Tag: donald trump

If This Is Winning, America Can’t Afford Much More of It

“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore. Mr. President, it’s too much.’”—Donald Trump

Donald Trump promised Americans they would get tired of winning.

If this is what winning looks like, America can’t afford much more of it.

We are losing ground economically. We are losing credibility abroad. We are losing tourists, workers, stability, trust, constitutional guardrails, and whatever remained of the illusion that the government answers to “we the people.”

The tourism economy is taking a hit, with international visitors increasingly reluctant to come to the United States. Even migration—the lifeblood of America’s economic growth, innovation, labor force and national renewal—is now moving in the wrong direction. Fewer people are coming in, more Americans are leaving, and by some estimates the country has already crossed into negative net migration.

That is not the mark of a nation “winning.” It is the mark of a nation people are increasingly choosing to escape.

Even the looming World Cup—normally an economic windfall for tourism, travel and hospitality—is being shadowed by the administration’s immigration crackdown, detention protests and threats to disrupt international travel at key airports.

That is what happens when a nation treats visitors, immigrants and dissenters as threats first and human beings second: people stop coming, businesses suffer, and fear becomes official policy.

The economy, despite the administration’s relentless victory laps, is flashing warning signs: downgraded growth, strained consumers, rising costs, depleted savings, and policy chaos that leaves families, small businesses and entire industries guessing what fresh disruption tomorrow will bring.

We are being worn down by the losses.

Meanwhile, the man who promised to end wars has presided over their continuation and expansion. The man who promised to bring prices down has helped drive uncertainty up. The man who promised to drain the swamp has turned government into a spoils system for loyalists, cronies, contractors, oligarchs and power brokers. The man who promised law and order has treated the law as something to be weaponized against enemies and waived for friends.

This is not winning.

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Trump Says “They’re Rigging the Election” in California as Counting Continues – “They Found a Lot of Mail-in Ballots Last Night”

President Trump sounded the alarm on California on Thursday, telling reporters, “They’re rigging the election,” as counting continues across the state and key races for California governor and Los Angeles mayor remain undecided. 

As The Gateway Pundit reported, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt had surged on election night, taking an early lead over Democratic Councilwoman Nithya Raman and trailing incumbent Democrat Mayor Karen Bass by a slim margin. The two top vote-getters will advance to a runoff if no candidate receives over 50% of the vote.

However, the late-arriving mail-in votes, which are expected to be roughly a third of the total vote, will take days to arrive under California’s lawless vote-by-mail system.

As of 2:47 pm ET, 62% of ballots in the Los Angeles mayor’s race had been counted. Only Bass has been projected to advance to the runoff in November, where she will face either Spencer Pratt or Nithya Raman.

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Trump Says Accountability Is Coming Over The ‘Rigged’ 2020 Election

In a new, wide-ranging interview on “Pod Force One” with Miranda Devine, President Donald Trump is saying out loud what he says a growing body of evidence increasingly supports: the 2020 election was rigged, the people responsible are known, and something is coming for them.

Trump was unambiguous. “We had a rigged election,” he told Devine. “I used to say that a year and a half ago, the election was rigged. And the cameras would literally turn off. Yeah. And the anchor would say, ‘Sir, you’re not allowed to say that.’ Now nobody ever turns off the camera because it’s been proven to be rigged.”

Trump added, “Look at what happened in Georgia. Look at all the stuff that we found out. It was a rigged election. Biden lost in a landslide.”

Trump went further, connecting the consequences of that election and the disasters that followed, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which, Trump says, “would have never happened” had he still been in office. And, of course, there was Biden’s border crisis, which resulted in, by Trump’s count, 25 million illegal immigrants into the United States in four years, many of whom, he said, were criminals.

“And fentanyl deaths,” Devine pointed out.

“Yeah. He was the worst president,” Trump argued. “And we were laughed at all over the world as a country. We’re not laughed at anymore. We have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

Devine pressed him directly on the accountability for what happened in the 2020 election. “So someone has to be punished, though, for that,” she said. “So how do you do that?”

