21 September 2020

Eight years ago, in this blog, I argued for the election of Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. I was wrong about Mitt and about Mitt's running mate, Paul Ryan, who said mostly the right things, but didn't really mean what they said and didn't fight to win. (Mitt did well enough in his first debate, but that was about it.)

I was right about Barack, who won and, in his second term as president, continued to apologize for America, worsened a bad situation in the mideast, and further compounded the nation's suicidal drift towards socialism, lack of military preparedness, and fiscal insolvency. (Not to mention that, towards the end of his second term, Obama apparently employed politicized elements of the federal bureauocracy to launch an effort to undermine the election of, and subsequently to bring down the administration of, his eventual successor, Donald Trump ... which effort continues today as a dominant preoccupation of the Democrat Party ... even as they simultaneously try to cover up this effort!)

In my labor day blog, four years ago, I lamented the state of the republic and suggested that Trump, despite his combative style (and, in part, because of this style) represented the nation's last chance to reverse course and return to the constitutional and historically successful American vision of its founding fathers.

Much to the amazement of the political class and their sycophants in the media, Trump won a substantial victory in the 2016 election. Although the losing candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, promptly conceded this election, the Democrat Party (including Ms. Clinton) has basically never truly recognized Mr. Trump as their president. Instead, they have fomented a series of absurd hoaxes designed to remove him from office (claiming, in particular, that he colluded with Vladimir Putin during the 2016 campaign and that, after his election, he engaged an impeachable phone call to the president of the Ukraine). Not only has President Trump not had a honeymoon, he has not had a moment's rest. How fortunate has the Republican Party been to have had a leader over the past four years who has the energy, stamina, and street smarts to weather such an assault!

So how successful was Donald Trump's first term? And does he deserve to be re-elected for a second term this coming November?

I think that Lou Dobbs has got it about right. Whether you like him or not, Donald Trump's first term as president has been a spectacular success. He is already an Historic President, and, despite the very significant (and very ugly) opposition that has obstructed his first term, he has a chance to be a Great President, perhaps America's Greatest President. But he needs to win (and win big) in November, in order to complete his reforms and take his rightful place on Mount Rushmore.

Just look at what he has accomplished:

Internationally, he has proceeded and is proceeding on many fronts. He has called attention to and is addressing:
1) China's increasingly aggressive posture, economic and military;
2) the rogue behaviors of North Korea and Iran;
3) our trade inbalance with China and with other nations;
4) the folly of the proposed and now defunct TPP;
5) a new trade deal with China;
6) a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico, replacing NAFTA;
7) other new trade deals, already negotiated or being negotiated;
8) our lack of a secure southern border and the resulting influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America;
9) the necessity for a southern wall to secure this border and stem this influx;
10) the recognition that unwanted immigrants take jobs from American workers and vote illegally, biasing our electoral process;
11) the false promise of and adverse consequences to our economy and to our national security of globalism and the recognition that globalism is bad for American industry and takes jobs away from American workers;
12) the consequent imperative that we abandon globalism and remain a sovereign nation, that we make deals that are good for America and reject deals that are not good for America, and that we become strategically independent and rebuild our industrial base;
13) the attendant need to become and remain energy independent (Politicians have been talking about this need for decades. Trump has actually done something about it.) ;
14) the threat posed by the ISIS caliphate and by other terrorist groups and personalities (Baghdadi and Soleimani, no longer among them);
15) a new smart approach to dealing with such threats, using technology and intelligence to attack the command chain from above rather than from below;
16) the folly of the never ratified and now defunct nuclear deal between Iran and the previous administration;
17) the clear failure of the nation's decades-long nation-building efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other middle eastern states (These efforts may have been worth a try, but they are not working, so it's time to declare an end to them);
18) in recognition of the nation's newly established energy independence, the loss of a principal strategic justification for putting American lives at risk in the mideast;
19) the need, nonetheless, to remain a significant player in the region in order to protect our strategic interests, in particular to promote the nomalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors (as, for example, in the recent agreement between Israel and the UAE), to provide an effective check on Iran's expansionist and nuclear ambitions, and to support our allies in the region (in particular, the Israelis and the Saudis);

(Note that Mr. Trump has recently received two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, one for brokering the opening of diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE, the second for brokering an economic settlement between Serbia and Kosovo.)

