The following excerpt is taken from the new book &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Butler-Untold-Assassination-Americas-Heartland/dp/1546009140/ref=sr_1_1?crid=38ZQJ31BTXE78&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.yBjqsViUcuzSmJ0JQfFO_9pbEehSi-8OfBIfkv9uv-Eg2YesGVnshEb31LRcm_VyNV90yUlv9buV5-Eg4h3ANjvLeboA5BuUjGHF1yBXHxfXZoSn8Vchp7NkJJKFCPPN0JdICFPkw8GWPPCc2BBMMPqe_qSkBWh_hh_CkKUxGhVJA_Ayn3SjyWBemTcvmDq42l4iaEdSi5Ih0Lab_rtq0w.UQCO-toWBwgEMYzS_IK8UvoFWqL6oOP4CgnKEYfwSsE&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=salena+zito+butler&amp;qid=1751464363&amp;sprefix=salena+zito+butle%2Caps%2C170&amp;sr=8-1">Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America&#8217;s Heartland,&#8221;</a> by Salena Zito (July 2025, Center Street/Hachette Book Group)
* * *
<h3>They Shoot Presidents in Butler</h3>
George Washington was less than pleased.
It was December 26, 1753, well past dusk and the temperature had dropped dramatically as darkness fell. Thanks to the drop in temperature, the mix of sleet and snow would make travel perilous in the deeply forested wilderness of what is now present-day Butler County.
But Washington and his guide Christopher Gist were left with little choice; they had to move, and move quickly.
They needed to make their way to the forks of the Ohio River. Days later, Washington, then a young major in the Virginia militia, would write in his journal that fear coursed through his veins and spurred the urgency of their flight after he was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet that whizzed past his ear just hours earlier.
Both he and Gist knew his assassin would be back to finish the job.
<div id="attachment_942151" style="width: 417px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/salena-zito/butler/9781668649909/?lens=center-street"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-942151" class="wp-image-942151 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-02-Jul-2025-09-02-AM-8755-407x576.jpg" alt="Cover credit: Center Street/Hachette Book Group" width="407" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-02-Jul-2025-09-02-AM-8755-407x576.jpg 407w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-02-Jul-2025-09-02-AM-8755-212x300.jpg 212w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-02-Jul-2025-09-02-AM-8755-768x1086.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-02-Jul-2025-09-02-AM-8755-1086x1536.jpg 1086w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-02-Jul-2025-09-02-AM-8755-1448x2048.jpg 1448w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-02-Jul-2025-09-02-AM-8755-scaled.jpg 1810w" sizes="(max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" /></a>Cover credit: Center Street/Hachette Book Group</div>
At twenty-one years old, Washington was on his first diplomatic mission, with direct orders from the Crown tucked in his saddlebag to basically tell the French to get off King George II’s land or face war with England.
In 1753, the British and French Empires were in the early stages of clashing over their colonial possessions. Britain’s North American colonies were mostly packed along the Atlantic coastline and then moved westward toward the Allegheny Mountains.
France’s colonial holdings were in the center spine of the country that began in New Orleans and ran up along the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes region toward the St. Lawrence River. Both empires claimed control of the vast expanse of what was then known as the Ohio Country, which began in present-day western Pennsylvania and West Virginia and spread due west across the states of Ohio and Indiana.
Washington was at the center of that clash of royal aspirations, which were largely spurred by greed in the form of an immense royal grant to the Ohio Company, whose largest investor was Robert Dinwiddie, Virginia’s royal (lieutenant) governor and the man who sent Washington on the mission.
The young Virginian’s destination was Fort Le Boeuf, just fifteen miles south of Lake Erie. In Washington’s possession was a note from London, signed by King George II, that read: “If the French were found to be building forts on English soil, they should be peacefully asked to depart. If they failed to comply, however, we do hereby strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms.”
The trip from Virginia had been a daunting 250 miles of untouched wilderness. It involved scaling high ice-crusted ridges, slogging through thick brush, swamps, and dense forests with mounds of heavy snow, and navigating icy waterways. The journey was as difficult as one could imagine, not just because of the terrain but also because of a weather system that had pummeled Washington and Gist the entire way.
Washington arrived at Fort Le Boeuf on December 11. The fort system was rudimentary at best, made of scrap bark and planks and consisting of four buildings. The young soldier and French commander Capt. Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre had a cordial, diplomatic conversation despite Washington’s delivery of the Crown’s demand that the French vacate the Ohio Valley immediately.
Saint-Pierre made clear that he was not intimidated by the British and retained every right to arrest their traders who were poaching on French territory. “As to the summons you sent me to retire, I do not think myself obliged to obey it.”
Four days later, Saint-Pierre handed Washington a sealed message for Dinwiddie. It was then that Washington discovered that, although Saint-Pierre had filled Washington’s canoe with a generous amount of supplies for the journey home, the French commander had also bribed Washington’s Indian guides with food and drink to stay behind.
Washington was furious. He had not only been deceived by Saint-Pierre; he had also observed enough during his four-day wait for the commander to respond to Dinwiddie to know that France was building a large-scale fort system throughout the disputed territory. He also observed that they were building a formidable military operation, which was prepared to defend the land the French would take over.
Washington and Gist set off, anxious to deliver the news to Dinwiddie. However, their horses were so debilitated by the journey to Fort Le Boeuf that the men had to abandon them and continue on foot.
On the journey toward the outpost known as Murdering Town (in present-day Butler), they were heavily burdened by their backpacks. Along the way, they encountered several French Indians who quickly — probably too quickly, in hindsight — offered to help get them to the forks of the Ohio River. The battering snow and sleet, freezing cold, and rough terrain had worn Washington down, and when one of the Indian guides offered to carry his backpack, he took him up on it.
Gist, a skilled surveyor and frontier guide, immediately sensed something was off about the situation. He wasn’t wrong. As soon as the group came to a clearing, one of the Indians sprinted ahead of them into a meadow and then turned to face the two men before firing point-blank at Washington from fifteen paces.
The exact amount by which the French-aligned Indian missed Washington is unclear. Washington’s diary entry is vague, but the intent was obvious. The Indian guide wanted the young Virginian dead.
If muskets had contained rifling — grooves inside the barrel to make a bullet travel more accurately — 270 years ago, everything in the world would have changed at that moment.
There would have been no skirmish several months later in present-day Fayette County, Pennsylvania, between Washington’s regiment and French soldiers — a skirmish that led to the first shots fired in what would quickly escalate into the French and Indian War. It was a war that ultimately led to the Revolutionary War, when the British Crown tried to tax the colonists to pay for debt incurred during the first true world war.
There would have been no General Washington, no President Washington, and we might not have the country we call America today if that bullet had been only an inch closer.
* * *
Salena Zito is a veteran political reporter with more than twenty years of award-winning experience in print and broadcast journalism. With her trusty Jeeps that have clocked well over 400,000 miles on their odometers and a refusal to travel on interstates, Zito is a reporter who harkens to an older generation of journalism, one who listens to the stories of everyday Americans in places far outside the artificial bubbles of Manhattan and the Beltway. One of the last scribes of middle America, she famously popularized the root cause of their failed coverage and underestimation of Donald Trump by the phrase coined by Brad Todd saying, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner, and a special contributor to the Washington Post. She has been a columnist for the New York Post and has contributed to The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Excerpted from &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Butler-Untold-Assassination-Americas-Heartland/dp/1546009140/ref=sr_1_1?crid=38ZQJ31BTXE78&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.yBjqsViUcuzSmJ0JQfFO_9pbEehSi-8OfBIfkv9uv-Eg2YesGVnshEb31LRcm_VyNV90yUlv9buV5-Eg4h3ANjvLeboA5BuUjGHF1yBXHxfXZoSn8Vchp7NkJJKFCPPN0JdICFPkw8GWPPCc2BBMMPqe_qSkBWh_hh_CkKUxGhVJA_Ayn3SjyWBemTcvmDq42l4iaEdSi5Ih0Lab_rtq0w.UQCO-toWBwgEMYzS_IK8UvoFWqL6oOP4CgnKEYfwSsE&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=salena+zito+butler&amp;qid=1751464363&amp;sprefix=salena+zito+butle%2Caps%2C170&amp;sr=8-1">Butler,</a>&#8221; by Salena Zito. (Copyright 2025) Used with permission from Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

BUTLER, PENNSYLVANIA – July 13: Former president Donald Trump r

They Shoot Presidents In Butler

assassination attempt

Books

Butler

George Washington

Pennsylvania

Presidency

President Trump

Michelle Obama is complaining again, and this time it’s about how “expensive” it was living in the White House while her husband was president.
The 61-year-old former first lady discussed her woes during an appearance this week on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast.
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“How do you raise kids in the White House? It’s dangerous,” Obama said. “As the first black potential president, we knew there would be death threats … how would we afford it? Because it’s expensive to live in the White House, as many people don’t know.”
“I mean, much is not covered,” she continued. “You’re paying for every food, every bit of food that you eat, you know, you’re not paying for housing and the staff in it … but everything, even travel, if you’re not traveling with the president, if you’re kids are coming on a Bright Star, which is the first lady’s plane, we had to pay for their travel to be on the plane.”
Obama repeated, “It is an expensive proposition, and you’re running for two years and not earning an income, so all of that was in my mind, um, how would we manage this.”
This isn’t the first time the “Becoming” author has mentioned the topic of paying for life during her husband’s presidency.
During a 2018 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, she again discussed the topic of paying for food.
“If you say you want some exotic fruit, ‘Yes, ma&#8217;am, we&#8217;ll get that right away,’ and then you get the bill for a peach and it&#8217;s like, that was a $500 peach!?” Obama <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AktU2gettoU">told</a> the late night host. “I would tell Barack, ‘Barack, do not express pleasure for anything unless I know how much it costs.’”
Per <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/chart-shows-net-worth-us-presidents-before-after-office-1992975">Newsweek</a>, the Obamas entered the White House with a net worth of $1.3 million, and now have grown that amount to around $70 million. This 5,300 percent increase is the second highest jump in net worth for any president in history, second only to Bill Clinton.

Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama Complains It Was ‘Expensive’ To Live In The White House

Michelle Obama Complains It Was 'Expensive' To Live In The White House

Barack Obama

Politics

White House

Tuesday marks 100 days of President Trump&#8217;s second term.
President Trump has done an enormous number of amazing things, ranging from fighting DEI in every aspect of his administration to targeting university campuses that are hotbeds of antisemitism and leftism and wokeness, to having the Secretary of Defense try to fix all the problems at the Pentagon, to establishing DOGE, which is going through all aspects of government spending with Elon Musk and attempting to cut waste, fraud and abuse.
The president has issued more executive orders in his first 100 days than any president in history. He&#8217;s been incredibly effective in terms of pushing forward many parts of his agenda.
With all of that said, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/27/trump-poll-approval-rating-100-days/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">polling</a> right now for President Trump is not good. That is a reflection of public sentiment specifically regarding the economy. And that is all before the main effect of the tariff war that he has declared kicks in.
The good news for President Trump is that he&#8217;s blessed by his enemies, because they are awful. The American people hate the people that President Trump faces down even more than they dislike President Trump.
The same Washington Post/ABC News-Ipsos <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/27/trump-poll-approval-rating-100-days/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">poll</a> showing President Trump with a 39% approval rating also shows that 7 in 10 Americans say the Democratic Party is out of touch, while 6 in 10 say that about Trump.
So whatever the American people think of President Trump, they think even less about the Democratic Party.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2187-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
There’s a good reason for that, which is that the Democratic Party is so unbelievably unhinged. They are truly incompetent. It is amazing. It&#8217;s a target-rich environment for Democrats out there, particularly on the economy — but they cannot help themselves because they&#8217;re constantly running to the radical left of their own base. They&#8217;re saying idiotic things on a daily basis.
Over the weekend, J.B. Pritzker — the rotund governor of Illinois who has to be lowered into the Illinois capital by crane — was <a href="https://x.com/IsaacDovere/status/1916660604577763511" target="_blank" rel="noopener">giving a speech</a> in which he suggested that anybody who is a supporter of Trump ought to be harassed on the streets.
He declared: 
<blockquote>Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I have now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and every microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.</blockquote>
Democrats are unhinged. Instead of them simply saying, “President Trump isn&#8217;t doing the job Americans want him to do,” which would be the smart way to actually approach this, they&#8217;ve decided instead that they&#8217;re going to go psychotic.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and would-be House speaker, was in the middle of a protest when he <a href="https://x.com/IsaacDovere/status/1916660604577763511" target="_blank" rel="noopener">started quoting</a> Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, suggesting that America could break down between patriots and traitors. Presumably, the traitors in his mind would be Republicans. 
He quoted Grant saying: 
<blockquote>Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now: that is, we have a government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots.</blockquote>
This is just psychotic, because he’s not even arguing about the supposed violation of law by the Trump administration. He&#8217;s not arguing about emoluments. He&#8217;s arguing here about the budget. He&#8217;s suggesting if you&#8217;re on the wrong side of the budget negotiation, then you are a traitor. 
President Trump is blessed in his opposition. He brings out the absolute worst in all of his enemies. Jon Ossoff, the soon-to-be ex-senator from Georgia, was trying to rile up the Democratic base, and said that he&#8217;d be <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-jon-ossoff-signals-support-trump-impeachment-rcna203126" target="_blank" rel="noopener">in favor</a> of impeaching President Trump for selling meme coins as a fundraiser. 
With all of that said, it is not good news for President Trump that he&#8217;s riding so low in the polls. That&#8217;s particularly true with independents; according to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/27/trump-poll-approval-rating-100-days/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a brand-new</a> Washington Post/ABC News-Ipsos poll, among independents, only 33% approve of Trump while 58% disapprove. Among independents who lean Republican, Trump&#8217;s approval has dropped from 76% to 63% since February.
There&#8217;s one reason for this drop, and that reason is not immigration. That reason is not foreign policy. That reason is the tariff war. The tariff war has absolutely crippled him.
According to that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/27/trump-poll-approval-rating-100-days/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">poll</a>, only 31% of Americans approve of the recent turmoil in the stock market. Only 34% of Americans approve of tariffs on imported goods. Only 38% approve of his relations with foreign countries, only 39% approve of his work on the economy.
The problem, however, is that whenever a president is unpopular on one issue, it tends to drag him down on a wide variety of other issues. On immigration, which is a signal issue, his key issue since 2015, President Trump is succeeding. But when it comes to the economy and expanding the power of the presidency, 64% of Americans say that he&#8217;s going too far.
If you&#8217;re hoping for President Trump&#8217;s success, as I am — as someone who voted for him and fundraised for him — he needs to succeed on the economy because if he doesn’t, everything else goes down in flames.
I&#8217;m talking to people who are in the wholesale and retail space and they are freaking out about the tariffs. They’re seeing their orders cut while prices increase. They’re seeing the supply chains break and ships arriving empty. There are a lot of fears of actual shortages and price hikes. I know people who are in the import/export business and they&#8217;re getting hammered, some looking at the possibility of actual bankruptcy. The Magnificent Seven are off to their worst start to a year.
As I’ve said before, there are preconditions to fighting a successful trade war. You need to get ready for it just like a regular war. If you&#8217;re going to win a regular war, you need to make sure your supply lines are in place. You need to make sure that you actually have the material. You have to have your allies in place.
Meanwhile, Congress needs to get the tax bill through ASAP.
President Trump&#8217;s presidency now relies on a couple of things. First, ending this trade war or recalibrating it so that it will be more likely to be successful, which will require dramatic moves. Second, passing the tax bill. If neither of those things happens, then President Trump&#8217;s presidency will continue to spin out. That’s because as the economy goes, President Trump&#8217;s promise for all of his career has been that he&#8217;s a great businessman, and he would make sure the economy was okay. 
Getting the economy right is what President Trump needs to do if he wishes to make the American people happy with his presidency again, which will give him the political capital necessary to do everything else.
That would be fantastic, because he is getting so many other things dead-right.

TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-TRUMP-HABBA

100 Days: Where Does Trump Stand?

Ben Shapiro

Democrats

Donald Trump

Hakeem Jeffries

J.B. Pritzker

Polls

Republicans

Tariffs

Washington Post

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is reportedly backing out of a potential run for the U.S. Senate to set himself in a better position to compete for the White House in 2028.
Buttigieg bought a house in the Traverse City, Michigan, area in 2020 and went to live there after four years serving in former President Joe Biden’s cabinet.
The former transportation chief considered a run for Michigan’s open Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. Buttigieg met with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer about a potential bid. Democrats are anxious to keep control of the seat in 2026.
Buttigieg decided to pass on a Senate run as he eyes a renewed attempt at the Oval Office, according to <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/13/pete-buttigieg-michigan-senate-run-00227583" target="_blank" rel="noopener">POLITICO</a>. Running back-to-back campaigns in 2026 and 2028 would be difficult and could hurt his chances at the White House.
“The hardest decision in politics is to pass on a race you have a very good chance to win,” David Axelrod, a veteran Democratic strategist who has mentored Buttigieg, told POLITICO. “Pete was an A-list recruit and would have been a formidable candidate for the Senate had he chosen to run. But had he won in ’26, it would almost certainly have taken him out of the conversation for ’28.
“This certainly keeps that option open. Beyond that, I have a sense that he wanted to spend more time with his family, and with people in communities like his, where the conversations and concerns are so different than the ones you hear in the echo chamber of Washington,” Axelrod said.
Before being Transportation secretary, Buttigieg’s most notable role was as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, the fifth most populous city in the state with just over 100,000 residents. He ran for president in 2020, losing to Biden in the Democratic primary.
As Transportation Secretary, Buttigieg had a mixed rating from voters. In a Rasmussen <a href="https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/biden_administration/democrats_like_buttigieg_others_not_so_much" target="_blank" rel="noopener">poll</a> released in April 2024, 41% of likely voters reported having a favorable impression of Buttigieg, while 40% reported an unfavorable impression, a marked decline in popularity from the year prior.
Most of his support came from Democrats, 63% of whom reported a favorable opinion. Thirty-eight percent of unaffiliated voters and just 18% of Republicans reported a favorable view of Buttigieg as Transportation secretary.

