Tag Archives: donald-trump

Is it productive for Trump to push legal limits?

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I won’t leave you in suspense. I’m a lawyer, so the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no.

If you’re in the tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is wrong, or the opposite tribe that thinks whatever Trump does is right, then read no further. Just skip the analysis and instead warm up your cheers or your jeers for the Comments below, as your tribe dictates.

But if you’re in neither tribe, but are just a political partisan (which is different than being in a tribe) or a political neutral (are there any these days?) then read on.

It’s important to recognize at the outset that Presidents push legal limits all the time, and they often lose when the matter is adjudicated in the courts. The actions of Joe Biden’s administration were frequently struck down as being in violation of applicable laws or Constitutional provisions. That includes actions on important matters concerning the immigration laws, the environmental laws, the deference to administrative agencies, the wage laws, and student loan forgiveness.

Before you exclaim “Yeah, Biden was a crook,” be aware that this is something that just happens with Presidents, including Bush, Obama, Reagan and nearly every other one. Abraham Lincoln illegally suspended the Constitutional habeas corpus rules, thereby precluding wrongly imprisoned American citizens from seeking court reviews of their cases.

(All that said, Biden was indeed a crook.)

It would be a simpler world if the good guys and bad guys and all the rest of us always knew exactly what’s legal and what’s not. We’d just send the bad guys to jail when they did something that’s not. We wouldn’t need trials, courts, judges and juries.

But our world is complicated and fact-dependent, and so is the law.

That’s why I have no problem with President Trump testing the limits. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be doing his job – a job I voted for him to do, three times (in three elections, I hasten to add).

A good example is the issue of birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment appears to state that a person born in this country is automatically a citizen of the country, regardless of whether the mother is in the country legally.

But the Amendment contains a vague qualifier “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Trump’s argument is that this qualifying phrase excludes from citizenship a baby born in this country if its mother is here illegally. 

Although I hope Trump’s argument will succeed, I think it ultimately will not. But it’s a non-frivolous argument, and I would not be shocked if the Supreme Court ultimately buys it (though I would indeed be surprised).

In such a case, it’s fine for President Trump to make the argument. Let it go up to the Supreme Court, as Trump has requested, and let them decide the matter. That’s the way the system is supposed to work, and it nearly always does.

By the way, six of the nine Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Republicans who might lean toward Trump’s view of the matter.

(Here’s where you can complain that some of the Republican-appointed Justices are not “real conservatives.” Fine. But if that’s the case, then the blame lies with the Republican Presidents who appointed them – who was President Trump in his first term in the case of three of the six.)

Now here’s where things get dicey. What happens if Trump’s argument on birthright citizenship fails at the Supreme Court?

Trump himself has said he has no intention of violating court orders. That should end the matter. If it doesn’t, then we truly have a crisis, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

We had a hint of a crisis this week. The Department of Justice put Venezuelan immigrants alleged to be gang members on planes to deport them. There was apparently no contention that they were here legally, but there was also no due process finding that they were indeed members of the identified gang.

A judge ordered that they not be deported for another two weeks so that the matter could be given minimal due process. Meanwhile, the individuals were safely in the DOJ’s custody.

The judge at a hearing explicitly told the DOJ that they should instruct any planes already in the air to turn around. However, the judge’s subsequent written order did not include that instruction.  

Be aware that judges often issue orders orally. There’s no magic about reducing an order to writing.

But the White House has contended that the absence of the judge’s oral turn-around order in his written order meant that it was no longer in effect. Therefore, they say, they were free to let the planes proceed without intending any violation of the court’s order.

I find that argument dubious.

But I’m very glad they made that argument, rather than simply stating “We don’t follow court orders we don’t like from judges we don’t respect.”

That sort of belligerence would be unconstructive, and would cost Trump the support of most Americans. We’ve come too far to lose it all in an ill-advised cafeteria food fight.

Unfortunately, however, that’s the belligerence I’m seeing in some of the internet commentary from the tribe.

Let’s look at the big picture. In virtually all democracies (almost by definition), the final interpretation of laws is made by the judicial branch, not by an executive branch. The Constitution that we conservatives hold dear requires the executive to defer to the courts in interpreting the nation’s laws.

If the executive doesn’t like a law, his remedy is to get the law changed if the people’s representatives concur. It’s not to say “I can do whatever I want because the people elected me.”

