constitutional republic but in name only. We are being ruled by a cabal of elites in business, science, the courts, social media, entertainment and, of course, politics.

According to Codevilla, the central hope of overthrowing the ruling elite is this:

Increasingly, conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power. Whoever would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle’s 1941 basic rule for la résistance: refrain from individual or spontaneous acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. But join with thousands in what amount to battles to defeat the enemy’s initiatives, weaken his grip on power, and prepare his defeat. Thus, an aspirant to the presidency in 2024, in the course of debunking the narrative by which the oligarchy seized so much power over America, might lead millions to violate restrictions placed on those who refuse to wear masks. Or, as he pursues legislative and judicial measures to abolish the compulsory racial and gender sensitivity training sessions to which public and private employees are subjected, he might organize employees in a given sector unanimously to stay away from them in protest. They can’t all be fired or held back.

My thought: we must try.

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Daily Broadside | Six Practical Things All of Us Can Do to Prepare for What’s Coming

Daily Verse | Hosea 7:2
But they do not realize
    that I remember all their evil deeds.
Their sins engulf them;
    they are always before me.

Happy Thursday, Broadsiders! Since being beset in ice suggests our Bahamas cruise went off course, won’t you join me for a jog on the Promenade deck to keep warm?

I’m painfully aware that most of my blogging simply breaks down the news of the moment, peppered with disbelief and some sass. What I don’t offer much of is answers, which frustrates me because I often complain to my computer screen that the commentary I’m reading does a great job analyzing and diagnosing the problem, but doesn’t offer any solution.

I’ve discovered that’s hard to do, because we live in a dynamic and ever-changing world, and culture doesn’t change over night. What can you do when one party steals an election? What can you do when one party demonizes your half of the national population? What can you do when one party acts unconstitutionally as a standard practice? When one party seeks to turn us into a socialist state?

There aren’t any easy answers. Nevertheless I’m sometimes asked, “So what do we do?”

My first response is, “Pray.” I think our society as a whole ignores the efficacy of prayer, myself included.

Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always. (1 Chronicles 16:11)

Most of us are looking for some kind of direct action to take that will effectively slow or stop the infrastructure from any further rot. We want immediate results and prayer requires faith, discipline and patience. But God will not be rushed.

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)

Unfortunately, there isn’t a quick fix to the situation we find ourselves in. Even if the Orange Savior, Donald J. Trump, were to make a comeback in 2024 (Save America!), he only has one four-year term available. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t help to have him in office again — it most likely would — but we can’t unwind 80 years of decay in just four.

Doug Wilson, whose blog I’ve recommended before, wrote something the other day that I thought would be very helpful for all of us to consider. Seven Ways to Prepare Your Family for What’s Coming is a thoughtful post on some things that Christians (and those who are beginning to see that the foxhole only provides so much protection) can do.

I will briefly list them here with a partial quote from his description of each one. I encourage you to click through to read the entire post. (Please note that although Wilson’s title says “Seven Ways,” I find only six.)

  1. Deal With Personal Sin. “Learn to confess your sins to God, honestly and forthrightly. He sees down to the sludge layers at the bottom of your heart anyway, so there is no sense trying to blow sunshine at Him. Simply acknowledge it. Ask Him to deal with it as only He can deal with it. You know He wants to.”
  2. Minimize Encumbrances. “In ordinary times, it is good and proper to use up all your available bandwidth with various projects, challenges, commitments, and so on. But now may be the time to streamline … you are freeing up available bandwidth so that you can protect your family more effectively.”
  3. Stock Up On the Word. “Now is the time to become serious about storing up the Scriptures in your heart and mind … In addition, you should be a regular, diligent, focused Bible reader.”
  4. Meet Regularly With God’s Umasked People to Worship Him. “Ironically, the willingness of countless pastors and elders to shut down worship, restrict numbers coming to worship, require masks (and/or vaccinations) in order to worship, has been a true unveiling.”
  5. Do Nothing That Feeds Your Fears. “It would be better to go into a time of trouble with a true evangelical confidence, and no freeze dried food, than to have a basement full of freeze dried food that represented, in a rather tangible way, the sum total of all your fears.”
  6. Assume the Posture of Victors. “We should be preparing in our hearts for that glorious moment—after fierce fighting—when we raise our flag on the top of a spiritual Iwo Jima.”