Domestically, Mr. Trump has also addressed or is addressing:
1) revising the tax code to substantially lower tax rates and stimulate economic growth;
2) revoking many of the previous administration's regulations inhibiting economic growth;
3) increasing GDP (~ 3%);
4) achieving record setting reductions in the level of unemployment among minorities (blacks, hispanics, and Asians);
5) achieving the lowest rate of women's unemployment in 65 years;
6) significantly increasing wages for American workers;
7) significantly increasing consumer confidence;
8) lifting 4.6 million Americans off of food stamps;
9) adding 284,000 new manufacturing jobs in 2018, most since 1997;
10) approving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines to stimulate the nation's energy production;
11) achieving American energy independence, an important element of our national security;
12) overseeing the nation's response to the coronavirus pandemic;
13) shutting down air travel to and from China and Europe to slow the spread of this virus to the USA (despite near universal opposition to this shutdown);
14) coordinating the coronavirus response with the nation's governors and making sure that ventilators and hospital beds were available to all that needed them;
15) spurring the rapid production of Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines;
16) recognizing the negative consequences of a nationwide economic shutdown in response to the pandemic and insisting that this response needed to balance health and economic considerations, i.e., the nation's economy needed to return to some semblance of normal as soon as possible;
17) achieving a remarkably rapid V-shaped economic recovery, following the decision to restart the economy;
18) building a wall across our southern border to stem the tide of illegal immigrants and drugs crossing this border;
19) initiating the nomination of several hundred non-activist judges to the judiciary (including two to the supreme court) to counter the previous administration's nomination of activist judges (in order to legislate via the courts);

(Note that the metrics 3) through 9) reflect the state of the economy prior to the shutdown.)

Democrats have criticized the president's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. I don't think there is much to criticize. You have to remember that Covid-19 was/is a novel virus. No one, not even the medical experts, knew/know quite how to deal with it. For the most part, Trump did what any president would do. He listened to the experts at CDC. But he also recognized that 1) to one extent or another, these experts were flying blind and 2) his responsibilities as president extended well beyond medical issues. (The economic health of the nation was also of critical importance.)

Where Trump differed from the experts and made a common-sense decision contrary to their advice, I think he has been largely correct. For example, I think he was correct to shut down air travel from China and Europe, and I think he was correct to fast-track the production of therapeutics and vaccines. I also think he was correct to push the reopening of the economy.

It might be argued that reopening the economy prompted the resurgence of the virus nationally in July and August. Yes, this reopening may have contributed to the resurgence, but I think there is another explanation for this resurgence, which is that it resulted from the spreading of the epidemic to different parts of the country. Initially, the virus bloomed in the northeastern USA. New York and New Jersey peaked and then settled down. Other states had some cases but did not bloom until later, when the virus spread to Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. Those states have now bloomed, causing a second national wave, and are settling down. Note that New York did not have a resurgence. I'm doubting that there will be a significant third wave, as the more populous states have mostly already bloomed.

The USA has been hit hard by Covid-19, and the pandemic has not yet run its course. But I think that Trump has handled the pandemic and its economic consequences about as well as anyone could have. Whatever you may think of him personally, he gets things done, and Covid-19 is just another example of this. The Donald has an extraordinary ability to tackle difficult problems and rapidly find practical solutions.

