Tariffs – RESOLVE

Trump did it

The Left has furiously managed the decline of our nation, domestically and globally, for the better part of 15 years. The consequences are coming to the fore. In order to distract from the carnage now so visible in the wake of three Obama terms in power, Trump and the Make America Great Again majority must be falsely and persistently accused.

By Steve Woodward

Everything is Donald Trump’s fault. Everything deemed unpleasant, unexpected, uncomfortable and unbearable. Everything.

It’s a demonstrable falsehood, of course. But it is perpetuated by a surging, media-fueled blame culture. It is the Left’s last best hope.

Covid-19. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. January 6. October 7. These are among the large-scale events for which President Trump is to blame. (He was not even in office in some cases).

But there are more. Americans are cancelling summer travel because of Trump’s tariffs, reports The Wall Street Journal (the intent of which are purposely distorted by coordinated media talking points). A high death toll after recent Kentucky tornados? That’s on Trump, squeals The Washington Post. Even pop culture is in decline, concludes The Atlantic magazine. It interviewed art critic Dean Kissick, who scolds that we’re living in “the long 2017”, which an Atlantic writer describes as “a period in which anxieties related to Donald Trump and Brexit (Brexit?) have smothered culture with moralism, navel gazing, and conformity.” (Why is it that “critics” always try to get away with making statements devoid of substance or meaning? Morals are evil?)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is Trump’s “modern day Gestapo,” says Minnesota Marxist and Gov. Tim Walz, thus Trump and Trump alone must be blamed if even one potentially lethal illegal alien is temporarily jailed with a hoard of really lethal guys after their deportation to El Salvador. The “Maryland man”, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, became collateral damage in America’s long overdue war on mass illegal immigration, a war fought on two fronts — at the U.S.-Mexico border and through active arrests and deportations. Collateral damage is the price of war.

In the Left’s war on American sovereignty under the Obama/Biden regime of 2021-24, we witnessed repeated collateral damage — raped and murdered innocent citizens such as Laken Riley, Rachel Morin and Kaitlyn Weaver. Weaver was killed in July 2024, the victim of a high-speed auto collision. The driver of the speeding car was an illegal immigrant minor, 15, who just last week was sentenced to probation (emphasis added) and community service by a Trump hating Colorado judge.

No one on the Left, not presidents, not governors, not judges, is to blame in the aftermath of these one-off tragedies. The blame culture is real enough, and the media corrupt and pervasive enough, that any assignment of blame directed at Trump/MAGA can be justified, even legitimized.

They’ll probably get around to pinning Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis on Trump’s mean “Sleepy Joe” comments.

As obviously absurd as that would be, look more closely at the “doomed summer travel narrative”.

A couple told the Journal they are cancelling a bucket-list trip to France owed to Trump’s tariff re-balancing strategy. (The Left calls it a trade war, which is accurate if the context is that war is what other countries have waged against the United States for decades).

“We’ve been talking about Paris as long as we’ve been together, which is 54 years,” said Don Pratt, 75.

The Journal reports, “The couple sketched out a two-week itinerary that included England and Scotland, where his ancestors lived centuries ago. ‘Then the tariffs sort of got everybody around the world mad at us’,” Pratt said. “He worried about a chilly greeting if he showed up hoping to meet long-lost relatives. So instead, they recently booked a trip to take their adult son and his family to Walt Disney World … ”

This is a truly sorry side effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome. These mentally warped seniors traded reunions with relatives, memories of fabulous landmarks, and world-class cheese and wine for woke Disney drag queens and long lines of poorly dressed Americans swilling 32-ounce sodas. Are they devoid of any hint of national pride that once was presumed to be wired into the DNA of American citizens? Apparently, yes. They’re fine with high tariffs imposed by the French on products inbound from the U.S. and never contemplate why, for example, you’ll rarely see a Chevrolet Suburban navigating Parisian thoroughfare, or an award-winning Napa Cabernet Sauvignon on a Lyon wine list. The trip to visit the relatives would have been worth it just to explain how fair trade actually works.

