On Wednesday, there was a big announcement from the House Intelligence Committee. The House Intelligence Committee chair tweeted a statement suggesting that there was a serious national security threat the American public needed to be made aware of.
This freaked everybody out because when vague national security related threats are made, suggesting they are serious enough they need to be declassified, everybody starts to have some palpitations.
As it turns out, it appears there is intelligence suggesting Russia is going to attempt to deploy a nuclear anti-satellite system in space.
Apparently, the Russians haven&#8217;t done it yet; the system is under development. We don’t know how far the technology has gone.
There are two questions: What would it mean if Russia actually were to do so? And, why are we finding out about this now?
To the first question: Presumably, America&#8217;s satellite technology would be seriously threatened, although if a nuke is detonated in space, it would not have the same ramifications as if it were detonated at high altitude. A nuclear weapon feeds on the air around it; it requires oxygen in order for it to continue expanding.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1906-russian-nukes-in-space-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
So if a nuclear weapon explodes in a vacuum — if in space — it doesn&#8217;t have quite the same impact as a nuclear weapon at high altitude. Effectively, radiation is blasted out, which significantly damages or degrades pretty much all the satellites within the immediate orbit. It would create a sort of perennial hotspot in that place or cause satellites that pass through it to be significantly damaged.
As the largest single investor in space capabilities, the United States could lose $200 billion per year of real gross output from its space assets. Military space assets would be degraded over time. A nuclear weapon in space would do great economic damage.
Is this the kind of serious national security threat that requires everybody to go on panic mode for a full day where everybody is thinking, Oh, my God. I need my bunker? No.
Now to the second question, which is: Why are we finding out about this now?
Possibly to induce more support for Ukraine. I have sympathy for the idea of giving aid to Ukraine, but I don&#8217;t think that amount of aid should be $60 billion. I don&#8217;t believe the United States has an interest in allowing Russia to simply walk over the entirety of Ukraine. I think that has significant negative geopolitical ramifications for the United States and American citizens.
But scaring the American people into green-lighting an aid package by releasing information about a serious national security threat doesn&#8217;t seem like a great tactic to get people in your corner.
Ultimately, it&#8217;s going to alienate more people than it draws.
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Biden Administration Announces National Security Threat. This Raises Some Questions.

