RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/30/trumps-triumphs/

The new president threw official Washington into a spinning tizzy when on Tuesday his Office of Management and Budget announced that he was temporarily freezing $3 trillion in “all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.” The executive order was blocked by a federal judge and the administration rescinded the memo. But the message was sent. This president is serious about removing the dead wood from the federal machine.

An interesting secondary effect of the order was to show just how dependent politicians, party and government functionaries, institutions, and far too many private individuals have become on the federal trough. They reacted as if the world were ending.

The 47th president is different, different from the 45th, and different from every president going back to the 19th century. His only rivals would be Calvin Coolidge, a zealous advocate of limited government, and Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric about pulling back government was spot on even if his execution wasn’t always in line with his lofty goals.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said Trump’s first week in office “totally reset my conception of what’s possible, in two wholly different dimensions.”

The headline on law professor and Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ recent New York Post op-ed declared that Trump’s “unprecedented and swift action … has reset the national mood.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/30/conservative-suspicion-about-rfk-jr-s-long-history-of-leftist-activism-is-understandable/

As the Senate debates Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, it would benefit conservatives to question whether handing the reigns of an entire federal agency to a career Democrat is in their own political best interests.

RFK Jr.’s abrupt party realignment and Trump endorsement certainly raised eyebrows this summer on both ends of the political spectrum.  From the outset, Kennedy’s calculated pivot from a long career as an advocate for enacting liberal policies as a card-carrying Democrat was met with justifiable skepticism. 

Kennedy’s ideology is reflected in both his political legacy and professional career.  As he said himself during a town hall event earlier this year, “You know, people have said to me, ‘why don’t you run it as an independent’ … and I say ‘because I’m a Democrat,” even going so far as to invoke the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a model.  

Even as Kennedy criticized current Democrat leadership and lamented the current state of the party, he made it clear he still identifies with the party’s larger agenda.  That positioning is not reflective of someone who has undergone a fundamental transformation in ideology and is ready and willing to implement any sort of conservative agenda.

The motivation behind Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump has raised questions across the nation’s capital.  Federal Election Commission filings reveal that the Trump campaign paid $100,000 to a law firm employing Kennedy just weeks after he dropped out of the race and threw his support behind Trump.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/01/27/pardoned-j6-protester-fatally-shot-during-traffic-stop-n4936417

Matthew W. Huttle, a 42-year-old J6 protester who was pardoned by President Donald Trump last week, was fatally shot by an Indiana police officer during a traffic stop near the Pulaski County line, reports FOX32 Chicago.

The incident has sparked outrage and suspicion among those who view Huttle’s death as part of a larger pattern of targeting Trump supporters and J6 protesters.  

According to local law enforcement, Huttle resisted arrest during the traffic stop, leading to an altercation in which the officer fired his weapon, killing him. 

“An altercation took place between the suspect and the officer, which resulted in the officer firing his weapon and fatally wounding the suspect,” the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

The officer, whose name has not yet been released, is currently on paid administrative leave, as per protocol. Jasper County Sheriff Patrick Williamson has requested an investigation by the Indiana State Police, promising transparency in the process. In a statement, Sheriff Williamson expressed condolences to Huttle’s family, saying, “Our condolences go out to the family of the deceased as any loss of life is traumatic to those that were close to Mr. Huttle. I will release the officer’s name once I have approval from the State Police Detectives.”

The timing of Huttle’s death, coming so soon after his pardon, has led to speculation about whether this was a tragic coincidence or something more sinister. 

Recent reports suggest that some judges have been pushing back on Trump’s pardons, refusing to dismiss the cases against various defendants. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/28/trump-is-off-to-a-great-start/

Like most Trump supporters, I consider his first term a mixed bag, with the capstone being the rigged election of 2020. This was not all his fault, obviously, but there were failures of execution along the way. Things were often disorganized; disloyal people were put in positions of power, while quality outsiders were not invited into the fold. Trump faced relentless opposition from the Democrats within the Deep State and had to have eyes on the back of his head because of turncoat Republicans like Paul Ryan.

As I wrote in an earlier piece, “Trump’s presidency will have little permanent effect if he does not devote himself to the task of reform. The first order of business . . . will be to take full charge of the bureaucracy.”

He seems to have taken the criticism to heart that he was great on the big picture but poor in execution. This time around, everything is different. The last week has been a whirlwind of activity, including many executive orders, each one more impressive and revolutionary than the last.

This has been a week of wins, and Trump’s policy focus and high energy are good omens for future success.

Trump Takes on the Border Disaster

One of his more visible achievements has been executive action to halt the immigration crisis after Joe Biden’s disastrous policies allowed millions of unvetted and unskilled immigrants into our country. On day one, Trump shut down the ridiculous app that allowed otherwise illegal aliens to make an appointment to obtain long-term parole, during which they will wait years for hearings on fraudulent asylum claims.

