RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/26/trump-2-0-a-shockwave-of-change-in-just-six-days/

It’s almost as if elections have consequences. Donald Trump hasn’t been in office for a full week yet, but already the mood of the entire country seems to have undergone a beneficent metanoia. Sure, there have been hundreds of executive orders on matters large and small. There were many pardons, for 1500 people who engaged in that self-guided tour of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and also for many others.

But it is more than that. In his first term, Trump endeavored to “drain the swamp” and counter the woke ideology that had infiltrated so many university campuses and government agencies. But Trump was a political greenhorn, surrounded by people who were not on board with his program. He said many of the right things. But in many cases when it came time to implement the policies he outlined, the message got lost or garbled in transmission.

This time, older, wiser, and now surrounded by better counselors, Trump is not fooling around. Within hours of taking office, bang! Trump suspended the security clearances of the 51 intelligence officers who had, for partisan reasons, signed a public letter announcing that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” He lifted the security details assigned to former National Security Advisor and current anti-Trump fanatic John Bolton. Ditto the security detail for Anthony “Mr. Science” Fauci.

One of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0 is his attention to the importance of moving past words to deeds. On Tuesday of last week, he sent a memo to the heads of all government agencies, ordering them to shut down their DEI offices by 5 p.m. the next day. All DEI hires were to be placed on paid administrative leave “immediately.”

That’s not all. Aware that the order would spark panic among the sinecured bureaucrats in and around the DEI apparat, the memo went on to say, “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024, to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances.” And just in case that wasn’t enough, the memo included this warning: “There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting” on efforts to disguise DEI programs. “However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/eithan-haim-we-took-on-the-federal?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Until Friday afternoon, Dr. Eithan Haim, 34, was facing a potential decade in federal prison for revealing publicly that Texas Children’s Hospital was continuing to perform gender transitions on children even after declaring a moratorium on the controversial practice. For this, Haim, a Texas surgeon, became the target of the Biden Department of Justice, which indicted him for allegedly violating patient privacy laws.

There was no violation of patient privacy. What Haim blew the whistle on were mostly surgeries to insert hormonal devices that prevent children from going through puberty. The records he revealed about these interventions carefully redacted identifying information about the patients. What’s more: He had caught the hospital in a bald-faced lie about the very existence of the program. Most dangerous for Haim was that he had run afoul of the Biden administration’s unquestioning support of medical transition of young people distressed about their gender.

“Eithan Haim was the only person with the courage to stand up for what was right,” Haim’s wife, Andrea, wrote on X about her husband taking on the powerful children’s hospital, the country’s largest. “For him, it wasn’t even a decision. Kids were being harmed, and he had to stop it.”

It came with a high price. The couple lost close friendships, all their savings, and their peace of mind. But they never budged.

On Friday came vindication.

At around 2:30 p.m. on Friday, Haim received notice that the Trump DOJ issued a dismissal of all charges against him, with prejudice—meaning the charges cannot be refiled. In a conversation with The Free Press, while he and his wife were celebrating over champagne, he said, “We didn’t think it was going to happen. We took on the federal leviathan and we won.” He added, “This is epic. This is like Lord of the Rings.”

Although Haim had raised more than $1.2 million in a GiveSendGo account, mounting a case to stay out of federal prison has cost $2 million. “We’ll be paying legal bills for 20 years,” he said.

Andrea knows about federal indictments. She herself is an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas—her husband was indicted in the Southern District. Andrea, who gave birth to their daughter four months ago, said of their ordeal, “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a year without worrying my husband would be in prison and I would be raising our daughter alone. We are now going back to normal life.”

https://quillette.com/2025/01/22/weve-known-it-for-years-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-programs-dont-work/

In January, the world’s second-largest restaurant chain, McDonald’s, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, both joined the long list of multinational corporations that have announced they are discontinuing their formal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. It’s a trend that also includes such household names as Amazon, Walmart, Molson Coors, Ford Motor Co., John Deere, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson, Toyota Motor Corp, and, as of this week, the U.S. federal government: Donald Trump’s administration has ordered all federal workers staffed in DEI roles to be placed on paid leave.

In explaining its move, McDonald’s cited the “shifting legal landscape”—specifically, a June 2023 US Supreme Court decision that struck down race-based affirmative-action programs in college admissions as unconstitutional. In its memo to employees, Meta likewise cited Supreme Court jurisprudence, as well as the fact that “the term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

DEI Was Supposed to Help People Like Me. It Didn’t
My bosses wanted my Caribbean face at diversity training sessions. What they didn’t want were my actual viewpoints.