CONTINUE READING

It is amazing to be here in Budapest. I want to talk today about the battle for the heart of Western civilization. But to do that, we have to start with a definition of what Western civilization actually is.
Western civilization, rooted in Man&#8217;s individual liberty and his collective duty; in his freedom of speech and in his duty to act virtuously; in his property rights and in his familial obligations; in the right to the equal application of the law; is unique. It is the wellspring of virtually all human prosperity and all human progress.
Western civilization did not come from nowhere. It came from Biblical wisdom; the wisdom of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition. It came from the Bible&#8217;s admonition that we ought to seek truth through the light of reason. When we cut ourselves off from the sources of our own civilization, our civilization decays.
And make no mistake, our civilization is now in the midst of decay.
We can see that decay in the anarchic marchers in the streets, chanting on behalf of radical Islamic terror groups by the hundreds of thousands. 
We can see it in the push by intellectual elitists for a bizarre alternative morality that suggests the fundamental, free-flowing nature of sexual identity, where boys can be girls and behavior ought to be separated utterly from the realm of morality. 
We can see it in the push for an ever growing domination of a powerful governmental infrastructure, crowding out familial bonds, crowding out church. in favor of a faceless state that offers money rather than virtue.
We can see it in that crusade against churches that refuse to jettison their values in favor of moral relativism and flying rainbow flags.
What are these forces that have mobilized against our civilization?
The key force is the force of Western post-modern leftism. Sure, we can look at the radical Islamists who have invaded Europe, who support terrorism, who use Western governments to impose effective fatwas against Westerners who speak out against them, people who target Jews and Christians, who openly chant for the downfall of the civilization that they leech upon.
But the question really isn&#8217;t radical Islamists. They, after all, are doing just what they have always done: invading and conquering.
The question is why the West allowed them in.
And the answer is that the West, thanks to that post-modern Left, bears a peculiar and self-defeating blood-guilt. A guilt that says that because the West is too successful, it owes it to the rest of the world to destroy itself.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/battling-for-the-heart-of-western-civilization-cpac-hungary-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Perhaps the most colorful champion of this philosophy was the Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1961, a Francophone rebel named Frantz Fanon wrote a shockingly violent book titled “The Wretched of the Earth,” in which he posited that colonized peoples had a moral duty to kill their colonizers; that they ought to unleash, in his words, “red hot cannonballs” and “bloody knives.”
Frantz Fanon expressed that the colonized man was right to want to rape the wife of his colonizer, to murder him, to take what he had, and Sartre, a Western leftist, agreed. The West, Sartre said, was an inherent colonizer. Its very success in the world, whether through war or through markets, was a sign of its uniquely rapacious and exploitative nature.
Thus, Sartre argued, Europeans had to die at the hands of their victims. He said, “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor, and the man he oppresses at the same time. Then there remains a dead man and a free man.”
In other words, Sartre advocated civilizational suicide, and the West largely complied.
But why did the West comply? Now, part of the answer lies in the West’s pathological and religiously based adherence to the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance. Our culture, Western culture, is a guilt culture, a culture that focuses on the reality of absolute morality and says that when we fail, we are guilty. This means that we feel bad when we sin.
That&#8217;s actually one of our virtues.
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But there are many other cultures, shame cultures like, say, the Islamic cultures or the pre-World War II culture of Imperial Japan, or the modern Left, that focuses not on any absolute standard of morality or conscience, but on the evil of being humiliated.
For these folks, admitting fault is the weakness. Because we in the West reflexively look to our own sins before those of others, we fall prey to civilizational suicidal impulses.
