Posts Tagged → Trump
Seriously, Trump vs. Musk?!
Like so many supporters of President Donald Trump, I am unhappy, shocked even, at the unhappy falling out between the president and Elon Musk. Not only is the disagreement about policy, which happens every day in politics and which grown ups take in stride, without fracturing their relationship, because our relationships are more important than being “right” on one policy issue or another, but both men are not showing their best sides.
Why are both men acting like this in public? Because they are both high-T prominent businessmen who have built successful businesses and they are both used to giving orders and being in charge.
But it does not matter why they are publicly fighting with each other. It matters only that they are fighting, because it is personally and professionally bad for each of them, bad for America, bad for the Trump Administration, bad for public morale. Trump looks too easily upset and unappreciative, and Musk looks thin skinned, disloyal, and vindictive. All bad, no upside.
What I would like is for President Trump to say “Elon, I am sorry I lost my temper. You have been an incredible asset to this administration and a good friend to me personally. Thank you for all of the sacrifices you made to start DOGE and get American government back on track to serve The People. Let’s stay in touch.”
And just leave it at that. Showing good, strong character and taking the high road. For the good of America, which President Trump has always done. And let’s be honest: Elon Musk has sacrificed a TON for his work to bring the federal bureaucracy to heel. We all owe Elon a huge thank you for that.
Edit: Today is the 81st anniversary of D-Day, the Allied storming of Nazi Europe. At huge cost and sacrifice, in the cause of freedom. America was the leader. This is true leadership, and the kind of thing that actually matters in life.
South Africa 2025 > racism than South Africa 1985
The South Africa of 2025 is a far more racist, more violent, more evil place than the South Africa of 1985. The Apartheid of South Africa 2025 is much greater, much worse, than the South Africa Apartheid of 1985. The South Africa that we see today is a failed state, a leper among nations, and I do not suggest that I know how it can get better. My role is to simply call it what it is: Racist evil.
Like all inveterate racists, today’s South African “leaders” have to want to get better, they have to want to repent, and they have to actually make substantive policy changes, before they are actually better people with a more representative democratic government. Right now, President Ramaphosa and his many associates are only in the early stage of being confronted about their evil racism, and they are trying to put up a fight. Not that Ramaphosa et al are in denial about their racism, no, they are simply telling us all to talk about something else. At least their racist White predecessors acknowledged their own racism. These current people are just bad liars.
Very well do I recall watching the Super 8 camera footage and nascent video footage of uniformed South African police (of all skin colors) beating black South Africans with rubber truncheons in 1985. My dad and I were watching the evening news on television, and the violent images were highly disturbing. Peaceful, non-violent protestors were being beaten badly, sent to the hospital, so that a racist and race-based government in Praetoria could maintain control. It was awful, about as a bad as any government could be. It motivated me to participate in the construction of our own student “shanty town” in front of Old Main at Penn State, and to hold many demonstrations there.
Those violent images did not stop until several years later, when the Whites-only South African regime stepped down and turned political power over to everyone else who lived in South Africa – black, brown, Asian Indian, Muslim, Hindu, white, Christian, etc. You name it, the entire ethnic and religious melting pot that the original South Africa had attracted to live there from across Africa and Europe and Asia since its founding in the early 1700s.
But then new South African images began to enter the nightly TV news: Black South Africans burning each other alive with gasoline and car tires. Butchering one another with machetes. Dragging one another behind vehicles until only a bundle of bloody rags with some bones and tattered meat remained at the end of the rope. Entire shanty towns burned, with poor mothers and children running pell-mell to escape. Such is the cost of political turmoil, one supposes. Perhaps when democracy and self-rule emerges from this turmoil, everyone involved will step back and call it quits.
Nope.
South Africa may have given up the original Apartheid of roughly 1947-1987, but it has only exchanged it for an Apartheid of Black-on-Brown and Black-on-White oppression. Racial oppression is evil, regardless of who is doing it, and the current South African leaders are a bunch of evil racist bastards, who use butchery, rape, and torture to hold on to political power. Don’t try to explain this away. Evil is evil, racism is racism, oppression is oppression, regardless of who is doing it.
And I think one of the lessons we have learned about the current Apartheid South Africa is that they will tell everyone that their oppression and racism is not oppression and racism. That the images of whites being beaten to death on their farms (which I have seen and will not re-post here), and white women being gang raped (which the perpetrators enjoy filming because they are not held accountable, and they are in fact encouraged by President Ramaphosa) before being be-headed, are not violence.
