In case you didn’t pay attention, and you’re completely excused if you didn’t, the Democrats had an election over the weekend to choose a new party chair. It’s someone named Ken Martin, and he’s been the chairman of the state party in Minnesota — where Democrat politics produced Tim Walz, Ilhan Omar, and Keith Ellison when it wasn’t treating the police like Bane did in Gotham and opening the windows to enjoy the smell of burning cities. And lest you think that Ken Martin is cut from a different cloth than the nomenklatura of that party, I can disabuse you of such a notion with alacrity. Here’s a quote… “The fight right now is against Donald Trump and the billionaires who bought this country.” Hmmm. The Democrats have a problem they don’t seem to want to acknowledge. Virtually every poll — and I’ve seen three of them in the last few days — puts their approval rating in the low 30s (31 percent was the last one) and their disapproval rating in the high 50s. (RELATED: Democrats Have No Roadmap for Their Journey Through the Wilderness … and James Carville Knows It) This isn’t just a verdict on their party leaders, though it is that. They’ve got some real problems with finding a standard bearer. It’s this bad… 2028 National Democratic Primary (+/- shift vs December) • Harris – 33% (-2) • Buttigieg – 9% (-3) • Newsom – 7% (=) • Ocasio-Cortez – 6% (+3) • Shapiro – 3% (-2) • Walz – 3% (-2) • Whitmer – 3% (=) • Klobuchar – 3% (+2) • Stephen A. Smith – 2% (new) • Booker – 2%… pic.twitter.com/9Azjt1irek — InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) January 30, 2025 There’s an awful lot you can glean from that poll. For one thing, it tells you that Democrat voters are terribly uninformed. A third of them are for Kamala Harris largely because they don’t even know who else is out there, and a majority of them are for one of the people on that list because of identity politics. You don’t get good candidates that way. And a primary electorate in which AOC doubles up Josh Shapiro is a really, really unhealthy petri dish from which to grow a relevant party. This is why it’s considerably more instructive that David Hogg is your new DNC vice chair, or one of them, than that Martin is the chair. There are few people less appealing or interesting than David Hogg. This is somebody whose sole source of political relevance is the fact that he was not killed in the Parkland, Florida shooting, and therefore he was handed a platform from which to opine about Australia-style gun control. When any reasonable examination of that terrible event shows that the availability of firearms was far, far less the source of the problem than Democrat policies discouraging or barring disciplinary actions against dangerously deranged students. Not to mention the utter and complete failure of the local police to intervene timely when things went horribly wrong both before and during the shooting. Hogg has gone around flogging the “Defund the Police” shibboleth. And he still sounds like he did in 2018… He’s exactly the wrong ambassador for that party. The Democrats have been here before. They were last in this position in 1988, following Michael Dukakis’s disastrous collapse against George H.W. Bush, but this is a far more severe situation for them than 1988 was. After all, in 1988 George H.W. Bush was elected president, and he was bound to give away the proverbial store to them over the next four years — which he did. Donald Trump is a different animal altogether, of course. He’s systematically tearing down the entire edifice of “Our Democracy” that the Party of Obama built, whether it’s a demolition of the USAID graft engine, a lopping-off of the FBI’s weaponized leadership, a strategic about-face on foreign policy, or massive changes at the Pentagon. And a whole lot more structural changes to the federal government which dramatically affect the status quo. All of these are actions that cut into the meat of the power base of the Democrat Party, its easy sources of funding (when the full scope of the graft, corruption, and self-dealing at USAID is known, for example, the outrage of the public will not be easily contained) and the incentives for being an activist in that party. Because if you consider it, being a performative leftist crank in America is not a bad existence. When Democrats are in power there are cozy sinecures in government — or if not, then in the “private sector,” loosely defined to include non-governmental organizations lavishly funded for purposes that are, at best, ineffectual at achieving honest goals but more likely relatively effective at doing real damage to our national interests. Or there’s academia. And you can be an utter idiot and still pull down a six-figure job at some university somewhere. Not to mention the lush consulting gigs that await the well-connected in a Democrat administration. Until this Trump term, exactly nobody has sought to put a stop to the graft and waste and change that status-quo