Our enemies don&#8217;t. They&#8217;re happy to blame us for their problems and unfortunately, we&#8217;re all too happy to blame ourselves. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, “The duty to repent forbids the Western Bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions. Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths closed. Our only right is to remain silent.”
But why should we feel uniquely guilty? The West seems to bear a unique amount of guilt because we have come to believe a giant lie, a great giant lie about ourselves.
And that lie is that we, the West, are uniquely evil.
We hear this lie all the time. Just a couple of days ago, for example, King Charles visited Canada, a country with a parliament, only because it was once a dominion of the British Crown, and then he read a land acknowledgment to the Algonquin Indians as though the British Empire ought to repent its establishment of the country of Canada.
The very concept is ridiculous. Watching King Charles sit there in all of his royal regalia, lamenting his own empire, is insane. And yet this kind of nonsense is imitated at nearly every college event across the West.
But that&#8217;s the lie: that the West is uniquely evil, and that lie gained an enormous amount of credibility due to the horrors of the 20th century.
We were told often by Marxists like Sartre, that imperialism was a uniquely Western phenomenon, despite the fact that human beings have conquered other people for as long as human beings have existed.
We were told that the Nazis and their allies were natural outgrowths of Western civilization, rather than perversions of it.
We were told that if we abandoned Biblical values in favor of a namby-pamby secularism, we could avoid all the terrible atrocities of the past, even though it was the pagan dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, their secular dogmas, not their Biblical adherence that led to their assault on humanity.
We were told that if we mitigated our cultural honor, if we discarded it, we could then expunge our sins, even though it was craven cowardice in the face of transnational Left-wing movements like Nazism and Communism that led to their domination of the European continent and proud, resurgent patriotism that stopped it.
We were told that if we abandoned our borders, we could alleviate our guilt, even though obviously the Nazis and the Soviets had no respect for borders and sought to obliterate them themselves. It was not Western civilization or Biblical values, rule of law, free speech, and private property rights that led to the tragedies and horrors of the 20th century.
It was the rejection of the West&#8217;s core values that led to those horrors.
But too many in the West believed the lie that the horrors were the result of Western civilization rather than a perversion of it. And in believing that lie, we surrendered our own civilization to people who would destroy it. We turned over our nations to consortiums of international elitists who sought to rule us from above and from without. We opened our nations to groups that sought to destroy our history and our unity.
Now it is time to reverse that process. We have to, in all humility, recognize that Western civilization, like all civilizations, has, of course, committed sordid wrongs and egregious evils.
But the truth — the real truth, something we have known for a very long time, since the Garden of Eden — is that all human beings have a capacity for evil. Human evil is a universal truth.
But the glories of Western civilization are not universal. They come from a particular philosophy, a particular history, a particular culture.
Western civilization isn&#8217;t uniquely evil. Western civilization is uniquely good.
Slavery was a human universal. It was Western civilization that ended it.
Poverty is a human universal. It was Western civilization that has exponentially mitigated it.
War is a human universal Western civilization has wildly reduced it.
And the secular, post-modern leftists who refuse to admit this are engaging in evil of their own.
This country, the very country these secular, post-modern leftists seem to despise, a country they label Nazi-esque, is the only country in Europe, perhaps, that is not currently overrun by Islamic radicals.
This supposedly Nazi country is the only country in Europe where I, an Orthodox Jew, can walk in safety and comfort down the street wearing a yarmulke.
It is a country where children don&#8217;t actually have to fear that their innocence will be robbed by a perverse, anti-Biblical Left seeking the spiritual destruction of those children.
Hungary, like the rest of the West, isn&#8217;t perfect because no country is.
But Hungarians are trying to stand up for their civilization, our shared Western heritage and civilization. And that is a thing that is worth fighting for.
And if we fight for it, we will emerge victorious against the forces that seek to destroy our civilization from outside and inside as well.