That could be our system, but it clearly is not. If it were, then all the judges – and, for that matter, all the legislators – could just go home. But it would be to a very different home.

Glenn K. Beaton practiced law in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

Was Michelle Obama a DEI bride?

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I have nothing against Michelle. The media tells us that she’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s accomplished, and I’m sure she’s charming. As her husband said about Hillary Clinton, she’s “likable enough.”

OK, I’ll admit that I didn’t particularly like her comment that the first time she was proud of America was the night Barack was elected. Surely there was a time in her first 45 years before then that she felt some pride in America. How about when the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team beat the Russians? How about when we put a man on the Moon? How about when we passed the Civil Rights Acts? 

In any event, I always thought she could have congratulated her husband for being elected President of the nation without gratuitously insulting that nation. If she truly thought so little of the nation that she’d never before been proud of it, how could she be proud that he’d been elected President of it? 

And how could the incoming First Lady be so rude to the country? A more gracious statement still true to her feelings might have been something like “I was so proud of America that night.”

Also, I think the media fawning over her beauty was a bit overdone, to the point that it seemed racially condescending to me. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to my eye she is not as beautiful as Jackie Kennedy was. But, for that, blame the media and their eyes for their contrary judgment, not Michelle. 

As for Michelle’s considerable accomplishments, one was indeed comparable to Jackie’s — it was to marry well. Michelle married a bright, rising politician by the name of Barry Soetoro. 

Soetoro had been born to an 18-year-old white woman and an older Kenyan man who abandoned them. He grew up in Hawaii as a mixed-race boy of a white mother. 

Soetoro became interested in politics, particularly the ethnic type. In that, his white mother — his only parent that was present — was a liability. Being half Black was an asset, but only a half-ass-et. 

With a touch of the self-promoting genius he was to display throughout his career, he changed his name to “Barack Obama,” taking his missing father’s Kenyan name. And he decided he “identified” as all Black.

In one of the self-promotion books he later wrote, he even stated in the preface that he had been born in Kenya. When that became problematic — nay, disqualifying — in his campaign for the Presidency, he “explained” that the preface had been written by someone else and he’d never read it. 

Uh huh. It’s surprising that the press let him get away with that explanation, until you realize that this same press later dismissed the Hunter laptop as fake and assured us that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack. 

This guy now going by Barack had a talent for riding the early 2000s wave of liberal white guilt. Chameleon-like, he could be what he really was — a mixed race kid from Hawaii — or, on demand, he could drop his g’s and be shuckin’ and jivin’ with the bros. 

Hillary might have been likable enough, but Barack was Black enough. And in the year 2008, Black was better. 

Barack had foreseen it all, early on. And he had already orchestrated the show.

There was one problem. Barack had several girlfriends before he got married. The thing in common was . . . they were white. 

That presented a problem because this guy had consciously reinvented himself as a Black leader with a white personality, someone who could garner Black votes with his Blackness while garnering white liberal votes with his whiteness.

So Barack let the white chicks go. Bad fit for his career ambitions. He substituted a bright young lawyer, Michelle. She was ambitious, almost as much as he. And very much Black.

He married her. He won the Presidency. He won the adulation of the media. He won that thing he imagined was ever-arcing toward him — history.

Now in his post-history, his post-presidency, his post-Blackness, and perhaps his post-marriage, he might have won Jennifer Aniston. The rumors are thick that the two of them are an item. Liberal “fact-checker” Snopes says there’s “no evidence” of it, even as they reference numerous insiders who swear it’s true. (When Snopes wants something to be false, the evidence of it is always deemed not evidence. What do they want, a stained blue dress?)

Moreover, there’s a dog that didn’t bark. Michelle was mysteriously absent from two big political events — the inauguration of Donald Trump and the funeral of Jimmy Carter, both of which were attended by everyone who’s anyone, but which Barack attended alone. 

The only question now is, will he change his name back to Barry Soetoro? 

Was Michelle Obama a DEI bride?

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I have nothing against Michelle. The media tells us that she’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s accomplished, and I’m sure she’s charming. As her husband said about Hillary Clinton, she’s “likable enough.”

OK, I’ll admit that I didn’t particularly like her comment that the first time she was proud of America was the night Barack was elected. Surely there was a time in her first 45 years before then that she felt some pride in America. How about when the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team beat the Russians? How about when we put a man on the Moon? How about when we passed the Civil Rights Acts? 

