Donald Trump has a second chance, with a much better understanding of how things work in Washington and whom to trust there, to have a transformative presidency.
The absurdity is finally over. Almost. The insanity of the national Democrats we have seen over the last four years, particularly since Donald Trump’s November defeat of Kamala Harris, seemed as though it would never end. Yet, this ending on a sour note is useful insofar as it reminds Americans why they voted the way they did this past fall. It also brings hope that the second Trump Administration will again take up the task that Donald Trump announced in his Inaugural Address eight years ago: to make sure that “a nation exists to serve its citizens” and that “our government is controlled by the people.”
The Biden Administration’s purposeful weakening of our border shows that the first goal was far from Democrats’ minds. That they don’t want the people to control the government was demonstrated in spades by the latest bit of Biden absurdity. Friday, the official Joe Biden account posted a tweet with a picture informing Americans, “PRESIDENT BIDEN DECLARES THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT IS NOW THE LAW OF THE LAND.” The poster declaring this all-caps nonsense was accompanied by text saying: “Today I’m affirming what I have long believed and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: The 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”
This was the social media version of a Friday statement released by the White House indicating the same thought, but adding that the premier legal guild, the American Bar Association, agrees with him. Yet a Community Note to the text, supplied by readers on X/Twitter, explains why this claim is nonsense: “The text of the Equal Rights Amendment contained a ratification deadline. The amendment was not ratified by the requisite number of states prior that deadline. While some states have ratified the amendment post-deadline, other states have revoked their ratification.”
What’s so funny—in a dark way—is that after eight full years of being told that Donald Trump is an authoritarian and dictator, we saw Democrats claiming the ability of the President to simply amend the Constitution by saying it is amended. Many online commentators observed that this resembled the episode of The Office in which Steve Carell’s idiot character Michael Scott believes he can declare bankruptcy by loudly yelling, “I declare bankruptcy!” Many came up with their own self-declared 29th Amendments, mandating such things as: the rescinding of California’s statehood, Canada becoming a state, the abolition of the IRS and the federal income tax, the repeal of the designated hitter rule, “the return of red cups and iron-skillet cooked pizzas to Pizza Huts across the United States,” Die Hard being always referred to as a Christmas movie, Americans “rocking down to Electric Avenue,” the declaration that Return of the Jedi is the last real Star Wars movie, the prohibition of Tom Brady from sportscasting, and many others.
Patriotic Americans know how to react to something as stupid and toothless as a tweeted Constitutional Amendment: they mock it. One can’t help imagine an alternative scenario, however. How many national magazines would dedicate special issues to the descent of fascism in America had Donald Trump done this? How many cable news networks would drone on endlessly about the Orange Hitler’s Twitter Tyranny?
Patriotic Americans can laugh because it’s hard to imagine anything truly bad coming from this idiotic maneuver. In fact, it might even be seen as a plus that this particular action didn’t rank in the top 100 of the disasters the Biden Administration has been leaving for America even since the election. And it serves the useful purpose of reminding Americans why they voted for Donald Trump in the first place. They are tired of being bullied by academics from Georgetown and corrupted guilds such as the ABA attempting to rule them via fiat.
No, Americans are tired of all of this. I don’t know what Donald Trump’s Second Inaugural Address will say, but if he even repeated the first one, Americans would be very happy. For what Trump said on that first occasion was what every American politician needs to understand. This nation is for her citizens and this government serves at the behest and the control of the American people.
The problems he identified involved Washington, politicians, and the political establishment flourishing while Americans were not able to share in the wealth or protect themselves from the results of the policies being enacted.
“Americans,” Trump said on January 21, 2017, “want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.” But, for too many Americans, a different reality than these “just and reasonable demands” obtains: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
Very dramatically, Trump proclaimed, “This American carnage stops here and now.” What he wanted in the place of this carnage was to make America great again: “We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.”
Those goals still apply. Securing our border and deporting illegal aliens, starting with the ones who are criminals threatening the safety of our neighborhoods or foreign terrorists threatening our national security, is probably the most important one. And Americans are for it. A New York Times poll shows that “63% of Americans support deporting immigrants in the country illegally who arrived during the recent wave of migration to the southern border over the last four years.”
Dealing with our immigration problem will immediately help the problem of American job loss since, as even the U.S. Government’s own job numbers have been revealing, native American employment numbers have been in a slump, while immigrants are getting the jobs that are there. This is true at both the level of blue-collar workers and of white-collar workers. The H-1B visa debate is very relevant to the latter.
There is, of course, much more to do: cleaning up our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, reforming our military, reverting to the foreign policy of Trump’s first term that projected strength and brought peace, and making America again an energy powerhouse, among them.
But the most important task will be making sure that the buck stops with the officials who are responsible to the American people—especially the president himself. 2024 finally revealed on a large scale that Joe Biden was not really in charge and was not capable of being in charge. Who was? One of the best guesses is still Barack Obama. Or perhaps “the Interagency.” That we do not know means that it was really impossible for the people to control the government.
Donald Trump has a second chance, with a much better understanding of how things work in Washington and whom to trust there, to have a transformative presidency. His first term was, until the Covid episode, a tremendously successful period that portended a very bright future. That it was interrupted by four years of a presidency that is now being rated by Americans as among the worst in history is perhaps a bit of providence.
We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt how corrupt that Washington establishment and the so-called mainstream media are. We now know how many lies were told in order to derail this country from the direction it was heading from 2017 to 2019. We now know how much will be needed to clean up the problems left to us by a long line of Washington politicians and administrative agencies.
There is no doubt that Trump will not be perfect. We cannot expect utopia. But we can hope for something much better than what we’ve had these past four years. Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday means that we can now start a journey back to the future that was looked much brighter in Trump’s first term.
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The featured image is “President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump walk across the South Lawn of the White House after disembarking Marine One Thursday, Sept. 2, 2020, returning from their trip to the Flight 93 National Memorial in Stoystown, Pa. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks).” This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