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Hungary And The Fight For Western Civilization: Shapiro’s Budapest Speech

The Court of International Trade, which is a court that nobody has ever heard of, moved to block President Trump&#8217;s tariffs in a “sweeping ruling,” according to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-court-blocks-trumps-liberation-day-tariffs-2025-05-28/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Reuters</a>, that “found the president overstepped his authority by imposing across the board duties on imports from U.S. trading partners.”
The court suggested that the law under which the President of the United States was declaring these tariffs was not, in fact, capable of carrying those tariffs because the president used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president the power to regulate imports during certain emergency situations.
But those emergency situations do not actually extend to issues such as a trade deficit. Big trade deficits do not amount to a national emergency.
That&#8217;s what the court found — and the court isn&#8217;t wrong. If the president actually wants to impose tariffs, there are other legal mechanisms he can pursue, but this should be in the purview of Congress. It always should have been in the purview of Congress.
You don&#8217;t want any president being able to unilaterally decide that there should be massive tariffs across the board on all of America&#8217;s trading partners. That is not the balance of powers that was envisioned by the Constitution, by the Founders, the Framers.
It&#8217;s not what they wanted. It&#8217;s not something that I want either. And whether you like the tariffs or you don&#8217;t like the tariffs is irrelevant to the question of whether the president ought to have the unilateral capacity to do as President Trump did on Liberation Day and simply declare a 46% tariff on Vietnam, or a 145% tariff on China. Congress should have to sign off at some point.
Does this mean that all the tariffs are going to go away permanently? No. In fact, an appeals court has already granted a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/blocked-trump-tariffs-trade-court-appeal.html">temporary stay</a> allowing Trump’s tariffs to remain in place.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2209?elementPosition=6&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Still, the markets spiked on the news that the tariffs would be blocked. The Dow Jones Industrial Average futures market immediately jumped significantly and then came back down to earth a little bit as the markets realized, “Oh, wait a second; it may be that President Trump is still going to be able to do some of these tariffs.”
Based on the lower court’s initial block, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/tariff-ruling-is-a-setback-for-trump-but-doesnt-end-trade-war-b1e83c73">The Wall Street Journal</a> reported:
<blockquote>The administration has already said it will appeal the ruling, and trade experts and lawyers say it has a variety of other legal avenues to prosecute the trade war that are unaffected by Wednesday’s decision.
“This is just one more bump in the tariff road that we are going to be on for as long as Trump remains in office,” said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Singapore-based Hinrich Foundation, which advocates for free and open trade. “He loves tariffs and he loves the idea of being able to impose them at will, and I don’t think he’s going to give that up easily.” &#8230;
The judgment undermines the legal basis for those “reciprocal” tariffs—which the administration paused for 90 days to allow time for negotiations—that are the centerpiece of Trump’s effort to rein in the U.S.’s yawning trade deficit. The court also shot down special levies of 20% imposed on Canada, Mexico and China for their alleged role in the U.S. fentanyl crisis.</blockquote>
Theoretically, you could make the case that we should put tariffs on Mexico and declare a national emergency on the basis of fentanyl.
You could at least make a colorable case for that. But you could never make a colorable case that that was the case with Canada. The United States last year, in terms of fentanyl, saw something like 50 pounds of fentanyl the entire year at the border. The idea that there was a national emergency that merited a 20% tariff on Canada originally far exceeded the scope of authority originally presented to the President of the United States by that act in 1977.
There are still a bunch of other tariffs that are going to be on the books if the temporary stay is lifted. The court&#8217;s decision does not impact 25% levies that are in place on steel, aluminum, and cars because those levies were imposed using alternative legal avenues, not the national emergency situation. Those are conventional avenues. Those are known as Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs. The president does have the capacity to actually do tariffs under that sort of power, but they&#8217;re usually used for specific sectors. They are not blanket across the board giant tariffs on entire countries.
The markets were pretty happy about the lower court’s initial decision to block the tariffs. If the stay is lifted, does this mean the end of President Trump&#8217;s trade war?
No. It does mean that the president does not have the unilateral ability, by declaring a national emergency, to impose gigantic tariff regimes across the board.
And that is a good thing. I believe that we should be drawing closer trade relations with our allies and that the shot across the bow, if it was meant to get them to the table, still exists.
But the fact is that there was economic damage from the uncertainty wrought by the tariff war on our allies.
We should be gradually ramping up tariffs on China, reshoring manufacturing away from China, making closer trade alliances with countries that are more aligned with us, ranging from Vietnam to India. All of that would be good.
I don&#8217;t like the tariff policy, but that is actually a peripheral issue; whether you are a fan of the president or not, the balance of power that was drawn in the Constitution should be something that we like and want.
And that’s for this reason: I promise you, the next time a Democrat takes office, that same exact national emergency power will be used for something that you don&#8217;t like.