While Trump’s name doesn’t appear in these memos, the president’s previous comments likely played a role in corporate decision-making. This week’s anti-DEI executive order was no surprise, as Trump had pledged to “eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the entire federal government”; and his most vocal conservative supporters typically attack DEI as being inspired by “woke” or even Marxist principles—an affront to the merit-based ethos.

Trump has also spoken about using his executive powers to withhold federal funding from cities, states, and publicly funded educational institutions that continue to promote DEI. And there are indications that his administration may find ways to pressure private-sector entities to abandon DEI as well.

https://thespectator.com/topic/donald-trump-fooling-this-time-security-clearances/

It is said that the adage “he who hesitates is lost” is an adaptation of a line from Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato. I do not believe that Donald Trump is a student of the co-founder of The Spectator, but he has clearly absorbed that nugget of practical wisdom.

Within hours of taking office on Monday, Trump issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations affecting the government’s conduct on everything from immigration to DEI, from energy policy to the 1,500 people incarcerated in Washington jails because they joined in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  

It is one thing to issue orders and proclamations. It is another thing to see them carried out successfully. But here we are, barely fifty hours into the second Trump administration, and the activity on the ground is furious. On Tuesday, heads of all government agencies were ordered to shut down their DEI offices by 5 p.m. today, Wednesday, and place all DEI hires on paid administrative leave “immediately.” Trump is not fooling this time. The order also directs the heads and acting heads of every agency to ask employees “if they know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.” 

That chill in the air that you feel is not due solely to the polar vortex making the mercury plunge. The country is also in the grip of the Trump common-sense vortex. With respect to illegal immigration, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan reports that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement team made 308 arrests yesterday. Following his policy of going after the “worst first,” the people arrested were all violent criminals: murderers, rapists, gang members and the like. The total number of people apprehended crossing the southern border illegally has dropped from between 10,000 and 12,000 under Joe Biden to 766. That’s in two days. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/24/lets-turn-the-pdb-into-the-trump-daily-intelligence-briefing/

The Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) was once a well-regarded daily intelligence summary prepared for the president and his most senior national security officials that provided timely and vital highly classified intelligence. Unfortunately, due to the bloated and increasingly politicized intelligence bureaucracy, the PDB’s usefulness and quality have plummeted over the last twenty years.

President Trump has well-founded suspicions about the U.S. Intelligence Community, which was weaponized against his campaigns and first administration. It therefore will take radical changes to fix the PDB and assure President Trump that his daily intelligence briefings are fair and objective.

I speak on this subject from experience. As a CIA analyst in the 1980s and 90s, I drafted over 50 PDB articles and received feedback from two presidents. At that time, the PDB contained 7-10 concise, carefully written articles on critical national security issues. Although the PDB usually did not shy away from controversial issues or bad news, articles would be added on issues of interest to the current president.

The PDB staff I worked with served for decades. Most PDB editors also served as briefers and were usually senior CIA analysts late in their careers who kept a low profile. They were on the PDB staff to serve, not for attention or to advance their careers. Although not every president liked or trusted the PDB, most did because these officers worked to produce a daily intelligence product that was not about politics or currying favor with the president or Congress.

Unfortunately, things changed for the worse for the PDB in the mid-1990s when the CIA decided to staff it with younger, up-and-coming officers and not just senior officers approaching retirement. Unfortunately, the CIA’s increasingly liberal analysis directorate exploited this change to put young liberal ideologues on the PDB staff, who used these assignments to rocket up the career ladder and advance the intelligence deep state.

https://tomklingenstein.com/trumps-mandate-restore-national-sovereignty/

Donald J. Trump’s 2024 electoral victory was so decisive that, for the first time since 1988, congressional Democrats did not challenge the certification of a Republican presidential victory. Trump won the popular vote, swept the swing states, and ran ahead of down ballot Republicans. Unquestionably, he has a mandate to govern. That mandate belongs to the MAGA agenda, not to conventional Republican priorities.

President Trump best defined his political mission in his 2016 address at the Republican National Convention: “The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect.” In his second inaugural address this week, as he echoed these same themes, the 47th president’s first promise to the American people was simple: “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed.” 

Trump’s goal, in 2024 as much as in 2016, is to reorient politics and policy towards America’s national wellbeing through common sense reforms. (Again in the second inaugural, he promised a “revolution of common sense.”) These reforms include protecting American workers and balancing foreign trade, revitalizing manufacturing, securing energy independence, ending foreign wars and drawing down military commitments abroad, mass deportation of illegal aliens, limiting legal immigration to maintain wage stability and cultural unity, and nurturing patriotism and civic confidence.