Today President Trump hosted President Ramaphosa at the White House. Ramaphosa wanted to talk about trade and getting more free money from hard working White American taxpayers, but Trump forced him to sit through about five minutes of horrible video showing Black-on-White political activity and hate speech from South Africa, including white-owned farms being gleefully ransacked by racist assholes. Trump also had some White refugees from South Africa talk about being ethnically cleansed from the land their families had called home for over 300 years. Three hundred years anywhere makes you a native.
And yes, let’s talk about human migration a bit, because that seems to be at the heart of all this Apartheid-reverse-Apartheid stuff going on. Fact is, humans migrate across this planet. They all do.
Asians especially have migrated a lot to then-empty lands, occupied them, called them home. Blacks have migrated to Europe in huge masses, seeking economic opportunity unavailable in their home sh*thole countries run into the ground by racist people like Ramaphosa. Whites have migrated out of Europe, Arabs and Asians have violently migrated into Europe over the past thousand years (Ghengis Khan, the Ottoman Turks, the Muslim Arabs).
There has been a non-stop human migration around the planet, but when white Europeans do it, it is oddly decried as Colonialism. Even when the white Europeans founded incrediblly developed, wealthy nations like South Africa, which in turn attracted even more human migration, because of the unprecedented opportunity in the region, and which formed the basis for the modern day Apartheid South Africa that is now run by people like Ramaphosa, corruptly lapping up the last dregs of civilized development and wealth that remain, and creating none to replace what is taken.
Yes, white refugees from South Africa are a reality that breaks the racist narrative that only White people can be racist. Fact is, everyone can be racist – Blacks, Browns, Whites, Yellows, Reds, and all shades in between. Everyone of all skin colors can hog power, and use it unjustly. We are seeing these simple truths with Hamas and Hizb’alla, with the race-mocking Ramaphosa, and with the poorly mis-named International Court of Injustice and Official Discrimination that has sought to finish what master racist Adolph Hitler tried against the Jews.
Only here in America, it appears, do we have an opportunity to create a non-racial society, a racially blind society, where the quality of your character is the sole basis for judgment and measure. I am proud of President Trump for starting a conversation about racism that is looooooong overdue. The fact that the South Africa of 2025 is much worse than the South Africa of 1985 – more racist, more Apartheid-y, more cruel and violent, shows how much work needs to be done. Ramaphosa is a useful foil.
I am looking forward to the honest discussion about it, and in the meantime to helping the refugees from today’s racist South African Apartheid.
Trump storms the Middle East
Awful lot of hand-wringing and anxiety over President Trump’s un-orthodox approach to the Middle East this week. Understandably. A lot is at risk if the president fails, and he is jumping head-first into a region that is already steeped in failure.
From the Sunna-Shia conflict that most recently showed up in Syria, where Sunni jihadists massacred thousands of Alawite (Shi’ite/Shia) men, women, and children, to the perilous position of all minorities (Jews, Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Coptic Christians) in a now overwhelmingly violent Islamic area, it just seems like the Middle East is a gigantic minefield where no matter where a person steps, the likelihood is high that an explosion will follow.
Into this minefield runs head-first our president, Donald Trump. His approach is probably completely different than anything done before by the West. It appears that Trump is forcefully grabbing everyone there into one gigantic bear hug, full of economic prosperity and political legitimacy. So long as they all participate on his terms.
Judging by the openly amazed smiles of the Saudi, Qatari, and Syrian leaders, as they stand shoulder to shoulder with President Trump, they are indeed surprised and also willing to be hugged. It remains to be seen if they truly understand what Trump wants from them, or if they think they can outwit him and get what they want, without having to give.
Yes, there is real risk with Trump’s approach, but if nothing is risked, nothing is gained. Qatar is funding a great deal of the pro-terrorism unrest on American college campuses right now, as Qatar has also been the source of most Sunni-oriented terrorism around the planet. Home to Islamic propaganda outlet Al-Jazeera and Hamas leaders living in luxury, Qatar has never been a huge friend of the West, but rather an antagonist who has used the West’s openness against it. So, accepting an airplane from Qatar to serve as a government-owned makeshift Air Force One, as Trump has done, and standing with the emir of Qatar as chums, has blurry optics, let alone the probability the plane is loaded with Chinese spying devices that will undermine American security.
But…what if Qatar can be turned from its evil ways? Huuuuge win for world peace!
And Trump trusts American security personnel to sweep the Qatari Trojan Horse gift plane for spy devices, of course, and any that are found will probably be held quietly in reserve, in the event that Trump needs to reverse course with Qatar. Which is a real possibility, as Trump’s tariff negotiations have revealed: Today you are in like flint, tomorrow you are out in the cold, but the following day you are allowed back in the house because you did the right thing. Thus far, Trump has masterfully played tariff and international trade policy like a maestro conducting a symphony orchestra.