Pete Buttigieg

Buttigieg To Pass On Senate Run As He Eyes White House In 2028: Report

Elections

Michigan

On July 30, 1941, a wan, painfully gaunt man in his early fifties was chauffeured through the Kremlin gates and ushered into the office of Josef Stalin. The American presented the Soviet dictator with a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In it, FDR instructed Stalin that his sickly envoy should be treated with “the identical confidence you would feel if you were talking directly to me.”
The man’s name was Harry Hopkins.
Hopkins, whose last official government title was Secretary of Commerce until 1940, acted as Roosevelt’s chief emissary throughout the war years. He was, in fact, Roosevelt’s most trusted confidant. So heavily did the president lean on his friend’s counsel that Hopkins literally lived for three-and-a-half years in his own <a href="https://time.com/archive/6782779/presidential-agent/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">private quarters</a> within the White House. He had been the principal architect of the New Deal and, between that and his work at the Commerce Department, was considered a top notch administrator. Indeed, Hopkins had the president’s unshakeable faith — so much so that Hopkins’ <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Barbarossa-Cataclysm-Jonathan-Dimbleby/dp/0197547214/ref=asc_df_0197547214?mcid=0fb21b4b93c03010be6c135e68622dcc&amp;hvocijid=6511239155696965424-0197547214-&amp;hvexpln=73&amp;tag=hyprod-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=730434177080&amp;hvpos=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=6511239155696965424&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvdvcmdl=&amp;hvlocint=&amp;hvlocphy=9013184&amp;hvtargid=pla-2281435178098&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">detractors</a> saw him as “a sinister figure, a backstairs intriguer, and an Iowan combination of Machiavelli, Svengali and Rasputin.”
<div id="attachment_875305" style="width: 422px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875305" class="size-large wp-image-875305" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468-412x576.jpg" alt="Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953) with American diplomat Harry Hopkins (1890 - 1946). Original Publication: People Disc - HW0294 (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="412" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468-412x576.jpg 412w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468-215x300.jpg 215w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468.jpg 733w" sizes="(max-width: 412px) 100vw, 412px" />Hulton Archive/Getty Images</div>
But he was FDR’s man. Someone to whom he’d effectively given a sort of presidential power of attorney to speak on his behalf throughout the war to such important allies and world leaders as Stalin and Churchill, and to decide matters that could affect the fates of millions across four continents, while the physically deteriorating president stayed back in Washington. Hopkins was also appointed to head the $11.3 billion Lend-Lease program to aid the Allies, and became a member of the War Production Board and the Pacific War Council. But he functioned mainly as the president’s intimate, and unelected, advisor.
This was some serious power placed courtesy of the president into the hands of one man, an unelected administrator. Indeed, Hopkins wielded much more de facto power under FDR than Elon Musk does under Donald Trump today. The tech billionaire’s unsalaried role as the head of DOGE is to recommend to the president actions he might take to root out government waste, fraud and abuse, and nothing more. As per the historical record, no one “voted” for Hopkins any more than they voted for Musk — a common complaint from a Democrat Party that has not been so bewildered by a total loss of power since Appomattox.
Unlike President Trump, Roosevelt never openly campaigned on giving Hopkins, who also served as his 1940 campaign manager, such an integral role in the center of his administration. And yet, there were no GOP lawmakers making fools of themselves, a la Chuck Schumer today, through cringe-worthy grandstanding by shrieking over any perceived threat Hopkins posed to the health and safety of our sacred Democracy.
While Hopkins was pushing his cancer-riddled body to the breaking point in his global travels on behalf of his closest friend, other unelected men who would also wield awesome power and authority granted by Roosevelt were hard at work back home shifting the USA’s manufacturing base to a war footing.
<div id="attachment_875321" style="width: 714px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875321" class="size-large wp-image-875321" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-704x576.jpg" alt="Homeward bound from the Casablanca Conference of 1943, President Roosevelt is shown in animated conference with Harry Hopkins. Sitting directly behind them are Lieutenant George Fox (left), US Navy Medical Corps, and Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntyre (right), Surgeon General of Navy. Across the aisle are Guy H. Spaman (back to camera) of the US Secret Service, and Captain John L. McCrea, Presidential Naval Aide. Standing are Arthur Prettyman, valet, Charles Fredericks, (hands folded), Elmer Hipley, Secret Service, Wilmer Deekand, Secret Service, and Captain Otis Bryan, Chief Pilot." width="704" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-704x576.jpg 704w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-300x246.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-768x629.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 704px) 100vw, 704px" />Homeward bound from the Casablanca Conference of 1943, President Roosevelt is shown in animated conference with Harry Hopkins. Getty Images.</div>
This was not an easy task for FDR, a neo-socialist, whose isolationist stance stalled America’s response as war clouds brewed overseas. His ideological antipathy towards pure capitalism caused the U.S. government to do everything it could to hinder war production through activist policies that capped profits on war materials, and banned the sale of arms to foreign powers. By 1940, Roosevelt had effectively destroyed the U.S. defense industry. All this while malevolent nations like Germany and Japan were on the march.
It is difficult for us today to imagine how weak the United States military was leading up to the Second World War. At its outbreak in 1939, the U.S. fielded less than 175,000 troops, ranking 19th in the world and behind such global powerhouses as Portugal. In fact, in 1940 FDR was advised that Nazi Germany — which was by then Blitzkreiging its way across Scandinavia, the Low Countries and the mighty France — might only need five divisions to take over much of the country. The administration was suddenly faced with a difficult choice: bring back the war economy, or risk invasion.
Gen. George Marshall, FDR’s Joint Chiefs head, told him in no uncertain terms that the U.S. government could not prepare the nation for war and then execute production on its own. He therefore urged Roosevelt to bring in the industrialists if this mammoth mobilization effort was to succeed. Says <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCkIyEmUgX0&amp;t=555s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Stephen Davies</a> of the <a href="https://iea.org.uk/dr-stephen-davies/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Institute of Economic Affairs</a>, “There was no large army, there was virtually no air force. It all had to be created from scratch in almost no time at all, and the administration, the government, recognized very realistically that there was just no way they could do this themselves. What they had to do was to reach out to private industry, the private sector, and divert it to the war effort.” 
Roosevelt saw the light. Says <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCkIyEmUgX0&amp;t=555s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">historian</a> and pilot Randy Hotton, “Roosevelt said ‘I want the top manufacturing guys in this country.’ And one of his top advisors said, ‘Number one is Bill Knudsen of General Motors. Number two is Bill Knudsen of General Motors.’ And we can all guess who number three was.” Knudsen ended up flying in the face of the administration&#8217;s and other war economies’ dicta by keeping the U.S. war economy unplanned, unfettered, open, and allowing defense industries to turn a profit.
<div id="attachment_875313" style="width: 730px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875313" class="wp-image-875313 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-720x576.jpg" alt="File:General Motors head. Washington, D.C., May 29. A new informal picture of William S. Knudsen, President of General Motors Corp. Harris &amp; Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="720" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-720x576.jpg 720w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-300x240.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-768x614.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-1536x1229.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-2048x1638.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" />William S. Knudsen, President of General Motors Corp (right). Harris &amp; Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</div>
Hopefully by now the reader sees a parallel between Roosevelt’s actions in delegating authority in the 1940s to affect a specific outcome — overhaul the war effort while bestowing upon unelected officials enormous power to affect real change both domestic and abroad — and what Trump is doing today in his empowering a man he trusts in Elon Musk, and those also unelected DOGE whiz kids, to massively overhaul our own federal government.
The Democrat Party is so pathetically lost, so out-of-touch, so confused that they are desperate for any issue to use as a differentiator between them and the Trump-enabled wrecking ball laying waste to their carefully constructed edifice of waste, fraud and abuse. So they have turned their vocal and crazed minority loose on their newest impediments to maintaining power: Elon Musk, “Big Balls,” and the DOGE crew. They claim DOGE is behaving in an “unconstitutional” even “illegal” manner. Why? Because, as Senator Elizabeth Warren screeched with an interesting choice of grammar for a Harvard professor, “No one elected Elon Musk to nothing!”
As the examples above show, when faced with a far more daunting task than rooting out government waste, even Roosevelt, among the most Left-wing of presidents, did not keep the task of winning the war within government alone, but rather brought in top men from the private sector to do the job that the federal bureaucracy simply could not be entrusted to do. Knudsen’s National Defense Research Committee and Office of Production Management was to the 1940s what DOGE is today. And the GM CEO then was the Tesla CEO of his day. And like Musk, Knudsen was even an immigrant! 
The enemy these two extraordinary men, along with Hopkins on the other side of the Atlantic, were mobilized to defeat may be different — Roosevelt’s team faced an external threat in the Axis, whereas Trump’s crew faces the internal threat of a far-reaching, ingrained web of Deep State corruption and waste. But the underlying idea of bringing on top private sector minds in a particular field (manufacturing in 1940, coding and AI search algorithms in 2025) to most efficiently perform a vital, indeed existential service to the country, even though no one elected them, is a model that has been tried before, and has succeeded with stunning results.
The Democrats know this, of course, don&#8217;t they? Ignorance can be rectified, but deep-seeded corruption, mendacity, lust for power and reliance on theft for one’s income is a harder course to change.
And as for Musk’s seeming “co-presidency” as Time magazine’s latest cover showing the Tesla/SpaceX CEO sitting behind Trump’s Resolute Desk implies, all I can say is there have been no private citizens in modern history with more power bestowed upon them by an American president, a Democrat icon no less, than Harry Hopkins and William Knudsen. Even the rabid isolationist Henry Ford got on board after Pearl Harbor. 
These men, who were akin to the Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos of their day, had very prominent seats at the Roosevelt administration table in order to tackle problems that were simply beyond an entrenched, ideological Federal administrative state. And not only did the nation survive, it thrived. We won the war and came out on the other side as the economic colossus of the world. Courtesy of the diligent and invaluable efforts of many patriotic, if unelected, titans of their day.
* * *
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id%3D55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3K_WhJtiUZw7LF1PwSIHtH">books</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw02hy-lB4UuAlHo7FfD_FIQ">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/bschaeffer123&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0P6pRoAqcBhUQ1W0qwN5rH">X/Twitter</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