In any event, I always thought she could have congratulated her husband for being elected President of the nation without gratuitously insulting that nation. If she truly thought so little of the nation that she’d never before been proud of it, how could she be proud that he’d been elected President of it? 

And how could the incoming First Lady be so rude to the country? A more gracious statement still true to her feelings might have been something like “I was so proud of America that night.”

Also, I think the media fawning over her beauty was a bit overdone, to the point that it seemed racially condescending to me. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to my eye she is not as beautiful as Jackie Kennedy was. But, for that, blame the media and their eyes for their contrary judgment, not Michelle. 

As for Michelle’s considerable accomplishments, one was indeed comparable to Jackie’s — it was to marry well. Michelle married a bright, rising politician by the name of Barry Soetoro. 

Soetoro had been born to an 18-year-old white woman and an older Kenyan man who abandoned them. He grew up in Hawaii as a mixed-race boy of a white mother. 

Soetoro became interested in politics, particularly the ethnic type. In that, his white mother — his only parent that was present — was a liability. Being half Black was an asset, but only a half-ass-et. 

With a touch of the self-promoting genius he was to display throughout his career, he changed his name to “Barack Obama,” taking his missing father’s Kenyan name. And he decided he “identified” as all Black.

In one of the self-promotion books he later wrote, he even stated in the preface that he had been born in Kenya. When that became problematic — nay, disqualifying — in his campaign for the Presidency, he “explained” that the preface had been written by someone else and he’d never read it. 

Uh huh. It’s surprising that the press let him get away with that explanation, until you realize that this same press later dismissed the Hunter laptop as fake and assured us that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack. 

This guy now going by Barack had a talent for riding the early 2000s wave of liberal white guilt. Chameleon-like, he could be what he really was — a mixed race kid from Hawaii — or, on demand, he could drop his g’s and be shuckin’ and jivin’ with the bros. 

Hillary might have been likable enough, but Barack was Black enough. And in the year 2008, Black was better. 

Barack had foreseen it all, early on. And he had already orchestrated the show.

There was one problem. Barack had several girlfriends before he got married. The thing in common was . . . they were white. 

That presented a problem because this guy had consciously reinvented himself as a Black leader with a white personality, someone who could garner Black votes with his Blackness while garnering white liberal votes with his whiteness.

So Barack let the white chicks go. Bad fit for his career ambitions. He substituted a bright young lawyer, Michelle. She was ambitious, almost as much as he. And very much Black.

He married her. He won the Presidency. He won the adulation of the media. He won that thing he imagined was ever-arcing toward him — history.

Now in his post-history, his post-presidency, his post-Blackness, and perhaps his post-marriage, he might have won Jennifer Aniston. The rumors are thick that the two of them are an item. Liberal “fact-checker” Snopes says there’s “no evidence” of it, even as they reference numerous insiders who swear it’s true. (When Snopes wants something to be false, the evidence of it is always deemed not evidence. What do they want, a stained blue dress?)

Moreover, there’s a dog that didn’t bark. Michelle was mysteriously absent from two big political events — the inauguration of Donald Trump and the funeral of Jimmy Carter, both of which were attended by everyone who’s anyone, but which Barack attended alone. 

The only question now is, will he change his name back to Barry Soetoro? 

Democrats are still owned by their hate

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It was predicted that the changing demographics of America – specifically, more racial minorities – would deliver permanent control of the government to the Democrats by now.

Instead, over the past few years the Democrats have lost the Presidency, the Senate, the House, a majority of governorships, a majority of state legislatures, and the Supreme Court.

This isn’t just about Donald Trump, though his approval ratings are higher than ever while Joe Biden’s (who?) are lower than ever.  It’s broader than that. The approval ratings of Democrats are at historic lows in general, while the approval ratings for Republicans are near all-time highs.

In their rosy predictions of perma-control, here’s what the Democrats got wrong.

Americans don’t vote for their skin color, they don’t vote for their sexuality, they don’t even vote for their financial interests.

What they vote for is America. A Hispanic American does not vote for Hispanic illegals; he votes for America. A gay man does not vote for gays; he votes for America. Black men do not vote for Blacks, or at least less so than before; they vote for America.

Even middle-aged white men don’t vote for middle-aged white men; they, too, vote for America. Democrats used to mock white men in Kansas for being too stupid to “vote their interests.” Which meant that those white men – typically on the low end of the income scale – failed to vote for wealth redistribution that would benefit them personally.