Let’s hope Trump can do the same magic in the Middle East, because recognizing as legitimate the bloodthirsty, murderous jihadis in Syria (who most recently axe murdered a bunch of Druze), and negotiating a doomed-from-the-start nuclear deal with ever-lying Iran, carries enormous risk, as does having all kinds of separate American relationships with the Saudis et al that do not include Israel. If Israel sees Iran gearing up for nuclear blackmail or all-out war, then Israel will have no choice but to strike hard.
So, it appears that suddenly Israel is the wild card here, not the evil nuke-happy Iran or jihadist Syria or terrorism-enabling Qatar. And yet, everyone knows Trump is already in like flint with Israel….
What a strange pattern we have here, as President Trump weaves a creative new web to capture and finally hold stable the most difficult and unstable region on the planet. Let’s hope he is successful, and that a Pax Trumpica can finally happen.
Easy to fix FBI-DOJ staffing mis-steps
Both the DOJ and the FBI have made strange choices in staffing since the new administration took office on January 20th. Yes, there have been some firings, but nothing like the cleaning house that was promised because it is so badly needed.
Probably 80% of the sitting FBI and DOJ employees, and probably the same holds true for DHS, as well, are far-left America hating lawless political partisans. There is no room, no place for any employee with this kind of attitude in our federal government, much less in our law enforcement branches. When your staff are stacked against you and everything you desire to achieve, then you must clear them out. Fire them, re-assign them, get them out of the way. Otherwise, you will fail, because these people will undermine you at every step.
In their place you (you being the erstwhile senior manager/ executive of the FBI-DOJ-DHS i.e. Kash Patel and Pam Bondi) must hire completely new replacements, who are loyal to the American Constitution. Loyal to the rule of law, not to political parties. Who see the American people as the sheep they are guarding, not the sheep they are eating.
Yesterday the elevation of a deep insider FBI agent named Jensen raised an internet ruckus. Jensen is infamous for being the person who led the charge against Americans he designated as “domestic terrorists”: Soccer moms concerned about their kids’ education in public schools, religious Catholics, gun owners, religious Protestants, registered Republicans, etc. In other words, Jensen clearly does not fit into the Trump Administration, or any administration dedicated to the rule of law, and yet…he was just promoted to run the FBI Washington DC Field Office.
Why are the federal law enforcement agencies not hiring temporary replacements from the ranks of retired state investigators from places like Oklahoma, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Missouri, North Dakota or from retired military criminal investigators? These are all highly experienced criminal investigators from places that can be ideologically trusted more than others. If they simply took over the FBI-DOJ-DHS for a few years while new and superior recruits were brought on line, a great deal of the holdover damage would be erased.
If you want to drain the DC Swamp, this is how you would do it. But in some ways, it looks like the DC Swamp just took over the DOJ and FBI.
Fair trade, not free trade
When I ran for Congress (at that time the PA 10th inhabited by Democrat Tim Holden, which included about all of Schuylkill County and parts or all of Berks, Lebanon, Dauphin and Perry counties) in 2009-2010, I remembered and repeated a phrase from my long ago 1980s political activism days in Centre County – Fair trade, not free trade.
Despite being fifteen years ago, this phrase caught on with our voter audiences. They really liked it, and many voters I met while campaigning had personal stories about their family’s various jobs in then-shuttered factories. And I was reminded of watching a high tech glass and industrial mirror factory close up shop in State College, PA, around 2000. It was the old Corning branch there on the Benner Pike. Literally sat there and watched the workers carefully, lovingly package up their machinery for its trip to the “new” factory in China. Some of the workers went over to train their Chinese counterparts, before returning to State College without a job.
Funny thing that President Trump’s tariff policy amounts to this exact summation of the more or less running bank account that every responsible nation keeps with all other trading partners. The fact that only most nations are tariffing American made goods at high rates, while enjoying very low tariffs on their products imported into America, is a sign of what ails us Americans: We think we can give give and give away everything we have, and we are too big to fail from it all. Which is nonsense.
Interestingly, we see the same argument about illegal immigration and endless government spending: No limits, America must take and absorb all of the costs that the world places on us…Everything is “free free free” except, of course, it isn’t free. These policies come with huge costs to Americans.
Free trade, as in giving away our trade imbalances for free, which enriches everyone else and impoverishes Americans, is a sign that our policy makers and indeed our own voters falsely believed that America is such a huge fountain of bounty and wealth that it can endlessly sustain this. What a silly and dangerous fantasy.