structure. This one is finally endeavoring to do that. And it’s a major problem for the Democrats. (RELATED: Elon Musk and Chris Murphy: The Old Game Keeps On Failing) When Martin chose to screech about Elon Musk in his acceptance speech, it signaled a real problem: America likes Elon Musk better than the Democrat Party. Elon Musk makes cars and robots and satellite internet and rockets that can go to space and land on the launch pad. Elon Musk is on the way to rescue stranded astronauts in space. And Ken Martin hates Elon Musk because Musk wants to scrub waste out of a federal government that is $2 trillion per year in the red. What’s Ken Martin got to offer instead of that? What’s David Hogg got? Some of the other vice chairs are even less appealing. For example, here’s another one… I want to bring back and engage our caucuses & councils. I’m the National Campaigns Director of the @AFLCIO. I want to make sure that our message is reaching, working class voters, working families. The issues that count about who we are, knowing our audience and making it happen pic.twitter.com/Ypx9RfPLmY — ArtieBlanco (@ArtieBlancoSays) January 31, 2025 A Mexican community organizer for a union who speaks about the loathsome Harry Reid as some sort of sleazeball demigod. And another one… .@malcolmkenyatta has been a key leader in protecting voting rights, expanding worker protections, enacting common-sense gun safety policies, & rooting out government corruption and waste. Raise a #CupOfJoe to the new DNC Vice Chair!#DemsUnited pic.twitter.com/EL3psVTCgJ — TizzyWoman ~ Keep moving forward (@tizzywoman) February 2, 2025 A gay state rep from a deep-blue legislative district in Philadelphia who also thinks the secret is “organizing.” I’ve said this, but the Democrat Party has been built, since Barack Obama took it over in the runup to the 2008 cycle, off of a 20th century socialist model of “community organizing.” Meaning, that their foundation isn’t trying to meet voters where they are and craft a policy agenda that is relevant to national success and widespread popularity, but instead to pull together a coalition of the most aggrieved, most disaffected, and most motivated rent-seekers and supplicants to government that can be found. Everything Obama did before getting into elective politics was about not making anyone’s lives better but instead making them angry enough about their station that he, as the organizer of those disaffected and underprivileged souls, might have the political power to move local officials. And that’s what he bequeathed to the dimestore wannabe Obamas now taking over the remnants of that party. They’re where they were in 1988 when the final vestiges of pointy-headed Northeastern liberalism were being packed away only to make a meek comeback in the person of the hapless John Kerry in 2004 before Obama’s rise. Except, what saved their relevance following Dukakis’s disaster was the Bill Clinton “New Democrat” revamp of 1992. Let’s not oversell that, of course. Clinton’s resuscitation of the Democrats would never have happened but for the nonstop betrayal by Bush 41 of his own base, much of which abandoned him for Ross Perot’s third-party run in 1992 and 1996. And, Clinton’s first policy initiative was to let his wife have a crack at imposing a national socialized medicine scheme on the country, which was paid off in a historic mid-term blowout loss to Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans. Furthermore, Clinton was about as unideological a power-seeker as was possible to have. Following that 1994 defeat, the response by his team was, as Dick Morris later noted, that “we’re all Eisenhower Republicans now.” But at least Clinton understood the value of a thorough re-brand, and the Democrats were a party willing to try it in 1992. Those conditions don’t really exist now. Trump is bound to be awfully controversial in this term. That’s who he is and it’s also who he needs to be given the challenges in front of him. But what’s easy to predict is that he’s going to fix a lot of things everybody knows are broken, and that will redound much to the good for his party going forward even if the voters turn on Trump personally (and some will, but certainly not most, given the loyalty of his base). But no matter how controversial he might be, there will still be the contrast between Trump’s reforms and the absolutely broken government Joe Biden left him on Jan. 20. People won’t forget that. And they also won’t forget their disdainful treatment at the hands of the DEI and climate change lunatics, or the obnoxious and even deadly transgender mob, or the Mexican flag-waving illegals now blocking streets across the country protesting very popular deportations of illegal-alien criminals. Or any of the other recent or current abuses of the Hard Left that Obama invited in as the active ingredient in Democrat politics. Like Clinton, Obama was a talented politician. Unlike Clinton, Obama — and especially with Biden, his defective puppet, “governing” in his stead the past four years — wrecked the place. Until they shake off his legacy, Obama is going to haunt the Democrats. And you do not shake off Barack Obama’s legacy with a derivative Deep State leftist social-media motormouth like David Hogg or community-organizing identitarians like Artie Flores and Malcolm Kenyatta as key voices in the room. There’s a reason they’re in the wilderness. It’s the same reason they’re going to be there for a while. Until this changes, until they learn something, that’s a dead party walking. And America needs it to be. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Scenes From a Commonsense Revolution Pharmahontas on the Warpath at the RFK Jr. Hearings Democrats Have No Roadmap for Their Journey Through the Wilderness … and James Carville Knows It The post The Democrats Are Hogging the Wilderness appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The back and forth was as revealing as not surprising. Recall the story. It went everywhere, but in this case here is the headline and account from the Hill back there in the stone age of 2018. The headline: “FBI agent in texts: ‘We’ll stop Trump from becoming president.” The Hill reported this: An FBI agent who was removed from the probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign texted an FBI attorney that the agency would “stop” then-candidate Donald Trump from becoming president. Text messages disclosed Thursday in a highly anticipated report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog showed Peter Strzok, a top investigator into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, seemingly reassuring lawyer Lisa Page that Trump would not become president, the Washington Post reported. “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok in August 2016. “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded. The text messages’ disclosure comes as part of the inspector general’s review of former FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. For all of the back and forth in the last seven years since, the essence of the problem has not changed. Members of the iconic Federal Bureau of Investigation were no longer playing by the rules and pursuing straight-up violations of the law. With the rise of Donald Trump, there were FBI bureaucrats who were playing quite decidedly blatant politics in their jobs in the Bureau. As if that were not bad enough, the pattern continued. Here’s a headline from USA Today from the other day: “Trump’s Justice Department starts sweeping cuts targeting Jan. 6 prosecutors, FBI agents.” That story reported: President Donald Trump’s administration launched a sweeping round of cuts at the Justice Department on Friday that appeared to focus on FBI agents and others who worked on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. The shakeup, detailed in two memos seen by Reuters and by three sources familiar with the matter, is the Trump administration’s latest move to remake the U.S. criminal justice system since he returned to the presidency last week. A group representing FBI agents issued a rare public warning of the potential for hundreds of firings at the nation’s top law enforcement agency. The new administration already has fired more than a dozen prosecutors who pursued criminal charges against Trump in two cases that have been dismissed. It also has paused all civil rights and environmental litigation and ordered criminal investigations of state and local officials who interfere with his hardline immigration initiatives. …. The FBI was also ordered by Tuesday to provide a list of all employees who worked on the criminal cases against Trump, according to a memo seen by Reuters. That memo ordered eight FBI officials to resign or be fired, saying that their participation in the Jan. 6 cases represented part of what Trump has called the “weaponization” of government. And what was the response from the organization that represents FBI agents? USA Today reported: In a statement on Friday, the FBI Agents Association, a membership group of more than 14,000 active and former FBI agents, called the moves “outrageous.” “Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for failure,” the association added. In short? Right there is reason aplenty for the appointment of Kash Patel to be the next Director of the FBI. The plain and simple fact with these revelations is that there were agents inside the Bureau who chose — say again chose — to inject politics into the FBI. Manifestly using their politics to run their jobs instead of doing the straight-up, by-the-book jobs for which the Bureau had once been justifiably famous. With this clearly in mind, President Trump has appointed Kash Patel to serve as the new Director — and to get about cleaning up the political mess he would inherit. Unsurprisingly, various Senators immersed in the Washington Swamp used the Patel confirmation