Here come The Disrupters.

President-elect Trump is moving a warp speed to fill out his administration.

Top Democrats, the legacy media and most of the permanent Washington bureaucracy are aghast. The reaction of Sidney Blumenthal, a senior advisor to Bill Clinton, is fairly typical. He said in a Wednesday op-ed in The Guardian:

Trump’s cabinet picks are agents of his contempt, rage and vengeance.”

Well, Sid, that’s a bit much don’t you think? But I’ll give you this. Trump’s picks this go-around constitute a clear departure. Missing are the likes of Jim Baker, Bill Barr, Dick Cheney, Jeff Sessions and Josh Bolten – all central casting Washington establishment types – that served in either or both of the last two Republican administrations.

This crowd is different. I’m going to call them “The Disrupters.” Trump is trying to create a quasi-superhero force to turn Washington on its head. And I have news for you, Sidney. The implicit promise in the Trump campaign of such disruption is exactly why he won the election.

The American people have had it with Washington-as-usual.

Is America’s education of its youth better than it was when the Department of Education was formed in 1979? (Don’t answer. It’s a rhetorical question.)

The motto of the Department of Health & Human Services is, “Improving the health, safety and well-being of America.” Are we healthier, safer and more well than when the department was formed in 1980? Another question that answers itself.

Starting under Obama the Department of Justice has transformed itself into something resembling the STASI of East Germany. Do you feel confident that we still have ‘equal justice under the law?’

We can pretty much go department by department and ask similar questions and get similar answers about each.

The Congressional Budget Office reported recently that at least 1,264 federal agencies and bureaus have expired authorizations yet still received a total of $516 billion in funding in fiscal year 2024.

There are 2.2 million civilian federal employees, which makes the executive branch of the United States government the largest civilian employer in the country and among the top three in the world. (Wal-Mart and Amazon are bigger only if you count their overseas employees.) Most of those federal employees were sent home during COVID and most of them have stayed home, despite being ordered by President Biden to return to the office. As a result, according to the Government Accountability Office, 17 of the 24 largest federal agencies use on average only 25 percent of the office space that you and I are paying for.

I have news for Sid Blumethal and his fellow travelers. Cleaning this up (and there’s so much more of it) is what the American people hired Donald Trump to do.

So, I’m onboard with The Disrputers. Their arrival is long overdue. The swamp creatures are going to resist The Disupters with everything they have. Victory is by no means assured.

But Trump’s cabinet lineup this time sends a clear signal that the battle to drain the swamp will be fully joined.

Thank you, Joe.

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This time four years ago I, and most of you who follow this column, were none too happy. We were coming to grips with the realization that Joe Biden had likely just eked out a squeaker of a victory against President Donald Trump in an election that was clouded by COVID-induced voting irregularities.

Though he ran as a “moderate,” I and many like me were convinced – and as it turns out rightly so – that Joe Biden would implement a far-left agenda.

Oh, boy.

But what we couldn’t imagine at the time, given that the smoke hadn’t started clearing, was that Biden’s election might eventually come to be seen as a blessing.

So it was in the days after the election. But by March 25, 2021, just eight and a half weeks after Biden took the oath of office, I, among others, was singing a slightly different tune. Here’s a portion of that week’s column that bore the headline, “The Biden Presidency Will Be Costly – To Democrats.”

All of the perfectly legitimate criticisms of Trump notwithstanding, on his watch wages rose, unemployment fell, order was restored on the border and prosperity flourished. For many traditional Democratic voters – notably blacks and Hispanics – it was their first-ever taste of prosperity.

None of that will be soon forgotten – particularly as Biden policies of higher taxes, open borders and increased regulation take hold and provide a jarring comparison.

Which means that whatever Democrats attain during a Biden presidency in the near term, they will pay for dearly over time.”

That bill came due last week. Thanks to Biden’s victory in 2020, and the administration that ensued, millions of American voters got to see and experience what far-left governance looks and feels like. And they sent a message last week that they aren’t having it.

Nobody sane wants a country with a wide-open border over which a flood of poor, uneducated, social services consuming third world immigrants pours in. Nobody sane wants the concomitant crime, drug trafficking and inevitable importation of incipient terrorism.

Nobody sane thinks that boys who “identify” as girls should compete against actual girls in varsity athletics (after changing clothes in the girl’s locker room).

Nobody sane thinks that men can have babies or that adolescent boys need tampons in their school restrooms.

Ordinary Americans weren’t much impressed when wealthy, liberal, coastal elites condescendingly told them that they are just too unsophisticated to understand the wonders of Bidenomics. That’s a hard sell to people who are having trouble paying for food, gas, and rent.

Put simply, the Biden administration was a real-world clinic in the failures of leftism. So, with a fresh understanding, the heartland of America rejected the radical leftism that hijacked the once semi-sane Democratic Party and chose a Trump 2.0 presidency instead.

If the history of Ronald Reagan’s similar defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980 is any guide, the demographic and political realignments that put Donald Trump back in office will prove durable.

We have Joe Biden’s 2020 victory to thank for that.

