RUTHFULLY YOURS

When asked by a reporter about how many of the 3,500 illegal immigrants arrested since President Donald Trump took office were criminals, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “All of them.” The reporter was flabbergasted, but Leavitt was right. Those who entered the country illegally by definition are guilty of committing a crime.

This is what Trump meant when he said in his inaugural address that “we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.” The Democrats’ response has been anything but common-sensical.

The first weeks of the Trump administration have been a whirlwind of these sorts of common-sense orders and pronouncements that, as our I&I/TIPP survey showed (see “Trump’s Executive Orders Have Solid Voter Backing: I&I/TIPP Poll”), are popular with everyone except out-of-touch Democrats.

• Sending troops to secure the southern border is a common-sense solution to a national crisis. So is letting border patrol officials do their jobs. So is deporting the millions here illegally, starting with hardened criminals.
• Requiring federal workers to return to their offices full time is perfectly reasonable.
• Declaring that there are two genders – something humankind has known since Adam – and banning the use of taxpayers’ money for federal “gender identity” programs might rankle the far left, but it makes perfect sense to everyone else.
• Blocking access to abundant domestic energy supplies while China builds a coal plant every day makes no sense. Boosting oil and gas production does.
• Ending racist, divisive, and mostly likely illegal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs and instead focusing on skills and merit when making federal government hiring decisions counts as common sense to everyone except left-wing extremists.
• How about freezing federal grants until someone has a chance to review them? Trump had to backpedal on this, but only because the order was poorly worded. Even so, it immediately exposed some truly ridiculous things that the federal government supports with your hard-earned cash.
• Requiring regulators to eliminate 10 regulations for every new one they impose is the definition of common sense when you consider that the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 100,000 pages long.
• Our favorite common-sense move was to offer federal workers a buyout option. Companies struggling to make ends meet do this all the time. The federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits and can ill afford to have workers on the payroll who don’t want to be there, as well as the many who shouldn’t.

Have there been missteps? Of course. Do we agree with everything Trump has done? Not necessarily. Setting off a trade war with friendly nations doesn’t seem too common-sensical to us. (Then again, Trump keeps winning concessions from countries against which he treatens stiff tariffs.)

But the reaction from the left to these common-sense steps as been priceless.

When Trump figured out how to email every federal employee at once – something businesses have been able to do since email was invented – federal workers sued. When he offered buy-outs to workers, the left screamed that this was illegal. When he paused grants, nonprofits cried that they couldn’t pay their rent. On and on it goes.

The good news is that the public is finally catching on as to which political party has common-sense solutions that address their problems and which party is completely out to lunch.

A New York Times survey published this week found that “Americans think the Republican Party is more in sync with the mood of the country.” They see Democrats as fixated on abortion, climate change, the LGBTQetc. agenda, while Republicans are focused on issues they care about, such as immigration, the economy, taxes, and crime.

The Times’ survey came out just as Senate Democrats were beclowning themselves at nomination hearings – see Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Are you supportive of these onesies” moment – and the party was electing far-left Minnesotan Ken Martin to lead the Democratic National Committee, along with the 24-year-old anti-gun putz David Hogg as vice chair – at an event described as “liberal lunacy” that was “beyond parody.”

Democrats said bye-bye to common sense long ago, leaving the field wide open for Trump and the Republican Party to claim it for good.