hearings to play politics, exactly as the politicized FBI agents themselves have been doing. After Minnesota Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar started down this path, Patel replied: “If the best attacks on me are going to be false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations, the only thing this body is doing is defeating the credibility of the men and women at the FBI,” Patel said. “I stood with them. Here in this country, in every theater of war we have, I was on the ground in service of this nation, and any accusations leveled against me that I would somehow put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair, and I will have you reminded that I have been endorsed by over 300,000 law enforcement officers to become the next director of the FBI. Let’s ask them.” Over there in the New York Times, opinion columnist David French made a point of standing up for the Swamp: “Kash Patel Is a Warning Shot.” Saying, among other things that Patel believed “he shouldn’t be judged by his words and actions over the past decade.” French is apparently oblivious that the Swamp dwellers in the FBI (and elsewhere) should indeed be judged by their words and actions since Donald Trump emerged as a serious presidential candidate. And as has been demonstrated, their words and actions, as epitomized by the back-and-forth, are not good. They are the very picture of political interference. This is exactly why Kash Patel has been nominated by President Trump to head the Bureau. The place has become a politicized mess, with access to serious power that was being used to target a president for no other reason than the sheerest of left-wing politics. In essence: Kash Patel is exactly the right person to be the next Director of the FBI. And not a moment too soon. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Jim Acosta and the Tyranny of the Liberal Media RFK Jr: Like Father, Like Son Senator Murphy Steps In It The post Three Cheers for Kash Patel appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It didn’t take long for Democrats to revert to form: a call to arms. Or rather, the streets. For Democrats, that’s a distinction without a difference. Arms, streets — it’s all the same and it’s all the Left. Democrats have been straining to play nice, all while chomping at the bit to be themselves. Instead, they have struck the pose of contrast to the caricature they created of Jan. 6, 2021, and with which they sought to tar conservatives and Republicans. “Extremists,” “insurrectionists,” “threats to democracy” they chanted as mantras, hoping that saying it enough would make it fact. More than a message, that has been their script since Jan. 7, 2021. When Donald Trump’s second inauguration came, Democrats were self-consciously conscious to not be Jan. 6 — at all costs, they wanted to maintain the contrast that existed in their minds. Then came Hakeem Jeffries’s statement last week. Regarding the Trump administration agenda, Jeffries said: “We’re going to fight it in the streets.” It took less than two weeks for Democrats to drop their forced façade of moderation. Welcome back to the faded memories of the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton and their extended tantrum for the next four years. There was the lecture of Vice President-elect Mike Pence and his family at the Hamilton show. There were repeated disruptions of the electoral vote count of Trump’s 2016 victory. There were refusals to serve Trump administration officials when they went to restaurants. There had been Rep. Maxine Waters’s unhinged call for harassment. Then there were the memories of 2019 and 2020, when flush with their midterm takeover of the House, Democrats had unleashed countless investigations and hearings of the Trump administration. There was Speaker Pelosi defiantly tearing up Trump’s speech as she stood behind him at his 2020 State of the Union address. There were not one, but two, impeachments of Trump and a staged and stacked Jan. 6, 2021, investigation. Beginning in 2023, the tools of Democrats’ radicalism were put away — as though another inconvenient Hunter Biden laptop — as they copped a pose of moderation juxtaposed to extremism. Democrats unleashed lawfare to formalize the juxtapositional theater they had been pursuing. Trump was indicted — not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times — by four different Democrats in four different locations. Democrats thought that would be enough to keep him busy and sufficient to cement the image of Trump they wanted America to have. He was charged with felonies. At least one of the Democrats’ four ships had to come in, and then he would be a convicted felon. All the while, they practiced their “convicted felon” epithet. To ensure their contrast would be complete, Democrats used every device to make it so. Biden repeated the magic words because he was different from Trump. He went to Independence Hall to say them; he went