Sending our factory jobs, indeed our actual factories with all of their equipment and machinery, abroad to be re-born in China, Vietnam, India and elsewhere was nuts. It sent our means of production, our workers, our jobs, and our money out of America. All America got in return was maybe cheaper and junkier versions of what we had once made here, at a high quality. And yet this “free trade” thing picked up steam as big American corporations and their pet politicians began to take on a global view of trade. No longer were companies based in Delaware “American.” Rather, many of these companies’ senior leaders considered them to be global citizens that just happened to find a perch in America.
This off-shoring of everything America makes, grows, produces went on unchecked for a good thirty years, until everyone began to notice the downside, the cost. Just about every East Coast and Mid West state now has its own “rust belt” area. Areas filled with hulking, empty brick buildings and over-grown parking lots next to rivers and highways tell the sad tale of America’s economic downfall, and our nearing ruin.
Sure, we had a lot of government spending in the past twenty years to temporarily make up for the job losses, the depressed wages, the looming home foreclosures. But that spending is unsustainable. It is “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” It is simply printing Dollars for the sake of printing them. Less and less stands behind them. And yet someone standing way back there in the background was making a ton of money off of this screwy policy, while the rest of us Americans lost from it.
And so now we have a bold and very natural pro-America policy, the equalization of tariffs, making trade fair, not free, and the whole world is suddenly going upside down. My 401(k)! My dog’s retirement account! Oh my God, what will happen?
Folks, relax. Do a bong hit or have a glass of red wine. Our American world is not only not going to end, it is going to return to our glory days. Yes, it takes time, it will take time, so don’t be a bunch of prissy little Gen Z weenies demanding immediate gratification. America is worth fighting for, and these dueling tariffs are the opening salvo. Round One.
You know what is kind of oddly funny about that Fair trade, not free trade slogan? As apt as it is right now, I got that from some 1980s Centre County union workers, which trade or factory or coal mine they were in, I no longer recall. But they were right. And Trump is right. And we Americans are all aligned together on this to Make America’s Economy Great Again…
All together now, breeeaaathe…
No pain, no gain
The old gym motto “No Pain, No Gain” applies to the much-needed economic shakeup the Trump Administration is bringing to the entire planet. If we Americans do not put up with a little temporary pain and necessary readjustment now, for our own good, then we will enjoy no huge gain later on. It takes work to then earn and enjoy resulting benefits.
President Trump’s promise to American citizens was that he would return us to glory days, a golden age, which we richly deserve. Trump is correct that America has been the world’s piggy bank for decades, due to the huge tariff and trade imbalance. We should add that being the world’s piggy bank is an unsustainable and unfair arrangement paid for by the long forgotten American taxpayers, who see very few benefits in return for handing over their hard-earned cash to every Tom, Dick and Harry the American bureaucracy could dream up.
As we have learned over the past eight weeks from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), trillions of American taxpayer dollars have been illegally mis-spent on millions of dubious schemes, ideas, organizations, and fantasies, many of which directly aimed at harming the United States. American taxpayers have been funding their own sworn enemies through agencies like USAID, DHS, EPA, HHS, and the Department of Education.
In other words, domestic enemies here in America were running the federal government, and using our tax money to damage and destroy America. This egregious situation is only in addition to the lopsided international tariff arrangement that has grown out of control since about 1920.
The tariff situation is egregious by itself. All kinds of countries we Americans think of as “allies” have had heavy tariffs placed on importing American food and manufactured products, including milk and dairy, steel, etc. Many of these countries’ governments paid what minimal tariffs that the USA had in turn on products being imported into America, in effect buoying up their own private businesses.
America did not do that for our own businesses, and in fact America has had very low to no tariffs on most imports. And now after essentially handing over our own wealth and manufacturing sectors to foreigners for decades, we are tired of being the economic piggy bank or punching bag or host body for all of these takey-takey people around the world. It is hard to understand why Americans, particularly working and taxpaying Americans, support this large imbalance and wealth transfer from America to the world.
And yet, as we see, plenty of working Americans are arguing against tariff parity, and are setting fire to Tesla cars and dealerships as a form of protest against DOGE finding and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money. Do you have to be mentally ill to belong to that one political party? Do you have to be self destructive to be a voting member of that one political party?
Do you have to hate America, Americans, the rule of law, and everything great about America to belong to that one political party?
Why would any normal American belong to that one political party?
Just as DOGE is causing Americans to take a long hard look at federal government mismanagement, Trump’s tariff parity is going to cause a shake-up in our international trade relationships, no doubt. It is going to cause some re-arrangements of pricing and products we are used to having easily available to us. For example, cheap Chinese crap on Amazon is probably not going to be as cheap any longer. And yesterday the Princess of Patience and I went to look at a new car for her, and we see how the new tariff parity might effect car prices. We learned that those foreign-brand vehicles already ordered and in the pipeline are not subject to tariffs (our family is positively prejudicial in favor of Toyota vehicles).
