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1.
Well before Donald Trump was sworn in as president in 2017, high-ranking members of Washington’s uniparty establishment, recognizing him as an existential threat to the long-standing system of rule by unelected Deep State bureaucrats, were hard at work trying to bring him down. For years, a narrative set in motion by Hillary Clinton and substantiated by a totally cooked-up dossier portrayed Trump as a tool of Vladimir Putin. And this was only one of many hoaxes about Trump that were endlessly repeated by the media – so many, indeed (from the bleach hoax to the “fine people” hoax), that hardly anyone could keep track of them all, and so preposterous, every last one of them, that they opened one’s eyes to the degree of credulity that Americans marinated in progressivism could evince in matters touching on a man they’d been taught to hate.
During the second half of Trump’s first term in the Oval Office and into the early days of Biden, the Democrats exploited their majority in the House to try to demolish Trump with not one but an unprecedented two impeachments, both of them founded on utterly absurd premises. During the 2020 campaign, Twitter and other social media, which had become satraps of the CIA and FBI, forbade any mention on their platforms of the Hunter Biden laptop, which contained materials proving massive corruption on the part of the Biden family but which 51 former members of the intelligence community claimed to be part of a Russian plot. During the first half of Biden’s presidency, a House Select Committee, consisting of seven Democrats and two fiercely anti-Trump Republicans, cooked up a profoundly dishonest account of what had happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to paint Trump as an insurrectionist and, therefore, a traitor. Meanwhile, left-wing prosecutors around the country filed all kinds of suits against Trump, each more ludicrous than the last, in an effort to bankrupt him, put him behind bars, and make it impossible for him ever to be re-elected.
Remarkably, it all failed. In the political comeback story of all time, Trump returned to the White House. This time, however, the lay of the land is dramatically different than it was during his first term. He has majorities in both houses of Congress. And, savvy now about the ways in which treacherous members of his own executive branch had worked against him, he’s filled all the key leadership positions with intelligent, experienced, principled, selfless, articulate, and tough-as-nails all-stars who are determined to replace Deep State mischief-makers with patriots who believe in the Constitution. Some of the Trump folks, including Trump himself, are working for free. That’s how serious they are about taking the government back, on behalf of the American people, from a globalist political class whose leading members have presided indifferently over an insanely increasing national debt, destroyed the American manufacturing sector while enabling another country (for the first time in 125 years) to attain a GNP rivaling America’s, enriched themselves beyond belief by means of the most blatant sort of corruption, and allowed a veritable army of dangerous foreign gangsters to pour over our borders even as they’ve waged expensive, endless, and meaningless foreign wars. The obscene, ill-gotten wealth of the Clintons, the Obamas, the Pelosis, and others should have landed them all in prison a long time ago. But nothing has ever been done about any of it. Because everybody in D.C. profited by letting everything just go along as it has for decades.
Until now. Now, finally, it’s all being exposed, unraveled, undone. Day by day, the FBI, CIA, NSA, USAID, Voice of America, the departments of State, Treasury, Justice, Defense, Education, and other agencies are being increasingly emptied of traitors at their highest levels. Elon Musk and his DOGE team, in investigating the finances of many of these agencies, have discovered that colossal sums in taxpayer funds have been wasted, gone missing, or ended up in the wrong pockets. Much of the money allocated every year to USAID for foreign assistance turns out to have been used to pay Democratic Party expenses. Already the scale of the malfeasance is staggering; it’s impossible to imagine just how many people, when all is said and done, will need to be terminated (at the very least). Day by day, Trump’s enemies – America’s enemies – are losing their grip on their most crucial power bases.
2.
Alas, however, there are still men and women in positions of power whom Trump can’t fire, many of whom feel as threatened by his determination to regain control of the executive branch as anyone in Washington – and who are willing to do anything to thwart his agenda. I’m referring, of course, to the scores of district judges who – in response to preliminary injunctions or temporary restraining orders filed by plaintiffs who will suffer in various ways as a result of Trump’s actions, and in what can only be described as textbook examples of judicial overreach – have blocked those actions in recent weeks, and thereby instantly soared from obscurity to nationwide notoriety. For example, judges in several states rejected Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. Maryland’s Theodore Chuang ruled against DOGE’s closing of USAID. California’s William Alsup and Maryland’s James Bredar nixed 24,000 layoffs at federal agencies. D.C.’s Loren AliKhan stopped the freezing of grants and loans promoting Marxism, transgenderism, and green ideology. Rhode Island’s John J. McConnell Jr. instructed OMB not to freeze payouts.