“Well, you don’t have to punish them all,” he said. “I’d rather not get into it. Let’s see what happens. The election was rigged. We know who rigged the election. We know it. We know everything now. You know, we have information that nobody thought was possible. But when you get to office, all of a sudden, people start giving you things.”

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Senate GOP Narrowly Defeats Schumer’s Amendment to Ban Trump’s Weaponization Fund – These Three Republicans Voted with Dems

Senate Republicans on Thursday voted 49-50 to defeat an amendment that would ban Trump’s weaponization fund.

Three Republican Senators voted with the Democrats: Susan Collins (ME), Dan Sullivan (AK) and John Husted (OH).

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche this week said the DOJ is dropping the $1.8 billion weaponization fund created to pay people who were persecuted by the Biden Regime.

President Trump and the DOJ have suggested that they are working on a backup plan to pay back Americans who were brutalized by Biden’s DOJ.

Democrat Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced the amendment to ban Trump’s weaponization fund during Wednesday’s vote-a-rama.

The Hill reported:

Senate Republicans voted on Thursday morning to defeat an amendment sponsored by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) to prohibit the Department of Justice from establishing a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for MAGA allies, a proposal that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers this week the administration would abandon.

Notably, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and John Husted (R-Ohio), who all face tough re-election races in November, voted for Schumer’s amendment.

The proposal, which would have amended a $70 billion budget reconciliation package to fund immigration enforcement, still failed by a vote of 49 to 50.

All Democrats voted for it.

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President Trump Announces Investigation into California’s Extremely Slow Vote Counts Just as Suspicious Late Drops Slash GOP Leads in Two Critical Races

President Trump is fed up with the election shenanigans in California and is taking action.

As The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson reported, highly popular reality TV star-turned-mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt and businessman Steve Hilton emerged on election night seemingly in good shape to advance past the open primary for Los Angeles Mayor and California Governor, respectively.

Pratt is currently leading Marxist LA City Councilwoman Nithya Raman and trailing Bass by a slim margin. Hilton leads all candidates for governor. Few votes have been tallied since election night, but the ones counted so far have been good for Democrats.

Are Democrats beginning to execute the steal?

Trump thinks so. On Thursday morning, Trump alleged “big cheating” by the Democrats and announced an investigation had been launched by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in LA.

There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks.”

“Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”

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Brooke Rollins Details How Trump Admin Is Cracking Down on Food Stamp Fraud

Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins on Thursday during a hearing explained how the Trump administration is working to combat food stamp fraud.

Rollins wrote, “@USDA has NEVER had access to State SNAP data. Not until this Administration demanded it. That’s why every figure from years past is meaningless. From the 29 states that DID share data, we’ve already identified at least $3 billion a year in fraud. Extrapolated nationwide: more than $10 billion. This isn’t ‘erroneous payments.’ This is FRAUD — and yes, @RepAngieCraig, I know the difference. Do you?”

Rollins shared a clip of her exchange with Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (D-MN) in which the secretary explains that much of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamp, data they receive from states such as California and Minnesota cannot be trusted.

“The lowest fraud rate of any program in America is the SNAP program. You can’t be serious when you say that,” Rollins said.

She then said, “@RepShontelBrown just said the quiet part out loud: Democrats want as many people on welfare as possible. It’s remarkable.”

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War, Arrogance, and the Unraveling of US Power

The United States is not approaching collapse because it lacks power. It is approaching collapse because it has too often mistaken power for wisdom. Its armed forces remain unmatched in reach, its financial system remains central to global commerce, and its technology sector continues to shape the future. Yet these advantages can conceal a more dangerous condition: the erosion of judgment.

A superpower begins to decay when it treats coercion as strategy, military reach as political authority, and exemption from rules as evidence of strength. The result is not immediate collapse, but a cumulative weakening of legitimacy, fiscal discipline, institutional trust, and strategic clarity.

The war on Iran is the latest expression of this disorder. Washington and Israel possess overwhelming conventional capabilities, and early assessments show that Iran has suffered serious military damage. Nevertheless, the central question is not whether the United States can strike Iran; it is whether violence can produce a stable political outcome.

