Is the era of rounding up government or academic “experts” to declare their support or opposition to ongoing controversies over? Public declarations by Anthony Fauci and his associates to follow their “expertise” or “science” did not work out well and persuaded few.

Recall the 1,200 partisan healthcare “professionals” of June 2020 who flipped to assure us that it was mysteriously now medically OK to break quarantines—but only if to publicly protest during the post-George Floyd unrest.

Most recently, five former Secretaries of Defense—William Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, and Lloyd Austin—co-authored a public letter to Congress. They blasted the Trump administration’s dismissals from command of several generals—including the current chairman of the joint chiefs, General C. Q. Brown Jr.

This will not work out well.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has been dying a slow death since Donald Trump assumed the presidency once more. Suddenly, it’s in rigor mortis.

It’s a philosophy that was aimed at evening the playing field for people of all races, genders and sexual persuasions, but instead it merely divided people and encouraged institutionalized racism, division, and putting someone’s characteristics over their actual merit for jobs and promotions.

Now two financial giants, BlackRock and Bank of America, are moving away from DEI even after BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink made the ludicrous statement in 2021 that “we must embed DEI into everything we do.”

A very strange priority, since his firm is supposed to effectively manage capital for people, pension plans and companies, not wage social justice campaigns.

But BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company that manages over $11.5 trillion, has now cut some key wording out of its annual report:

Critics view the Department of Government Efficiency’s emails asking federal employees for evidence of productivity as chaotic, arbitrary and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.

But Elon Musk is simply bringing normal private-sector standards to a government that desperately needs them. Since the Pendleton Act of 1883 introduced merit-based selection and civil-service job protections for federal workers, the administrative state has proliferated without sufficient checks and balances from the president or Congress.

The federal bureaucracy has ballooned from a few agencies to more than 450, many of which are “independent” of the president. Americans often view the president as responsible for the actions those agencies take. The system nudges new presidents to give up and go along.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done. No president—not Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—has cracked this nut. Most reforms have made the administrative state larger, not smaller. Mr. Trump refuses this deal.

US Joins Russia To Vote Against UN Resolution Condemning Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Republican lawmakers are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s pointed refusal to blame Russia for starting the war in Ukraine, and they are highly skeptical about negotiating any lasting peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom many describe as a war criminal.

The Republican criticism of President Trump’s strategy for ending the war in Ukraine comes after the United States voted with Russia and its allies, such as North Korea and Belarus, against a United Nations resolution condemning Russian aggression toward Ukraine and calling for the withdrawal of its troops from the country.

The vote was on Monday, three years to the day when Russian began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The measure, which received the backing of NATO allies, passed the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly despite the U.S. opposition.

While GOP senators were willing to grant Trump broad deference on his controversial Cabinet nominees, they are doubling down in blaming Russia for starting the war and warning the president to approach Putin warily in any negotiation.

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, I had many ideas for today’s speech, but one by one I discarded them. Here’s why. We live in turbulent times. After a short break from history that some of us enjoyed, it has again caught up with us all.

In times like these, when the world seems out of joint, when the old seems to be dying but the new cannot yet be born, what we need is a return to basics. To questions about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s actually happened, and what’s just a figment of propaganda.

According to Kremlin’s propaganda, what started three years ago was a justified reaction to Western imperialism allegedly threatening Russia’s security.

In fact, we have seen a modern-day colonial war against Ukrainian people who want a better life and realize they can never achieve this goal by going back to their subjugation to Russia.  Kremlin aggression is a manifestation of a failing empire’s desperate struggle to restore its sphere of influence.

Democrats are anxious to rebuild their party on the heels of President Trump’s victory in November. But they have a major problem as they try to refashion their brand: The money isn’t there.

Democrat donors — from bundlers to small dollar donors — say they are still angry about the election results and uninspired by anything their side has put forward since then.

“I’ll be blunt here: The Democrat Party is effing terrible. Plain and simple,” one major Democrat donor said. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”

A second donor was equally as pointed. “They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking. … The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”

Apartment building destroyed by Russian missile in Kherson yesterday (2/20)

This has been a dizzying and disorienting week in international diplomacy. One with wild implications for Ukraine, the future of America’s standing in the world and President Trump’s legacy.

President Trump is absolutely right in wanting to end the bloodshed in Ukraine. The suffering has been appalling and the stalemate brutal. But in the furious mix of wild opinions this week from the White House down, there are at least 10 truths which every American voter must hang onto.

In Trump’s rush to end the bloodshed, these are also the truths against which any deal will be judged and will define him when the history books are written.