There have also been high-visibility workplace raids. ICE says it is now working seven days a week, and the military is already getting involved in shoring up the border.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/28/desperate-dems-throw-eggs-at-trump/

After four years spent denying that inflation was a problem, Democrats are suddenly screaming at President Donald Trump for not having lowered the price of eggs already.

“Democratic lawmakers slam Trump for not making good on promise to ‘immediately’ lower food prices amid egg shortage,” shouts NBC News, pointing to a letter signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other leftist lawmakers who accuse Trump of backtracking on his promise to deal with Bidenflation.

This is all part of a coordinated – and rather pathetic – campaign by the left, which is saying things such as “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, egg prices in the United States have hit an all-time high,” “What is Trump going to do about the price of eggs?” and “Donald Trump lied, he did not bring down the price of eggs on day one.”

Social media “influencer” Harry Sisson posted on X that “Trump has been president for 3 days and egg prices are at all-time highs. TRUMP’S AMERICA!!!”

(Sisson is the same guy who last June posted that “Inflation is going down … and grocery prices are falling. Thank you, President Joe Biden!”)

What’s amusing – or depressing, depending on your perspective – is that all this handwringing is the result of a Consumer Price Index report released a week ago that found that egg prices are up almost 40% compared with last year.

There’s just one problem. That CPI report was about price increases in December 2024 – a month before Donald Trump took office. The more recent spate of egg shortages and price hikes is due to the avian flu.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/27/trump-and-his-new-frenemies-abroad-and-at-home/

President Trump recently gave a video talk to the World Economic Forum (WEF) assemblage in Davos.

He expressed fondness for Europe. He praised many for their attendance—and then tore into the evils of hyperregulation, high taxes, radical environmentalism, and the DEI/ESG commissariat of both the prior Biden administration and indeed the European Union.

One might have thought the attendees’ heads would have exploded when Trump referred to oil as “liquid gold.” And he topped that by referring to the venerated Green New Deal as the “Green New Scam.”

“I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful Green New Deal—I call it the ‘Green New Scam,’ withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, and ended the insane and costly electric vehicle mandate.”

But then a strange thing happened.

The questions from international bankers and financiers that followed were not all that critical. In fact, one could characterize them as curious and carefully encouraging.

So, what prompts the polite European reception to such green and economic heresy?

A careful hearing of Trump’s entire speech would reveal it was not confrontational as much as aspirational. He was trying to envision a new European partnership—albeit one under American leadership.

“Under our leadership, America is back and open for business . . . So, you know I’m trying to be constructive because I love Europe. I love the countries of Europe.”

The U.S. economy has grown to nearly twice the size of the European Union’s since its inception more than two decades ago. Indeed, over 20 years, the gross domestic product of both was roughly comparable.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/27/art-of-the-deal-trading-the-income-tax-for-tariffs/

While speaking Saturday in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump suggested, as he had during the 2024 campaign, replacing the federal income tax with tariffs on foreign imports. We don’t need to see an economic analysis to believe this is debate worth having. Of all the good Trump could do as president in the next four years, eliminating the federal income tax would be one of his greatest achievements.

“If the tariffs work out like I think, a thing like that could happen, if you want to know the truth,” he said.

Trump also reminded the fussbudgets and change-fearing conventionalists who will predict that without a federal income tax the country will fall into a decline that until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, there was no federal income tax. That’s right, establishing a federal income tax required a change to the Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1895 struck down an effort in the year before to establish a national income tax. It was, said five justices, unconstitutional.

An income tax at any level is insidious. Internal taxes, Thomas Jefferson said, were an assault on liberty, which “covered our land with officers and opened our doors to their intrusions.”

“Jefferson would be horrified by the power of today’s IRS to break down our doors and seize our property, and he surely would have led a revolt on seeing the powers added to the IRS under Obamacare,” the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards wrote nearly a full decade before the Biden administration and the Democrat Congress weaponized the IRS with a plan to add 87,000 new agents.

The federal income is an economic assassin. According to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Americans burned more than 7.9 billion of their hours last year complying with IRS filing and reporting requirements.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/01/24/the_cold_civil_war_is_over_we_won_152244.html

The civilizational inflection point in our cold civil war happened sometime between Donald Trump’s second inaugural address on Monday and the end of his new presidency’s second day on Tuesday. At some indeterminate moment between Monday’s soaring midday speech, in which the first nonconsecutive two-term president in over 130 years artfully took a sledgehammer to the entire Obama-Biden era legacy without so much as uttering the men’s names, and Tuesday’s epochal executive order coming as close as legally possible to banning wokeism throughout the republic, the war ended. And as with the English capturing New Amsterdam from Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch centuries prior, it happened without firing a single shot.