President Franklin Roosevelt

Before Trump, FDR Had His Own Unelected Millionaires Come To Washington

American History

Cabinet

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Federal Government

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)

World War II

Manifest Destiny is a concept that hasn&#8217;t been explicitly invoked by an American president in a very long time. It&#8217;s the idea that Americans have a divine mandate to conquer, to expand, to reach out across vast expanses. If James Polk hadn&#8217;t embraced Manifest Destiny in the middle of the 19th century, there&#8217;s a very good chance that America wouldn&#8217;t look anything like what it does today. We wouldn&#8217;t have states like California, Utah, Oregon, Washington and many more. Our country never would have gained access to the Pacific. We would have established no foothold west of the Mississippi at all. Foreign powers would have retained control over wide swaths of the North American continent. We would be a much smaller, much weaker nation today. So small and weak that, by now, we may not even be a nation at all.
We wouldn&#8217;t have experienced the unprecedented economic and technological growth that we did in the 19th and 20th centuries — growth that ensured America would become the world&#8217;s greatest superpower. As part of our journey to the West, we developed everything from new farming techniques to the telegraph system to the transcontinental railroad. This was a period of extraordinary expansion in every sense, made possible by Americans&#8217; belief in God and His will and His calling on our lives. And yet, until yesterday, no modern American president wanted to talk about it. Manifest Destiny has somehow become a point of embarrassment. The pioneer spirit was extinguished, in favor of a spirit of weakness and shame.
But Donald Trump wants to change that. It was one of the major themes of his inaugural address. What made his address so brilliant is that he talked about all of the practical things that we need to do as a country to get to a point where we can thrive and succeed again. But he also, at the same time, took a larger, grander view. He talked about the sweeping vision of things, along with the practical. And as for sweeping visions, that’s what Manifest Destiny is all about.
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Trump wasn&#8217;t paralyzed or guilt ridden by it. He wasn’t focused on the plight of so-called &#8220;indigenous people.” He didn&#8217;t make any apologies for this country, or the people living here, or our history. Instead, he affirmed that God wants this country to succeed and grow and flourish. He also affirmed that America was a great country when it had the will and desire to explore, expand, and conquer — and that we need to return to those principles. And then Trump explained what exactly that will look like, in the modern context. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 Expand America" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nrmHB8_r3cY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
In the past century, American presidents simply haven&#8217;t talked like this. Barack Obama, for example, claimed we had &#8220;duties to the world,&#8221; including what he called &#8220;the Muslim world.&#8221; Joe Biden fear-mongered about &#8220;democracy&#8221; and COVID, which he claimed (falsely) had taken more lives than World War II.
In fact, even if you go back and watch Trump&#8217;s first inaugural address, back in 2017, you won&#8217;t find rhetoric about America&#8217;s divine mandate to grow, expand, and flourish. Instead, the theme of Trump&#8217;s first address was about more immediate concerns — specifically, restoring American manufacturing, ending wasteful commitments to foreign governments, and securing the border.
This is what Trump referred to as the &#8220;America First&#8221; platform. The plan, at the time, was to shore up America&#8217;s failing infrastructure, and restore the government to the people. It was a necessary plan that was intended to stop what Trump called the ongoing &#8220;American carnage.&#8221; But it was also a plan that signaled that, after eight years of rule by Barack Obama, America needed emergency repairs. We weren&#8217;t in a position to conquer or explore. There are still many repairs to be made. But now we can go beyond that as well.
In 2025, for his second administration, Trump has made it clear that, this time around, the goal is bigger. Now his administration intends to expand American influence and usher in a new Golden Age — an era of historic economic and technological progress. As Trump went on to explain, there&#8217;s never been a better time in modern history for a president to call for something like this. Trump now has the full backing of some of the smartest people in the country, including actual innovators like Elon Musk.
And perhaps more to the point, Trump himself just achieved what many considered impossible. He became president for a second time, despite the efforts of every power center on the planet to stop him. At one point in his speech, Trump made it clear that he believes he&#8217;s only alive today because of divine intervention. Inspired by his near-death experience, he&#8217;s now committed to reviving Manifest Destiny — a desire to explore and conquer that has defined Americans since our country was founded. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Ambition is the Lifeblood of a Nation" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5TIWZz1lajo?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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Within hours of his speech, Trump took nearly 200 executive actions to put these principles in action, and restore America&#8217;s sovereignty. (And in between each one, he talked to reporters at length, which is something Joe Biden obviously would be incapable of doing.) Trump opened up oil and gas exploration in Alaska, which the Biden administration had shut down. In fact, he permitted drilling across much of the coastal United States. This is a whole frontier that was closed to the American economy solely for superstitious, ideological reasons. And now it&#8217;s open.
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More symbolically, Trump also reinstated the name &#8220;Mount McKinley&#8221; and changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Mount McKinley in Alaska had been named Mount McKinley for over a century, until the Obama administration changed it to Denali, which is supposedly the “indigenous” name for it. But the mountain is ours. It belongs to us. It is American, in America. We have the right to name it. The “indigenous” people do not. They never even developed a written language, so whatever they called the mountain a thousand years ago is unknown to us and them. We are far more advanced. We conquered this country. It’s our mountain. We name it. That is Trump’s attitude, and it’s the right one.
Trump also pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants who were prosecuted for political reasons, which is a major step towards restoring Americans&#8217; First Amendment right to peacefully protest. He signed an order to make federal architecture more aesthetically appealing, in order to inspire future generations. Which is what great architecture is meant to do. Additionally, Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, which worked with China to cover-up the origins of COVID, a decision that led to years of suffering and lockdowns in this country.
Crucially, Trump also ended birthright citizenship for illegal aliens, which is maybe the single most important step he could take, when it comes to fulfilling this country&#8217;s Manifest Destiny. After all, we can&#8217;t explore and conquer the world, if we&#8217;re being conquered ourselves. Watch:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
🚨 BREAKING: President Donald Trump signs executive order ending unfettered birthright citizenship for aliens coming into the U.S.
Trump notes he expects court challenges. <a href="https://t.co/InEcJ15isV">pic.twitter.com/InEcJ15isV</a>
&mdash; Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) <a href="https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/1881504161059287438?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This is a move that&#8217;s obviously going to be challenged in the courts, as Trump went on to acknowledge. Democrats believe — whether correctly or not — that the key to their political power is importing illegal aliens, because most of those illegal aliens will eventually have children. And then those children become American citizens, and can vote in future elections. So Democrats are going to fight very hard to make sure that this executive order is overturned.
It&#8217;s not clear at the moment if they&#8217;ll win. There&#8217;s no Supreme Court case that&#8217;s ever directly addressed this particular issue. But it&#8217;s clear that birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens is one of the most destructive policies that&#8217;s ever been implemented in this country. It gives a massive incentive for foreign nationals to flood across the border, and fundamentally reshape this country.
But Trump isn&#8217;t just relying on this one executive order. He&#8217;s also already fired the people who are responsible for the fraudulent asylum process in this country, which is a major loophole that illegal aliens have been exploiting. Asylum, as you may know, is intended for people who are facing very extreme and very specific cases of persecution. But in recent years, the government has been allowing anyone with a fake asylum claim to stay in the country. Asylum went from something meant for people facing political persecution, to something for people who just happen to want to come into the country.
Just to give you some perspective on the numbers: <a href="https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/2024_1002_ohss_asylees_fy2023.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">According to DHS</a>, &#8220;Affirmative asylum case filings &#8230; nearly doubled from 241,280 applications in 2022 to 456,750 in 2023, the highest number on record.&#8221; So this is a massive increase. And almost every single one of these claims is fraudulent. But these people are being allowed into the country, while their fake claim is &#8220;adjudicated&#8221; — a process that can take years. And of course, they often don&#8217;t show up for their hearings. So they&#8217;re essentially given a free pass into the country.
That&#8217;s all about to change. The New York Times reported <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/trump-administration-fires-immigration-judges.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">with shock and horror</a> on the changes that have already been made to the asylum system, on day-one of the second Trump administration: &#8220;The acting head of the U.S. immigration court system and three other top officials were fired on Monday soon after President Trump took office. &#8230; The abrupt removals signaled that the Trump administration wants to remake the immigration court system, which is housed under the Justice Department, as part of a broader immigration crackdown that Mr. Trump began within minutes of being sworn in for his second term. Immigration judges oversee an essential part of the system: granting asylum to migrants whose claims pass muster and ordering the deportation of those whose cases do not.&#8221;
These are people who obviously should&#8217;ve been fired a long time ago. Now that&#8217;s finally happening. 
And again, Trump&#8217;s not stopping there. He also declared that foreign drug cartels are terrorist organizations — and he didn&#8217;t foreclose the possibility of going into Mexico and taking them out. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="006 cartels" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O34giQVVu_U?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This is what Manifest Destiny looks like, in practice. If people are going to cause problems for us, we can go out and get them. If there&#8217;s territory that&#8217;s valuable to us — like the Panama Canal — we can take it. If there&#8217;s a planet that could ensure the survival of the human race one day— like Mars — then we&#8217;ll colonize it. That was maybe my favorite part of his speech, when he declared that America will plant a flag on Mars. That really matters. Not just to ensure humanity’s survival. I have no idea whether Mars will ever be actually colonized. Elon Musk thinks so, and he knows a lot more about this stuff than you or I do. But regardless of that, planting our flag on another planet would be the greatest achievement in this entire history of mankind. We should strive for that achievement simply for its own sake. Because great countries do great things. And because we as a people, as a nation, need a moment of collective triumph like that. We haven’t had one in many many years.
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In other words, it&#8217;s clear from his first day in office that Trump is focused both on the practical issues and on the big picture. It&#8217;s difficult for a leader to do both of those things. Joe Biden, of course, did neither. It wasn&#8217;t even clear who was running the country for the last four years. But that&#8217;s all changed now. If Trump can keep up this level of focus and momentum through all four years, this has a chance to be one of the great presidential terms in American history. Trump has embraced an ideology that&#8217;s rooted in confidence — one that all successful and high-functioning countries embrace. He is openly promoting the promise of Manifest Destiny, which no president has done since James Polk. And now, armed with the lessons he learned from his previous four years in office, the chances seem pretty high that Trump will make good on that promise.

TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-TRUMP-INAUGURATION

The Dawn Of A New America

Executive Orders

Inauguration

Matt Walsh

Opinion

Today, every American, whether Democrat, independent, or Republican, ought to pray for President Trump’s success, because then you are praying for the success of the United States of America.
That doesn&#8217;t mean you have to agree with all his policies. It doesn&#8217;t mean you have to agree with everything he does. I&#8217;m not going to agree with everything he does.
But it does mean that for the sake of the country, I hope and pray President Trump will be precisely the kind of president that America needs: a president who relies on common sense; a president who does not just seek momentary victories, but also seeks long-term victories; a president who restructures the systems that need restructuring; and cleans out the deadwood in need of cleaning out.
I think President Trump takes all of that seriously; he seems to already be taking on the task before him. It is a very serious approach. It is a moment of optimism, but it also is a moment of determination. 
The Republicans need to hit the ground running. They need to get to work on the one-bill strategy. They need to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and to loosen regulations dramatically.
They need to fire an enormous number of people in the executive branch. They need to restore our nation&#8217;s border and deport illegal immigrants, particularly criminal illegal immigrants. They need to restore the semblance of sanity in a country that completely lost its sanity under Joe Biden.
The stakes are really high because America doesn&#8217;t get opportunities like this particularly often.
It is very rare to get a second bite at the apple. I think there has been a lot of despair. In 2020, I was one of the people who felt that despair when Joe Biden took the White House. You get a second chance so rarely, but the American people are getting a second chance with President Trump.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2120-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
My prayers today are with President Trump, with the members of his excellent cabinet, with the members of his administration, with the members of his family. My prayers are with the country today, as I think everyone&#8217;s ought to be. President Trump has pledged a big agenda — a big, robust agenda — and some of it&#8217;s going to start taking place today.
But it&#8217;s not just going to require the efforts of President Trump, because the country doesn&#8217;t rise and fall on one man. It rises and falls on the American people and their elected representatives. That means members of Congress need to help push forward the Trump agenda in pragmatic fashion. It means the Senate needs to push forward President Trump&#8217;s agenda in pragmatic fashion.
Yes, there will be give and take, and push back, and no bill is going to be perfect. I hope that conservatives get more out of these bills than members of the Left do. That&#8217;s my hope.
But for us, the American people, this is our opportunity. This is our opportunity to thrive. It&#8217;s an opportunity for merit to take the floor once again. Freedom is being restored. Free speech is being restored; free markets are being restored.
Take this opportunity to go to church. Take this opportunity to get in touch with your neighbors. Take this opportunity to recapitulate what made America great in the first place. Things like free minds, free speech, community values, and rule of law. Those are the things we should all be praying for under the incoming Trump administration.
This is our opportunity. The excitement is here.
President Trump is going to get to work. 

So should we.
* * *
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The Inauguration Of Donald J. Trump As The 47th President

President Trump Gets To Work. So Should We.