D.C.’s Tonya Chutkan reversed Trump’s closing of the EPA’s Green Bank Program, under which $14 billion in grants were to be distributed to recipients described by EPA chair Lee Zeldin as “pass-through, politically connected, unqualified and in some cases brand-new” nonprofits. Washington State’s Jamal Whitehead reversed a Trump action barring refugees from the U.S. and halting funds for refugee organizations. New York’s Jesse Furman blocked the deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who planned pro-Hamas unrest at Columbia University. Maryland’s Julie Rubin ordered the Department of Education to restore $600 million in grants. In D.C., Royce Lamberth blocked the transfer of several “transgender women” from women’s to men’s prisons. Also in D.C., Ana C. Reyes blocked the Pentagon from enforcing Trump’s ban on transgender troops. Washington’s Lauren King and Maryland’s Brendan Hurson ordered that federal funds continue to pay for “gender-affirming care” for young people. Maryland’s Ellen Hollander blocked DOGE from accessing Social Security Administration databases. Washington State’s James Boasberg demanded that two planes carrying members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador return to the U.S. And D.C.’s Amir Ali directed the Trump administration to spend billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for USAID.
Never before has America seen so many judicial rulings against presidential actions handed down in such a short time. El Salvador president Nayib Bukele has called it “a judicial coup.” Legal expert Josh Hammer, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, has called the district judges “lawless punks.” Their actions have been compared to the declarations, in 1935 and 1936 respectively, that the National Recovery Administration and Agricultural Adjustment Administration, two of FDR’s New Deal programs, were unconstitutional. But those were just two rulings by the Supreme Court in regard to a couple of patently unconstitutional executive actions – not over a dozen rulings by lower courts, which were never intended to be able to wield such powers in regard to legitimate exercises of executive authority.
Yes, the Supreme Court jumped into the fray this time around too, but its 5- 4 decision on March 5, affirming Judge Ali’s above-mentioned decision, was described by a CNN legal analyst as “modest” and was accompanied by a fiery dissent from Justice Alito, who wrote: “Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”
Where were all these activist judges, one wonders, when Biden’s White House puppeteers were serving as travel agents for illegal aliens? There were always crooked judges, needless to say; but the judges who have been pulling these stunts of late don’t seem to think they’re crooked. It’s just that their prime loyalty is not to the Constitution, which they probably consider outmoded, but to the progressive agenda of the Democratic Party and Deep State. Granted, many if not most of their rulings will probably end up being overturned by the Supreme Court. But that could take years. Meanwhile the rulings will almost certainly keep on coming, and will keep on erecting roadblocks for Trump’s reforms. There are, after all, no fewer than 677 district judges at present, and a great many of them are very far out on the political left. Add to this the fact that when a judge issues a ruling, however legally baseless, against an action by Trump, he or she will almost certainly pay no price for doing so; on the contrary, the judge will become, for a brief period anyway, a hero to millions of ill-informed people in America and abroad who’ve been told by the legacy media that Trump is a scourge, a fascist, a racist, and a Nazi, and that he should therefore be resisted in every way possible.
To be sure, there have been calls for the impeachment of at least some of these judges, and Elon Musk has contributed large sums to members of Congress who have joined in these calls; but it seems unlikely that any of the judges will be removed from the bench. Indeed, when Trump called for the impeachment of Boasberg for his act of judicial overreach, Chief Justice John Roberts had the temerity to criticize Trump publicly for it – thereby doubling down on the overreach. More promising was the seconding by Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in a note to Attorney General Pam Bondi, of Trump’s insistence that federal courts comply with the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure, which directs that parties seeking seeking a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order provide a financial guarantee. Uniform enforcement of this rule would likely cut down on the number of lawsuits on the basis of which the judges have issued these cockamamie rulings.
3.
Judicial overreach, however, is only one of the challenges Trump faces in his current term. While the activist judges are overreaching in one way, many other Americans are overreaching in other ways. Convinced that Trump and Musk are existential threats to freedom, to the Constitution, and to “our democracy,” ordinary citizens have begun to engage in the perilous practice of “swatting,” which means phoning the cops, giving them the address of some prominent Trump supporter, and saying that a felony is underway at that location – a rape, a murder, a hostage situation, whatever. Among those who’ve been targeted in this fashion in recent weeks are Larry Taunton, Mat Van Swol, Shawn Farash, Nick Sortor, Gunther Eagleman, Joe Pagliarulo, Chase Geiser, Chad Caton, and Owen Shroyer. Some of them are local media figures; others are nationally known, with social-media followers numbering in the six figures.
Of those TDS sufferers who haven’t been swatting their political opponents, some have kept busy smashing Teslas, throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla charging stations, and firing bullets through the windows of Tesla dealerships. During the summer of 2020, which is now ironically referred to as the “summer of love,” and which was the last summer of Trump’s first term, Antifa and BLM members in many cities committed acts of vandalism, arson, and other felonies that went virtually unpunished by local and state authorities. This time around the targets are cars, their manufacturers, and their sellers and owners; and leading Democrats, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have come extremely close to defending and encouraging their actions. As has been widely observed, when a man dressed up to look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s became the face of Bud Light, nobody on the right vandalized beer aisles at grocery stores or firebombed Anheuser-Busch’s corporate headquarters in St. Louis or left the severed head of a Clydesdale in Dylan Mulvaney’s bed. They just switched beers. Unlike conservatives, however, left-wing Americans have been taught that their opponents’ speech acts are tantamount to violence while their own acts of violence constitute legitimate and righteous forms of protest.
4.