My support for Donald Trump is not without reservation. A particular concern is that he has yet to explicitly address the deficits and debt that threaten to overwhelm the nation's fiscal solvency. It is not reassuring that, as a private citizen, Mr. Trump several times declared bankruptcy. Moreover, the options for dealing with bankruptcy as a private citizen are not available to the nation as a whole. I am not an economist, so I cannot spell out in detail the likely consequences of national bankruptcy, but I believe that it is safe to say that 1) these consequences will be dire and must be avoided and 2) the further in debt the nation becomes, the more difficult it is to gain control of this debt.

There is no doubt that rebuilding the economy is an essential element in addressing the debt (because it increases the revenue that can be applied to paying off this debt), and Mr. Trump has shown that, among his many talents, he knows how to rebuild an economy. Moreover, he will enter his second term with rebuilding the economy high on his list of priorities. But to what extent will rebuilding the economy ease the debt crisis? What other measures are required? Mr. Trump has yet to enunciate an explicit plan for dealing with deficits and debt. I will be greatly disappointed if he does not address this issue during his second term. Presidents cannot continue to kick this issue down the road to succeeding administrations. At some point, we will lose fiscal control of our country.

Most complaints about Donald Trump are in reference to his style. In his former life, he was a successful New York City businessman. I think you don't become successful in New York City without being competent, aggressive, and confident. And you don't run for president without having a very positive self-image and a willingness to promote this self-image. These are perhaps immodest traits. But they are traits that, in combination with other traits, less often commented upon, make him a very effective president.

It is claimed that Mr. Trump lies routinely. I don't think so. He is, after all, a salesman, and you don't sell something without making a positive case for it. So, yes he engages in hyperbole. For example, he claims the economy that he engineered prior to the pandemic was the "best ever." Putting aside the question of how you measure an economy in order to compare it with other economies, (the answer to which is somewhat arbitrary, as there are many metrics that might enter into this comparison), one would have to say that, whether or not Trump's economy was the "best ever" in some absolute sense, it was undoubtedly "awfully good." And that's the kind of translation that should apply when any salesman touts his product as the "best ever."

So as a lie, this kind of hyperbole simply does not compare with Obama's lie during his speech before the DNC, one of many lies, that Trump "did not take the pandemic seriously," or with Biden's lie, one of many lies, that Trump is causing the current riots in Democrat cities. Democrats routinely turn the truth upside down and get away with it because the media also lies and is on their side. They also routinely falsely project their behavior onto Republicans (falsely accuse Republicans of engaging in behavior that they themselves are engaging).

Donald Trump is not a polished wordsmith and is repetitious, but he communicates well, whether addressing a rally, answering questions at a press conference, or speaking off the cuff. He is quick witted, direct, and transparent. No one leaves a Trunp rally, not knowing where he stands on an issue. While he is prone to hyperbole, he is not underhanded or deceitful. He does not say one thing and do another. He does not deliberately make claims that he knows to be untrue. He can be persuaded and will alter course when persuaded, but he will not back down if he thinks he is correct about an issue. He fights back. He works very hard, and he keeps his promises.

As a first time politician, Trump has done very well. He clearly recognizes that you can't govern unless you win and that demographic trends do not favor the Republican Party. Early on, he engaged a serious (and thus far successful) effort to win significant support among blacks and working-class Americans, both traditionally part of the Democrat base. And he has done so without compromising fundamental Republican tenets. While it may be true that globalist Democrats have countered this theft by robbing Republicans of a portion of their traditional base within the business community (whose CEOs unfortunately prosper in a globalist economy), Trump's current populist base of middle-class and working-class Americans (including a significant portion of blacks and hispanics), when fully mobilized, is ultimately a winning coalition.

Having failed repeated attempts to cancel his presidency during his first term, Democrats are now desperate to prevent Trump's reelection this coming November. What is astonishing is the campaign strategy that they are pursuing in order to achieve this end. As would be expected, this Democrat strategy strongly condemns Mr. Trump and his policies. But it also explicitly condemns his very sizeable, very loyal, and very American base, which it falsely labels as racist and white supremacist. And it accompanies this condemnation by supporting a host of anti-American and anti-constitutional causes (Antifa, Black Lives Matter, rioting and looting in the streets of American cities, the defunding of police, the censorship of conservative speech, the termination of individual gun rights, and more). As empty headed and destructive of American values as these causes are, and as clear as the Democrat motivation in supporting these causes is to the American electorate, you would think that Democrats were campaigning for the reelection of Donald Trump.