What can we do? Start with these six activities. Add to them prayer, as I mention above. And, as Wilson says in a couple of other posts, “don’t take the bait.”

I would also buy ammo. Really — not kidding. I’ve got some other things in mind that we can do, but those are for another post another time.

For now, consider these seven things a good place to start.

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Daily Broadside | Bush 43’s Appalling Comparison is Revealing

Daily Verse | Daniel 6:23b
And when Daniel was lifted from the den, no wound was found on him, because he had trusted in his God.

It’s Tuesday my friends. I’ve had enough of kumquats in the fruit salad.

I wasn’t always interested in politics. In many ways, I was your typical naïve citizen who believed that all of our presidents and congressmen were good men and women who sought the best for the country, revered our founding documents, and were worthy of the office.

It wasn’t until later that I discovered that many of them were scoundrels who played dirty out of sight of the public. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed historic civil right legislation but predicted that, by doing so, he would “have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” Then there was Richard M. Nixon, who infamously lied about what and when he knew about the Watergate break-in and eventually resigned in disgrace as he faced certain impeachment and removal from office.

Still later, as I matured in my political knowledge and understanding of how our government operates, I began to see that even Republicans — the party of Lincoln! — and, ostensibly I thought, the keepers of tradition and conservative values — weren’t “conservative” as a whole. There were conservatives, of course, in the Republican Party, but there were also moderates and liberal Republicans — even libertarians!

And then I began to see a frustrating pattern. Democrats would be shredding the Constitution, our traditions, our morals, and the Republicans would make a lot of noise opposing the Democrats — but nothing would change. Republicans just sit there and act as if they’re powerless to do anything.

In other words, it slowly dawned on me that many Republicans were part of the “establishment” just as the Democrats were. And that awareness left me feeling politically homeless.

I write all of that to set up what has been a further disappointment coming out of the 20th anniversary of September 11. Former president George W. Bush gave a short speech at the 9/11 memorial service for Flight 93 in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Bush was president when the Islamic jihadist terrorist attacks were carried out, and he helped set the tone and the direction for the nation in the immediate aftermath of the devastation. He was generally lauded for his leadership then.

But now this speech.

In his brief comments, Bush likened the American citizens who breached Capitol Hill on January 6 to the radical Islamic jihadists who flew suicide missions on September 11, killing nearly 3,000 innocent people.

There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them.

That’s right. George W. Bush compared American citizens protesting a clearly questionable election result to Islamic extremists. The only people to die that day were two of the protestors, with one being shot by a Capitol Hill officer and the other possibly being killed by Capitol Hill police using “a highly noxious gas on protesters.”

The protestors had no guns, didn’t kill anyone (not even the officers who subsequently died of other causes!) and most simply wandered through the building like lost tourists. Those that did cause damage should be charged and held accountable, as many are.

But it wasn’t an insurrection.

That didn’t stop Bush, whose comparison was appalling. While he didn’t specifically mention January 6, his words implied who he had in mind by leading with “their disdain for pluralism.” He didn’t mention BLM or Antifa, either, and we know those two movements, which celebrate “pluralism” and disdain whites, have been more destructive to our national bonds than anything that happened in January.

Bush is part of the swamp and his comments demonstrate a frightening fact: it’s not just the Democrats who despise conservatives — it’s the entire ruling class that they’re a part of, including men like George W. Bush.

Our political machine is rotten through and through, and those fighting against it from the inside, like Donald J. Trump was, are the exception.

“So interesting to watch former President Bush, who is responsible for getting us into the quicksand of the Middle East (and then not winning!), as he lectures us that terrorists on the ‘right’ are a bigger problem than those from foreign countries that hate America, and that are pouring into our Country right now,” Trump said in a statement distributed by Save America PAC.

[…]

“He shouldn’t be lecturing anybody!” Trump added.

George W. Bush agrees with the illegitimate junta that America’s greatest threat are patriots who dispute the last presidential election and are therefore “domestic terrorists” or, as some have called them, “the American Taliban.”