But those men didn’t fail to understand that they personally would benefit from the Democrats’ socialistic wealth redistribution schemes. They understood it perfectly. They simply concluded that it was bad for America even if it might be good for them personally.

Democrats are unable to grasp that. They cannot fathom a person who puts the interests of America above his own personal financial ones – perhaps because those Democrats never would do such a thing themselves.

That’s something unusual and great about America. For all the divisiveness and emotion, we’re still a great melting pot of ethnicities and variations with the common goal of making the country great. People don’t care so much about the color of your skin or where you came from. They care about your ideas, your work, and your love for the country.

Ronald Reagan understood this sentiment, and shared in it. For that matter, so did John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and maybe even Bill Clinton.

Kamala Harris did not. Nor did Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden. They thought a presidential campaign was all about assembling and pandering to a hodge podge of people with nothing in common other than grievances against The Man, whom they perceived as their oppressor.

Ironically, the Democrats have continued campaigning against The Man – the establishment – well after they’ve become him. It’s amusing to see leftist professors who comprise 95% of the faculty rebelling against their oppressors – who are presumably the remaining 5% that haven’t yet been purged.

Trump broke the fever. He offered a campaign founded on common sense and plain talk, spiced with an unrelenting calling out of the broke woke.

For that, they hated him. It wasn’t his policies per se, but his independence. He didn’t seek the approval of the establishment powers.

Trump instead spoke truth to that power. I’ll admit that sometimes he exaggerated the truth, to make his point. OK, occasionally he even fibbed.

But the outrage that the powerful expressed at his fibs was faux. They weren’t really outraged that he fibbed to them. He’s a politician, after all. Rather, they were outraged that he refused to bow to them.

Trump not only refused to bow to them; he refused to accept their legitimacy. They had forfeited legitimacy long ago with lies about Russian collusion, burying Hunter’s laptop, hiding Joe’s senility, deleting 30,000 of Hillary’s emails after Congress subpoenaed them, and telling us “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

It’s one thing to disagree with the establishment. For that, they’ll merely beat you, a la Mitt Romney and John McCain. But if you challenge their legitimacy, they’ll hate and hound you forever because then you threaten their very existence. In Trump’s case, their hatred almost cost him his life.

The Democrats and their establishment cronies are unable to get past this hatred for Trump, and they might never. To use one of their favorite cliches, Trump is an existential threat.

And so, they will double down on mutilating the genitals of boys, trying to promote or pass over people on the basis of their skin color, urging a re-opening of the borders to illegal immigration and lethal drugs, and, as the Democrat leader of the House promised last week “fighting in the streets.”

They long for Antifa and BLM which, to them, were the glory days.

At this point, the Democrats’ policies are not designed to solve problems, but to milk them. They’ve forgotten the substantive bases for their failed policies, if there ever were any. Now, their policies are simply futile, destructive expressions of their raw hate against a person who rejects their mindless dogma, undermines their absolute power, and threatens their establishmentarian existence.

It’s scream therapy.

Expressing one’s anger in a dramatic fashion can be therapeutic, up to a point. But until the Democrats get past their grief, it will continue to cost them elections.

This just in: Illegals are criminals

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For years, the legacy media (hereinafter the “Leg-Meds”) parroted the Democrats’ line that the population of immigrants can be divided into the “documented” ones and the “undocumented” ones.

The euphemism “undocumented” finally became a joke, and so the Leg-Meds and the other Democrats eventually surrendered to the word “illegal.”

However, within that category of “illegals,” they clung (bitterly) to the notion that about 99.9999999% were “law-abiding” and only the remaining 0.0000001% were criminals.

That lie was called out yesterday by President Trump’s new press secretary. This 27-year-old woman owned the Leg-Meds. Here’s the exchange:

REPORTER: Of the 3,500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back onto office, can you just tell me the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are in the country illegally?

KAROLINE LEAVITT: All of them [have a criminal record] because they are criminals as far as this administration goes.

She’s right. Here’s the text of 18 U.S.Code Section 1325:

(a)Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts

Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

This quoted section clearly and unambiguously sets out criminal penalties including prison time for illegally entering the country. Imprisonment is only for crimes. You can’t be imprisoned for a mere civil violation of the law.