Will Democrats learn from Trump’s victory?

So, wide open borders, sky-high grocery prices, rising crime, boys competing against girls in sports (after changing clothes in the girls’ locker room), taxpayer-funded transgender surgery for prison inmates, high gasoline prices, looming government diktats regarding what kind of car you can buy and what kind of stove you can have in your kitchen, and conspicuous fecklessness regarding conflicts in Israel and Ukraine that could mushroom into World War III – don’t all come together to create a formula for winning the presidency.

Who knew?

Let me admit that though I might claim justification for having had them, my reservations regarding the electability of Donald Trump as expressed in this space during the run-up to the primaries proved unfounded. Donald Trump didn’t just beat Kamala Harris, he obliterated her.

But that drubbing isn’t the real story. The real story lies in how that drubbing came about. Donald Trump created a political coalition on the Republican side of the ticket the likes of which the GOP has never seen. And with that coalition behind him, he demolished the far-left radical agenda that hijacked the Democratic Party.

Sure, Trump did well among core conservative voters. But as I noted in my (often roundly criticized) analyses as to why I harbored reservations about a Trump 3.0 candidacy, those conservative voters alone would not have gotten him elected.

What I didn’t see coming last fall, and what propelled Trump’s electoral victory this week, is the fact that in unprecedented proportions, black voters, Hispanic voters, union workers, high school diploma-only working-class voters and just-out-of-college young voters all abandoned their traditional home in the Democratic Party to vote for him.

Democratic Party leadership, together with their media handmaidens, accelerated the alienation of those traditional Democratic base voters via a toxic combination of condescending to them and taking them for granted.

If in 2019 the combined monthly incomes of you and your spouse were sufficient to make ends meet with some left over for luxuries and savings, and if in 2024 you are, financially speaking, now gasping for air, you’re not really in the mood to be told that Bidenomics is working just fine, that massive illegal immigration is just a right-wing talking point, and that you’d understand these things if only you had a top-tier college degree, admission to elite political, media, corporate or show business circles and the concomitant financial ability to afford a home in a gated community at a comfortable remove from the consequences of inflation, illegal immigration, spiking crime and homelessness.

The question now before us is this. Given the shellacking they just got, will Democrats learn anything?

The normal people who make the country work just repudiated the far-left loons and the condescending liberal elites that control the Democratic Party. Will that repudiation give rise to the kind of introspection the party now clearly needs?

Let’s hope so.

A return to a sane, policy-centric contest between Republicans and Democrats – rather than the lunacy we have suffered since 2016 – would be good for Democrats and Republicans alike.

The issue today is the same as it has been.

Here’s a quote. Let’s play “Who said it?”

The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.”

OK, so was it Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign? Was it William F. Buckley in a column at National Review? Or perhaps the redoubtable Dr. Charles Krauthammer on the FOX News Channel. Or was it Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign?

The answer: none of the above.

Though the words certainly resonate in today’s fractious political climate, they were uttered more than 200 years ago by Thomas Jefferson, whose long list of accomplishments includes principal authorship of the Declaration of Independence.

That those words have such resonance more than two centuries later tells us that the basic questions facing societies never really change. Though independence from the tyranny of King George III of Great Britain was won in 1783, and though our Constitution was ratified six years later, the question remains on the table. Are we going to govern ourselves or are we going to abdicate that duty and forfeit that hard-won right in favor of the ministrations of a ruling elite?

That is the question that is on the ballot this coming Tuesday and it transcends Donald Trump’s outsized, and to many, off-putting personality, and it transcends any significance that might be attached to the possibility of electing the first female U.S. president.

One vision of America is that of a nation filled with hard-working, decent people who want the freedom to live their own lives and pursue their own dreams and aspirations, do their part to pay the taxes that are necessary for a limited, but properly functioning government and otherwise order their own lives and dispose of the fruits of their own labors as they, themselves see fit.

The other vision is that of a nation that is overseen by a small cohort of über-educated elites imbued with the power to order our lives down to what and how much we eat, where we live, how we transport ourselves and how we raise our children.

In the last third of the preceding century, the encroachment of that latter vision accelerated in government, academia and our cultural institutions. Those who have gained wealth, power and influence under that governing vision are loath to give it up, even as those in the great American middle class living in the heartland and doing most of the work that keeps the country running, have experienced incremental decline in wealth, power and influence.

Thus, the rabid hatred for Donald Trump, who, rejecting the politesse of Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney, dared to call the elites out. Today’s top Democrats, who bear little resemblance to the FDR and JFK Democrats of previous generations, despise Donald Trump because of the existential threat to their power that he represents.

So, Jefferson was right. The issue today is, indeed, the same as it has been throughout all history.

Farmers get a say in who the president is, too.

A conference this week had me traveling in Missouri. I landed at Kansas City and drove three hours through some beautiful farmland to Lake of the Ozarks. When I returned, I found waiting for me a book bearing the title, “Every Vote Equal – A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by Popular Vote.” (If you’re in this business, authors and their agents are always sending you books.)