And what exactly does the Democrat Party offer the American electorate?

There are the usual promises of new entitlements (medicare for all, a free college education). Never mind that nothing is ever free and that the nation's indebtedness is already at a critical level. And there's the termination of America's newly-established and hard-won carbon-based energy independence, so important for our national security. That's coupled with a forced transition to green energy via the Green New Deal, which nobody can take seriously because the bottom line is so wildly beyond what is fiscally possible. And never mind that wind turbines and solar panels cannot begin to meet the energy demands of the nation and that the underlying Global-Warming justification for this policy provides an unacceptable basis for such a radical and costly policy.

But what the Democrat Party offers, above all else, is a continued drift leftwards, which drift has reached its own point of no return. Towards top-down centralized control, socialism, and beyond. Towards a system in which your rights as an individual have been cancelled for the supposed greater good of society as a whole. Towards a Utopian system that is the polar opposite of the practical and successful political system that our founders created, which system values the individual and indiviual freedom above all else.

Over the last half century and more, in preparation for this Utopian transformation, Democrats have focussed their attention on gaining control of America's levers of power. Very slowly, they have succeeded in infiltrating and taking control of the nation's power centers (academia, the media, the entertainment industry, the government beaurocracy, the courts, and, more recently, social media and Big Tech). The left wants to change the system. Normally that would be accomplished by amending the constitution. Procedures for amending the constitiution are spelled out in this constitution. These procedures are burdensome, but not prohibitive. Motions to amend the constitution have succeeded several times in the past. The current situation, however, is different. The left does not want to amend the constitution; it wants to tear up this constitution and start over.

Absorbed in their own pleasures and ambitions, most Americans have taken little note of these developments. It's time they woke up. They are in danger of losing their country. Make no mistake, the left's wish list is toxic to the American Republic. Like it or not, we are witnessing a political war for the soul of the country. What those currently in charge of the Democrat Party want for the country is incompatible with the American constitution and with American governance over the past two and a half centuries. If this Democrat cabal is allowed to take power in November, you can say goodbye to the America of our founders, goodbye to American prosperity, and goodbye to the quaint notion that, in America, you control your own life.

The Democrat leadership has long recognized this undeclared political war and is employing an aggressive no-holds-barred "scorched-earth" strategy to prosecute it. No accommodation or cooperation with the other side. (That would be a victory for them.) Engage in endless criticism of your opponent. (It doesn't have to be true. It just needs to be loud. Repeat it often enough and people will believe it.) Take advantage of every opportunity to create chaos and confusion, to obscure your tactical objectives and to make life difficult for your opponent. Use proxies to accomplish your dirty work. Find a way to excuse this dirty work and to excuse your support for these proxies. Always spin things to your advantage. The truth doesn't matter. What matters is what people believe to be true.

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the American economy and Donald Trump were riding high and Democrats were desperate to find an issue to carry them through to the coming November election. Along came the pandemic and the subsequent economic lockdown. The Democrat leadership was ecstatic. Never mind that these developments posed a very serious threat to the nation's health, both medical and economic. They now had several issues that they could exploit. The longer they could delay and prolong the nation's response to the pandemic and to its economic consequences, the more chaos and confusion they could sow, the better their chances in November!

The pandemic has been devastating. Over 200,000 Americans have currently died from the coronavirus (typically older citizens with other contributing illnesses). We are currently in the eigth month of this pandemic. We have seen an initial surge in New York and in other northeastern states and are currently on the downside of a second more intense surge across the southern US from Florida to California. More recently, this downside appears to have plateaued, and it is not clear what to expect next. But effective therapeutics and vaccines are projected for later this year, so there is hope that, regardless of where the pandemic wants to take us, we can finally get it under control.