America

Catholic Church

Church

Joe Biden

Synagogue

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and Jarrett Stepman on a special <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/morning-wire/biden-to-trump-a-tale-of-two-presidencies-1-19-25" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sunday edition of Morning Wire.</a>
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As Joe Biden exits stage left, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. One presidential legacy is now in the books and another – Trump’s remarkable comeback second term – is about to be written. Morning Wire sat down with the author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-History-Conspiracy-Rewrite-Americas/dp/1621578097" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The War on History</a>,” Jarrett Stepman to discuss the defining moments of Biden’s presidency and what to expect from Trump’s second term.
JOHN: Joining us to discuss Joe Biden’s legacy and expectations around Trump’s second term is Jarrett Stepman, author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-History-Conspiracy-Rewrite-Americas/dp/1621578097" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past</a>.” Jarrett, thanks for coming on.
JARRETT: Thanks for having me.
JOHN: Let’s start by looking back, with a post-mortem on Biden’s presidency. He gave his <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bidens-farewell-address-four-years-too-late" target="_blank" rel="noopener">farewell address</a> on Wednesday evening – what stood out to you?
JARRETT: It really felt like, in this address, that this was the “Friday night news dump.” It was very low energy, which I think defined especially the last part of his presidency. He focused on things like the spread of misinformation and perhaps censorship of online media, which I thought was a very peculiar take for a president trying to define his presidency, his one term in office. And I felt that the speech itself had very little impact, which is very fitting for the Biden presidency that seems to have wound down into nothing very quickly. But it seems to be an outlier, too, because farewell addresses are usually a defining moment of any presidency, how to define his term. And Biden simply faded out, which I think is very appropriate for his presidency.
JOHN: Joe Biden’s presidency was plagued by inflation and a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan – what else will he be remembered for? 
JARRETT: I actually think that he will be remembered for being a frail man who represented crumbling institutions at the end of history. I think that really is what&#8217;s defined the Biden presidency, he very much came into office. As an institutionalist, he was supposed to represent the third term of Barack Obama, a sort of attempt to create a permanent Democratic majority through the executive branch. That basically ground to a halt at the end of Biden&#8217;s presidency. I think he was a president who was often missing in action, especially when the country was counting on him. When you had incidents like the failed Afghanistan withdrawal that really turned into a shambolic affair, President Biden was often nowhere to be seen and it was unclear where exactly the buck stopped in our executive branch. Nobody at the top seemed to have lost their job and business continued on as usual. I think that these were ominous signs about his presidency — one that was more ruled by the various executive agencies than the man at the top, than the man who was actually elected to be president of the United States. So, I think his legacy was of an institutionalist and institutions that were losing favor from the American people and going in a direction that Americans didn&#8217;t want.
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JOHN: Often, a presidential legacy boils down to just one or two defining moments or developments. What will come to define Biden’s legacy?
JARRETT: Again, I think that Biden was an institutionalist at a time where the confidence in institutions was crumbling, and I think that Biden&#8217;s, behavior, his frailty, his inability to actually be a strong leader in a time of great challenges to an old system that had been in place will define his presidency. I think it was very symbolic, especially given the man who will eventually replace him. These are two men who come from a similar age demographic, but represent two very different directions for the American people. And I think Biden’s legacy will be ushering in the age of Trump at the end of the age of Biden.
JOHN: Now, turning our gaze to the near future – we have the 47th president being inaugurated Monday – and he happens to also have been the 45th president. Non-consecutive terms have only happened one other time in our country’s history. Do you believe the gap will have a positive or negative influence on his second term and how he governs?
JARRETT: I think the gap will actually have a positive effect on his second term. Now everything will be quickened — it&#8217;s almost like he&#8217;ll be very quickly a lame duck president. That&#8217;s obviously something that happens at the end of a presidency. It&#8217;s certainly a unique situation in American history. This has only happened one other time with Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century. But this is actually a unique situation even in comparison to that because Trump didn&#8217;t just lose a presidency, he was really up against many institutions that tried to squeeze him out, to prevent him from ever coming back into office ever again. That Trump was able to triumph over all those forces — both the political institutional forces and also the media forces that tried to keep him out of the White House — the fact that he triumphed given those challenging circumstances makes this a unique journey to the White House. And I think it actually empowers him. It may end up being a blessing in disguise, because I think Trump the first time around you could say that his presidency was maybe a bit of an accident and Democrats had simply gotten lazy or careless in allowing this man to become president. I think especially given the headwinds that were against him and the fact that now Trump comes in more popular than he&#8217;s ever been, he comes in with closer to what you consider an electoral mandate. He actually didn&#8217;t just win the electoral college, he seems to have won the popular vote as well, which he certainly has touted. I think it makes him a lot stronger than in 2016, especially given now his experience actually running the White House and being a statesman. Whereas before, he had very little. He was a complete neophyte. He was a man of business and entertainment, but now he&#8217;s a man with quite a bit of experience in running the executive branch, with his own outlook on how to run things. So, I think he&#8217;s going to hit the ground running faster this time than he did last time and have his own institutional support, as opposed to 2016.
<div id="attachment_861551" style="width: 916px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-861551" class="size-large wp-image-861551" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-2194251751-906x576.jpg" alt="TOPSHOT - Melania Trump watches her husband, US President-elect Donald Trump, speak at a candlelight dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, on January 19, 2025, a day before his inauguration ceremony. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)" width="906" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-2194251751-906x576.jpg 906w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-2194251751-300x191.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-2194251751-768x488.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-2194251751.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 906px) 100vw, 906px" />JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images</div>
JOHN: There&#8217;s been a lot made of the resistance movement against Trump over the years – and it was very robust in his first term. When he first took office, there was a huge array of resistance elements in the government and the media – that had a lot of power. And it does seem like this last election, so many of those institutions, as you have pointed out, were failing, and his defeat of them seems to have undermined the idea that there could be as robust of a resistance. What do you see coming in terms of the resistance effort against Trump? Will it be as influential as it was in 2016?
JARRETT: It&#8217;s going to be much more marginalized in comparison to that time. Again, because Trump comes in with so much more of a mandate this time around. Trump is not going to be surprised about the hashtag “resistance” this time around. In fact, I think he&#8217;s keenly aware of it, and it may even become a defining part of his presidency. I think he&#8217;s going to use a lot of cool tools, including something called Schedule F to remove recalcitrant bureaucrats. I think that in many cases, this election was about Trump&#8217;s kind of populist uprising against the White House. I know that Biden Democrats tried to define themselves as standing with democracy, but it really was an uprising against the bureaucratic fiat that they thought was ruling the country during the Biden administration. And I think that they, the bureaucrats who were so empowered during the Biden presidency, I think they&#8217;ve lost a lot of power and I think that there&#8217;s going to be a lot less tolerance within the Trump administration for that kind of resistance. And I think the American people are fed up with it too. So, I do think that there&#8217;s going to be a sort of revival of a kind of popular self-government – and I think that will define the Trump presidency.
JOHN: So, weeding out bad elements in the bureaucracy. What other specific actions or policies do you believe he will pursue, based on his campaign trail rhetoric and the kinds of nominations he&#8217;s made for his cabinet?
JARRETT: Yeah, I think something&#8217;s going to happen immediately. I think he&#8217;s going to restore a lot of the immigration and border policies of his first term, including the Remain in Mexico policy. I think that is going to be absolutely a priority. I think something that&#8217;s going to be worked on in conjunction with the legislature, undoing some of Biden&#8217;s executive decisions in the bureaucratic fight, especially when it came to, redefining gender through Title IX, which was, I think, a very big issue, an underrated issue of the Biden presidency. There&#8217;s already a bill in the House to undo that, to undo those changes that happened under the Biden administration. His first term, his first 100 days in office, he will also re-implement tax cuts from his first administration. I think those will be the big priorities, especially the border, which was a big theme of his first term, but now seems to be even more of a crisis, especially given the fact that under the Biden administration there was a massive surge of illegal immigration. A lot of Biden&#8217;s supporters turned against him given the chaos in American cities and a lot of chaos across the country, not just at the border.
JOHN: What do you make of Trump&#8217;s cabinet picks so far? We&#8217;ve had some days now of confirmation hearings. Is there a unified message we&#8217;re hearing from those cabinet picks?
JARRETT: I think his cabinet picks are very interesting because all of them, while they have some disagreement on various issues, all of them represent a critique of those various institutions. If it&#8217;s somebody like Pete Hegseth at the Defense Department, this is a man who comes in not as a four star general. He comes in as a man who has experience as just a regular soldier criticizing the woke DEI direction of the agency. You have somebody like Cash Patel, a man who was not part of the FBI, now being potentially put at the head of the FBI in criticism of the way that the FBI has operated during the Biden presidency. He really has created a team. Many of whom have very impressive resumes, but they are sort of anti-institutionalists. I think this time around, Trump is less dependent on the sort of conservative Republican infrastructure that exists in Washington D.C. and now has his own team that&#8217;s going to define his presidency. That is a big difference from the first time around. I think Trump has a much more clear and defined different direction for where he wants to take his presidency and the issues that he wants to prioritize. I think all of his cabinet picks represent Trump&#8217;s various feelings about the issues in those various policy areas.
JOHN: In his first term, Trump focused on significant deregulation and judicial appointments based on his rhetoric and policy priorities. What legacy building actions do you think he&#8217;ll focus on this time around?
JARRETT: Interestingly enough, I think a big part of his legacy is actually going to be his foreign policy. It&#8217;s something that&#8217;s an underrated part of Trump. I think he was a very strong president on foreign policy during his first term, but I think you can even see in the days before he actually enters the White House how much he prioritized issues like Greenland, possibly reacquiring the Panama Canal — talking about a revival of a sort of Monroe Doctrine — ending conflicts around the globe. There&#8217;s been a deal to end the war between Israel and Hamas, and potentially in the future, ending the war in Ukraine. And I think that Trump actually will make foreign policy a priority because, I think the way that Trump looks at it, if there is going to be a Golden Era of the United States, and he is going to make a lot of changes, domestically, then that means he must prevent any kind of global catastrophe, any kind of potential war with China. So, I think he is going to create a more realist perspective in American foreign policy and focus on containing the threat of communist China, which represents a real threat to the United States. I think the appointment of Marco Rubio at the State Department really defines that. And I think that will be a huge part of his legacy that is very underrated, especially when people focus on his domestic outlook. I think his foreign policy is actually a huge part of what Trump does as president, what he does best.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/morning-wire/biden-to-trump-a-tale-of-two-presidencies-1-19-25" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LISTEN: Catch the full interview with Jarrett Stepman on Morning Wire</a></h3>
JOHN: Yeah, I think you&#8217;re right. Final question, Trump has vowed to make America great again. Do you see things aligning in such a way that he&#8217;ll be able to pull off that very lofty goal?
JARRETT: I think it is a massive challenge. As I said, Biden really represented the last part of the crumbling institutions at the end of history. I think that Trump represents, potentially, a great man and a return to history. Now that means many complicated and dangerous things. I think we&#8217;re returning to an era of great power conflict, something that we haven&#8217;t experienced in a very long time. The United States has had no challenge or peers since the end of the Cold War. Suddenly we have that again. I think there&#8217;s a lot of questions about the end of the Cold War, the Post Cold War consensus that Americans have come to regret some of the things that have happened since that time. I think Trump has an enormous challenge ahead of him. It&#8217;s certainly too much for simply one man to be expected to restore confidence in America and continue into this new American century. But I think Trump is uniquely placed. I think he represents a pivot point in American history. And I think if he does actually pull this off, he will certainly be remembered as one of the great presidents in the country&#8217;s history. There&#8217;s no question that the contrast between him and his predecessor will be enormous. Now, whether that ends up being a spectacular catastrophe or a spectacular revival, I think is really up to him and how he treats issues and how he performs in office. But I think he is at a point in which he could have enormous impact over the trajectory of the United States and really the world.
JOHN: In the meantime, enormous anticipation leading up to the inauguration and what will follow in Trump’s first executive actions. Jarrett, thank you so much for joining us.
JARETT: Thank you for having me.
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‘Ushering In The Age Of Trump’: An Interview With The Author Of ‘The War On History’

'Ushering In The Age Of Trump': An Interview With The Author Of 'The War On History'

