The Summer of Trump
Republicans unify to send Trump's Big Beautiful Bill to his desk. America chooses winning.
Seldom has a president and nation stood so tall and dominant.
Congress passed Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill on Thursday. The House passed the legislation 218-214 after the Senate approved it 51-50 on Tuesday. The law enshrining Trump’s pro-growth tax levels is a grand triumph, but only the latest.
Trump has taken more decisive action in the first months of his second administration than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Unlike Roosevelt, he has done so without overwhelming congressional majorities and with the near-unified opposition of the liberal media and major institutions.
He just keeps winning. And so does the United States.
In short order, Trump has brought new illegal immigration effectively to a standstill. Former President Joe Biden’s open border and brazen attempt to flood the nation with illegals who would then illegally vote for Democrats has been reversed. Trump’s visit to “Alligator Alcatraz” this week was more than symbolic: the State of Florida prepared the new deportation facility in the Everglades wasteland in record time, reflecting the can-do spirit that has flowed from Trump throughout the country, not only on deportations, but other matters like ending DEI and transgender cultural Marxism.
The media has crowed mightily about how many times Trump initiatives have been set back by courts. But progressive elation has turned to sorrow as Trump has won virtually every legal battle once elevated above cherry-picked Democrat judges to higher courts or the Supreme Court.
Liberal hopes that Republican Justices John Roberts and Amy Barrett would drift left were crushed in the Court’s recent decision to limit universal injunctions. Writing for the majority, Barrett observed that Justice Ketanji Jackson, a Biden-era diversity hire to the Court who wrote the minority opinion, is basically stupid, adding: "We will not dwell on Justice Jackson's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
The opinion wasn’t just an enjoyably brutal smackdown. It marked another step in restoring the power of the presidency, which is the most democratic part of our democracy considering we all vote on it and it’s the only office that can get much good done. The pro-Trump decision is also another waypoint in America’s cultural reversal in favor of honesty and reality five years after the Summer of Love riots and Black Lives Matter McCarthyist storm that progressives engineered beginning in 2020. This is part of the new direction in politics that Trump has made possible, and it is accelerating.
Trump has won libel fights against ABC News and CBS News. He has also effectively defunded the leftwing Voice of America and has moved a bill rescinding government handouts for NPR—known in the business as Nicaraguan Public Radio for its pinko tilt—through the House of Representatives.
On the world stage, Trump is unrivaled. His decision to join Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear program after ample attempts at diplomacy—opposed by nearly all Democrats and the more insular parts of his own political movement—will remake the Middle East. More than setting back a single worrisome nuclear program, Trump revealed yet another piece of received wisdom from the foreign policy establishment—that attacking Iran would start a regional war in the Middle East and choke oil supplies—was false.
With Europe and parts of Asia stagnating, the United States and an increasingly stable and prosperous Arabian Gulf are the best shows in town. Certainly investors know it. Trump has essentially eliminated the supply risk to energy that has been a persistent worry since the 1970s.
Trump has had unprecedented success in bringing home Americans and others who are wrongfully detained abroad, restoring human rights policy to its rightful focus on citizenship and individuals.
Trump’s drop-by appearances at the G7 and NATO summits were like a VIP blazing through otherwise irrelevant meetings of people who haven’t mattered in a long time. NATO’s top bureaucrat even called him “daddy” while promising implausibly that its members would spend 5% of their national output on defense—a Hail Mary gesture by governments with delusions of adequacy. Trump's triumphant trip to the Middle East was far more important since the alliances and investors he energized there pertain to the future, not the past.
Then there is what the media calls “Trump's trade war.” It’s actually America’s fight—not just Trump’s—to establish fairer trade and start to control trade deficits that have prevailed since the 1970s and led to a lopsided economy with too little manufacturing. Trump has hyped progress on agreements that remain vague with China and Great Britain, and played hardball with Canada and Japan. He announced a breakthrough agreement with Vietnam on Wednesday. Few doubt that turbulence will continue, but by the end of summer, Trump will likely have concluded deals with countries that matter most to the future. Japan will likely strike a deal after its upper house legislative elections on July 20. With luck, Trump can evolve an arc of prosperity that runs from the Arabian Gulf through India, Japan, America, and possibly to Great Britain.