Meanwhile, it’s tornado and hurricane season, and while many Americans delight at tracking and “modeling” potentially deadly systems and where they might be headed, media fear mongers are salivating, anxious to fire up the climate change narrative machine. Naturally, Trump’s fingerprints will be everywhere in the aftermath of high winds and surging water. (In stark contrast, the Left’s media slaves never raised similar concerns about Biden or North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper when thousands of the state’s citizens were abandoned after Hurricane Helene last September, and the devastation continues to roll off the back of Josh Stein, North Carolina’s latest Democrat governor.)

Severe tornadoes hammered parts of Kentucky on May 16, 2025. The Washington Post breathlessly reported that “Jackson, Kentucky, is four meteorologists short of what agency officials have deemed ideal staffing” and blamed that on sweeping, (overdue) audits of federal agency staffing and payrolls. Kentucky’s Lexington Herald Leader ran with an ominous headline — “Did staffing cuts at weather service affect Kentucky’s tornado response?” — but its reporter couldn’t find anyone on the scene who answered in the affirmative.

“As planned in advance, neighboring offices provided staffing support to the office in Jackson,” a spokesperson said. Read that closely. Resources, in this case human resources, were coordinated as needed under extreme circumstances. Is that not what taxpayers should expect from federally funded agencies and their field offices?

During his recent unhinged rants while “performing” in the United Kingdom, cranky, old Bruce Springsteen took blaming Trump to new depths, in once case decrying “residents” being taken “off American streets” and sent to “foreign detention centers”. These of course are dangerous illegals being returned to their countries of origin. In other words, definitely not “born in the USA”.

Springsteen finally calmed down and attempted poignancy, quoting writer James Baldwin, who observed, “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.”

Is there enough? Where is the humanity in a nation overrun by illegal immigrants, mostly gang trained males, killing our citizens? Where is the humanity in gutting American manufacturing jobs in favor of cheap foreign labor? (Springsteen’s contemporary Billy Joel lyricized about “closing all the factories down [in Allentown]”, remember?) And where is the humanity in covering up Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis until even compliant media no longer could sustain the lie that he was mentally competent as a sitting President?

Dunces 2.0

By Steve Woodward

Amid my eternal quest to understand the deranged Left in 2025, a long-forgotten book title jarred my feeble brain as I inhaled the longleaf pine-infused air on a Spring evening.

“The Confederacy of Dunces”, published in 1980, was written in the late 1960s by an iconoclast named John Kennedy O’Toole.

“The novel offended the progressive sensibilities of publishers based in New York,” wrote historian Auguste Meyrat in 2024. “It took a fellow writer from Louisiana, Walker Percy, to agree to read the manuscript and advocate for the book’s publication nearly a decade after Toole committed suicide.”

And what happened next? The book was declared to be a literary classic. And what did it, and central character Ignatius C. Reilly, reveal that resonates today?

“There’s a whole generation of Ignatius’s today: vain, overeducated young adults who can’t hold a job, live healthily, own any property, or maintain a friendship or romantic partnership, and yet often feel proud of themselves,” writes Meyrat. “Like Ignatius, they feel qualified to deliver their opinion on a whole range of issues they have no clue about. Without a doubt, if Ignatius existed today, he would likely be an online influencer hosting a popular YouTube channel or podcast.”

Ignatius is the poster boy for today’s Democrats, in other words. Their narratives, compliantly advanced by an ever more corrupt media, never have been more absurd, or delusional. We need to call them out for what they are. Dunces. Consider:

Tariffs are imploding the economy to permit a few Trump cronies to short the stock markets and make billions. (The tariffs are, in fact, causing a flurry of requests for Oval Office visits and phone calls by freaked-out foreign leaders knowing the gig is up).

The economy is teetering (but never mind the easing of inflation as reflected by the March consumer price index).

The deportation of illegal immigrants tied to murderous gangs is just a pretext in a grand scheme to mass deport American citizens. (If true, start with Hunter Biden).

The Department of Government Efficiency ultimately plans to dismantle Social Security and Medicare to deprive American citizens of their “God-given” entitlements. (False, but at least DOGE will end Social Security payments to the deceased).

Luigi Mangione, who shot a UnitedHealthcare CEO in cold blood, is a brave martyr and, damn, he’s handsome, too. (Who knew the steely eyes of a crazed killer are a turn-on?)