A drive through Missouri farmland and a book on abolishing the Electoral College actually tie together. Work with me and I’ll explain how.

I arrived early Sunday morning to begin a drive that passed through countless farm communities. It seemed like they each had two things in common. One was a white-steepled church straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. And the other was a Donald Trump yard sign seemingly everywhere you looked.

And it hit me that, a.) these people work from dawn to dusk making sure that my family and I get enough to eat; and, b.) they pretty much all go to church on Sunday; and, c.) well-manicured white liberals who live on the coasts and who work in government, politics, media and entertainment look down their noses upon them.

When I got back to the office, I found this 1,216-page tome advocating the elimination of the Electoral College.

Each time the subject of abolishing the Electoral College comes up – which is to say every presidential election year – it reveals anew that many nominally well-educated Americans don’t fully grasp that our nation is a union of sovereign states. Thus, they can’t appreciate the fact that the citizens don’t elect the president, the states do.

When drafting our Constitution, the founders feared two things. First, was an overly powerful federal government. Almost every argument at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was about giving the federal government the power to be effective without giving it so much power as to nullify the sovereignty of the states.

The other thing they feared was factionalism. They feared anything that could have the effect of pitting the states against each other. They were prescient enough to understand that for the nation to flourish, the bankers of Pennsylvania were going to need the farmers of the Carolinas.

Thus, they decided that for a candidate to be elected president, he would need more than majority popular support. He would need majority popular support in a majority of the states. To be president, you can’t just win votes. You have to win the country.

To bring this about, each state is represented by a slate of electors in the Electoral College. Early in our history, those electors were appointed by state legislatures. Today in all 50 states, electors are chosen by popular vote.

The founders were exceptionally farsighted in establishing the Electoral College. But for the Electoral College, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin of victory in California alone would have decided the election.

Where would that have left those farmers whose communities I passed in Missouri? The answer is, functionally disenfranchised – and likely a lot less interested in feeding us.

What would ‘the most trusted man’ think of his alma mater?

CBS News was once the gold standard in broadcast journalism. With Walter Cronkite sitting in the anchor chair, CBS dominated TV news ratings throughout the 1970s.

Though Walter Cronkite was a committed liberal, he largely succeeded in keeping his personal politics out of his reporting. As a result, he earned the title, “the most trusted man in America.”

What, then, would he think of the version of CBS News that we are suffering today?

In the span of a couple of weeks CBS has incinerated any remaining trace of its once sterling reputation.

Let’s start with CBS getting caught editing the answers that Vice President Kamala Harris gave in a “60 Minutes” interview. It was an apparent effort to clean up Harris’s word salad responses to good questions posed by Bill Whitaker.

Since when do news organizations clean up presidential candidate interviews? When did CBS ever try to clean up for Donald Trump (or any Republican)?

CBS denies it, of course. But calls for CBS to release a full transcript of the interview are so far being ignored.

Next, we have CBS brass sharply rebuking morning show anchor Tony Dokoupil for asking entirely appropriate questions of author Ta-Nehisi Coates. In his book, “The Message,” Coates characterizes Israel as the villain in its war with Hamas. While interviewing Coates, Dokoupil asked:

Tony Dokoupil: Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits. And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?

Plain and simple, Dokoupil did his job. He respectfully challenged an interview subject for presenting a one-sided picture.

But in the regular editorial meeting on October 7 (of all days), CBS management effectively apologized for the interview, saying that it did not meet CBS’s “editorial standards.” For doing his job, Dokoupil was called before the standards and practices team at CBS as well as the network’s “race & culture” unit.” (Can you just imagine that star chamber?)

Is CBS being unfair to Dokoupil? Well, here’s the test. Would CBS rebuke Gayle King for similarly grilling Donald Trump? (Don’t answer. It’s a rhetorical question.)

The demise of CBS mirrors that of all the American legacy news organizations that at one time set the world standard for broadcast journalism. A recent example includes ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s grotesquely inaccurate fact-checking of Trump running mate JD Vance on the impact of illegal immigration.

Walter Cronkite managed to be a liberal and “the most trusted man in America” at the same time. Today, even the pretense of objectivity is gone.

For very good reason, journalism is the one enterprise in America that enjoys explicit protection in the Constitution. But journalism in America is dead, having committed suicide.

We now live with the reality of that death in our broken politics.

The great shift.

Speaking broadly, the American workforce is roughly divided into two cohorts – those who shower before they go to work and those who shower after work.

Again speaking broadly, those who shower before work, work in offices. They are the doctors, salesmen, office managers, bookkeepers, bankers, small business owners and other white-collar workers whose daily efforts add value to society.

But the shower-before-work crowd also includes DEI-obsessed HR managers, untethered-from-reality college professors, unaccountable government bureaucrats, bottom-feeding lawyers, “journalists,” and rent seeking climate change activists who deplete societal marrow.

This latter group, along with the approximately 42 million Americans who receive welfare benefits, constitute the core of the 21^stcentury Democratic Party.

That’s a dramatic shift.