To ignore them or not treat them with the gravity they deserve will also have enormous consequences for decades to come:

TRUTH No. 1

Vladimir Putin started this war, despite what President Trump said days ago.

What is the long-term Democratic Party’s strategy to return to power?

The latest poll on Democrat favorability—conducted by liberal Quinnipiac—reveals historic dislike of Democrats, with only 31 percent of voters expressing a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party.

Are Democrats then pivoting or self-correcting?

Do they support legal-only immigration? Do they wish to join in finding fraud in the federal government?  Do they perhaps at least wish to reform the Pentagon, or lower the price of energy?

Nope.

So, what then is their agenda?

It is a retread of 2017, mixed in with the anti-Trump hysteria of 2021-4. By now we all recognize the weary symptoms of their five-point blueprint:

US Treasury Sec Bessent meets with Zelensky in Kyiv about the contract (2/12)

Donald Trump’s demand for a $500 billion “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.

The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonization of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved.

In genuine commerce the other side can usually walk away. Trump’s demand is iron-fist coercion by a neo-imperial power against a weaker nation with its back to the wall, and all for a commodity bonanza that exists chiefly in Trump’s head.

Yesterday (2/18), Trump did something extraordinary to return the American government to constitutional principles: He issued an executive order (“EO”) entitled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies.”

The leftists are decrying the EO as the end of so-called “independent” agencies, but that’s exactly the point. Under our Constitution, there are only three branches of government, not four. The agencies are subordinate to the Executive branch, and Trump’s EO properly restores that reality.

By the end of last month, we taxpayers were supporting a staggering 438 federal agencies. There’s no doubt that some of these agencies are useful, even necessary, and some are in the Constitution, of course.  But now, with this EO, an equally staggering number of them will be headed for the chopping block.

[This is the full text of the President of Ukraine delivered at the Munich Security Conference last Saturday, February 15. Full video is here.]

________________________________

At the start of the Conference, every country usually shares its stance, priorities, whether officially, openly or through informal talks with journalists, with partners.

This year, a country that was not even invited still made its presence known. A country that everyone talks about here – not in a good way.

The night before Munich this year, a Russian attack drone struck the sarcophagus covering the ruined fourth reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

It was a modified “Shahed” drone – a Russian drone, a technology Iran passed on to Russia. Its warhead carried at least 50 kilograms of explosives.

We see this as a deeply symbolic move by Russia, by Putin.

William “Boss” Tweed (1823-1878) was, of course, a Democrat

Last November, Democrat fraudsters bypassed the presidential race and focused instead on the down-ballot races. In Florida, local Democrat candidates received more votes than either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris at the top of the ballot. Something was definitely amiss.

For instance, Republican Rocky Rochford was running against incumbent Democrat Kathy Castor for the U.S. House seat in Congressional Race 14 (FL-14). The district straddles Hillsborough and Pinellas counties and includes the cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Castor was declared the winner, but Rochford is now contesting the race, claiming voter fraud, primarily by vote-by-mail ballots.

There is deep suspicion that this method of fraud has happened across the country, costing Republicans four Senate seats, about a dozen House seats, and countless local municipal seats and referendums.

A longtime Trump associate, Peter Ticktin, is representing Rochford. The Ticktin Law Group has identified a systematic breakdown of internal election controls that affected the FL-14 race and other races far beyond, those in the Senate and House mentioned above in particular.

We are, as Trump promised in his inaugural address, entering the 'golden age' of common sense. And there's no going back, not anytime soon.

Just look at three of the biggest ads during the Super Bowl 59 — an event at which Trump, as the first sitting US president to attend the game, was cheered, while Taylor Swift, who wholeheartedly endorsed Kamala Harris, was booed.

The culture has gone full MAGA.  Brad Pitt, as you saw above, starred in a nearly five-minute long Super Bowl ad for FOX Sports and the NFL, extolling national unity and pride. There was no irony, no winks to a liberal agenda or racism or the 'threats' to so-called marginalized communities.

Nope, just a full-on ad for American exceptionalism — a phrase and a concept that hasn't been part of the lexicon since the 1980s.

Here are some of the untruths told about Elon Musk and DOGE.

“Musk has no right to cut USAID.”

Elon Musk and his team are not cutting any federal programs. They are auditors. They were given legal authority under a presidential executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Ultimately, Musk can propose program cuts, but Trump holds the authority to approve or reject them. He may or may not act on all, some, or none of the DOGE recommendations.

“No one elected Musk.” 

They may develop a sense of entitlement and even become narcissistic. And proving that judges are no exception to this reality are a number of recent court “opinions” designed to scuttle President Trump’s agenda.