2024 Election

Conservatives

interview

Morning Wire

U.S. Politics

Nature is healing.
Things are beginning to change. Donald Trump will be taking his oath of office in a few days, but in order for him to take office, Joe Biden has to go.
And before he goes, Biden is attempting to constrain President Trump as he comes in.
The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/us/politics/biden-policy-decisions.html">reported</a>:
<blockquote>In the final days of his term, President Biden has issued a series of policy decisions intended to cement his agenda and, in some cases, make it harder for President-elect Donald J. Trump to put in place his own.
The 11th-hour decisions, many of them executive actions, include measures on environmental justice, prison reform, immigration and foreign relations. Some are intended to preserve Mr. Biden’s legacy, while others are last-ditch efforts to expand his approach. Many are likely to be undone after Mr. Trump takes office next week.</blockquote>
“Environmental justice” means banning fracking and limiting drilling off the coast. “Prison reform” means jailbreak.
This is always the danger of an outgoing administration, particularly one as venal, corrupt, and terrible as Joe Biden&#8217;s administration.
Biden is creating two national monuments in California, an action that is not really about creating national monuments; the monuments are intended to prevent mining and drilling that would cover 848,000 acres of desert and mountainous land in a portion of the state where no human would ever visit — unless they were actually going to increase the energy production of the United States.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2119-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
The Biden administration announced they would remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in an attempt to box Trump in.
Biden commuted the sentence of 37 out of 40 inmates on federal death row. He left out those who had murdered protected classes of people, which apparently does not include small children. Biden said he would cancel student loans for more than 150,000 borrowers, which he doesn&#8217;t actually have the capacity to do and the Supreme Court said he could not do.
The Biden administration issued sweeping extensions of deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of people to prevent President Trump from actually moving those people out of the country. And, of course, President Biden signed a piece of legislation that gives full Social Security benefits to some public sector retirees who are currently receiving them at a reduced level.
The garbage policies that Biden is planting in the heart of American democracy are going to take a while to come to fruition, but they&#8217;re going to be completely damaging. The vast overspending, the changes to procurement systems, the way that environmental regulations have been done, all those things will take time to fully materialize.
By the time Biden left office, people didn’t like him — across the spectrum. Moderates didn&#8217;t like him because he wasn&#8217;t moderate. The Left didn&#8217;t like him because they are nuts and felt he wasn’t nuts enough.
Meanwhile, President Trump is entering the White House with more positive sentiment than he has ever had in his entire political career, including his first term. According to a new <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/16/politics/cnn-poll-trump/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CNN poll</a>, Trump continues to see majority approval for his handling of the transition; 55% approval, which is a very, very high percentage.
Almost six in 10 Americans expect Trump to do a good job in his second term, and that&#8217;s including moderates, Democrats, and everybody else.
Why?
It’s because as it turns out, Trump is a pragmatist. He&#8217;s utilitarian. All he cares about is winning. Even people who may not agree with many of his conservative policies are interested in a country that actually functions again, a country that actually has a booming economy and a strong foreign policy.
He is coming in with a honeymoon. And if Congress does what it is supposed to do, then we are going to see this boomlet turn into an actual boom on behalf of President Trump.
You can feel the mood changing in the country.
The addition of Elon Musk on the Republican side of the aisle has been an imagistic boon in extraordinary ways. Yesterday, for example, his super-heavy booster was caught again by the so-called chopsticks. Musk is doing things with technology that are simply astonishing.
It’s cool to be American. It&#8217;s cool to live in a country that makes this sort of thing possible. It&#8217;s cool to live in a country where a guy who comes to America with pretty much no money can build himself into the richest person on Earth, making companies that create electric cars and rockets that are reusable and can be caught in mid-air that are 20 stories high.
It gives you a feeling of optimism about the country.
The Trump effect.
It’s real and it’s amazing.
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TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-BIDEN-DIPLOMACY

Before He Exits, Biden Tries To Undermine Trump

Biden Administration

federal regulation

Leftists

Last night, President Biden gave his farewell address.
On his way out, he decided to give an Eisenhower-like warning. Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address, famously inveighed against the military industrial complex.
I happen to be a believer that Eisenhower’s remark was one of the dumber statements he ever made. The military industrial complex theory, which was pushed by a Marxist-leaning sociologist named C. Wright Mills, says that the defense industry drives America toward war. It is a fool&#8217;s way of explaining how foreign policy actually works.
But somehow, Biden found an even bigger fool’s way to explain American policy.
On his way out, he warned about a tech oligarchy. Let&#8217;s be clear. One of the key reasons Biden became president in 2020 was because of the tech oligarchy working with his people — shutting down, for example, the Hunter Biden laptop story so he could win.
It turns out that billionaires disproportionately support Biden and his party. But Biden decided he would weigh in about the supposed “tech oligarchy.”
What Biden really means is that the people he wants to run the country are career bureaucrats and politicians who have never run a popsicle stand.
There are two alternatives. Either the people are going to be left to their own devices to actually hire people, build businesses, and run their own lives — or Joe Biden will run their lives.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2118-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Biden has never worked a real job in his entire life. He&#8217;s been politicking since the age of 29. He wasn’t even old enough to be in the Senate when he was elected to the Senate. And now, he&#8217;s 173-years-old, and he inveighed against the oligarchy in which he has been a key cog for his entire adult life.
He <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stated</a>:
<blockquote>Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.
We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.
They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy pay the by — play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers won rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class and the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen, and we’ve got to do that again.</blockquote>
Biden’s idiotic notion that we have to break the modern robber barons, that it&#8217;s people like Elon Musk and the tech bros who are really the problem, is garbage. 
Who do you think is creating the productivity, the innovation, and the jobs that Americans have? It isn&#8217;t Joe Biden. It isn&#8217;t the government. This is the key conflict of vision between people like Biden and those of us who actually like free markets, free enterprise, and freedom in general. Biden believes that by freedom, we mean the government should allocate to you a particular role in life.
When those of us on the other side refer to freedom, we mean that we should all be able to rise and fall on our own merits, and those actions generate positive externalities for everyone.
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It’s repugnant to listen to Biden whine about the oligarchy while he himself has never produced a positive thing in his entire life. Then, he inveighs against people who actually do the producing, who actually do the innovation, who make life better for literally hundreds of millions of people.
Meanwhile, he&#8217;s been a complete leech on the ass of society for five decades, talking about the oligarchs.
You know who is truly an oligarch? Somebody who uses unearned power, somebody who is given power by the American people to crack down on the freedom of others for redistributive purposes. That person is much more of an oligarchy than whatever supposed oligarchy Biden’s talked of.
What a terrible old man.
I cannot wait for him to be out of the White House.

President Biden Delivers Farewell Address To The Nation

Biden’s Farewell Address: Four Years Too Late

Biden's Farewell Address: Four Years Too Late

Big Tech

Silicon Valley

Social Media

The 119th Congress has begun, and Republicans are poised to pass a series of conservative priorities in line with President-elect Trump’s agenda. Given the overwhelming number of caseloads facing the judiciary, and the subsequent inefficiency of our legal system, creating <a href="https://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/governmental_legislative_work/publications/washingtonletter/december-24-wl/congress-add-judges-1224wl/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">new Federal Judgeships</a> should be lawmakers’ top priority. 
In 2023, the Judiciary <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/judiciary-news/2023/03/14/federal-judiciary-seeks-new-judgeship-positions" target="_blank" rel="noopener">requested</a> 66 new District Court Judgeships be created to assist with its burdensome caseload. Last month, Congress listened and passed the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4199/text" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Judges Act of 2024</a>. This bill, which <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4199/all-actions?overview=closed#tabs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">passed</a> with bipartisan support in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate, sought to remedy the judiciary’s issues by creating 66 new Federal District Court Judgeships to relieve overwhelmed and overworked jurists.
Unfortunately, President Biden <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/23/biden-vetoes-bill-federal-judge-slots-00195981" target="_blank" rel="noopener">vetoed</a> the much-needed Judges Act a few weeks ago, purportedly because of “hurried action” from the House regarding how judgeships are allocated and how senior-status judges and magistrates affect the need for new jurists. 
President Biden’s reasoning is inopportune. Congress conducted an <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4199/text" target="_blank" rel="noopener">extensive</a> investigation into the judiciary’s issues and allocated judgeships in a manner which does not benefit either party. Congress passed this bill in a bipartisan fashion for these reasons. President Biden likely vetoed this bill because he does not want his successor, President-elect Trump to fill those 66 new judgeships.
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While Federal District Courts are expected to maintain a large and robust docket, they are currently overwhelmed with the amount of cases on their dockets. Federal District Courts had <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/reports/statistical-reports/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics-2024">347,991</a> civil cases filed in 2024, an increase of 22% from the prior year. Moreover, pending civil cases <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/reports/statistical-reports/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics-2024" target="_blank" rel="noopener">increased</a> by 8% — meaning these cases are stalled in the litigation process. Because there are only <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-senate-approves-bill-create-66-new-federal-judgeships-2024-08-01/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">677</a> Federal District Court judges in the United States, each District Judge has 1000 pending civil cases on their docket and 514 new civil cases filed in their court. This burdensome caseload is prolonging cases. On average it takes <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/reports/statistical-reports/judicial-business-united-states/judicial-business-2023/us-district-courts-judicial-business-2023" target="_blank" rel="noopener">8.7 months</a> to dispose of a civil case, and only <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/reports/statistical-reports/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics-2024" target="_blank" rel="noopener">298,371</a> civil cases concluded in 2024 — a 12% decline from the prior year.
District Court judges don’t only hear civil cases. Their dockets also include criminal ones. Last year, 66,053 federal criminal cases were <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/reports/statistical-reports/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics-2024" target="_blank" rel="noopener">filed</a>. Moreover, 113,511 federal criminal cases are currently pending before a federal court. This means on average a federal judge had 100 new criminal cases filed in their court and 167 criminal cases pending on their docket. Much like the civil cases, this burdensome caseload has also led to delays as terminations of criminal cases also <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/reports/statistical-reports/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics-2024" target="_blank" rel="noopener">decreased</a> by 2%. Judges believe these delays in civil and criminal cases <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/judiciary-news/2024/11/18/need-additional-judgeships-litigants-suffer-when-cases-linger" target="_blank" rel="noopener">erode faith</a> in the judiciary and harm litigants. Federal District Courts are overwhelmed and need help.
President Biden erred in vetoing the Judges Act. Federal District Courts are not political entities, but neutral forums where parties resolve disputes. In fact, Federal District Courts rarely delve into the political or cultural issues consistently heard by the Supreme Court. Rather, they mainly deal with tort cases, contract disputes, and procedural issues.
Further, Federal District Courts issue non-precedential decisions, meaning their decisions do not affect any other Courts. Such actions are consistent with the Supreme Court’s belief that the proper role of the Federal Judiciary is to “<a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/5/137/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">say what law is</a>.” By playing games with the District Courts, President Biden toys with the lives of litigants who are dealing with pressing civil and criminal legal issues. These issues must be solved sooner rather than later — as prolonged litigation can cost both parties thousands of dollars and, in some criminal cases, could mean life or death.
Unfortunately for President Biden, Republicans retained the House and regained the Senate. Hence, they can pass bills that align with President Trump’s agenda of fixing America. Congressional Republicans should prioritize passing the Judges Act as President-elect Trump’s administration would gain short and long-term wins if it passes. Not only would this be an easy short-term win as a bipartisan solution to a pressing problem facing our nation, it would grant President Trump future wins by empowering him to confirm more judges, something his conservative base loves. President Trump has a knack for confirming judges; in his first term, he <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/01/13/how-trump-compares-with-other-recent-presidents-in-appointing-federal-judges/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">confirmed</a> 174 Federal District Court Judges- roughly 26% of all active Federal District Court Judges. By creating more judgeships, Congress can empower President-elect Trump to reshape our lowest courts by appointing fair-minded jurists who can expeditiously and fairly resolve cases on their dockets. 
This would be a boon to the new administration, the Federal Judiciary, litigants, and the American people. A smart Republican Congress will pass this bill and empower President-elect Trump to resolve the judiciary’s peril while building his legacy.
* * *
Ryan Silverstein is a J.D. Candidate at Villanova University and a fellow with Villanova’s McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy. His work has appeared in Fox News, the New York Post, and RealClearPolitics.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Court house neoclassical building in Lower Manhattan