At one time – not that long ago – the Democratic Party was seen, with some justification, as the party of the shower after work crowd. Those who shower after work do so because they get hot and dirty doing the sweaty work that must be done if the country is to function. These workers are busy all day building houses, working on cars, repairing downed power lines, answering calls to put out fires, and climbing into sweltering hot attics to fix air conditioners.

And for decades they voted for Democrats.

But against the background of a Democratic Party that was already morphing into a coalition of celebrities, the ultra-rich, über-educated white coastal liberals and those who depend on government benefits for daily living, Donald Trump came down the escalator.

Donald Trump is a multibillionaire who built his fortune on the labor of those who shower after work. The respect that Trump has for that worker is authentic to the point that it need not be spoken. Trump never has to put on a hard hat and go to a jobsite for a photo op. He has been to plenty of jobsites when no one in the media was looking. The workers on that jobsite get Trump because he exudes the fact that he gets them.

Trump’s empathy for the common man arrived concurrently with a gnawing fear in the pits of the stomachs of working and middle-class Americans that the country is about to pay a terrible price for having exported its muscular work to third world countries. It’s not hard to imagine how China having more shipbuilding yards than the United States could one day come back to bite in a most unpleasant way.

As to the timing of shower-taking, Democrats like Kamala Harris look condescendingly upon the late shower-takers. They have disdain for people who get dirty at work and who don’t know Pinot Noir from Pinot Grigio. In the past 30-odd years, and with the acquiescence of squishy Republicans, they have allowed the United States to devolve from the Arsenal of Democracy to the Nation of Zoom Meetings.

The Democratic Party of Kamala Harris is by no stretch any longer the party of the working man.

The irony of ironies is that the Republican Party, led by a New York born & bred billionaire, now is.

A sacred responsibility shirked.

Tuesday’s VP debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz offered further compelling evidence – as if further evidence is needed – that debate sponsor CBS, in keeping with the rest of the legacy news organizations, has abandoned even the pretense of journalistic objectivity.

Tuesday’s debate rules specified that the moderators would not fact check the candidates and would instead allow the candidates to fact check each other. As my mother often said, “that didn’t last ‘til the water got hot.”

In the portion of the debate devoted to immigration (a subject upon which much less time was spent than on climate change and January 6), JD Vance was making a point about the approximately ten thousand Haitian migrants that the Biden administration has air-dropped into Springfield, Ohio, a community of only 58,000.

CBS News debate moderator Margaret Brennan – in direct contravention of the rules – dove in to “correct” Senator Vance on his assertion that the Haitian migrants are here illegally. As it happens, JD Vance’s premise was right and Margaret Brennan’s “correction” of him was wrong.

To Vance’s credit, he didn’t let Brennan get away with it, despite her sputtering about having “so much to get to,” (such as climate change and January 6).

Vance said,

The rules that you were not going to fact-check, and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.”

(That’s how it’s done, Mitt Romney. Just sayin’.)

But the particulars of the Haitian migrant situation in Springfield, Ohio stand beside the point.

The point is that the legacy media – as now embodied by elitist, condescending partisan hacks like Margaret Brennan – are deeply in the tank for the Democratic Party and anyone who is opposed to Donald Trump. I was privy to the emails that CBS News Radio was sending to their affiliates Tuesday night. Though both candidates misstated some facts, CBS News emailed their radio affiliates numerous fact-checks against JD Vance while not offering even a single fact-check against Tim Walz.

Am I surprised by that? Of course not. Am I appalled by it? Absolutely.

Though CBS, ABC, NBC, The Washington Post and The New York Times no longer command the audience shares they once did, they are still huge. Despite years of squandering their inheritance from the days when 92 percent of the country trusted Walter Cronkite, these legacy organizations are still the primary sources of news for millions of Americans. They continue to enjoy their status as practitioners in the one field of professional endeavor to be given specific protection in the U.S. Constitution. They continue to be at the front of the line when it comes to the necessarily limited access by news media to the top leaders and top levels of the U.S. government. (That’s a way of saying that a reporter from CBS will get a seat in the White House briefing room long before Paul Gleiser from KTBB gets one.)

Put simply, the legacy media organizations are still at the top of the food chain in American media. They are the privileged ones. They get the best seats at the political conventions and the first access to disaster sites like those we’re currently seeing in western North Carolina. They’re still the big dogs. (They also get reservations at the best restaurants when those same restaurants are telling the likes of you and me that they’re fully booked for the night.)

For all these reasons, the Margaret Brennans of the world bear a special responsibility.

In America, a properly informed electorate can be counted on to get it right at the ballot box more often than not. A commitment to fairness and objectivity toward the goal of creating that informed electorate is a small price to pay for the privilege and standing that the legacy media continue to enjoy.

That they have long ago abandoned that commitment does much to explain why we in America are at each other’s throats.

Common sense on illegal immigration.

Former president Donald Trump is pledging to deport millions of illegal aliens if he is elected. That sounds great to a whole lot of voters.

The simple fact is illegal immigration has long ago quit being a border state issue. There are few places in the country in which the negative fiscal and social consequences of having allowed 10+ million unvetted, mostly poor, mostly uneducated, and often criminally inclined people into the country aren’t being felt.