There is a real solution to what we have now, a kritocracy, a dictatorship of judges.  It’s that federal and state officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. They do not take an oath to uphold judges’ opinions.  What are the consequences of this?

The Democrat Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.

Democrat self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.

But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.

Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democrat Party do?  Evidently, that question has not even been asked, much less any attempt to answer it.

Early in Donald Trump's second term, reforming the bureaucratic state has become job number one. That's not surprising given the weaponization of government that personally targeted the president for years on end, doing everything it could to prevent him from ever returning to the White House.

Enter Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been hard at work uncovering the waste and abuse of taxpayer funds.

Unsurprisingly, that has sent Democrats into an apoplectic rage. That's because when they lose elections, they aren't supposed to actually lose.

With their power structure now being threatened, Democrats are lashing out, and unsurprisingly again, some lower-court judges are more than happy to play along with their gambit.

We'll see where this goes, but I'm going to make a prediction: Pain is coming for Democrats.

[TTPers know that beloved TTPer Yasuhiko Kimura has Stage 3 Esophageal Cancer.  Many of you have already been kind enough to donate to the Help Yasuhiko Genku Kimura Heal from Cancer GoFundMe, for which he and his wife Mira Joy are deeply grateful.  A fight for life often brings out talents unknown before.  Thus Yasuhiko, a devotee of history’s great poets, has become a poet himself. 

He has gifted us with Two Odes to Trump, one in the style of England’s most famous, John Milton (1608-1674), the other in that of England’s most idiosyncratic, William Blake (1757-1827).  The common bond between them and Donald Trump is all three are champions of freedom.  Thank you, Yasuhiko!  Our prayers are with you.]

Miltonic Ode to Trump (Written in the political spirit and the poetical style of John Milton) Yasuhiko Genku Kimura

Of Man's first Freedom, and of Liberty, Through ages dim, where tyranny did dwell, I sing of Trump, whose valiant spirit free From despot's grasp, did lead with wisdom's spell

Looks like a job for Trump the Builder

For how much longer will the world’s conscience now allow for two million people to be held hostage by Hamas, crammed into a 140 square mile Strip, stuck between the sea and two countries who will not let them enter: Egypt and Israel?

I was in Israel on October 7 and share the trauma of a nation under attack from Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others. Now,

Hamas has vowed more October 7 attacks.

No nation in the world would accept a permanent terror base on its border, with over 200 miles of tunnels hiding weapons and training for destruction.

In this context, it would be Einstein’s definition of madness to try all the old options all over again in Gaza. Now it is time to think differently, as Trump 47 certainly is. And in so doing, he is fully aware that we cannot be cruel to the Palestinians. That they are a people who deserve homes, dignity and peace.

It’s been three months since Donald Trump and Republicans swept the 2024 elections — and Democrats haven’t learned a thing.

Here are three snapshots of a party wallowing in denial:

When the eight candidates running to head the Democratic National Committee were asked who among them believed that “racism and misogyny” were factors in Kamala Harris’ defeat, all eight raised their hands.

When congressional Dems gathered outside the headquarters of the rogue USAID agency that Trump plans to shrink or close, one of their lead speakers was the antisemitic terror defender and America-hater Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Then there’s New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who said Saturday (2/01) he was hiding an illegal immigrant in his house and challenged ICE, saying “good luck to the feds coming in to try to get her.”

I’ve long believed Trump has a gift for driving his opponents over the edge. Now we know that for sure.

An Oxford-educated British elitist picked an intellectual fight with an American “hillbilly” over the weekend, and guess who won? Yep, the “hillbilly”.

It was a showdown between JD Vance, the new American Vice President, and Rory Stewart, a podcaster.  It started when Vance gave an interview to Fox News in which he outlined his Christian belief in a hierarchy of love.

With superb haughtiness, Rory took to X to accuse Vance of misunderstanding the Gospel of John. Vance’s order of love is “more pagan tribal” than Christian, he pronounced, like some pope of correct-think.

Vance fired back, and it was glorious.

Marco Rubio meets Panama President José Raúl Mulino, Feb 2

Recent statements by U.S. President Donald Trump and Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver Carone, as well as the trip by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Central America, have focused attention on the risks posed by the activities of China in Panama.

Aside from China’s low key military engagement with Panama, the real issue is the vast scope of its commercial presence there.

Beyond just the ports, China’s economic engagement and development of networks of personal influence and benefit in Panama have arguably facilitated its use of the country as Beijing’s global logistics and financial hub to promote its commercial advance in the region under conditions of limited transparency, with numerous shady dealings.