The conflict has already shifted from a narrow military campaign into a test of endurance, maritime pressure, domestic patience, and bargaining leverage. Iran’s ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates the difference between battlefield superiority and strategic control. A weaker state need not defeat a superpower outright. It need only raise the cost of victory beyond what that superpower’s public, economy, and allies are willing to bear.

This is the recurring failure of American interventionism. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran belong to a broader tradition in which Washington enters conflicts with maximal confidence and exits them with diminished credibility. The pattern is not simply a military error. It is a conceptual error: the assumption that destroying capacity is equivalent to creating order. The post-9/11 wars revealed how quickly punitive power becomes a strategic burden. Brown University’s Costs of War project has documented the enormous human, fiscal, and social consequences of that era. Iran risks extending the same logic into a still more dangerous regional environment.

The deeper problem is imperial overstretch. Paul Kennedy’s classic argument was not that great powers fall because they become poor, but because they allow external commitments to exceed the economic and political base that sustains them. That diagnosis remains relevant. The United States carries global military obligations, subsidizes allies, maintains vast overseas deployments, and finances repeated wars while its own fiscal position deteriorates. The Congressional Budget Office projects large deficits and rising public debt through 2036, with interest costs absorbing an expanding share of national resources. A republic cannot indefinitely combine imperial commitments with domestic under-investment and expect no internal consequence.

The moral contradiction is equally corrosive. At least until recently, the United States has claimed to defend sovereignty in Ukraine, oppose coercion in Asia, and uphold international law against rivals. Yet in the Middle East, it has often shielded allies from the very standards it invokes elsewhere. U.S. support for Israel amid the Gaza catastrophe, the wider regional war, and the confrontation with Iran have deepened the perception that American legality is selective. Human rights organizations have warned that continued military support amid alleged serious abuses risks complicity and weakens the credibility of the legal order Washington has traditionally claimed to defend. A power that applies law only to adversaries does not preserve order; it converts international law into a global power hierarchy.

U.S. economic policy now displays the same arrogance. Sanctions, tariffs, export controls, investment restrictions, and financial penalties have become routine instruments of U.S. statecraft. Used carefully, they can serve legitimate security purposes. Used excessively, they teach other states that dependence on U.S.-controlled systems is a vulnerability. RAND’s recent work argues that the boundary between economic security and economic statecraft has broken down, and that U.S. policy now needs clearer tests of purpose, economic soundness, legitimacy, and sustainability. Research on financial sanctions similarly notes that the overuse of dollar power can encourage hedging against the dollar-centered system. Coercion may deliver short-term compliance, but it can also lay the groundwork for long-term exit.

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Why Trump May Actually Have Told Netanyahu ‘Everybody Hates You!’

“You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

According to Axios, this is what Donald Trump said to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in “an expletive-laden call” earlier today.

Trump also accused Netanyahu of ingratitude since Trump had helped keep Netanyahu out of jail. At the heart of the matter was Trump’s frustration with Netanyahu not caving to his demands to cease bombing Lebanon, as Israel’s aggression risked jeopardizing Trump’s diplomacy with Iran.

The story has understandably been met with considerable skepticism. After all, there is a long and well-documented pattern of American presidents privately expressing anger and frustration with Israeli prime ministers while publicly standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them and continuing to support their policies.

Take Joe Biden as an example. In late December 2023, Axios reported that Biden’s frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu had become so intense that he abruptly ended a phone call with the Israeli leader, reportedly concluding the exchange with the terse remark: “This conversation is over.” Yet in practice, Biden remained firmly aligned with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

Two months later, NBC News reported that Biden had repeatedly referred to Netanyahu as an “asshole” in private conversations with aides and donors. But even as he vented his exasperation behind closed doors, Biden continued to arm Israel lavishly and shield it from mounting diplomatic and political pressure at the United Nations. The gap between private frustration and public policy could hardly have been more striking.

According to Bob Woodward’s 2024 book War, Biden’s frustrations became intensely personal during the Rafah dispute and Biden told an associate: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f***ing guy.” No policy change followed.