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Court Blocks Trump’s Tariffs. Here’s Why It’s Correct.

There is a philosophy that has now become dominant on the Left and even parts of the center. It&#8217;s throughout the West.
The deeper roots of this philosophy bear a deadly fruit.
Let’s begin with a bizarre and hilarious spectacle. Great Britain’s King Charles III was visiting the Canadian Parliament and decided that it would be worthwhile to offer a land acknowledgment.
This is hilarious because King Charles is the King of Great Britain. The only reason the Canadian Parliament exists is because of the settlement of Canada by British citizens. That’s why he is there in the first place.
Charles doing a land acknowledgment and taking that seriously would amount to essentially disestablishing Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa and a bunch of other countries, because all of those countries were originally created as functioning polities by the British Empire.
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This bizarre idea that Charles can arrive on Canadian territory and start apologizing to the indigenous people for the presence of white people in this particular area is absurd, especially coming from King Charles, who is the greatest beneficiary on planet Earth of the imperialism of the British Empire.
There are human universals, such as migration, settlement, annexation, and conflict, and they are not unique to white people, Westerners, or Europeans; it&#8217;s just that white people, Westerners and Europeans, have been much better at it than other parts of the population on planet Earth. They&#8217;re more successful, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, but that does not mean that there is some unique sin that attends to whiteness, being Western, or being European.
Charles said, “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation. While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation, in both word and deed.”
Of course the land is unceded, because the nature of human conflict is that when people migrate from one part of the Earth to another part of the Earth, conflict tends to arise, and then someone wins and someone loses. And it is a very good thing that the British Empire won in Canada.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2208-the-trump-2026-victory-plan?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Here’s the basic idea: The world is better off because of the British Empire. The world is better off because of American power and the spread of European ideals. That is obviously true. The spread of things like property rights, due process of law, capitalism, freedom of religion, all of which are not human universals — those are the legacy of the West.
There&#8217;s always an attempt to take human universals and then project them as West-specific problems. That is not true.
The problems of murder and raping and looting and slavery are human universals.
What is unique about the West is all the other stuff. Reversing that polarity and suggesting that the West is somehow uniquely sinful because it was better at war than others, or because Westerners were better at settlement than the Algonquin who lived on the land where Canada&#8217;s parliament now sits, and that is a human tragedy, is not, in fact, a human tragedy.
Bad things happen throughout human history. The bad things are tragedies. But overall, in the broad scope of history, it is an absolutely wonderful thing that Europeans ended up on the North American continent.
Anyone who doesn&#8217;t believe so should probably leave. If you don&#8217;t believe that, you probably should go back to your dingy apartment and cede it back to the natives from whom your ancestors took it.
All of this ties into a deeper and more deadly philosophy.
The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, visited the White House and was asked about the “Kill the Boer” chant, which has become common at some rallies, targeting the Afrikaner farmers who originally settled in the area of South Africa as early as the 17th century, fought for hundreds of years, and were responsible at one point for tremendous racism against black people.
But the solution to that is not genocidal chants. Yet there’s an idea that as long as the people who are shouting the genocidal chants are not white, European and Western, it suddenly becomes okay.
Why? Because the rules don&#8217;t equally apply in this left-wing philosophy, where the sins of the West are unique and the West is unique in its evil.
What that means is that the West has to be destroyed. This has deadly consequences. And it doesn&#8217;t matter whether you call this stuff anti-white or anti-Semitic or anti-whatever. The problem with this generalized philosophy is that it is simply evil.
When you separate the world into victims and victimizers and you suggest that anyone who&#8217;s been uniquely successful is the victimizer and anyone who is not is a victim, what you get is victimizers with the moral impetus and the moral weight to kill people.
What you end up with is actual terrorism, actual violence, actual overthrow of the institutions that made the West great in the first place.