So, Trump’s pledge to begin deporting them is getting a sympathetic hearing in many quarters. Polling suggests that upward of 70 percent of Americans are in favor of mass deportation of illegal migrants.

But missing from Trump’s pledge is any detail as to how such a mass deportation might happen. We’re talking something north of 10 million people. Rounding up and deporting that many human beings presents logistical and political challenges on a cosmic scale.

One such challenge is the optics of it all. The images of armed federal officers descending upon “immigrant communities” and forcibly putting “good people who just want a better life” into vans and busses to be shipped out of the country will not play well. The Trump-hating media will have a field day.

The inevitable video of a frightened and crying little girl clutching her stuffed animal as she is stared down upon by a rifle wielding ICE officer will tear at the hearts of even the hardest of secure border hardliners.

But that doesn’t mean that we can or should avoid the clear necessity of drastically reducing the population of people living in the United States illegally. No nation that wishes to call itself sovereign can live with what is going on now.

So, let’s be smart about it. Start with rounding up gang bangers and criminals. That roundup won’t evoke much sympathy (except from the lefty-loon ‘defund the police’ crowd).

But forcibly gathering millions of non-criminals and deporting them is a logistical nightmare. Fortunately, there’s self-deportation. Those millions came in one by one, and they can leave one by one. And there’s a very simple and legal way to bring that about.

Cut off the goodies.

No more free cell phones. No more EBT debit cards for free groceries. No more driver licenses. No more free housing in hotels.

Also, to further weaken the magnet that is attracting so many illegal migrants, put real teeth in the enforcement of existing laws regarding employment eligibility. Severely punish a few employers and other employers will take notice.

Do these things and the illegal migrant population in the U.S. will begin to shrink.

The Left will call it xenophobic and (wait for it) racist.

But for some clarity, take a look at the Brits. It says plain as day on the stamp they put in your passport when you enter their country, “Employment and Recourse to Public Funds Prohibited.”

Are the Brits xenophobic and racist?

Or is it perhaps that one nation’s xenophobia and racism is a more discerning nation’s common sense?

Coming soon to your town.

One of the fact-check moments in last week’s debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris occurred when Trump talked about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

ABC moderator David Muir was quick to challenge Trump’s assertion (even though that wasn’t Muir’s job) while Kamala Harris stood by making a grand show of derisive laughter.

I wish Trump hadn’t gone there. His raising of the topic was an unforced error. Whether Haitian migrants are eating the domesticated pets of Springfield or not (disgusting as that is) isn’t really the point.

The point is that there is exactly zero chance that Haitian migrants could eat the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio if the Haitian migrants weren’t there in the first place.

Trump’s casting of the problem in terms of migrant carnism served only to validate the criticisms of the media and of Trump haters while letting Harris off the hook for the knowable consequences attendant to airlifting thousands of poor, unvetted migrants into a small town in the heartland. The problems now on display in Springfield are a manifestation of a much larger humanitarian problem that was intentionally created by the administration in which Kamala Harris currently serves.

A much more pertinent angle – and thus an angle never explored by the two partisan hacks from ABC that were “moderating” the debate – is how the Biden administration justifies dropping 20,000 unvetted migrants into a community of just 58,000.

There’s no dismissing that with derisive laughter. There’s no need for a David Muir “fact check.” The fact isn’t disputed.

Imagine if you woke up one morning to find that one of every four people living in your town was poor, unemployed, unable to speak the language, untethered to the norms and customs of your community and completely dependent upon your tax money for the necessities of life?

What if suddenly the number of students in your kid’s already overburdened classroom expanded by a third – and none of them spoke English?

New York City mayor Eric Adams never misses an opportunity to tell you that his city is being pushed to its limits under the strain of feeding and housing 67,000 illegal migrants. What if it were four million, the number in Springfield, OH scaled up to the native population of New York? How loudly would Eric Adams be squealing then?

It isn’t about eating dogs and cats. It’s about the fact that no nation that wants to call itself sovereign can permit millions of people to come in unvetted with no thought given as to the impact.

The simple truth is that Kamala Harris couldn’t care less about the problems that 20,000 Haitian migrants have visited upon Springfield, OH. Neither could David Muir. Muir and Harris care only about electing Harris.

But you and I and every sane person you know should care. Because the consequences of Biden administration immigration policy now being felt in Springfield, Ohio are coming to communities across the country if Kamala Harris wins the election.

Appalling.

One of the most appalling things to happen in this appalling chapter in American politics is that former vice president Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Kamala Harris, despite her current efforts to hide the fact, is a radical, far-left San Francisco liberal. She is by an order of magnitude the most far-left candidate the Democratic Party has ever nominated.

How a guy who was vice president in a Republican administration and who was one of the earliest endorsers of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy for president could endorse Kamala Harris seems to defy understanding.

But look a little deeper and understanding begins to emerge.