There are plenty of other examples.

There are, however, a few important counterexamples – particularly from Trump’s second term – that suggest the Axios story is not entirely implausible. (Indeed, the report would have been far more difficult to believe had Axios claimed that Trump told Netanyahu, “Everybody loves you.”)

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Trump Signs Executive Order Backing HHS On Childhood Vaccine Reform — Will It Matter?

An executive order President Donald Trump signed late last Friday has reignited the national debate on the childhood immunization schedule.

The order directs public health agencies to align the schedule with a federal assessment published in January that calls for fewer recommended childhood vaccines and reflects the “scientific evidence and best practices from peer, developed countries while preserving access to vaccines currently available to Americans.”

The order states:

“The scientific assessment found that the United States currently recommends more childhood vaccines than any peer nation, including more than twice as many vaccine doses as some European nations, and identified a set of consensus vaccines that are consistently recommended in all peer countries.”

In a Substack post, Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, wrote, “After decades in which the schedule only ratcheted in one direction — more products, more doses, earlier and earlier — this is a top-down instruction to reconsider that trajectory.”

The executive order comes amid recent suggestions that the Trump administration has strategically pivoted away from vaccine policy in the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections.

But for Michael Kane, director of advocacy for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the order “is a sign that examining the childhood vaccination schedule is a true priority.”

“The U.S. gives more vaccines to children before the age of 2 than nearly all other developed peer nations. In addition, we have the highest levels of chronic illness in children in the developed world. Lowering the number of recommended vaccines would allow us to see what role vaccination plays in the chronic illness epidemic we have in our nation,” Kane said.

Medical researcher Neil Z. Miller, who in 2023 co-authored a study finding a positive statistical correlation between infant mortality rates and the number of vaccine doses received by babies, agreed. “Many developed countries recommend a smaller set of vaccines universally while reserving others for specific risk groups. … The executive order establishes a clearer distinction between ‘core’ and ‘optional’ vaccines.”

The executive order also suggests guidance on how the federal government makes such vaccine recommendations and signals support for parental choice and the right to religious exemptions to vaccinations.

“This executive order is about far more than vaccines,” said Daniel O’Connor, founder and CEO of TrialSite News. “It’s about who gets to decide acceptable medical risk for America’s children.”

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The Rule of One Price and the Donald’s ‘F’ In Energy Economics 101

The Donald seems to think he has all the time in the world to end the conflagration he and Bibi started in the Persian Gulf. Today he even told the mullahs to take a hike when they suspended any further negotiations owing to Bibi’s brutal strikes on civilian targets in southern Lebanon and continued violations of the so-called April 13th truce in the Persian Gulf.

Thus, regarding the meandering negotiations of the last 45 days, the Donald averred,

“I don’t care if they’re over, honestly… I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,”

Brave words, these. And completely, totally and hideously out to lunch, too.

What’s actually just around the corner is an explosion of oil and related energy prices that will make the 1970s look like a Sunday school picnic, but here we have the Donald talking just plain barking idiocy about what comes next:

He also said he wasn’t worried about oil prices, which spiked following the report in Iranian state media that Tehran is vowing to “completely block” the Strait of Hormuz in addition to halting negotiations.

“I think the oil will be dropping like a rock in the very near, you know, the very near distance,” Trump said.

The president of the United States – the alleged sagacious businessman we have purportedly been waiting for – couldn’t be more sadly mistaken about something as basic and straight forward as the price of crude oil, its refined products and related energy commodities: To wit, the Donald is absolutely clueless about the cardinal fact that there is one world oil market and ONE PRICE the planet over.

And that’s regardless of the fact that the US is now a large scale net exporter of crude oil, refined products and nat gas liquids. In recent weeks, in fact, the Persian Gulf outages have caused exports to soar 12.9 mb/d, which is up nearly 20% from the 10.8 mb/d average during 2025. In all, current net exports of petroleum liquids at 5.7 mb/d leave not doubt that the USA is solidly “energy independent”.

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