We are under the illusion that there are two main political parties fighting each other for power and influence, but when you get right down to it, they are all part of the same untouchable elite who disdain “Normal” Americans.

It’s deeply disappointing, but instructive.

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Daily Broadside | “You’re Going to be Happy” With Who’s Running in 2024

Daily Verse | Daniel 2:43
“And just as you saw the iron mixed with the baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.”

Happy Monday, Broadsiders! Sawgrass is not a musical genre for southern carpenters.

As I’ve written before, I voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020, although I opposed him in 2016. Since then, I’ve had mixed feelings about him, although mostly positive because of his America First policies. Like many people, I think he could use more verbal discipline but, at the same time, I admire him for his willingness to fight back against the anti-Americans spread throughout our nation — including the Deep State, the not-so-deep state like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Adam Schiff and the current occupant of the White House, and the national media.

Given the choice, I’d rather have Trump in office right now. Give me gas at a $1.87 and I’ll tolerate the mean tweets, rather than watching Biden shred what’s left of the constitutional order as he restores our “norms.”

Everybody is liking the return to our norms, right?

As I watch Trump in exile, it seems to me that he’s engaging in a parallel presidency. Traditionally, once a president exits office, they keep a very low profile, refrain from criticizing their successors, write their memoires and maybe engage in some kind of volunteer public service. Jimmy Carter is best known for his work with Habitat for Humanity after his one term. George W. Bush is known for his work with U.S. military veterans since leaving the White House.

Trump, as is typical with him, has defied the traditions associated with former presidents. He and his organization have released powerful videos defining how awful Joe Biden is, Trump has given interviews in which he comments on current affairs, he still holds rallies with thousands in attendance, endorses political candidates, marked 9/11 by visiting first responders and published his own videotaped remarks; offers remarks during events like Sean Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” on the National Mall yesterday; and commentated on the Evander Holyfield-Vitor Belfort novelty boxing match. Plus, Trump merchandise is still selling like crazy.

Of course, he doesn’t have the executive powers of the presidency he once held, so his role is necessarily constrained. But he’s the de facto head of the Republican Party with millions of people still supporting him and wanting to see him run again.

I don’t think it’s a secret that millions of us believe that the 2020 presidential election was illegally tampered with and that Biden was wrongfully installed in the White House. (Even if you don’t believe that, you can’t deny that Biden is the absolute worst person to occupy the Oval Office in the history of the United States. Well, you can deny it, but no reasonable person does.) It’s also no secret that Trump has been teasing his plans to run in 2024, and during his visit to the police precinct in New York City on Saturday, he probably provided the clearest hint yet that he plans to run (my emphasis):

Asked by a police officer if he plans to launch a comeback in 2024, or perhaps run for New York City mayor, Trump responded “that’s a tough question.”

But then he said “actually, for me, it’s an easy question. I mean, I know what I’m going to do, but I’m not supposed to be talking about it yet from the standpoint of campaign finance laws, which, frankly, are ridiculous.”

And the former president, as he’s said numerous times already this year of his potential campaign decision, added that “I think you’re going to be happy.”

Put that together with the ads he’s running, the appearances he’s making and the way he’s staying connected to his supporters — and I think without a doubt he’s going to run in 2024.

Is that a good thing?

On balance, I think Trump is good for our politics. He represents an old-school barroom brawler that has been lost in the political machine of today that pumps out soft men and women who sit on the collective butts and collect paychecks from taxpayers but don’t deliver more freedom and more prosperity for the nation. They, in fact, do all they can to gum up our freedoms, pay political favors to keep themselves in power, and take more of our money through taxes to enrich themselves and other nations.

I don’t relish the prospect of the Deep State going after Trump again and Nancy Pelosi siccing her rabid party on him through impeachment charades.

But one has to wonder: if it wasn’t Trump and instead was, say, Ron DeSantis — what’s to prevent the Deep State from doing the same to him? Now that the Deep State understands its power and knows it can harass and hobble a president for the entire length of his term, why wouldn’t it mess with any Republican’s presidency?