The lockdown has also been devastating. Some 20 million people lost their jobs during this lockdown. The DOW, which had skirted 30,000 prior to the pandemic, responded by rapidly (over a month) dropping to a level of 18,500. But, as devastating as the economic lockdown has been, the recovery (over six months) from this lockdown has also been robust. (The DOW is already back to 28,000.) Mr. Trump predicted a V-shaped recovery, and it has been V-shaped (an asymmetric V). Mr. Trump continues to impress with his economic predictions. (Could it be that a practical businessman makes a very good president? Or is it just Donald Trump?)

As previously discussed, the Democrat leadership has seized upon the coronavirus pandemic to attack the president for his handling of the resulting crisis. But that is, by no means, the full extent of their response. We next review other aspects of this response.

To begin, Democrat governors and mayors have prolonged the nation's recovery from the economic consequences of the lockdown by opposing a timely reopening of the economy and dragging their feet on reopening their own particular jurisdictions. (Yes, such decisions are their responsibility, but that does not mean they have made the proper decisions, and it does not mean that these decisions were not influenced by political considerations. Indeed, these decisions appear to have been largely political.)

The Democrat leadership in the house is insisting on larding the second coronavirus relief bill with a massive fiscal bailout of states whose lack of fiscal discipline has resulted in massive debt, unrelated to the pandemic. It's not enough that the pandemic has already increased the nation's indebtedness by several $trillion; they want to add another $trillion just to cover this Democrat profligacy. Meanwhile those unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic are not receiving relief. (I am personally appalled that both sides seem so willing to incur such massive levels of additional federal debt, whatever the justification.)

In late May, in Minneapolis, the arrest of George Floyd by police resulted in his death. Videos from the scene of the arrest suggest that physical pressure applied to Floyd's neck by an arresting officer's knee may have caused this death, but a more recent autopsy report found substantial levels of fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd's bloodstream. The resolution of this case awaits the trial of the arresting officer.

Democrats have seized upon Floyd's death and its early explanation to unleash one of their favorite charges, systemic racial injustice at the hands of police. Not only is this charge unproven (because even if the Floyd verdict finds the arresting officer guilty of murder, it is only one such case), this charge is inflammatory. And that is precisely why Democrats have unleashed it. They want to stir things up, to create chaos and confusion, because they think that helps them in November.

And, sure enough, Democrats have since sown significant chaos and confusion. Acting through their proxies (Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other groups), they have fostered three months of protests, riots, looting, burning and destruction of vehicles and small businesses, and tearing down of historical monuments, in America's Democrat-controlled cities. You may not be fully aware of the scale and ugliness of these actions because the media, which is largely an advocate for the Democrat Party, simply refuses to report them.

The Democrats have lost control of these protests/riots. They are primarily focussed on the 2020 campaign. Their proxies, the ones doing the looting and rioting, not so much. Many rioters appear to be motivated by more crass impulses. They simply want to take advantage of an opportunity to raise hell and enrich themselves.

The effectiveness of the riots has been greatly enhanced by the decision of some Democrat governors and mayors to order state and local police to stand down (to not enforce the law). How they think this will help the situation is unclear. What is clear is that this order in no way discourages rioters and looters from rioting and looting.

Some Democrat-run jurisdictions have gone so far as to advocate defunding the police. If asking police to stand down is a good idea, I suppose there is no reason to pay them. But it's not a good idea to ask them to stand down. And it's not a good idea to defund (cancel) the police. They are needed to enforce the law and keep order. As long as people break the law, police need to there to enforce it. Cancelling the police only creates more lawlessness. If you want to be secure in your home and in your community, you need to have a functioning police.