Further, beyond Panama’s government, virtually all of Panama’s most influential families have business dealings with PRC-based companies.   You may be amazed at how deep China’s connections within Panama are.

In Latin America, word is out. And the word is FAFO.  The polite version is “Fool Around – Find Out.”  That first F stands for something else on Elon’s X.

Suddenly we are seeing a lot of them willingly cooperate with President Trump on the acceptance of repatriation flights for their own nationals in the U.S. illegally.

The reason looks pretty obvious: Nobody wants to be the next Petro.

President Trump's thrashing of far-left Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, who initially refused to take repatriation flights he had agreed to earlier, hollering like the pope about 'dignity,' before being forced to quickly reverse course and sing soprano, seems to have sent a message to the rest of Latin America's alien-exporting states, and now they're falling into line with Trump's agenda.

According to Reuters:

Many Trump supporters believe that Trump won the 2024 election because, this time, the vote for Trump was “too big to rig.”

Others dismiss the concern about “stolen elections” because Trump won the popular vote in addition to the electoral vote, plus a GOP majority in the U.S. House and Senate.

The reality is that elections are still corruptible. While Democrats didn’t rig the presidential race this time around, the narrow congressional majority means that down-ballot races were still manipulated...something Democrats can and will do again.

However, the primary reason the Democrats allowed the swing states to conclude counting votes on election night was that the Democrats decided not to steal the 2024 presidential election to punish Biden and Kamala Harris for breaking ranks.

At the “Deep Party” Central Committee level of the Democrat party—at the level of Barack Obama, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros—the order went out that Harris needed to lose.  Here’s why...

As someone who conducts focus groups for a living, I was hardly surprised by the poll this week that showed that so many British voters back Donald Trump’s agenda on issues such as migration and free speech.

That’s partly because of the state of public disaffection when it comes to successive governments’ handling of those issues in Britain.

But my lack of surprise was down to something else too. It has become clear from the work I do that many British voters admire Trump’s approach – on policy but, more importantly, on what amounts to his sheer determination.

“I don’t see why we’re all so [bothered] about making other people happy, but not ourselves as a country. Trump gets that,” a middle-aged man, a former Conservative voter, told me in Dudley last week. Another, a retired woman in Bury, said: “He’s done 100 things in one day and Starmer still hasn’t done anything. We need a Trump.”

Change happens, according to the famous Hemingway quote about his bankruptcy, “gradually, then suddenly”. The same could now be said of the dismantling of gender ideology. Its moral bankruptcy, a decade of sterilizing and mutilating children’s bodies, looks to be over.

In the flurry of executive orders that Donald Trump has signed since re-entering the White House, here is the big one: prohibiting gender transitions for people under the age of 19.

“It is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” reads the executive order, entitled Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.

This means no more puberty blockers, no more operations, double mastectomies, castration, “facial feminizations” and all the rest of it. No more irreversible “gender affirming care”.

How did we get to this? How did anyone think that telling children that they were born in the “wrong body,” and that those bodies could be surgically and chemically rearranged was sensible? But this is hardly the first time medics have caused harm.

Colombian plane leaving for California to bring back deported illegal aliens

With Donald Trump back in the White House, leaders across the world are sitting up. They will have to get used to something very new: an America unembarrassed about putting its own national interests first, and specifically in making the security of its borders one of the central aims of its foreign policy.

The South American nation of Colombia received an early preview of how President Trump will project US power. After initially refusing to accept US military planes carrying Colombian illegal migrants, Trump threatened a wave of tariffs and visa restrictions on the country’s political leadership unless it agreed to accept back its own citizens.

Within hours, Colombia had complied with Washington’s demands. The actions he is taking now to protect America’s national sovereignty should serve as a role model for the UK and nations across Europe who are facing the same challenges posed by mass migration.

A strong and revitalized America is great not only for the American people, but for the entire free world.

Official White House Portrait of the First Lady, January 27 2025

In 2017 it took almost three months for the White House to release an official portrait of the new First Lady who in a significant break from tradition had yet to move permanently into the executive mansion.

Previous Official Portrait of the First Lady, April 3 2017

Fast forward eight years and this time things, like so much else in Trump 2.0, look very different.  A bold, confident, disciplined and always sharply tailored boss was the Melania that the public got today and, up until now, was a woman that only those who worked closest with her were allowed to see.

Melania’s lightning-fast pictorial statement - in bold black and white (another barrier breaking feature of the image) - makes clear that she too realizes that not only is there no time to waste in declaring herself part of a presidential triumvirate.

She is picture three in the line-up after her husband and his vice-president on the White House homepage.