Save for the four and a half years during which he was chairman and CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney spent his entire career in the elite circles of official Washington. Dick Cheney is a part of the Washington establishment that managed – irrespective of which party was momentarily in charge – to put the nation $35 trillion in debt while concurrently diminishing the personal wealth of average Americans.

The term “average Americans” for this discussion is defined as the 160-plus million people who live between the coasts, get up and go to work every day, raise their children, and pay their taxes. This is the pool from which Donald Trump draws the lion’s share of his support.

By 2016, disgust among these voters with establishment Washington was sufficient to give rise to Trump’s otherwise improbable presidency. In this space in November 2022, I wrote this:

We’ve been led for decades by a small, inbred group of elitist Ivy Leaguers and they have made a pig’s breakfast of it. By this time in its history the United States should be substantially debt free, economically strong, and well-capable of deterring the world’s bad actors.

Racial animus in America should be on the wane.

Prosperity should be making its way through every demographic group in the country. Today’s generation of black and Hispanic parents should be approaching their old age secure in the knowledge that their children will be better off than they were.

Today, none of those things is true.

Trump’s arrival caused the scales to fall from the eyes of people like you and me who once were excited about a guy like Mitt Romney. (How the hell were we ever excited about Mitt Romney?) Trump brought long overdue clarity. We owe him for that.”

Though I admit to being blind to it during his time as VP, Cheney is the embodiment of the disdain expressed in the preceding paragraphs. His fealty to the customs and niceties of establishment Washington now exceeds any fealty to conservative governance he might have once had.

Cheney can support whomever he wants. It’s a free country. But his public endorsement of Kamala Harris is a slap in the face to the good people who once supported him and who valiantly defended him against the same vile, truth-starved slander that is now routinely visited upon Donald Trump by Democrats and their media handmaidens.

Cheney should be ashamed.

Don’t be confused about Nov 5.

There is confusion as to what is on the ballot on November 5. Note that I said, “what,” and not, “who.”

That’s because it’s really not about “who.”

Boiled all the way down, this is not a contest between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. It’s not even a contest between two political parties. And it goes well beyond such things as tax policy, fiscal policy and national defense.

The 2024 election is a contest between two governing visions for this 235-year-old republic – two governing visions that have seldom in our history been more divergent.

On the one hand, you have the governing vision that animated the Founding Fathers. That vision is one of a government that is tightly circumscribed. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was at times highly contentious. The Founders at various times during that sweltering summer in Philadelphia argued bitterly. But the arguments sprang from a commonly held conviction. The Founders were unanimous in their belief that government by its very nature tends toward tyranny and that government is, therefore, no better than a necessary evil.

Our founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – were both written by men who understood that when humans are given power over other humans, that power will be abused. So, they sought to give government only the bare minimum power necessary to defend the peace, support the currency and act as an impartial referee in the conduct of commerce.

Our founding documents fairly scream with distrust of concentrated power. The three co-equal branches of our federal government about which you and I learned in high school but about which a distressing number of college students know little today, exist for the express purpose of limiting each other and thereby limiting the reach and power of government.

Our Founders – who suffered the tyrannies large and small of a far-away King George III – sought to push government downward and away from centralization. It is easier to hold to account a locally elected constable or alderman that it is to hold to account a far-off potentate.

That concern about a potentate is why, when you read your Constitutional history, you find that the Founders struggled most with Article II of the Constitution – the presidency – than they did with any of the six other articles.

The grand vision of our Founders – as it is embodied in our Constitution – is that the federal government should have only a small impact on daily life. Their vision was that free citizens of sovereign states would be at maximum liberty to order their lives and arrange their affairs as they, themselves, believed to be best.

The Founders also believed that with respect to the power of government, the closer to home it is kept the easier it is to keep that power in check. That belief animated every discussion that involved any surrender of rights by the 13 original individual states.

That’s the vision in which I believe and it’s the vision that animates small-government Republicans. It is the vision that led President Trump in his first term to aggressively eliminate regulations that have piled up over decades of the federal government being allowed to grow beyond the bounds of the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.

That’s one side of the ballot.

The other side of the ballot, the one embraced by a rapidly increasing proportion of Democrats, seeks to bring about the perfection of society via top-down control. It’s a governing vision in which a relatively small cabal of elite and enlightened “experts” exercises extensive control over the daily lives of less enlightened citizens via the mechanisms of extensive legislation and regulation overseen by a sprawling federal bureaucracy.

That governing vision has the federal government dictating for our own good how, when and from whom we obtain our health care. It has the government dictating how many and what kind of vehicles we may drive and where we may drive them. It has the government possessed of the capacity to set our thermostats from afar to control our use of energy in our homes.

Speaking of homes, it is the ultimate vision of many big-government progressives that we abandon the conceit of individual ownership of spacious homes on spacious lots of our own choosing. Instead, we are to adopt collectivist living in concentrated government-planned and managed housing located close to city centers.

By concentrating us in close, government-overseen housing, we might more easily be coerced out of our private vehicles. Statist progressives want us walking to work, walking to the store, and walking our kids to school. Where walking isn’t practical, we are to use public transit. All this so that our use of private vehicles might be reduced or outright eliminated.