An example of where police were ordered to stand down is the autonomous "Summer-of-Love" zone that Democrat Mayor, Jenny Durkan, allowed to arise in downtown Seattle. This included a local police precinct that was taken over and occupied by protesters. This zone was in place for several weeks. It ended with the death of a protester. Subsequently, the City Council passed an ordinance rescinding the stand down order, but denying police the use of traditional tools for keeping order (tasers and tear gas). At that point Police Chief Carmen Best had had enough and tendered her resignation. (If you don't support your police, no one is going to want to do the job.)

Portland, Oregon, has been the scene of repeated rioting, burning, and looting, over a period of some three months. Democrat Mayor Ted Wheeler thought he was a friend of the protesters, but they would have none of it and targeted his home residence, forcing him to move to a condominium. Another target was Portland's federal courthouse, under the (federal) jurisdiction of the president. That confrontation ended when Trump sent in federal marshalls to protect the courthouse.

Note that, throughout all of this, the president has been very careful to respect the constitutional prerogatives of governors and mayors. (They are the ones responsible for law and order within their jurisdictions.) Trump has repeatedly reminded governors and mayors of their duty to maintain order in their states and cities and has offered the assistance of the National Guard. On several occasions this offer has been accepted by those in charge, with positive results. But most Democrat governors and mayors, driven by politics and reluctant to acknowledge the violence, have refused this assistance. It would be a shame, if at some point, the president were forced to use the Insurrection Act to preserve law and order within a Democrat jurisdiction. (He has that prerogative.)

Today's Democrat Party is not the party of John Kennedy. Indeed, it is no longer a liberal party or an American party. Its current illiberal left-wing ideology is antithetical to the American system of governance, which system has long fostered freedom, opportunity, and prosperity for the American people and for individual Americans.

Today's leftist Democrats seek to destroy this American system and replace it with a system, the details of which are unclear, but the radical thrust of which is all too clear and is all too clearly catastrophic. They want to embark on a poorly motivated top down fiscal adventure that will rob Americans of their freedom and treasure, and they want to silence anyone that disagrees with this program. It's called the Green New Deal and is based on an hysterical (and wildly expensive) reaction to the unproven hypothesis that the planet is warming significantly and rapidly from the burning of fossil fuels.

The truth is that the Global Warming hypothesis is not settled science. It is an hypothesis. Moreover, the time scale at which Global Warming can be expected to develop makes it difficult to verify this hypothesis in the near term. That means that this hypothesis will remain speculative and cannot provide an acceptable basis for undertaking disruptive and costly measures (such as the Green New Deal) to avoid projected planetary consequences. On the other hand, these consequences, if real, can be expected to play out very slowly (over hundreds, if not thousands, of years), giving us plenty of time to adjust to them or, if necessary, to enact countermeasures.

I agree with Democrats that November's election is likely the most consequential in our nation's history. Only they have got it upside down. We are a republic, not a democracy, and it is they, not Donald Trump, who threaten the very foundations of this republic. To this end, as already discussed, they have politicized the nation's bureauocracies, courts, and opinion-making institutions (academia and the media) to gain political power and, in turn, have used this power to further promote their political aims.

The most egregious exploitation of this politicization was/is the ongoing conspiracy to undermine (spy on) the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump and to remove him as president, following the 2016 election. This effort had/has multiple dimensions. First there was the investigation by Bob Mueller of possible Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Mueller's investigative team of Democrat lawyers, many of whom had contributed heavily to the Democrat Party, hoped to find evidence of Republican collusion with Russia during the campaign. Talk about tipping the scales of justice! This investigation consumed $32 million and several years of the nation's attention. It rounded up several Trump associates in middle-of-the-night raids, jailed these associates for minor crimes or crimes unrelated to the campaign, ignored Hillary Clinton's sale of uranium to Russia and her bankrolling of the Steele dossier, and ultimately failed to establish that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. There was clearly never any legitimate reason to have even begun this investigation. Democrats simply controlled the necessary levers of power and used these levers to attack the president.

