Though I got too busy to respond to the comments on Monday’s column, it’s clear that Michelle Obama has advanced out of the semi-finals in the Moron of the Month competition. And let me thank you all for your votes, and your kind comments.
However, when I mentioned that I am not going to succumb to the requests to post nude selfies on my website in a desperate attempt to boost my subscriber count, some of you – a hurtful number, to be honest – insisted that you wouldn’t want that anyway.
Jennifer England Land was typical, posting, “Here for the words not the nudes.”
Nice try, Jennifer, but I know all about reverse psychology, and I’m not going to fall for your sneaky ploy. I’ve spoken with your husband, and we both agree that you need to take a cold shower and focus on the political humor.
Now if I can just repeatedly snap my fingers and remind everyone in CO nation that my eyes are up here, I’ll continue with my report card on Trump’s First 100 Days.
To celebrate the fact that the Cubs have not yet been mathematically eliminated from this year’s playoff race, I’m going to say that I think Trump is batting around .750 right now, which is the best since Reagan by a long shot, and roughly .749 better than Biden.
(It’s hard to assess a comparable batting average for Reagan, because the political game was so different in the 1980s. We weren’t the brokest nation in history, owing $36 trillion; there were only two genders, and a “tranny” was in your car, rather than in a library reading books to toddlers; and the national Democrats hadn’t completely taken leave of their senses.)
I’ll break down the good Trump and the bad Trump, starting with the bad, in the spirit of following a little medicine with a whole lot of sugar. If any of you are always-Trumpers, you might want to skip the next few paragraphs. Or better yet, you might want to read them, and get some constructive criticism from an ally who really wants to see him succeed.
I think that Trump has only made three wrong moves of any consequence so far. The most important is his flawed tariff roll-out, because it has potentially the biggest impact, since perceptions of the economy tend to bleed over into overall perceptions of an administration.
In the past Trump has used the element of surprise to his benefit before, especially in a military context. “Is he going to take out Soleimani, or the top guy in Iran, or Putin? Who knows? But maybe. So they better mind their business.” But economic unpredictability doesn’t work as well, and needlessly screws with the kind of free-market investors and businesses whose lives conservatives should be making easier rather than harder.
It’s unsettling that Trump seems to regard trade deficits and non-reciprocal tariffs as equivalent –they aren’t – and that he has unnecessarily treated our allies as harshly as he has our enemies, by hitting everyone with tariffs, including those who have little or no tariffs against us.
Having said all that, I think he’ll adjust course, and we’ll end up with at least marginally better deals with almost all nations within a year or so. But when we need to get so much done in a very short time, our speed and efficiency is hampered, and everything is made harder when markets are roiled and the public is more sour about the overall economy than they had to be.
I think his second mistake was his handling of Ukraine, though I see that as a quasi-push. He’s way better than Biden, and we needed to put Zelensky in time out and stop shoveling mountains of cash into Ukraine with no accountability. But saying that Ukraine started the war is a lie, and a dumb one.
Zelensky has a lot of flaws, and the Ukraine is corrupt and flawed too. But Putin is an evil, mass-murdering KGB thug, and he started the war. Going softer on him than you do on Ukraine hurts the chances for peace. And going from promising, “I’ll end the war on day 1,” to “If Putin doesn’t come to the table, we’re walking,” is not a good look – and it’s what Putin wants anyway!
Trump’s third mistake is a result of his first: he contributed to the election loss of the solid conservative Pierre Poilievre in the Canadian election on Monday. I’ve seen some conservatives blast claims that Trump is responsible, but they are only partially right. Ultimately, of course, Canadian voters are to blame if they reject a good conservative for a lousy leftist one.
But several months ago, Poilievre was up by 20 in the polls, and an almost certain winner. Trudeau and the liberals had been in power for 10 years, and had produced terrible results. (Unexpectedly!) Trump or no Trump, the liberals’ chances of victory were improved by Trudeau’s resignation, and the fact that Mark Carney came in and did the two things most likely to produce a leftist victory: he reversed an unpopular leftist policy (axing a “green” gas tax) and shamelessly lied about his agenda.
But it wasn’t just Trump’s tariff battle that hurt Poilievre; his bluster about making another country our 51st state would arouse a sense of patriotism and resentment in the citizens of any nation, and it did here.
I love having Milei in Argentina and Bukele in El Salvador, and it would have been great to have a third strong conservative running a country in this hemisphere, especially in the closest country to us, geographically and financially. And while this will hurt Canada worse than us, it’s still a senselessly missed opportunity.
Okay, assuming the always-Trump contingent of CO nation has restrained themselves from burning me in effigy… I don’t just LIKE everything else Trump has been doing – I LOVE it!