Karmelo Anthony had to carry a knife to a Texas high school track competition and stab a fellow teenager in the chest because, like every black teen amid confrontation, an unarmed white kid is intent on killing him. (Media spin: the dead kid is not the victim).

Every business venture that became wildly successful under Elon Musk, especially electric vehicle production and space travel, is a threat to democracy and reminiscent of pre-World War II Germany. (And Trump is Hitler because if you repeat it often enough …)

Trump’s mass deportations are cruel and astonishing Executive branch overreach. And unprecedented. (Except Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden deported millions of illegal immigrants without inspiring one court injunction or Supreme Court intervention).

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a “Maryland man” who was deported to an El Salvadoran prison by a heartless Department of Homeland Security. He should be returned immediately to his wife and three children because he committed no crimes on U.S. soil.

(Entering the U.S. illegally 14 years ago was/is a crime. Maintaining ties to the notorious MS-13 gang – evidenced by Garcia’s identifying tattoos — poses a threat to Marylanders. And only a feckless Federal Bureau of Investigation spared Garcia from arrest and charges after he was pulled over for speeding in Tennessee in December 2022 with eight passengers in tow from Texas. They presented IDs showing the same home address but traveled without a single piece of luggage. Say it with me: human trafficking).

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) flew to El Salvador to score a photo op with Garcia (photo nearby), knowing there was no possibility he would be freed. But it turns out Van Hollen is not the most deranged among the apologists for thuggish gang members living in our homeland illegally.

A New Mexico magistrate judge was arrested and has been banned from the bench for life after homeland security officers raided his Las Cruces home, responding to a tip about who was living in the judge’s guest house. In March, officers arrested Venezuelan illegal immigrant Christhian Lopez-Ortega, 23, in the home of Judge Jose Cano, a Democrat. The Tren de Aragua gang member had been living with the judge’s family after his wife hired Lopez-Ortega to perform several home improvement chores.

The judge and his wife were said to be complicit in allowing their immigrant house guest to handle household firearms.

And what is the fate of the “adopted” Venezuelan? Another Democrat judge overturned his bail and suggested Lopez-Ortega be returned to the custody of his fellow judge because they, the two Dem judges, are friends. He remains detained while a hearing to decide the gang member’s fate is pending.

Did John Kennedy O’Toole contemplate dunces as extreme and pathetic as these? In 2025, who is the dunce? The illegal thug or the New Mexico judge? China’s hijacking of the U.S. economy or Trump’s overdue tariffs? Deported illegals or politicians who coddle them? The healthcare CEO assassin or the dead CEO? A knife wielding high school punk or his dead, unarmed victim?

Waiting.

Seriously?

By Steve Woodward

Functioning as a speechwriter for the Harris “campaign” must deliver quite a power trip. Her writers apparently have tremendous leeway. They toggle freely between fiction and surreality.

Consider this gem: “Donald Trump is an unserious man.”

This was delivered during her speech at the Marxist’s National Convention in Chicago, a.k.a., Gaza West, where armed security lined streets and storefronts were adorned with plywood.

Unlike much of what comes coursing out of her mouth, this one actually merits closer attention.

While Joe Biden found his calling as an entrenched Washington Democrat, a two-term vice president serving the most anti-Constitution, pro-socialism American president in history, and a public servant who betrayed his country (aided by his man-child son, Hunter) by selling access and influence to foreign adversaries in exchange for no less than $27 million, what was Mr. Unserious doing?

Trump built a commercial development empire, rolled out a golf resort business that has no rival (even Charlotte Democrats sneak out to play Trump National), and became the host of a 14-season, highly profitable NBC reality TV program.

And what do you know, he even delivered an encore. In 2017, Trump was elected President of the United States after which he pursued a seriously focused agenda that delivered desirable outcomes for millions of Americans and our foreign allies. Seriously. The 45th president in a nutshell.

More specifically, Americans witnessed a precipitous decline in the cost of fuel at the pumps (photo nearby, March 2020) and energy in their homes. Black and Hispanics citizens were employed at record levels hitting half-century highs. They held real jobs driving a robust economy during which inflation dipped as low as 1.9%. Serious results.