This effort was followed by the impeachment of Donald Trump for a routine phone call with the Ukrainian president. There was nothing irregular about the call, and house members knew that the senate would not convict the president. Nonetheless, these members used their majority in the house to impeach him. Another wasted effort, bullied into existence by the hate-Trump mob!

Meanwhile several associates of Donald Trump became victims of the politicized DOJ and FBI. One of these was General Michael Flynn, Trump's first choice as National Security Advisor. General Flynn had served in the Obama administration and had made it abundantly clear that he was not a fan of Obama's Iran policy. Democrats did not want him giving advice on national security to the new president. So the FBI arranged an informal interview with Flynn, unrepresented by counsel, in which they laid a perjury trap for him, and they later got him to plead guilty to a charge of perjury.

Enter attorney Sidney Powell, who took over Flynn's defense and got the DOJ to drop its charges against him, this prior to his sentencing for perjury. But a subsequent motion to the sentencing judge, Emmet Sullivan, asking him to follow precedent and conclude the case, was denied, so this case remains unresolved. There's more here, but how much more do we need to know, to understand that the current politicization of the judiciary is a very real problem?

Another associate, Carter Page, became the illegitimate target of a FISA warrant requested by the FBI, this despite the fact that the documentation supporting this request (the Steele dossier) was unverified and known to be highly unreliable. Several FBI Directors and other high level DOJ and FBI operatives are likely implicated in the effort to obtain repeated warrants to spy on Page.

Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed the attorney John Durham to look into these shenanigans. Hopefully, we will soon see some indictments of Obama-era officials, stemming from their involvement. Clearly, we are looking at two tiers of justice, one for those favored by the politicized DOJ, FBI, and judiciary (Democrats), and a second for deplorable Republicans and other ne'er do wells. Democrats skate and are never held accountable for their misdeeds. Republicans are raided in the middle of the night, tricked into committing process crimes, and railroaded into serving undeserved jail terms.

The Democrat Party does not deserve to win the 2020 election. Its platform is a radical nightmare, its presidential candidate is a doddering Trojan horse (if elected, he won't serve), and its no-holds-barred attack on the Trump administration, prior to and in the four years following the 2016 election, is beyond despicable.

The Republican Party, too, has lost its way. Instead of confronting Democrats and fighting the nation's leftward progression, too many Republicans have been willing to accept this progression. Some actively support it and actively oppose their party's president.

The one bright exception to all this insanity is our current president, Donald Trump. He continues to fight hard for America and for middle-class and working-class Americans. You may not like him personally, but you cannot deny that he has been a very competent and effective president, who seeks to preserve America's republican governance more or less as it has existed for well over two centuries. The alternative is to put the inmates in charge of the asylum and allow them to destroy our existing system of governance and replace it with an autocratic system no longer under the control of the Anerican people. Vote Trump/Pence in November!

And while you are at it, vote the straight Republican ticket. Trump needs to have the backing of both houses of congress to further enact his reforms. Yes, some congressional Republicans do not fully support the president, but an overwhelming victory in November will help to bring them back into the fold.

Sorry, Democrats. I think you are in for a rude awakening, this November. It's time for you to regroup. You have been taken down the primrose path by an incompetent and duplicitous Democrat leadership. I know there are many good people among you. America needs a strong and civil two party system. You need to retire your current leadership (much of which is using you to enrich themselves), to restore your faith in America, and to discard identity politics, political correctness, your support for mob violence, your misguided leftist fantasies, and your irrational hatred for Donald Trump. And you need to focus on defining a new path forward for your party, and to work with Republicans to craft bi-partisan common-sense legislation to improve the lives of Americans, as Americans.

Republicans and Independents, Donald Trump needs your support. Support him, and the next four years can be truly historic.

Mr. Trump, thank you for your exceptional service. You are doing a great job, but it will all come to naught if the nation goes bankrupt. You need to develop a plan to bring the debt umder control and keep it under control. If anyone can do it, you can!

I apologize for the length and rambling nature of this blog. We are at a crossroads, and there is an awful lot going on.

Cheers,

Russ