The governing vision of far-left progressives is that the federal government will have power over us down to what and how much we eat. An example of this can already be seen in the progressive-led jihad on beef and cattle ranching that has been underway for years.

Total control of public education is at the very heart of the leftist governing vision. Government as envisioned by the statists on the left will dictate to us what our children may be taught in the schools that we pay for and, equally important, what may not be taught in those schools. Parental input regarding the education of children will be neither sought nor suffered. In the perfect world of big-government progressives, private education will be done away with altogether so that the government might have ultimate control of what our children are taught and what they grow up believing.

This governing vision of education dovetails into a statist belief that rather than having the primary say as to how we raise our children, we should instead be de facto agents of the government in that endeavor.

These are the governing visions of the other side of the ballot.

Which means that rather than just choosing between two candidates, we are instead at an inflection point in our political history.

Not in yours and my lifetimes have the two parties been more divergent in what they believe and what they intend to do if elected.

For most of my life, Democrats and Republicans have largely agreed on the big things. We have largely agreed on our basic freedoms. We have largely agreed that America is basically good. We have largely agreed that the best way to raise children is in a household containing a man and a woman with a lifetime commitment to one another via marriage.

We have largely agreed that the government should stay out of our business.

We have largely agreed on the need for a strong, vibrant and capable military with a primary mission of deterring the ambitions of bad guys around the world.

We have largely agreed that men and women as created by God are fundamentally different and that those differences are intended by God to complement one another.

For most of our lives, Democrats and Republicans may have disagreed as to the what the preacher was trying to say in the sermon, but they nevertheless all sang from the same hymnal.

That is now coming undone.

Kamala Harris is the product of a Democratic Party that has gone far, far to the left. To understand what that means in practical terms, you need only look at the physical, spiritual and moral breakdown in major American cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis and others under their current Democratic Party leaders.

So, this election season, don’t be confused even as people try to confuse you.

You’re not choosing between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Each of them is merely a proxy. The real contest is between the original vision of the drafters of our Constitution; and a vision of our nation as informed by the writings and beliefs of the likes of Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky.

So, don’t get hung up on Kamala Harris’s idiotic ramblings or her stupid cackle. Don’t get hung up on Donald Trump’s “mean tweets” and verbal wild pitches.

It’s about choosing between the country of freedom and individual liberty that we inherited from our parents and grandparents, or a country administered by a small group of elites exercising top-down control over every aspect of our lives.

It’s certainly not about how either candidate makes you “feel.”

It’s all up to him.

Less than 40 days ago, Democrats were ruefully referring to Kamala Harris as “Biden’s insurance policy,” meaning that a clearly deficient Joe Biden was being protected by aversion to his obvious successor – a woman of scant accomplishment plagued by a penchant for nonsensical verbal diarrhea.

That was then.

Today, less than six weeks later, Ms. Harris is the Democratic nominee for president, is fresh off the convention in Chicago at which she was heralded as the finest candidate since the transcendence of Barack Obama, and is gaining in the polls. She has a credible shot at becoming president without having been subjected to the crucible of the primary election process. She is the first politician of the modern era to become a major party nominee for president without having received even a single vote in a state primary election.

Since her anointment, Ms. Harris has been floating on a puffy cloud of media adoration. If she becomes president, she will have done so with less effort than any president in American history, except perhaps for George Washington, who was elected by acclamation.

Though we can’t foretell the future, it is still safe to say that the media will be at pains to avoid challenging Ms. Harris in any way that might damage her chances against Orange Man. At this writing, she has successfully avoided unscripted events, press conferences and one-on-one media interviews save for one pre-taped interview with CNN’s Dana Bash (to which she brought a wingman). As the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger explains it, Kamala Harris is “the biggest soap bubble American politics has ever seen.” Only contact with a hard surface can keep her from “floating into office.”

The media has no intention of popping the bubble. In the absence of the vetting that a properly functioning fourth estate is supposed to provide, the only thing standing between Kamala Harris and the Oval Office is Donald Trump.

That fact has Republicans and conservatives biting their nails.

It can be argued that the 2024 presidential election is Trump’s election to lose, and it can be simultaneously argued that Trump is quite capable of bringing that loss about.

It’s all up to him.

If Trump will stick to the issues and avoid the distractions that plagued his previous campaigns, he will defeat Kamala Harris.

If he will stay disciplined and avoid being baited into sophomoric social media rants, he will win.

If he will mount a fact-based challenge to Ms. Harris’s well documented hard-left policy positions (from which she is now attempting to distance herself), and properly connect her to a deeply unpopular Biden administration, he will win.

If he can show independent voters that he has gained strength from his successes and wisdom from his mistakes, he will win.

If Trump can get voters to recall what it was like buying groceries, filling the tank, and paying rent when he was president, he will win.

But, if Lord help us, we get the Donald Trump of 2020, Kamala Harris becomes president.

It’s not about either of them.

(CHICAGO) I have spent this entire week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and I have heard speech after speech praising Kamala Harris as something akin to the second coming and I have heard speech after speech calling Donald Trump everything but a child of God.