On the other hand, “F Biden” is trending on Twitter, whole stadiums of students are chanting “F*** Joe Biden,” his poll numbers are disastrous, and Democrat strategist Douglas Schoen is sounding the alarm about the 2022 midterm elections.

It doesn’t mean Trump is a shoe-in. But at this point, I’d vote for Trump if he is the candidate.

Trump needs to make better choices regarding whom he surrounds himself with if he wins the White House again, but we need someone who can fight the enemy within. Trump has proven he can and will do that.

To quote Lincoln about Grant, “I can’t spare this man. He fights!”

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Daily Broadside | It Takes a Village Idiot

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 17:9-10
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind,
to reward a man according to his conduct,
according to what his deeds deserve.”

Friday and the end of another week — and what a week it has been.

When the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium building collapsed in Florida back in June, initial reports found that, while the cause of the collapse isn’t known, “the structural slab was deteriorating because it was flat instead of sloped. That meant the water didn’t drain off the concrete’s waterproofing quickly” and that “failure to complete the ‘extremely expensive’ repairs … would ’cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.'”

It feels like the United States has finally slid off its “structural slab” after decades of neglect and abuse, and is collapsing in a heap on the world stage. Perhaps the anti-American wokesters and progressive Marxists who pollute our country are learning that facts don’t care about your feelings.

But probably not.

It’s a pleasant LARP, with self-reinforcing loops of hashtags, New York Times puff pieces and Psaki ‘circling back’, until one day the Taliban roll in and everyone is running for the helicopters. It’s like US elites finally had the VR headset knocked from their faces and actually had a look around. And what they saw was a roomful of men with faces out of an illustrated bible looking like they’d just pillaged a Cabela’s—that’s how much top-shelf, modded-out AR hardware they captured—sitting down for a super-awkward Zoom meeting announcing a sudden change of plans for American foreign policy.

While there is plenty of blame to lay at the feet of George W. Bush, Barack Hussein Obama, and Donald J. Trump for the situation in Afghanistan, the one who matters is Joseph Robinette Biden. The most far-left executive ever to hold office (and that includes Obama), Biden has proven to be a one-man wrecking crew. It’s not that he’s doing it all himself; he has plenty of help from the junta installed after the hijinked election in 2020.

But he’s the acting head of our government.

More like acting the village idiot:

10,000-15,000 (!) American citizens are trapped in Taliban-held Afghanistan.

The U.S. government cannot go out and give them safe passage to the airport.

The U.S. government cannot guarantee the safety of American citizens in Afghanistan.

The Biden administration is making Americans pay $2,000 for a flight out of Afghanistan. (Hunter needs new shoes, baby!)

Afghan parents so desperate they’re passing their babies and kids over the crowd at the airport!

US soldiers stuck at Kabul airport while UK and French soldiers are getting their citizens out.

The Taliban are using our abandoned equipment. Say, where do you suppose the surplus will end up?

State Department won’t say why it killed Pompeo’s crisis evacuation unit. (One hint: #OrangeManBad!)

Joe Biden reacts to George Stephanopolous bringing up Afghans falling off our planes as if he’d “brought up irrelevant ancient history.” (Listen, fat.)

Joe Biden calls it a day for the weekend while Afghanistan burns. (He’s tired, doncha’ know.)

Our closest allies for more than a century, the UK, just held Biden in contempt for the disaster in Afghanistan.

Can one man literally be this incompetent? Or is there something more sinister at work here? I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Biden has been compromised by China, so one can legitimately wonder if there’s more than just poor management at work here.

Lara Logan thinks that the United States “chose this outcome” and it’s tough to deny her logic.

https://youtu.be/156RHClV84I

“Whoever is in power right now, whoever is really pulling the strings — and I don’t know [who is pulling the strings] — they could do anything they want to change this. And they’re not.” — Lara Logan

Are Biden and his cabal so utterly ruthless that they would proactively destroy all the work we did in Afghanistan just so that the U.S. would be humiliated before a watching world? So that our reputation as a so-called superpower would take such a massive hit as to be mocked by China and censured by the UK? To degrade the intimidation factor that Trump had recently brought back? To wreck a country with no regard for how many people die?