The results of the election last November were thrilling. So were the rapidity with which Trump announced first-rate appointees to key roles in his administration and the eagerness with which those new hires went to work, determined to reverse the damage done to America under Biden and other presidents. Their selfless patriotism and dedication are inspiring. It melts cynicism. It’s hard to believe that any decent American with a three-digit IQ could fail to applaud what they’re doing. But all too many Americans have been persuaded by the Democratic Party and its tools in the corporate media that Trump is out to turn America into Nazi Germany. In reality, of course, he’s out to save the Constitution from its globalist enemies – who are by definition our enemies, for they seek to replace our free constitutional republic with a system more reminiscent of feudalism.
Exactly how many domestic enemies do we have? We’re obliged to include here not only the kingpins of the Democratic Party and legacy news media as well as the swatters and the Tesla-ravagers, but also the politicians and scientists (from Fauci on down) who ordered suppression of our rights during the COVID pandemic, the professors who’ve brainwashed students with identity politics, the school teachers who inculcate children in trans ideology, the bitter old biddies of The View, and the unfunny late-night talk-show hosts who unvaryingly parrot the Democratic Party’s talking points. Not to mention any number of social-media “influencers” who traffic in titanic anti-Trump lies and encourage toxic Trump-hate, thereby rendering their influence insalubrious in the extreme.
Add to them the people in your life and mine who’ve cut off contact with us, or who turn every contact into an opportunity for a political lecture. Some of them have never paid much attention to politics but, in recent years – either because they’ve been through a so-called education at an elite college or because they’re lonely middle-aged (or older) folks who’ve allowed their sad and lonely minds to be rewired by the legacy media – have bought into the narrative, discovered the pleasures of virtue signaling, embraced what Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy, and consequently become unrecognizable in their idiotic vituperations. They worship the memory of a violent thug named George Floyd and are now head over heels for the accused murderer Luigi Mangioni, but they despise a benevolent genius named Elon Musk (who, although he is the planet’s richest man, is spending many of his nights these days sleeping on a couch while he labors to rescue the American economy). When they hear about people committing acts of terrorism against other people’s Teslas, they applaud. For heaven’s sake, when Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, they rushed online to say that they were sorry he’d survived.
They say that Trump is a Nazi. They profess to believe that at any moment now the Gestapo will knock at their doors and drag them off to Auschwitz. The elderly sister of a pro-Trump friend of mine recently wrote in an email: “When will they stage a ‘Reichstag fire’ and end all our rights?” One member of an online group for gay men in Palm Springs wrote: “Anyone who uses X is a capo” – and everybody in the group agreed with him. But these people don’t really act as if they think they’re in Nazi Germany. If they did, they’d be too scared to actually say such things: instead, they’d pack their valuables and board the next flight to London or Tokyo or Toronto. No, their hysteria seems to be merely performative, unrelated to what’s really going on around them. Instead of making rational arguments, they emote and point fingers and name-call. More and more, they act like children. What to make of it? These are people whom we love, or used to love, and whom we remember thinking of as decent and mature and sensible. How to make sense of them now? It’s as if they’ve transformed some private pain or frustration or fear into an insanely irrational hatred centered on a man who is, in fact, an astonishingly well-meaning, dedicated, good-hearted, and proficient president. Should they be forgiven because they know not what they do? Where, in fact, to draw the line? As in Nazi Germany, how to distinguish the overt perpetrators of evil from their low-information but genuinely fanatical followers?
Some of my own old friends – and perhaps some of yours – are longtime political junkies. In my case, almost all of them are people whom I used to think of as having the same views, generally speaking, that I did. A number of them are Beltway insiders – and almost all of them, since the advent of Trump, have made clear their thoroughgoing hostility toward him. They may refrain from calling him a Nazi but, a few weeks into his second term, their contempt for him is more virulent than ever. In their writings, they depict the likes of James Comey as a model of noble truth-telling. They argue in long, purportedly serious think pieces that Trump and J.D. Vance have put an end, once and for all, to the postwar America-led free world. They can’t possibly believe these things. They have to know better. They’re not dumb. I once thought of them, naively I suppose, as honest brokers, as people who were in D.C. because they truly believed in things – good things – that they wanted to fight for. What happened to them? Is there, in the end, nothing more powerful in them than their loyalty to the D.C. status quo, in spite of the federal government’s rampant corruption, its reckless handling of taxpayer funds and the lives of young American warriors, its distance from the kind of polity envisioned by the founders, and its disconnection from the American people? Should we count them among our enemies?
Naturally, we don’t like to think of our enemies as enemies; but they are our enemies, and they most assuredly think of us as enemies. Similarly, we don’t like to think of them as traitors; but they are traitors, or at the very least enablers and supporters and cheering sections for traitors, and they view us as traitors, too – traitors to the glorious future time, to the utopia that they see beckoning up ahead in the near distance, to George Soros and Klaus Schwab and an international commonwealth, founded upon intersectional ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, for which mere freedom within one’s nation’s own borders seems to them a very small price to pay. They see themselves as being at war with us; and it’s about time that we recognize that, whether we like it or not, we’re at war with them.