President Donald Trump was so busy on his first day in office that it’s been a challenge to cover everything that he did.

The best way to know which are the best ones to discuss is to look at the way Democrats are reacting to them. His pardon of J6 prisoners was a big one; they’re really up in arms about that.

Another one was his executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants in the United States. Now, Democrat attorneys general from 22 states are suing over the executive order.

The Democrat attorneys general and immigrant rights advocates say the question of birthright citizenship is settled law and that while presidents have broad authority, they are not kings.

“The president cannot, with a stroke of a pen, write the 14th Amendment out of existence, period,” New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin said.

These challenges are doomed to fail.

Senate Democrats who are considering holding up the confirmations of President Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments might want to rethink that course of action.

The president recently threatened to adjourn Congress so he can make recess appointments for some of his nominees.

This move would be unprecedented and would likely meet with a chorus of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left. However, it appears Trump is willing to make this gambit, according to CBS News.

The president has been eager to get the members of his cabinet confirmed. So far, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been the only official confirmed. The Senate is still set to vote on Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, Kristi Noem for Homeland Security, and John Ratcliffe for CIA Director.

Democrats have been slow-walking the process for Ratcliffe and could do the same for the other two nominees, according to CBS News.

There are questions as to whether Trump has the authority to adjourn Congress.

Back at the Resolute Desk, the President signs Executive Orders

Back at the Resolute Desk, the President signs Executive Orders

[This essay is stunningly remarkable as it is written by the founding editor and global editor-in-chief of one of the most Woke Anti-Trump media outlets in Washington, POLITICO.  It was published on politico.com yesterday (1/21) under his own name.  He is neither groveling nor abusive. His is an honest recognition of reality.  It is stunning nonetheless. –JW]

Donald J. Trump in his second inaugural address was everything his supporters hoped he would be:

In one light, it was all quite familiar. But the second occasion of Trump taking the oath of office also put him in an entirely new light.

For the first time, he is holding power under circumstances in which reasonable people cannot deny a basic fact: He is the greatest American figure of his era.

Great in this context is not about a subjective debate over whether he is a singularly righteous leader or a singularly menacing one. It is now simply an objective description about the dimensions of his record.

In other words, he is now a force of history.

Democrats are in freefall.

As of Monday January 20, Donald J. Trump is officially the 47th president of the United States. He starts his second term in the Oval Office with a bang – rolling out dozens of executive orders fulfilling promises made to American voters -- and more popular than he has ever been.

Democrats have no idea how to respond. Their party is currently earning its lowest approval ratings ever, for good reason. It is guilty of perpetrating the greatest political scandal of our lifetimes  -- pretending President Joe Biden was OK to run for another four years.

Their efforts to brand Donald Trump a threat to Democracy were a bust and their leadership is in disarray. They deserve every minute they serve in political purgatory.

A former communications director for Kamala Harris says Democrats "have got to burn down our image." He’s right.  But then what?

Donald Trump is once again President – and his second administration promises to be more Trumpian than ever.

Sworn in just after noon yesterday (1/20) – both the inauguration ceremony and his stick-swinging inauguration speech shielded from the cold inside the Capitol Building – he is essentially picking up where he left off. This time, however, Trump & Co have far more experience of how to navigate Washington’s corridors of power. They’re already showing it.

The past few weeks have seen Trump’s transition team prove its deftness in everything from foreign policy – that Gaza ceasefire – to a domestic agenda rife with executive orders promising to dismantle the vast DEI and identity politics network that former president Joe Biden and the Democrats had assembled with such alacrity.

And as Trump’s second inauguration speech made clear, he is only just getting started.

Vladimir Putin’s plan to outlast Joe Biden and an exhausted West has run into an unpleasant surprise – Donald Trump is surrounding himself with pro-Ukrainian hardliners.

Trump appears more willing than Biden ever was to throttle the Russian economy, if that is what it takes to force the Kremlin to accept peace on “America First” terms.

A new mood of relief – not yet optimism – is taking hold among Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisers in Kyiv. Europe’s diplomats are starting to wonder whether a Trump 2.0 presidency might not be such a bad outcome after all, at least when it comes to dealing with Russia.

“It is now absolutely clear that Trump is not going to throw Ukraine under a bus,” said Prof Alan Riley, a regional expert at the Atlantic Council.

Trump’s advisers have persuaded him, by the odd “Socratic method” that shapes policy at Mar-a-Lago, that a shabby American retreat from Ukraine would be orders of magnitude worse than Biden’s humiliation in Afghanistan, and also that the first line of defense against China lies in the Donbas.