(If the entry was legal, but the ongoing presence in the country is not, as with a student overstaying his visa, the issue is more complicated. That’s probably why the next subsection sets out civil penalties — rather than criminal penalties — for that circumstance. But the vast majority of illegals are not students overstaying their visas; they are people who snuck across the border.)

Therefore, people who enter this country illegally are illegals – and criminals. It is accurate to refer to them as such. The most precise term for them would be “criminal immigrants.”

Angels at the podium?

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Political candidates aren’t always seen by 19,000 people in big sexy arenas like Madison Square Garden.

They also play the rubber chicken circuit at little outdoor makeshift venues of a few hundred or a thousand people in rural America. These are places you would never visit unless you were looking for votes. Think “County Fair.”

So it was for Donald Trump one ordinary day last summer. He was on an outdoor plywood stage in rural Pennsylvania looking for votes from plain folk.

He was just a few minutes into his stump speech, or his stump speech du jour. Trump is not a polished speaker but he speaks from his heart and with his hands. He often strays from the strictures of his teleprompter, sometimes to the point where you wish he wouldn’t.

What happened next was initially trivialized by Associated Press, apparently to avoid martyring or heroizing the man. They reported:

“Loud noises rang through the crowd.”

One of those loud noises instantly kills a man standing behind Trump. Another loud noise wounds another person. And another wounds another. Altogether, eight loud noises come from the shooter and two from the Secret Service to neutralize him.

One loud noise goes through Trump’s ear, missing his cranium by half an inch. His hand instinctively goes to his shredded ear even before he is conscious of the pain there. He pulls his hand away to look at it, and sees the blood. It was only then that he knew he’d been shot.

Involuntarily, Trump does what anybody – and any body – would do. He falls to the floor behind the podium. The Secret Service keep him there for about two minutes as people around him are screaming and scrambling.

Imagine what goes through Trump’s mind in those chaotic two minutes. He’s not altogether sure what just happened. He doesn’t know if the ear wound is just the ear or the head too. He’s still not sure if he’s been shot anywhere else.

Agents try to assess his condition visually and verbally. They decide to get him to the relative safety of a nearby vehicle.

At the time, there was no way of knowing whether the shooter who’d been neutralized was a loner or one of many. Raising the President from the floor and out from behind the podium could make him a sitting duck. But leaving him there risked another barrage of bullets – and perhaps explosives as well.

Trump was smart enough to know all that.

Most men would have chosen to cower under the podium. It was a lousy shield against explosives and AR-15 bullets but at least it offered a bit of concealment.

But Donald Trump is not like most men.

The Secret Service agents wanted to carry him off in a stretcher, but he refused. Instead, with their help he got to his feet and came out from the podium, ear torn and face bloodied.

Then he did something unforgettable. Let him describe it:

I wanted to do something to let ’em know I was ok. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, Fight! Fight! Fight!

Since that day, Trump has said he believes God saved him, that he might save America.

Strong words. Presumptuous even. Some people would say arrogant. But those people have never had rifle bullets from a would-be assassin tear through their ear and kill a man right behind them.

Trump seems different now. Calmer. More thoughtful. Serene. Settled. Dedicated. Workmanlike. Mission-driven.

I don’t pretend to know if God saved Trump so that he could save America. Most of my communications with the Guy Upstairs are from me to Him, not the other way around.

But I know Trump himself believes that. Something happened to him in the eternity of those two bloody minutes as he wondered if they were his last.

Trump brilliantly baited Biden into admitting the guilt of the Biden-ites

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In one of his very final acts as the putative President, literally minutes before Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, the Big Guy issued a pardon to all his siblings and their spouses.

Joe’s five pardons together with his earlier pardon of his son Hunter for tax evasion and gun-running convictions (and all other crimes known and unknown over a period of ten years) bring Joe’s pardons of family members to a total of six. 

In case you’re wondering what crimes these six family members could possibly have committed that required a presidential pardon, let’s just say it was a family business. It was a lucrative one that raked in tens of millions of dollars in exchange for unidentified work. According to emails from Hunter, 10% was earmarked for the guy issuing the pardon – that very same Big Guy.

These Sordid Six thus join the 1,499 rapists, murderers and molesters whose sentences Joe commuted last week. It wouldn’t surprise me if the 1,499 feel insulted to be lumped in with these particular six.

Altogether, Joe issued 8,064 pardons and commutations – far more than any President in history and dwarfing the 237 by President Trump in his first term or even the 1927 by President Obama in two terms.