Around the world, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un and Iran’s ruling clerics apparently viewed Trump’s America First stance as a serious deterrent, not a campaign slogan. Mexican leaders apparently found Trump’s demands to reduce chaos at the U.S. southern border compelling. He threatened to impose tariffs. Mexico got the message quickly. Collaboration between U.S. border patrol agents and their counterparts restored order. Serious results.

When immigrants flood our homeland the result is deadly serious. The media defaults to cover-up mode to protect the regime. But young women dying at the hands of murderous illegal thugs — Laken Riley in Georgia, Rachel Morin in Maryland, two among many — did not go unnoticed. Joe Biden, coddled and sheltered, naturally miscalculated public sentiment. When he tried to say Riley’s name — on the fly in the State of the Union speech — he mispronounced it. What is worse than unserious? Unrepentant? Unmoved?

The Biden-Harris White House era will be recorded by historians as a dark epoch littered by the carnage of cultural decline and measurable suffering.

It adds up to one large snowball of unserious. Since the earliest days of 2021, willful neglect of the U.S. southern border has seen no fewer than 10 million (likely more) unvetted illegals surge into the homeland, including unknown throngs of terrorists.

By conspiring with a mafia of pharmaceutical profit vultures and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook, military careers, family run businesses and the health of young adults were destroyed by Biden-Harris COVID jab mandates.

Persistent inflation gutted the economy and household savings, aggregating to more than 19%. Gas prices spiked in all 50 states, crippling motorists, shipping and the travel industry. Unemployment climbed to nine percent. The aftermath finds people crushed by record high consumer debt.

With Harris at his side, Biden retreated as Russia advanced into Ukraine, and Hamas terrorists descended into Israel, exacting an initial death toll of more than 1,200. With Harris at his side, Biden unconscionably ordered a calamitous exit from the U.S.-owned Bagram airbase in Afghanistan three years ago, costing 13 American soldiers their lives, abandoning billions of dollars worth of military assets and reopening a terrorism training ground.

Serious coordination was required to conceal the steady decline of Biden’s mental acuity. A vice president conspiring with a First Lady, members of Congress and media acolytes to hoard power and torture a feeble old man is betrayal. That’s more than serious. That’s Satanic.

An unserious Secret Service detail assigned to Donald Trump’s campaign created conditions for the unthinkable — a bullet traveling toward the back of his head on July 13, 2024. That one missed. Another obliterated a Pennsylvania father and husband. His name is Corey Comperatore. Like so many deceased victims of Biden-Harris, it will not be read aloud from a teleprompter.

Chicago is fading from memory, and even unserious pollsters are failing to manufacture a Kamala surge as the convulsions of a scripted, sterile convention yield to the revulsion Harris and her running mate, the Mandarin Marxist of Minnesota, engender.

That deepening revulsion has inspired a roster of full-blown serious to mobilize behind Trump. Elon Musk. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And a former Democrat member of Congress, U.S. Army Reserves Lieutenant Col. Tulsi Gabbard (photo nearby).

Kennedy’s relatives are not taking this well. In a statement, they lament Bobby Kennedy’s “betrayal”, expressing support for the Harris ticket’s “shared vision of a brighter future” and “economic promise”.

Unserious Donald seems to have unhinged and unraveled a Democrat dynasty relegated with its lesser heirs — the Carters, Clintons and Obamas — to the obscurity of history’s ash heap.

Liberty first

By Steve Woodward
As we say so long to 2019, just off the top of my head …

Wage increases within the workforce rising at their fastest rate in more than a decade, faster than for supervisors (bosses).
Record or near-record setting gains for the Nasdaq (35%) and S&P 500 (28%).
Dramatic declines in illegal US-Mexico border crossings. The mayor of Yuma, Ariz., recently lifted a state of emergency declared last April because “the release of migrant families into the Yuma area has ceased.”
Wages rose 4.5% year-over-year in November among bottom 25% of earners.
Record low unemployment among black and Hispanic populations.
Lowest unemployment overall since 1969.
Energy independence from foreign sources.
Trade deal set with Canada and Mexico.
Pending trade deal with China that will end decades of trade abuse by the Chinese.
Record federal judicial confirmations of Trump nominees (48 in three years).

I’m beginning to think it might be safe, finally, to retrieve the gold, cash and firearms I buried in anticipation of Y2K!