to Valley Forge to repeat them. When it came time, he promised that he would not pardon his son (though he did, plus his family). He promised because Democrats had to contrast completely with the image they had created of Trump. (RELATED: Pardons Shouldn’t Stop Investigations) When Biden couldn’t make this contrast stick, Democrats handed the script to one of their own. Kamala Harris pursued the same strategy and said the same words. She was happy to the point of joyful. But the strain was starting to show. Harris wasn’t at her best in trying to make the contrast. Harris had always been at her best when working from a set of talking points — and even more, when these called for her to be nasty and sharp. And this was also where her audience — the Left, for, after all, she was one of them — was at their best too. With glued-on, grim grins, Democrats watched as Harris too faded. Then as she lost. Then as her defeat was clearly a landslide — losing every swing state, then the popular vote, then the Electoral College by almost 100 votes. Even as their frozen grins trembled with anger, Democrats were determined to keep their congenial contrast. They fought to hold it through the two-and-a-half months of transition. Even as Trump dominated everything from the reopening of Notre Dame to the Hamas-Israeli ceasefire negotiations; even as Biden abdicated, and Harris vanished. Democrats fought to endure. (Trump and the Advent of the Pax Americana) As Trump took office, Democrats tried to not crack the contrast they wanted America to see. Trump’s whirlwind of initiatives blew through Washington and Democrats flapped amidst their gusts and gales; they fought to hold themselves together. Then, with no leader, no agenda, and no oxygen, Democrats could take it no more. Just days into the next four years, Democrats cracked, and Hakeem Jeffries spoke their words. The words that Democrats know so well and longed to say — to scream from the parapets — for so long. Jeffries brought Democrats back to where they are most comfortable. To the street. To who they are, who they really long to be. Jeffries’s words aren’t a slip of the tongue. They aren’t misconstrued. They aren’t open to interpretation. They’re an admission. An admission that Democrats’ strategy of juxtaposition hasn’t worked. America hasn’t bought it. Trump’s now more popular than he’s ever been. So, Jeffries is admitting by not pretending any longer. The façade is over. The mask is dropped. And for Democrats, the street is theirs again. # # # READ MORE from J. T. Young: The Left Is Agog at Trump’s Audacity … Because He Meant What He Promised As California Burns, Is It Also Awakening to Disastrous Democrat Policies? Joe Biden: The Most Dangerous Man in America J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left from RealClear Publishing and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, the Office of Management, and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company. The post Taking It to the Streets … Democrats Finally Revert to Vindictive Form appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

On Feb. 1, 2025, the White House announced a new round of tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China, aimed at addressing the flow of illicit drugs and illegal immigrants, unfair trade practices, and the need to protect American industries. The new tariffs include a 25 percent tariff on select imports from Mexico and Canada, covering automobiles, steel, aluminum, and agricultural products. While Mexico and Canada have enjoyed zero tariffs under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), these new tariffs override that provision. Some exceptions may be negotiated, particularly for industries with deep supply chain dependencies. (RELATED: Use Timber Tariffs to Leverage Policy Changes) In addition, an extra 10 percent tariff will be applied to all Chinese imports, affecting a wide range of goods, including electronics, semiconductors, textiles, and consumer products. This is in addition to the existing tariffs imposed during the original U.S.–China trade war under Trump’s first term, which averaged about 14 percent, bringing total tariff rates to 24 percent or more. The world panicked. Numerous media outlets ran sensational headlines about the new tariffs. For example, the Wall Street Journal used titles such as “Tariffs… Spooked Almost Everyone.” Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton, described Trump’s decision as a “self-inflicted supply shock.” Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, warned that taxing trade would reduce trade activity and drive up prices. Jay Timmons, the leader of the National Association of Manufacturers, claimed, “The ripple effects will be severe.” But after these initial (over)reactions, we should analyze Trump’s new tariffs with a cool head and the facts. From a pure free-market economic perspective, tariffs are a government intervention that distorts markets and hurts both producers and consumers. But Trump is looking beyond economics — he sees tariffs as an effective tool for U.S. international policy and national security. His major goal with these new tariffs is to wage a more effective war on drugs and counter China’s large-scale adverse influence. (RELATED: To Secure the Panama Canal, Reinstitute the Monroe Doctrine) China is the primary source of fentanyl, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strategically uses China’s fentanyl production as a leverage point against the U.S. The CCP views the U.S. as its most important enemy. While direct military confrontation is costly, asymmetric tactics — such as economic and social destabilization — offer a low-cost, high-impact alternative. (RELATED: Is Fentanyl China’s Payback to the West for the Opium Wars?) Fentanyl, which has fueled America’s opioid crisis, weakens U.S. society by increasing crime and social instability, overburdening healthcare and law enforcement resources, and causing economic loss due to addiction-related workforce issues. From this perspective, allowing fentanyl precursors to flow into the U.S. indirectly serves Beijing’s interests by contributing to internal American decay — without triggering open war. Mexico, meanwhile, has little incentive to fully stop the flow of drugs to the U.S. Corruption is rampant, and the government lacks full control over the cartels. Many politicians, police, and businesses benefit from cartel money. Past crackdowns have often backfired, escalating violence rather than containing it. Mexico also uses the cartels as a bargaining chip in U.S. relations. (RELATED: Mexico’s Efforts to Capture Fentanyl Plummet, Sparking U.S. Concern) As for Canada, U.S. grievances extend beyond trade imbalances and unfair policies. The U.S. is also concerned about drugs and illegal immigration flowing in from Canada. But more significantly, Canada has allowed large-scale Chinese infiltration, including election meddling, bribery, espionage, intimidation of Chinese-Canadian communities, information warfare, and even the establishment of illegal Chinese police stations. In some ways, Canada has become a de facto Chinese province. Diplomatic complaints, as used by past administrations, have achieved little, and a “hot war” would be costly and deadly — neither an effective nor efficient option. From this perspective, imposing or removing tariffs is an effective, efficient, fast, and flexible tool, especially for a large country such as the U.S., because of its large market, affluent consumers, and relatively smaller exposure to trade. The U.S. economy is far less reliant on trade than those of Mexico, Canada, or China. Trade as a percentage of GDP for Mexico is 83 percent, for Canada 66 percent, for China 37 percent, while for the U.S., it is only 25 percent. These countries also rely on trade with the U.S. far more than the U.S. relies on them. Seventy-eight percent of Mexico’s total trade is with the U.S., whereas only 15 percent of U.S. trade is with Mexico. In a trade war, they suffer more than the U.S. does, making tariffs a more effective tool for the U.S. against these countries. Despite the headlines, the economic impact of tariffs is relatively small. In recent years, U.S. tariff revenues have averaged just 0.3 percent of GDP. Trump’s new tariffs could bring in an additional 1 percent of GDP — still a small fraction of the overall economy. The Tax Policy Center projects that by 2026, the average U.S. household’s after-tax income will decline by 1 percent, a reduction of about $930 per year if the new tariffs are fully implemented. Goldman Sachs economists estimate that tariffs on Canada and Mexico could increase consumer prices by 0.7 percent. Furthermore, there are mitigation factors. First, tax cuts, as promised by Trump, will offset some of the price increases. In addition, global supply chains have adapted, reducing dependency on single-country imports. Many U.S. companies have already shifted supply sources, which helps cushion the impact of potential price increases. Growth in U.S.-based manufacturing is also playing a role in buffering against higher import costs, ensuring that domestic production can absorb some of the shocks. In sum, the effect is small, and people shouldn’t panic. But the fact that the world is panicking only highlights how effective this strategy is — which is likely what Trump intended. And, indeed, the strategy already seems to be working: leaders from all three countries have either made or are in the process of making deals with the U.S. * * * READ MORE from Shaomin Li: TikTok Ban Necessary to Thwart CCP China’s Economy and the US in 2025 DEI and Marxism Destroy Merit and Excellence Shaomin Li is a professor of international business at Old Dominion University’s Strome College of Business. The post Tariffs Hurt, But They Are the Best Tool We’ve Got appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.