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Why The West Must Not Apologize For Its Success

There are enormous threats on the world stage. Those threats can be mitigated by President Trump. Or, through lack of clarity, they can grow worse. 
Just before the Memorial Day Weekend, Vice President JD Vance spoke at the Naval Academy. He suggested that President Trump&#8217;s visit to the Middle East, in which he visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, was designed to recapitulate an American foreign policy that is based on a realistic assessment of what the world looks like.
He explained, “I actually think the most significant part of that trip is that it signified the end of a decades-long approach in foreign policy, that, I think, was a break from the precedent set by our founding fathers. We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and the maintenance of our alliances for nation-building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests.”
The Vice President was presumably arguing against the war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is a bit of a different story, since originally the war in Afghanistan was launched on the back of 9/11, so it was, in fact, a core American national interest to defenestrate the regime that had protected Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the murder of 3,000 Americans.
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Vance suggested that American foreign policy has to be focused on countering our peer adversaries: “Our government took its eye off the ball of great power competition and preparing to take on a peer adversary, and instead we devoted ourselves to sprawling, amorphous tasks like searching for new terrorists to take out while building up faraway regimes. Now, I want to be clear. The Trump administration has reversed course. No more undefined missions, no more open-ended conflicts. We&#8217;re returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests. Now, this doesn&#8217;t mean that we ignore threats, but it means that we approach them with discipline and that when we send you to war, we do it with a very specific set of goals in mind. And consider how this played out in just the last major conflict we engaged in, with the Houthis over in the Middle East. We went in with a clear diplomatic goal not to enmesh our service members in a prolonged conflict with a non-state actor, but to secure American freedom of navigation by forcing the Houthis to stop attacking American ships. And that&#8217;s exactly what we did.”
The Houthi example is a very interesting one for him to use, because the reality is that the Houthis have not ceased their activities in the Red Sea. Originally, we did not define our battle against the Houthis as simply restoring deterrence with regard to Houthi attacks on American ships; the goal was to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. The goal was to ensure that people could use the Red Sea through the Suez Canal in order to ship things, including oil and LNG, from the region.
That has not been restored. The Houthis are still shooting a couple of missiles a day over Saudi Arabian airspace at Israel. And shipping has still not been restored in the Red Sea.
Now, I don&#8217;t disagree with anything that Vance is saying on the surface. But the use of the Houthis is a telling example, because one of the things that is an open battle in this administration, which we all need to keep our eye on, is what this sort of language obscures.
What is the actual policy of the Trump administration? Is it a policy that makes sure to actually set red lines that are keepable? The Vice President suggests that every mission has to have an exit strategy with an end in sight, saying, “Past leaders sent our service members on mission after mission with no exit strategy, no end in sight, and with little articulation for the American people or for the warfighters about what we were doing.”
All of that sounds really nice. The reality is that foreign policy is a lot messier than that. So, for example, the United States currently has troops stationed in South Korea. Why? That is an open-ended conflict. There&#8217;s an armistice with North Korea, and the United States is, in fact, maintaining the peace in the region between South Korea and North Korea by having a trigger force there.
The United States still has military bases in Japan. Why? Presumably to deter a Chinese takeover of the South China Sea. The United States still has overflight and overwatch power over the Middle East. Why? To ensure the free flow of oil, for example, and to prevent, I assume, the nuclearization of Iran.
This kind of easy notion that the United States can simply, in pinpoint fashion, define our conflicts and get in and get out is not the way actual foreign policy really works.
If you believe that we are now living in a much more dangerous world than we were previously, that&#8217;s going to require a larger commitment to military spending. A safer world, a world in which free trade actually applies, in which you do have freedom of navigation, in which economic growth is the norm, in which the United States has trade capacity and commerce; in which global growth is the norm — all of that is maintained, in the end, by the credible threat of the use of the American military.
That&#8217;s the reality of the situation. That&#8217;s always been the reality of the situation. The notion promoted by some on the more isolationist side of the Republican aisle — that if the United States basically defines in pinpoint fashion its own military engagement, the rest of the world will simply comply — is not the way the rest of the world works.
That&#8217;s been true all along. There&#8217;s a very famous story about George Washington at the Constitutional Convention. There was a constitutional delegate who suggested that the standing army of the United States should be limited to 5,000 men. The reason was that there were a lot of members of the founding generation who didn&#8217;t like the idea of a standing army on the national level. And George Washington would have to fend off the British with an army of essentially irregular soldiers, militiamen, whom he had to cobble together throughout the Revolutionary War.
The constitutional delegate proposed a 5,000-man cap on the army in the actual Constitution. George Washington agreed. And then he sarcastically said that there had to be a stipulation added to the Constitution that no invading army could number more than 3,000.
Of course, the joke he was making is that, when it comes to foreign policy, necessity is the mother of policy.
So you can have all of these principles that we all hope to have about “no open-ended missions,” “no long-term commitments.” The reality is that in a world in which the United States refrains from any long-term commitment and refrains from flexible policy, what you end up with is more red lines crossed.
And so the question becomes, for the administration, how strong are the administration&#8217;s red lines, and what happens when those red lines are crossed? When it came to the Houthis, the United States drew a red line. Originally, it was about freedom of navigation.
That freedom of navigation has not, in fact, been restored.
You can make the case that shouldn&#8217;t have been the mission in the first place in the Red Sea. Fine. But that was not actually the mission. The ends were shifted in order to achieve some sort of titular end to a conflict so the United States could then go and pick up checks in Qatar.
Again, you can make the argument that that&#8217;s a good policy or that it&#8217;s not a good policy, but let&#8217;s be clear about what happened there.
Right now, America&#8217;s enemies are perceiving, at the very least, that there’s some play in the joints.
If President Trump had the foreign policy team from his first term in place, it wouldn&#8217;t be happening. Trump 1.0 was extremely predictable on foreign policy: If you crossed a red line, you would get punched in the face. If you did not cross a red line, we would negotiate with you. That was the foreign policy of the United States. 
There&#8217;s been debate inside the administration over whether Trump 1.0 was too hawkish.
But what America’s enemies see is that now might be a good time to push. That is certainly clear from Russia, from China, and from Iran. Russia. China and Iran are sensing weakness in the Trump administration&#8217;s approach. Russia has been stringing President Trump along while it ramps up its attacks on Ukraine. According to reports, China has now strengthened its ability to rapidly attack Taiwan. Iran, which has been weakened by Israel to its weakest point in decades, is stiffening its negotiating stance with the United States.
President Trump is a peace through strength president.
But that needs to be conveyed not just in words, but in actual forward posture, in military spending, in public statements.
Because the United States has spent the last 20 years being non-credible in its threats. And that needs to stop, as it did during President Trump’s first term.