Conservative bulldog Sean Hannity repeatedly urges, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” Many of us are not there yet. Democrats present much about which to be perpetually troubled. (The drums of impeachment will awaken us from our New Year’s hangovers soon enough). But, consider more positive awakenings such as two I discovered with pleasant shock in The Wall Street Journal‘s December 28 letters to the editor.

They are letters written by residents of California and Illinois, no less, where the radical lefts reigns. They are direct smackdowns of columnist Peggy Noonan, a Never Trumper and out-of-touch Upper East Side New Yorker. Noonan is all for impeaching President Donald Trump if for no other reason than he is an objectionable character.

From Evanston, Ill.: “Ms. Noonan writes that many ‘serious’ witnesses of ‘obvious stature’ in the House impeachment hearings said the president abused his power. I don’t see it that way. Those bureaucrats said they disagreed with Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, which they think they (emphasis added), rather than the president, get to determine. Ms. Noonan should not mistake their arrogance for seriousness.”

From Mill Valley, Calif.: “We want the craziness of the left highlighted plainly. We want the corruption of elected politicians, permanent bureaucracy, intelligence services, judiciary and media exposed and cornered. We are tired of the politically correct speech codes and the protected classes for whom there can be no consequences. We prefer liberty.”

That is as powerful a mantra as I can think of to sustain us in the battles ahead in 2020. Republicans prefer liberty.

AOC for bartender

By Steve Woodward

Democrat Presidential aspirant Joe Biden is channeling Margaret Thatcher from her grave, apparently. He says the former British Prime Minister is lamenting the United States in the age of Donald Trump. He meant to reference Theresa May, the very alive Prime Minister who probably could use an overaggressive Biden hug about now.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking to social media to explain that she is horrified by the food waste disposer in her apartment (never seen one, she says), and mystified by produce growing out of the dirt in a garden. She is, famously, an ex-bartender and gives this profession a bad name.

Electronic surveillance is not the same as spying, claims former FBI Director James Comey. But, either way, he and current FBI Director Christopher Wray express no regrets or even acknowledge that high ranking FBI personnel weaponized the Bureau in an attempt to bring down Trump’s campaign. Spying or not, scandalous.

Hillary Clinton is out on the irrelevance circuit proclaiming that the 2016 presidential election was “stolen” from her. She should have her irony meter inspected. Three years on, it is clear that Clinton’s campaign hired the opposition research firm that would aid and abet an effort to rig the election — in her favor, not Trump’s.

China is practically begging for an all-out trade war. Iran is rattling its sabers in the Middle East, targeting U.S. forces. Hamas terrorists are bombing Israel with renewed fervor. Christianity is under persecution to such a universal degree that one expert says Christians find themselves facing genocide across the globe.

But what is making headlines in the fully compliant left wing media? Outrage over President Trump presenting golf legend Tiger Woods with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barack Obama presented it to Biden, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey, but that was just fine.

Meanwhile, with a few exceptions by select media outlets committing inadvertent acts of journalism, reporting on the U.S. economy as the marvel of the world (even China, if its leaders had an honest bone) and a work force partying like it’s 1969, is barely a blip on mainstream media’s radar. The MSM is all over Attorney General William Barr, who released the long awaited Mueller Report but somehow is to be charged with contempt of Congress. Any red-blooded American would freely admit being contemptuous of these frauds.

If the economy remains on its current trajectory, Biden will be asking to have Thatcher exhumed, and AOC will place her quivering hand into her food disposal (because she doesn’t know any better) when it’s in the “on” position. Against this backdrop of inside-the-Beltway hysteria, consider that:

The unemployment rate last was at 3.6% when Richard Nixon was beginning his first term as President in 1969. It is 3.6% in 2019.
Wage growth, which negates Democrats’ calls for national hourly minimum wages of $15+, hit 3.2% in April, the ninth consecutive month of wage growth north of 3%. In other words, inspired laborers will be blowing past $15/hour, if they have not already.
The last time unemployment among women was at 3.4%, Dwight Eisenhower was President (1953).

That’s good news for Ocasio-Cortez. When she loses in 2020, bartending jobs will be plentiful. Or, in this land of prosperity, she could try her hand at food waste disposal sales.