The maestro of Mar-a-Lago is known to fancy the Village People hit “Y.M.C.A.,” but perhaps the more apropos tune to blast at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this week is Queen’s anthem “We Are the Champions.”

Let’s take a step back.

Barack Obama, a Chicago radical in the Saul Alinsky/Bill Ayers mold, declared war on America during his 2008 presidential campaign. We know he declared war because he more or less said it: He vowed on Feb. 19, 2008, to “fundamentally transform America,” and one does not seek to “fundamentally transform” that which he loves and seeks to conserve. If that Freudian slip was our cold civil war’s Fort Sumter, then Obama’s presidency that followed was the extended opening campaign. Indeed, Obama did “fundamentally transform” America: He passed the nation’s largest new entitlement program since the Great Society, maligned cops and soured race relations, helped constitutionalize same-sex marriage, realigned our Middle East interests toward the fanatical Iranian regime, and more.

The first Trump presidency was, in many ways, the American people’s reaction to the rise of the woke Obama-era Democratic Party.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/uncommon_communicators_churchill_reagan_trump.html

After four years with a mumbling fool stumbling around in the role of “president,” we have a strong communicator back in the White House.  The difference is striking.  

While President Trump was simultaneously signing executive orders and answering questions from the press on his first day back on the job, he suggested to those in attendance that he might have taken more questions in those first few hours than Joe Biden had taken during all four years in office.  The assembled journalists seemed to quietly concur.  Joe’s handlers spent every minute protecting him from even the most trivial journalistic inquiries; President Trump handles hostile questions while juggling ten other things at once.  Consequently, the first hundred hours of Trump’s restored presidency were historic. 

President Reagan was the “Great Communicator,” and no honest listener could doubt that deserved appellation.  Reagan’s unique combination of eloquence, strength, and wit made him a formidable adversary for anyone who got in his way.  Reagan could be pithy or expansive as the occasion demanded, and some of his sharpest verbal attacks required only a few words.  He summed up his entire Cold War strategy in just four: “We win; they lose.”  It worked.

President Trump achieves much with concise rhetoric, too.  Only six days after Republican backstabber Mitt Romney lost a winnable election to Barack Obama in 2012, Donald Trump signed his name to an application seeking trademark approval for his four-word strategy for igniting a political revolution: “Make America Great Again.”  

That’s a fascinating glimpse into his long-term thinking.  Before Romney repeatedly tried to sabotage Trump’s campaign and presidency, he begged Trump for an endorsement.  Trump obliged and privately gave Romney some advice on how to win the 2012 election.  Romney trumpeted Trump’s endorsement but ignored his counsel.  After watching Romney crash and burn, Trump surveyed the damage and scrawled out a simple message.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Trump used MAGA as a rallying cry for pursuing Reagan’s clear objective: “We win; they lose.”  It worked, too.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/houston-ft-worth-san-francisco-mayors

Urban leaders have greeted the return of Donald Trump with about as much enthusiasm as they would have for a reprise of the bubonic plague. The National Urban League imagines an “extreme right-wing” administration that will ban abortion, threaten the civil service, and end both immigration and racial quotas. Trump has even proposed building new planned cities—so-called freedom cities—that could compete with the existing urban landscape. Some urban leaders fear Trump’s actions will force them to “go it alone”—to grapple with their cities’ problems without the benefit of federal funding. But perhaps this is less of a problem than it seems. After all, cities have declined over the past four years with a Democrat in the White House. Weaning cities from federal assistance may be just what’s needed to spur change.

Indeed, several mayors seem ready, if not eager, to go it alone. These include Houston’s John Whitmire, Fort Worth’s Mattie Parker, and San Francisco’s newly elected Mayor Dan Lurie. They are seeking to adjust to harsh urban realities by discarding the often-dreamy progressive notions that tend to dominate urban political discourse. They are keenly aware how cities have lost much of their appeal in recent years to fast-growing suburbs and exurbs and are intent on fighting a patient battle against these tides.

As we know from the 1990s and early 2000s—under reform mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Houston’s Bob Lanier, Indianapolis’s Steve Goldsmith, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan—good governance can restore urban vitality. Some of these mayors were nominal Democrats, others were Republicans, but all were effective in enacting regulatory reform, restraining taxes, and, most importantly, increasing public safety.

Unfortunately, many were succeeded by progressive mayors like Bill de Blasio in New York, who undermined the reformers’ achievements, notably in law enforcement. The new generation of urban leaders is today epitomized by Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, who is rapidly driving his once-great city, the nation’s third largest, into financial ruin. Johnson’s formula for destruction: borrowing massively to fund big raises for his teachers’ union backers while driving away many of his most productive citizens.