All of these trends have just been augmented by the Big Beautiful Bill. It is difficult to overstate its importance. Instead of an automatic tax increase that would have caused recession and possibly crisis, Trump has codified the pro-growth lower taxes he first enacted in 2017. The law clears the only real path for the United States to escape a fiscal crisis from out-of-control federal debt, which is through sustained private-sector economic growth. It turns the tide on perverse Democrat handouts like food stamps and free healthcare for able-bodied people that created a disincentive to seek work. Gone will be the unfairness of immigrants on government handouts having a better life than citizens who work.
The law will also ensure an expansion of the supply side of the economy that will offset any inflationary pressure from higher tariffs. This absence of inflation—a stark difference from the Biden administration which permanently robbed Americans of 20% of their purchasing power—will pave the way for lower interest rates once Trump replaces Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman and fool whom Trump rightly called a “major loser.” Lower interest rates will mean more affordable housing and the ability to refinance federal debt at reasonable rates to stave off fiscal crisis.
[Related: “Trump Can and Should Fire Fed Boss For Political Meddling,” by Christian Whiton, RealClearPolitics]
The legislation isn’t perfect. Ideally it would have cut government further, balanced the budget, and eliminated rather than increased the federal tax deduction for state taxes—a subsidy for blue states. It will also destroy much of the domestic solar industry that even climate change skeptics like myself see as an important hedge against imported energy and the delay it will take to build a new generation of (carbon-free) nuclear power plants. But tight margins in Congress always require ugly legislative sausage-making to get anything done.
Trump has also made strides in fixing the broken Pentagon. He has effectively ended DEI in the military and refocused the giant bureaucracy on winning wars—and therefore preventing them. Less certain is progress in transforming the military from a force dominated by hyper-expensive platforms and habits that the Ukraine War has demonstrated to be increasingly obsolete. Our military is not prepared for battlefields dominated by low-tech drones feeding off of high-tech intelligence from distributed networks.
But it is still early days at the Pentagon, which was never really a part of Trump’s first administration. Every first year of a new Republican administration is spent fixing immense damage that modern Democrats inflict on the military. Reform may still come and in the meantime, a budget boost for the military will solve some critical problems and help convince China to think long and hard before starting World War III.
While Democrats oppose it and the media denies it, these factors all add up to a fundamental restoration of American power. The economy will grow. The United States will take a break from self-hatred and cultural Marxism. The presidency will be restored. The government will seek to aid American citizens first and foremost. Those who play by the rules and work will be rewarded, not punished.
And where does the opposition stand? The Democrats are not just enraged by Trump, but also befuddled by him. They seemingly stand for helping the worst criminals among illegal aliens, transgenderism, inflation, discrimination against whites and Asians, defending anti-Semitic universities and useless and overpaid government employees, letting foreign countries rip us off, and World War III with Russia.
If the recent Democrat primary in New York’s race for mayor is any indication, they will nominate ideological extremists rather than moderates. This is partly due to rage and partly due to the reality that moderates in their party don’t really exist—as evidenced by the fact that zero Democrats voted for Trump’s bill.
As the party out of power, Democrats ought to win one or both houses of Congress in midterm elections next year—a natural cycle of voters initiating and then curbing change. But in their inability to appeal to normal people, Democrats may fail to win either house.
That leaves America in an extremely good position as the Summer of Trump sets in.
Speaking of the Pentagon
Fox Nation has produced a special on America’s unique new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cain. I was quoted a few times in the program, “Who is ‘Raizin’ Cain?,” including about how it is good to have an unusual top officer at a time when the Pentagon needs radical reform.
Link to story about the special.
Link to video (subscription required).
Iran Redux
On Fox Business, I discussed the impact of Trump’s decision to use force against Iran and why CNN and other fake news outlets are rooting against U.S. success.
One of the big picture aspects of all this winning is that the Democrats have positioned themselves as losers, given their refusal to support anything Trump has done. While this can always change, it appears that it is no longer cool to be a Democrat (loser) and it’s now cool to be a Republican (winner🇺🇸🇺🇸). Given the current Dem leadership, which has the appearance of the Star Wars bar scene (old, unattractive, inarticulate), the younger, articulate and telegenic Republicans are clearly on the upswing 👍👍👍
What about Ukraine and Trump, Christian?