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Peace Through Strength Requires Actual Strength

On Thursday, President Trump took a victory lap over the House passing his “one big, beautiful bill.”
He wrote on Truth Social:
“THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL” has PASSED the House of Representatives! This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country! The Bill includes MASSIVE Tax CUTS, No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, Tax Deductions when you purchase an American Made Vehicle, along with strong Border Security measures, Pay Raises for our ICE and Border Patrol Agents, Funding for the Golden Dome, “TRUMP Savings Accounts” for newborn babies, and much more! Great job by Speaker Mike Johnson, and the House Leadership, and thank you to every Republican who voted YES on this Historic Bill! Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! There is no time to waste. The Democrats have lost control of themselves, and are aimlessly wandering around, showing no confidence, grit, or determination. They have forgotten their landslide loss in the Presidential Election, and are warped in the past, hoping someday to revive Open Borders for the World’s criminals to be able to pour into our Country, men to be able to play in women’s sports, and transgender for everybody. They don’t realize that these things, and so many more like them, will NEVER AGAIN happen!
As for the content of the “one big beautiful bill,” here is the truth: The American people are not in touch with reality when it comes to fiscal issues.
Yes, it is good that taxes did not massively increase. Yes, we do need funding for border security. 
But — if you are worried about the fiscal health and economic health of America, we need to explode many of the myths that currently surround the American economy. 
Myths, such as the idea that there is no American middle class.
Not true. 
Myths, such as the idea that manufacturing productivity has gone down in the United States.
It has not. 
Myths, such as the idea promoted by both parties, that labor unions in the United States are the good guys, as opposed to businesses that hire people, who are the bad guys.
Axios reported that a brand new poll from the liberal Economic Policy Institute shows that labor unions are now significantly more popular than so-called big business. Labor unions have a popularity rating of about 60%, as opposed to big business, which is below 50% at this point. 
The reason why that&#8217;s not good is because it leads to a populist economic policy in which you only get to argue whether you want a government that spends a lot of money and has lower taxes or a government that spends even more money and has higher taxes.
Those are the two options for the parties. 
And that&#8217;s why you got a bill that looks like this. It&#8217;s a mess. 
There’s some good stuff in it, tax cuts, the border security funding. If I were in Congress, I would have voted for it, because the crap sandwich is still better than a massive tax increase in the middle of what currently is a pretty rocky economy.
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That said, the reason we can&#8217;t have nice things in this country is because the American people are fundamentally opposed to the things it would take for us to have actual nice things, like good government policy. 
For example, President Trump made sure that there were no significant restructurings of Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. 
The Medicaid changes were on work requirements. Those would not take effect until December of 2026. No changes to Medicare. No changes to Social Security. 
All of these are systemic drivers of America&#8217;s debt. 
The reason why there were no significant restructurings of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is that President Trump realizes the political reality, which is that there is no desire from the American people to restructure entitlements.
In order to avoid blowback from the Democrats, President Trump decided not to touch any of that stuff. 
More and bigger social services mean a higher deficit. And the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike, do not want to come to grips with this. They simply do not. 
There is a gigantic series of problems with the American debt, and this bill does not radically change the trajectory of that debt. It changes around the margins. It doesn&#8217;t actually get to the core of the matter. 
Our government is a ticking debt bomb. When you talk about America&#8217;s debt bomb, let&#8217;s talk about the American debt-to-GDP ratio. Right now, we&#8217;re already at roughly 100%.
U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to reach 118.5% by 2035 under current policies, based on the CBO projections. This would actually be higher than our post-World War II record of 106%, which is psychotic and crazy, as World War II was really, really expensive.
If the current legislation were to pass, then debt theoretically could climb even higher, maybe reaching almost 130% of GDP by 2034.
Social Security and Medicare, if there were no changes here, would still be bringing our debt-to-GDP ratio to about 120% over the course of the next ten years or so. 
So let&#8217;s be real about this. The bill makes sure your taxes don&#8217;t radically increase, which is a good thing. You want economic growth. You want to be able to grow your way out of some of this. You are going to need lower taxes and lower regulation. And those two things, lower taxes, lower regulation, that is stuff the Senate is working on.
However, to pretend that we do not have a debt bomb coming is silly. Obviously, we do. And this bill doesn&#8217;t solve that. 
The reality is that the American people are not willing to face up to what it would actually take to fix the economy for the long term. So what that means is you are likely to get a bunch of bad bills from here to eternity, or, at least, until the point at which the debt burden becomes so strong that it sinks the ship we are all sailing on together. 

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Is There A Debt Bomb About To Drop?

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In five different states this week, young girls lost state titles, qualifying spots, and medals to young men. Courageous high school students decided that enough was enough and protested the tying of a trans athlete with a biological boy on the team.

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