Here’s the truth. Kamala Harris isn’t all that and neither is Donald Trump. Both are human and both are flawed.

I don’t hate Kamala Harris. I’m not in the tank for Donald Trump.

I’m in the tank for the country.

My politics are animated by my desire for the United States to continue to be the “Shining City on a Hill,” as Ronald Reagan so eloquently characterized her in his farewell address to the nation.

I love this country. I cannot know how my life would have played out if I had been born somewhere else. What I know is that the freedom and opportunity that were my birthright for having been born here have allowed me to live a life for which I am more grateful than I can ever express.

When my two daughters are my age, I want them to feel the same way. I want them to have the freedom and the opportunity to pursue their passions just as I have.

I want as many Americans as God in His wisdom will allow – white, black, brown or whatever – to live prosperous, healthy, happy lives. I am a huge fan of that wonderful American invention called the middle class.

I want people all over the world to look at America with awe, a reasonable modicum of envy and, depending on who it is that’s looking, either a healthy respect or a chastening fear.

For these reasons, I am supporting Donald Trump. Not because I like or dislike him personally but because I believe that his governing policies – with which the country has recent experience – are the most likely to bequeath to my daughters the freedom, opportunity, prosperity and happiness that I have enjoyed.

Kamala Harris’s idiotic word salads don’t of themselves disqualify her. What disqualifies her are her well-documented policy beliefs – beliefs that she has been of late at some pains to hide – that have proven to be disastrous in places as far away as the Soviet Union and Venezuela and as near as her home state of California.

My support for Donald Trump isn’t personal nor is it blind. I believe that his presidency was by and large a policy tour de force. But I also believe that he has made very significant and costly political mistakes, and that those mistakes are now getting in the way of what might otherwise be an easy path to victory in November.

With that said, I believe in the American people. Get out of their way and the American people will amaze you. Give them the facts – good or bad – and they’ll make the right choices. I believe that Donald Trump shares that conviction.

But based on what I have heard this week, I’m quite convinced that the ruling class Democrats whose speeches I have suffered don’t share that conviction at all. In fact, I believe that they find the very premise preposterous.

The Democratic Party of 2024 is more top-down, command & control-statist in its governing philosophy than at any time in American history – with the possible exception of the Woodrow Wilson era.

So, the choice isn’t really between a more likable Kamala Harris or a less likable Donald Trump. It’s not about either of them.

It’s about a choice between two governing visions that are more divergent than at any time in my adult life.

My experience as an engaged adult, a business owner, a father and a husband – together with my appreciation for the lessons set forth on the blood-soaked pages of history – has led me to my choice.

When I consider it from that perspective, I find that I couldn’t care less about the persons of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

Questions for Kamala Harris (assuming anyone gets to ask them).

When President Joe Biden finally folded following his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump and dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, the Democrats being the Democrats could scarcely bother with anything as messy as democracy. So they simply crowned Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee without a single vote having been cast by a single voter.

Since her coronation nearly a month ago, she has not sat down for a one-on-one interview, nor has she taken a single question from the press. There are two reasons for this. First is her well-chronicled inability to ad lib a coherent response to a legitimate policy question. When a question exceeds the rather tight limits of Ms. Harris’s intellect, she is given to spewing gibberish punctuated by her trademark nervous cackle.

The second reason is that Biden administration policy is broadly unpopular. Inflation is biting hard in households that not so long ago were able to easily afford groceries, gas and rent. The chaos on the border is impacting schools and hospitals and public services in nearly every community in the nation. The last thing Ms. Harris wants is to be forced to defend the policies of an administration of which she has been a part for the past three and a half years.

So, the Dems are re-running the “2020 Biden-in-the-Basement” playbook and keeping Kamala Harris carefully under wraps.

But Biden had COVID to protect him. Harris doesn’t. She is bound to be forced out of the cloister some time and there are questions that a properly curious media (assuming that such a thing exists) might want to ask her.

Time and space are limited so here are just a few examples.

Madam Vice President, in 2019 you emphatically stated that you would ban fracking for oil and gas. You now say you don’t want to ban fracking. Have you changed your position based on your better understanding of how fracking helps produce affordable energy, or have you changed your position because Pennsylvania – a must-win state for you – is an oil & gas producing state?”

How about this question?

You have said on many occasions that ‘Bidenomics is working.’ You now seem to be distancing yourself from President Biden’s economic policies. Which of the two truly reflects your beliefs?”

Or…

You have repeatedly called for the abolition of private health insurance in favor of a government-run single payer system. That is, in essence, what the VA is. Given that the VA makes veterans wait months or even years for healthcare, how will a scaled-up version of the VA’s health system meet the needs of 330 million Americans?”

Truthful answers to these questions, and questions like them, don’t help Ms. Harris’s election chances. Voters remember not having to put necessities on a credit card. They remember low gas prices.

So, with the help of the corporate media, Ms. Harris is laying low hoping to simply run out the clock on the 2024 election. And she’s hoping that a sufficient number of independent voters won’t notice.

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