But I’m OK with the pardoning of the Sordid Six, despite the obvious self-dealing and miscarriage of justice. Here’s why.

Because it labels them guilty.

It’s true that, as a technical legal matter, a pardon does not necessarily mean a person is guilty. (On the other hand, an old Supreme court case suggests that accepting a pardon is, indeed, an admission of guilt.) And it’s true that Joe included some self-serving happy talk about how his fam’ is really, truly not guilty of the crimes for which he pardoned them.

Like Hunter, the other five did “nothing wrong,” Joe tells us.  He’s just concerned that overzealous prosecutors might make their lives hell for political purposes. You see, using the justice system to make a person’s life hell is something Joe is familiar with.

(There is the possibility that the pardons open the door to Congress or enterprising prosecutors calling these people to testify under oath against Joe or others – testimony they would be obligated to give since they won’t be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege against incriminating themselves of crimes for which they’ve been pardoned. On the other hand, they haven’t been pardoned for state crimes, since the presidential pardon power does not go that far. Therefore, there’s the possibility of being prosecuted for, say, criminally evading state income taxes, and so they might still have a Fifth Amendment privilege. I’ll let lawyers better than I sort this out.)

Leave aside the legalisms. At this stage, the court that matters most is the court of public opinion, and a subsidiary court that could be called the court of historians. In those courts, Joe’s pardon of all three of his siblings, their spouses, and his son, will be seen through common sense eyes, especially in view of highly incriminating hard evidence that has already been uncovered (such as the Big Guy emails mentioned above).

And so, common sense and public opinion says the seven Biden family members are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and guilty.

In a matter of weeks, Donald Trump and his fusillades were able to get guilty verdicts on Joe Biden’s entire family that Joe and his army of prosecutors were not able to get on Trump, alone, over the course of four years.

Remind me never to play poker – or geopolitics – against President Donald J. Trump.

Joe Biden’s presidency: “Hold my beer and watch this!”

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Question: What do the following have in common?

  • Stupid pet tricks
  • Bungee cord jumping
  • Abolishing the borders that define a country
  • Making oneself a human cannonball
  • Commuting the duly imposed death sentences of convicted murderers and rapists
  • Setting oneself on fire
  • Surrendering Afghanistan to barbarians from the 11th century
  • Jumping Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle
  • Closing all the schools to prevent transmission of a disease that barely affects children.

Answer: What these have in common is that all are stunts. They are designed to attract attention, and they succeed in doing so. But that’s all they do.

If you tell me you’ve taught a poodle to mix a martini and serve it to a parakeet, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Wow, that’s something!”

And it is indeed something, in the sense that it’s unusual. It gets attention. But it’s not consequential, other than to make a spectacle of two otherwise dignified animals.

If you tell me you plan to tie a bungee cord to your ankle and jump off a high bridge such that the bungee cord stretches almost to the breaking point as it catches you a few feet above the ground, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Huh, that’s something you don’t see every day.”

But, as in stupid pet tricks, it’s inconsequential, other than to demonstrate a certain daredevilry. There are good reasons not to issue dares to the devil for the mere purpose of getting clicks on YouTube.

To understand Joe Biden, you have to understand a few immutable traits about the man. First, he’s not very bright. A person who finishes near the bottom of his class at a fourth-rate law school is not very bright.

Second, he knows it. A person who plagiarizes five full pages of a law review article, “borrows” the family story of another politician, invents fabulations about standing up to a bully named Cornpop, and claims he finished in the top half of that law school class where he actually finished near the bottom, is aware that his real story comes up a bit short.

Third, there’s his relationship with his boss. Barack Obama was widely worshipped by liberals. Although Joe stood next in line for the presidency upon the completion of Barack’s papacy in 2016, Barack spurned him in favor of another candidate, was ambivalent about him running in 2020, and finally pushed him to the curb altogether in 2024 – for being too old and stupid.

Ouch. “Old” doesn’t hurt so much even though this is a guy who went to the trouble of hair plugs and tooth caps, but “stupid” hits close to home.

Joe has gone through life feeling that he had a lot to prove about himself. He was right about that. What he was wrong about was the way he went about that proof.

He decided to prove he was a greater leader than his intellectual superior, Barack. But why stop there? He then set his sights on proving he was the greatest Democrat since FDR, or since, I dunno, maybe Abraham Lincoln. (Half of Democrats think Lincoln was a Democrat. No joke!)