Honest answer? Yes, I believe they would. They are in a “no holds barred” situation because 2022 is coming and they know they have the potential to be slaughtered (figuratively speaking!) in that election. That is, unless they depend on late-arriving ballots to swing the elections to themselves.

It’s no secret that the far-left has taken over the Democrat party, and they HATE America. They hate our founding, they hate our constitution, they hate our rights, they hate whites’ skin color, they hate men, they hate normal marriage, they hate normal sex, they hate normal gender, they hate God, they hate Christianity, they hate Christians, they hate churches, they hate law and order, they hate our traditions, they hate our history and they hate our norms. These people are filled with a seething rage and indignation over the Western tradition and wisdom that gave us the most powerful and wealthy nation in all of human history.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a logical connection between the unmitigated disaster that is Afghanistan, the Left’s control of our government, and the beating that our country’s standing in the world is taking right now. What other country in its right mind would trust the United States to be a strong and stable partner with financial and military might when they need it?

More to the point, what confidence do regular Americans have in our government and the vast military that it wields? I speak for myself when I say that when I see the fustercluck in Afghanistan and contrast that with “pregnancy flight suits” and pride flags and transgenders in the armed forces, I no longer feel confident in my country’s ability to protect me from our enemies or, for that matter, to protect me from my own government’s overreach.

Maybe they should start focusing on winning wars instead of helping men walk in stilettoes.

In fact, I’m starting to suspect that the military is being prepared to lock down and harass and possibly arrest all those “potential terrorists” who oppose Covid lockdowns, question the 2020 election or support Trump.

I’ve never felt so unsettled about our country as I have this week.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | The Disaster Unfolding in Afghanistan

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 2:5
“They followed worthless idols
and became worthless themselves.”

Welcome to Monday and to a new week. I recommend naming your next dog “Doug” and changing the sign to read, “Beware of the Doug.”

If there’s anything that illustrates the incompetence of Joe Biden and this administration, it’s the withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban have taken over the Presidential Palace in Kabul. President Ashraf Ghani fled Afghanistan. U.S. troops flew helicopters to our embassy in Kabul to evacuate diplomats as the Taliban stormed the building, looking eerily like a replay of the fall of Saigon in 1975.

World leaders are roundly condemning Resident Biden who, even when he had all his faculties accounted for, wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box.

World leaders are speaking out about their disappointment with the security situation in Afghanistan, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson going so far as to pin the blame on President Joe Biden and the United States.

Johnson said it was “fair to say the US decision to pull out has accelerated things, but this has in many ways been a chronicle of an event foretold,” but urged western leaders to work together to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a “breeding ground for terrorism.”

Also to blame are our woke Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and super-woke Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, “the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, and the principal military advisor to the President, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Council.” But at least they have all the right opinions and are chasing the real threats to democracy: normal Americans.

Mike Pence piled on.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also blasted the Biden team for poor execution and strategy, but pointed out what our greatest concern has to be: a return to a rising Islamic terrorism.

Pompeo said the true concern in Afghanistan is not the Taliban per se. The primary fear is a return of Taliban rule will return Afghanistan to being a likely “hotbed” for Al Qaeda and ISIS, as it was before September 11, 2001.

Of course, the Left is covering for Biden, blaming their favorite scapegoat, President Trump, who called on Biden to resign.

“It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the Border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” the former president wrote in a statement.

We can debate whether Trump’s Afghanistan exit plan would’ve worked or not, but just like Covid-19 and the “plan” Biden had to take care of it, his administration inherited the Afghanistan mess and it’s his debacle, not Bush’s, not Obama’s, not Trump’s. His.

And he and his team are completely out of their depth.

The worst of it is the 20 years and billions of dollars we spent in that country doing what, exactly? While I was ready to have us out of there long ago we stayed and stayed and stayed to promote what — democracy? We did a terrible job and all that blood and treasure has gone for naught. We’ve got nothing to show for it.

What a waste of time, treasure and life, and how demoralizing for the veterans of Afghanistan.

With U.S. troops having left Afghanistan after nearly two decades of fighting in the region, many veterans who served in combat deployments are reportedly struggling with poor mental health and struggling to make sense of it all as they watch the Taliban retake the country.