Closing the border and deporting Biden’s 10 million illegals was the most serious challenge facing him, and Trump has been knocking both of those out of the park. Hulk Homan™ is a superhero, and Stephen Miller is a dead-eyed killer of would-be troll journalists. And the Democrats are earning their record low ratings by spooning with the worst tattooed gangbanging thugs they can find.
Government waste and corruption had come to seem like an inevitable fact of life, but DOGE is making great progress, and will hopefully continue to apply to it the most powerful antidote of all: public exposure.
As an academic, I’ve been tortured for years by the blatant bias and arrogance of the smug left that has dominated our universities since before I was born. But in just a few short months, Trump has fired volley after volley at the Ivory Towers, and now he is rolling the most ominous of his siege engines into place: federal dollars and the tax exemptions without which the anti-Semitic and anti-American narcissists inside cannot hold out for long!
Trump’s biggest weakness in his first term was inexperience, especially when it came to picking good personnel, and understanding how deeply embedded the human ticks of the deep state were in every government agency. Now he knows so much more about both, and has upped his game immeasurably.
Just about every cabinet member and appointee has been a clear improvement over those in his first term, and he’s made innovative use of the weapons that the Dems left for him. Rather than having to create something like DOGE from scratch, he repurposed Obama’s “Department of Governmental Efficiency.” What had been a lie and distraction in Obama’s hands is now a battle axe in Trump’s, and he’s been cleaving dead weight from the bureaucracy like Arnold in a Conan movie.
He similarly repurposed Biden’s CBP One app, which was formerly used to facilitate illegal entry into our country, and is now being used to warn and encourage those illegals to self-deport. He also transformed the forgotten Roosevelt Reservation – a narrow strip of land along our southern border from the Pacific to Texas, established by TR in 1907 – into a “national defense area.” This had two fantastic effects: it allowed the use of our military to supplement civilian border control forces, and it added enhanced criminal penalties for those who cross it illegally.
The good news is coming in so many areas that it’s hard to keep up with. Bobby Kennedy’s MAHA is off to a good start; the pulling back on counter-productive solar and wind farms and the ramping up of oil, natural gas, nuclear power and even cleaner coal is all great. Getting rid of DEI and corrupt NGOs won’t just save us money, it will prevent the damage that that money was doing.
On so many fronts, the “FA” phase is over, and the glorious “FO” phase has begun!
I’m still frustrated by how many delays are being caused by the illegitimate lawfare going on all over the country. But as the Dems and their arrogant, far-left judges keep going farther and farther, they are (hopefully!) only speeding up the day when a maddeningly reluctant SCOTUS is forced to move. And since I’m an optimist, I have to believe that we’re going to win most of the battles ahead of us: the president has to be the one in charge of the executive branch, and the supremacy clause has to mean that federal enforcement is going to trump illegal sanctuary city efforts, and civil rights and Title IX rules have to trump the Jew haters on campus and women haters in women’s sports and spaces.
During the 47 years of the Biden administration, I constantly had to limit my exposure to current events, because it was so depressing to see the damage the left was doing to my country. But now I can’t wait to get to the computer in the morning, and start scrolling through the mostly good news of the day, and good omens for the future.
Because I really do expect that as we head into mid-summer or so, the good news stories are going to start cascading. The first trade deals are going to start to be signed, which will settle and then encourage the markets. New manufacturing will either ramp up or start – chip-making in AZ, car-making in IN, power plants to replace failing solar and wind and to meet demand everywhere.
The court rulings are also going to start to come out, and those should have an excellent snowball effect. There are probably a dozen TROs stopping Trump from cutting spending and firing unnecessary employees in multiple executive departments, and another dozen saying he can’t withhold federal funds to enforce federal laws, and many dozens saying he can’t deport illegals without years-long trials-of-the-century for each illegal. If and when SCOTUS finally rules correctly on one case in each area, each precedent will cause many lawfare dominoes to tumble.
The principle of “pour encourager les autres” – for the encouragement of others – will magnify each win, and create more momentum. The two radical judges now facing charges after committing pro-illegal felonies, the various morons who have gotten caught vandalizing Teslas, the jihadi-enthusiasts on student visas who have now been kicked out – all of those are cautionary tales to all but the dumbest of the troublemakers.
Perhaps most importantly, when millions of illegals see the NGOs and sanctuary programs that used to support them ramping down, and ICE ramping up, and their countrymen getting caught and deported, they’ll start to self-deport.
If we can settle some of the tariff uncertainty and continue the progress in so many areas, I think that although our House and Senate majorities are very thin, there’s even a decent chance we can avoid the historic pattern of a president losing the House and/or Senate in the midterms!
If all of that happens, plus our wandering CO returns to us, our future will be bright indeed!
I leave you with two last thoughts:
No means no, Jennifer.
…and…
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 