The problem is, Joe has never really thought enough about philosophy, government, religion, or the human condition (I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Joe hasn’t thought about) to have a coherent platform from which to govern.

He had no bold policies; he had only boldness.

Much like Evel Knievel. History has largely forgotten that Evel’s rocket-powered motorcycle jump of the Snake River Canyon landed not on the other side of the canyon, but at the canyon bottom. But they do remember the stunt and the name.

Early in Joe’s term, he decided to pull out of Afghanistan. Never mind that the pullout left a strategic crossroads utterly unguarded. Never mind that we squandered a 20-year investment of time and thousands of American lives. Never mind that we left behind billions in high-tech weaponry for the barbarians. Never mind that we could have instead pulled out in an organized manner, as Joe’s generals urged.

What was important to Joe was that he make a bold statement. And he did. Just like Evel Knievel.

It was a bold “Hold my beer, and watch this!” stunt.

The world did watch Joe’s bold stunt. They were impressed with his boldness. With his common sense, not so much.

But Joe didn’t care if they thought badly of his common sense. In the world of stuntmen and carnival barkers, all publicity is good publicity.

It’s like setting oneself on fire. It might not be productive, but it’ll get you plenty of clicks on YouTube. Probably more clicks than Barack gets, at least on that particular day.

When the conflagration is over, proclaim through charred lips that it was an “extraordinary success.” That’ll get even more clicks.  

That was the pattern of Joe Biden’s presidency. He didn’t so much try to destroy America. He’s too stupid to accomplish that, and too self-centered to try.

Joe’s defiance of the Supreme Court, his commuting of the death sentences of rightly convicted murderers, his transference of college loan debts onto the backs of blue-collar Americans, his takedown of the southern border, his inflation-inducing handouts – they were all designed not so much with policy in mind. Joe’s mind is too small for policy to live there.  

No, Joe’s stunts were designed simply to draw attention to Joe. He succeeded. Joe’s stunts did draw attention to Joe.

But not in the way Joe expected. We’re now seeing his anger in learning that attention does not equal achievement, that infamy does not equal fame, that notoriety does not equal greatness.

Increase legal immigration

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Guess what these people have in common:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Enrico Fermi
  • John Audubon
  • John Muir
  • Elon Musk
  • Nikola Tesla
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Irving Berlin
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • Levi Strauss
  • Dikembe Mutombo
  • Liz Claiborne
  • Mariano Rivera
  • Melania Trump
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • Yo-Yo Ma
  • Ayn Rand
  • Elie Weisel
  • Sergey Brin
  • Bob Marley
  • Sammy Sosa
  • Carlos Santana
  • Henry Kissinger
  • Rupert Murdoch
  • Alexander Hamilton

You’ve probably guessed it – each was born outside the United States, and immigrated here. Most became full, legal American citizens after undergoing the citizenship process, including passing history, civics and English language tests that most American college graduates would flunk.

The list could go on for thousands of pages, but you probably get the drift.

And by the way, you can add to the list a full quarter of the American winners of scientific Nobel Prizes. American technological prowess owes a lot to immigration.

Legal immigration is a strength of America, and always has been. America has been the most attractive place on earth for immigrants for a long time – due in part to the role of immigrants in making it so.

Do build the wall. Do secure the Mexican border. Do deport at least the illegal aliens who are criminals. Do require businesses to check the immigration status of employees, and do impose substantial fines on those who hire illegal ones.

Illegal immigration over the last generation became a tool of the anti-American left. Leftists intent on destroying Western Civilization used it to import the tools of destruction. Only slightly less bad are Democrats who used it to recruit a Democrat constituency.

The rest of America has finally seen the destruction wrought. And ironically, the leftists misread the political sentiments of the only immigrants who can vote legally – the legal ones. Those immigrants who worked tirelessly to come here legally – and vote legally – tend not to sympathize with illegal ones who want to cut the line, and tend not to vote for leftists or Democrats who want to help them do so.

One of the most racist assumptions of the Democrats was that legal Hispanics favor illegal immigration simply because many of the illegal immigrants have brown skin.

OK, the Democrats overplayed their hand. But let’s not overplay ours. We would be foolish to turn away the brave, the entrepreneurial, the smart, the industrious, the legal.