Of course, foreign brand vehicles made here in America are not subject to tariffs, either, and many Toyota cars and trucks are made in America.
Long and short of this subject is give these policy changes time to work. Already America is seeing immediate positive responses from many foreign trading partners, who are lowering their own tariffs because they know that their own industries cannot afford to absorb Trump’s tariffs. They will lose their export markets if they lose American buyers. So just be patient, remember that this is all being done for your own good and your own bank account, and know that it will work out well.
Putting up with these changes is like making deposits into your bank account. You might feel like you are missing opportunities to party with your money in the short term, but in the longer term you will be very happy.
Eye for eye, order for order
Unelected over-reaching judges driven by blatant partisan political activism are trying to thwart the will of The People by issuing decisions (“orders”) on Trump Administration activities that are far outside their courts’ constitutionally defined jurisdictions. Something like nearly 100% of these decisions in the past twenty years have been issued against President Trump alone, which shows that Democrat Party judicial tyranny is the same as Democrat Party executive branch tyranny. These people will burn down America’s constitutional norms simply to hold on to power.
Executive branch decisions that are solely the jurisdiction of the executive branch are not up for question or “orders” by the judicial branch. But this elementary separation of powers fact is not stopping these political activists in black robes, and something needs to be done to stop their power grab, to restore balance to the galaxy.
That some people, especially John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, want these outlandish decisions to be adjudicated through the lengthy, time-consumptive appellate process means just one thing: They want to stop President Trump’s agenda from being implemented by any means necessary. No matter how illegal or unconstitutional, they want the judiciary to be the sole arbiter of the judiciary’s own unconstitutional over-reach.
In other words, “We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.” The judiciary is so far mostly siding with itself in hogging more power than the Constitution grants to judges, and is unlikely to stop itself from hogging even more power.
This is not an acceptable way to run the American republic, and some thing or many things must be done to fend it off. Some are talking about impeaching the most rogue, most lawless, most openly partisan of these judges, such as James Boasberg and Beryl Howell. OK, one survey I saw showed a 2:1 margin in favor of impeaching them, so get on with it, US House Speaker Mike Johnson. Impeachment will probably send a good signal, even if conviction and removal in the US Senate is not guaranteed. Impeachment hearings will tie up a judge’s work load and cause it to be re-distributed to other active judges.
Another way to end this radical judiciary’s assault on democracy is to take away their funding, and to then re-organize the courts, and then even more clearly defining their jurisdictions in the reorganization process. All of this is the sole purview of Congress, and while the Republicans have the majority, so should they act. So get on it with it, US House Speaker Mike Johnson, and do your duty.
Another way to respond to these lawless activist judges is to simply ignore their decisions. Issue blunt and stinging rebukes to their overeach, and carry on with executive branch activities as if they had never been involved. This will cause the Democrat Party’s mainstream media outlets to scream that there is a “constitutional crisis,” but again, I think there is sufficient new media firepower to over-ride that dead horse with the response that whatever “crisis” exists is solely due to the judicial branch’s inability to stay in its own constitutional lane.
However, there is a potential hybrid response the Trump Administration can make, that I am advocating here. While I have not seen anyone else write about it, I am certain plenty of politically active people have been thinking it: For every dingbat leftwing anti-America judicial “order”, such as Boasberg demanding that hardened illegal alien criminals – murderers, rapists – be returned to America from where they were legally deported to, the executive branch must issue a commensurate order in response.
For example, President Trump can issue an executive order requiring Judge Boasberg to personally retrieve all the illegal aliens he wants returned to America. With no promise that said wildman judge will be allowed back into America.
Or President Trump can issue an executive order that countermands exactly the precise wording of whatever unconstitutional order Judge Beryl “Howlin Wolf” Howell has issued.
Thus, this whole “crisis” becomes a battle of equal orders, from the rogue judiciary against the executive branch, and from the executive branch back against the power-hogging judiciary. This “eye for an eye” order-for-order response will flesh out the visible constitutional symmetry that President Trump’s administration needs the public to see. No longer will this situation be cast as “The courts have spoken…,” which always goes against the Republican president, but rather, it will be two co-equal branches of government issuing co-equal orders against one another, each order cancelling out the other.
An eye for an eye, an order for an order. And if the judiciary refuses to follow the executive orders, then so shall the executive branch be free to ignore the wild judicial orders, as well. True constitutional parity restored.