Biden’s failure in Afghanistan is of a piece with his failures everywhere else his team intervenes. They don’t care. This tweet sums up our country since Joey Chocolate Chip has been in office.

But No Moar Mean TweetsTM and a return to normal!

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Daily Broadside | Trump is More Than a Former President

Daily Verse | Proverbs 14:34
Righteousness exalts a nation,
but sin is a disgrace to any people.

Thursday and I’ve been thinking about something I wrote a few days ago:

Waving a “Trump 2020” flag wasn’t stunning or brave. But it was a step of activism and I was able to express my opposition to the fraudulent Biden administration. Not because I want Trump in office (although I do) but because it’s an act of defiance against the ruling junta.

There’s a lot that’s unconventional about Donald J. Trump. He’s got zero verbal discipline, for starters. He just goes with whatever he’s thinking and lets it fly without considering that a leader of the free world might better off be judicious with his words. On the other hand, you know exactly where he stands on the topic he’s discussing.

“Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.”
— Proverbs 17:28

He’s brutal with the personalized pejorative. We all know them: Lyin’ Ted, Sleepy Joe, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Little Marco, Cryin’ Chuck and Shifty Schiff, to name a few. I confess to having enjoyed them applied to those I consider enemies of the republic, like Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff, but it really bugged me that he tagged Ted Cruz as a liar during the primaries without anything to back it up. But even I have to admit — inventing nicknames for those he wanted to beat was an effective tactic, taken right from the pages of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “#13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize, and polarize it.”

From The Last Refuge (aka The Conservative Treehouse):
“The raw and unfiltered President Trump is the best Trump. President Trump endorses Mo Brooks for the Alabama Senate seat; and smacks Mitch McConnell and his DeceptiCon crony Richard Shelby in the process.”

Trump is also one of the biggest narcissists I can think of. He boasts about himself and what he’s accomplished, often polishing his accomplishments with superlatives like “tremendous,” “biggest,” “best,” “amazing” and “terrific.” In 2013 he wrote on Facebook, “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser — having a healthy ego, or high opinion of yourself, is a real positive in life!” The flip side is that he has accomplished some incredible things both in private and public life and, when he talks of them, he’s being factual. But he doesn’t demonstrate humility in leadership.

“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”
— Proverbs 16:18

Trump is pugnacious and always ready for a fight. I’m not sure I think this is necessarily a drawback. If you believe, as I do, that we are being forced into a defensive posture in the cultural Marxist’s war on the United States, then we need people who are willing to fight. As I’ve written before, Trump reminds me of what Mr. Lincoln said of Ulysses S. Grant: “I can’t spare this man. He fights!”

I say all of this because, while I say I want Trump in office, the truth is that, for me, Trump is a symbol of opposition to the corruptocrats in Washington, D.C. He was everything they aren’t: willing to put the American people’s interests before the interests of the ruling class. Domestically he brought businesses back from overseas, made us energy independent, presided over one of the hottest economies in our history with record employment, including for minorities, and a stock market on fire. Internationally, he pulled us out of the wealth-transfer grift, the Paris Climate Accords, he put Iran on notice, put the screws to China and brokered the Abraham Accords in the Middle East. He did all of this in one term and was still going strong when the not-made-in-a-Chinese-lab (wink wink) WuFlu was unleashed by the CCP.

I’d much rather have Donald J. Trump in the White House than the fraudulent dementia patient who sleeps in the People’s House these days. Trump’s not your typical politician, he gets things done, his heart is (mostly) in the right place, and he genuinely loves this country. I am deeply aggravated by the power the unelected bureaucracy has over us and the astonishing depths of foul play they engaged in (with no one — no one! — paying any price for the illegal things they did).

I support Trump for the simple reason that he symbolizes resistance to the State; that he stands for me and millions of other Normal Americans; that his ongoing presence reminds the Deep State and the Techopolies of their corruption; and that Trump may be one of the only men capable of standing up to the ruling class.

Do I wish that he was more refined? Sure.

But I’ll take the unrefined Trump any day over a man who leads with lies and wants to install a permanent socialist regime in the country that was once (and for many, still is — see Cuba) the greatest symbol of freedom in the world.

Keep America Great, America.