Trump’s powerful America will produce a safer world

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Henry Kissinger argued that geopolitical negotiations are successful only if they are backed by an implicit or explicit threat of force. In that argument, he echoed Teddy
Roosevelt’s quip a century earlier that America should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The contention that adversarial negotiations are successful only if you have some leverage to exert is an obvious truism. But American leaders need to re-learn this truism every so often. They naively – and sometimes malevolently – come to believe that the way to get along with the bad guys is to kowtow to them.

Our latest example began with Barack Obama. He was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism – a basic American tenet which goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s empire of liberty, Abraham Lincoln’s almost-chosen people, and Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill. Obama answered,

“Yes, there’s American exceptionalism, but I suspect the Brits also believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, Americans are exceptional in the same way that everybody else is – which is to say they are not exceptional at all. Moreover, implicit in his answer is that the only true exceptionalism in American is their conceit in believing in it.

Poisoned by his distaste for American civilization, Obama went about his stated task of “fundamentally transforming” it. His first act in this transforming was to go around the world apologizing for American misdeeds of the preceding two centuries.

Forget about America winning the Cold War; helping to win two World Wars; delivering billions in gifts to countries around the world; taking the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free; rebuilding Japan and Germany from totalitarian ashes; putting a man on the moon; spending a trillion dollars to create a well-intentioned but failed Great Society to pull up its underclass; and inventing Silicon Valley.

Forget all that. It is time, Obama preached, for America to apologize to the world.

And so, he did. For eight years, he did what he could – and that was a lot – to reduce American power and prestige in the world. He thought a smaller, weaker, apologetic America would result in world peace.

Barack Obama is nothing if not insincere. I suspect his peace-through-weakness approach was not designed so much to achieve peace, but to achieve his fundamental transformation of America. His vision had less to do with Liberty Gleaming, and more to do with Workers Uniting.

Obama’s reign of pusillanimity – his war on America – continued for eight years before briefly yielding to a four-year interruption. But the interruption was too brief, too chaotic and too sabotaged. Obama then returned in the form of his hand-picked puppet and eff-up in chief, Joe Biden.

Joe was too shallow to grasp Obama’s scheme of fundamental transformation, but he certainly knew what side his bread was buttered on, and he knew who knew about the skeletons in his closet.

Joe did what he was told, willingly and even eagerly. By golly, the man from Scranton was determined to outdo his teacher. With that eagerness, combined with a degree of plain incompetence that bordered on its own kind of exceptionalism, Joe took another step toward the fundamental transformation of America.

And the world. From Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza to the Mexican border and to everywhere else, Joe succeeded in projecting American pusillanimity and incompetence to produce worldwide chaos, violence and death.

Joe was the anti-Midas; everything he touched turned to shit. Sometimes, as in the border, it was on purpose.

Now there’s a new boss in town who’s not the same as the old boss. He was elected a month ago, and won’t assume office for another month, but already he’s making waves, and not the pusillanimous kind.

In response to his threat to impose steep tariffs that would decimate their economies, Mexico and Canada have already promised to clamp down on illegal immigration from their borders into the United States.

In response to his candid support of Israel and his no-nonsense threats against barbaric terrorists, a fragile truce has emerged in that forever conflict. Jefferson, who forcibly subdued the Barbary pirates, would nod.

Nearby, in response to his tough stance against Russian imperialism, rebels in Syria were emboldened to reclaim their country from years of a Russian-sponsored dictatorship.

In response to his muscular defense posture but unwillingness to write blank checks forever in an unwinnable war of attrition, Ukraine and Russia are quietly negotiating peace. Kissinger would approve.

In response to his indefatigable populism, the people of France are once again inspired by the people of America. Those people yearning to be free are demanding a government that represents . . .  wait for it . . . people yearning to be free.

Those people of France begged him to attend the re-opening of their Lady of Paris – the Notre Dame – while Joe Biden mumbles and stumbles around in the swamps of Brazil.

His enemies in America say this guy who supports the Jewish nation of Israel is just like Hitler. Other enemies say he’s too volatile to be in charge. Still others say he has surrounded himself with stupid yes-men (like Elon Musk?). But his American enemies mostly disbelieve their own rhetoric – they’re just bad sports and sore losers.

In the rest of the world, his enemies are lying low like rats in the basement. They’ll stay there – but only for so long as they see America as an unabashed empire of liberty, a strong and chosen people, a shining city on a hill.

Donald Trump and his progeny have an opportunity unseen in two generations. They’re off to a good start.