The Judges Act Would Be A Boon To Jurists, Litigants, And Trump’s Legacy

The Judges Act Would Be A Boon To Jurists, Litigants, And Trump's Legacy

Congress

Courts

Judges

Judiciary

U.S. House of Representatives

Donald Trump just gave one of the greatest press conferences in American history. He talked more in this press conference than Joe Biden has for four years. He spoke quite coherently and cogently.
The press conference was a doozy. It was wonderful in so many ways.
Trump is going to instruct the federal government to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and I am here for it. It is fantastic. If you look at a map, about 65% of the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico is in America.
Who&#8217;s going to stop us from renaming it? Mexico? Sure. They can’t even balance the budget or stop the cartels from running their country.
But that&#8217;s not the only item on the Manifest Destiny Agenda for the Trump administration that I love.
I love that Trump has been talking about making Canada the 51st state. I know that Justin Trudeau is out there tweeting how it&#8217;ll never be the 51st state, but he has no say in the matter because when we invade, he will be shipped to work the Panama Canal.
More America is better. Greenland, a vital place territorially, is on Trump’s list. Why not? The United States spends money on the military defense of Greenland, and we have military bases in Greenland. We use Greenland’s northern border in order to protect Arctic shipping. Greenland is very important because as ice melts in the Arctic Circle, there will be brand-new North Atlantic shipping lanes which have drawn interest from Russia and China. Either Russia and China are going to have an impact there, or we are. Arctic shipping has increased, according to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/01/08/why-does-trump-want-to-buy-greenland-heres-what-to-know-as-don-jr-arrives-on-island/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Forbes</a>, 37% over the past decade.
In addition, Greenland is part of the strategically important Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, a choke point that Russian ships actually have to transit to travel from the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic.
And Greenland has a plethora of untapped mineral resources. Those include copper, iron ore, diamonds, and oil. We should purchase Greenland.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2112-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
The people of Greenland have been talking about independence for a very long time. If that were to happen, they would realign with the United States in a heartbeat. First of all, it&#8217;s better to live in the United States than it is to live in a principality of Denmark. Second, as far as security concerns to defend those Arctic Straits against Russia and China, do you think Denmark is going to go up against the Russians or the Chinese?
If that is a matter of national security for the United States, why not sell Greenland to the United States if you are Denmark?
Back in 1775, Denmark and Norway declared Greenland a colony. Greenland was then formally transferred from Norway to Denmark by a treaty in 1814. Denmark started trying to colonize the island in the 1880s.
But before the 1880s, a huge chunk was actually discovered by Americans. Charles Francis Hall saw northwest Greenland during the Polaris expedition, which was from 1871 to 1873. And another explorer named Robert Peary actually claimed much of the North.
The only reason that Denmark has any claim whatsoever to Greenland, as far as the United States is concerned, is because when the United States was interested in purchasing the Danish West Indies during World War I, Denmark required the U.S. to recognize its claim over the whole island of Greenland.
At the time, Peary, the explorer who discovered and claimed much of it, opposed the U.S. giving up the claim because the Monroe Doctrine said there should be no European interference in the Western Hemisphere.
He correctly suggested that we should have purchased the island outright. And then, as it turned out, we had to defend it anyway because in the early 1940s, Denmark had been conquered by the Nazis. Once that happened, the United States basically had to defend Greenland as its own principality because it was the only known significant source of a material called rhyolite. Because Germany was attempting to use the North Atlantic as a base during World War II, the United States actually did apply the Monroe Doctrine on European colonies in the North Atlantic Ocean.
By 1946, the joint chiefs of staff had listed Greenland and Iceland as essential international locations for American bases. In fact, when NATO was in its heyday, Greenland was seen as more important to both American and Canadian defense than some of the Western European countries. That was because the very, very north of Canada, the North American continent, gets pretty close to territory that is controlled by Russia.
In 1951, Greenland and the United States signed a treaty that gave the United States exclusive jurisdiction over defense areas within Greenland. So there is a significantly solid case that the United States actually ought to buy Greenland.
But there’s more. 
President Trump has made clear that he does not want the Panama Canal to be controlled by the Chinese. He&#8217;s half joking when he&#8217;s making fun of Justin Trudeau and talking about making Canada the 51st state, but the Greenland issue is actually a fairly serious proposal. And when it comes to the Panama Canal, there really is a serious problem. The Panama Canal was built with American labor and money. It was turned over idiotically by one of our worst presidents, Jimmy Carter.
The Panama Canal has run significantly worse since we turned it over to Panama. The Panamanians have turned over both ends of the canals to Chinese companies who could easily shut off the entrances and exits to the Panama Canal. 40% of all American container traffic goes through the Panama Canal. That&#8217;s a lot of American commerce moving through the Panama Canal.
If the United States were ever to get into a conflict with China, most shipping would cease because China would try to take control of the Taiwan Strait and the Strait of Malacca, which is basically the tip of the South China Sea. That would shut off another shipping route. If they could shut off shipping in the Western Hemisphere, they could absolutely cripple the American economy.
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On foreign policy, Trump was asked about what he&#8217;s going to do if the hostages are not freed by Hamas by the time he takes office in just 13 days. 
President Trump <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/news/trump-vows-all-hell-will-break-out-if-hamas-hostages-not-released-before-he-takes-office-do-i-have-to-define-it-for-you/">answered</a>:
<blockquote>Do I have to define it for you? Look, all hell will break out. … If they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East. It will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say anymore, but that’s what it is. And they should have given them back a long time ago, they should have never taken them, there should have never been the attack on Oct. 7. People forget that, but there was, and many people [were] killed.</blockquote>
This is strength. Joe Biden never had any moral clarity about this because he&#8217;s a fool. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has moral clarity about this.
And this is the correct approach. If Hamas is not afraid, they&#8217;re not releasing the hostages. It is that simple. There&#8217;s nothing else that is going to make them release the hostages other than dire threats and action and allowing Israel to do exactly what it needs to do in the Gaza Strip.
And then Trump was asked about the possibility of a preemptive strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities if they were to ramp up their nuclear production. And Trump gave the correct answer on this one too.
Again, Trump gave more answers in this one press conference than Biden has given in four years. He made more intelligent statements in this press conference than Biden has ever said in his entire career. That’s because Biden was, is, and will be a dullard. 
President Trump explained that if Iran were to attempt a nuclear weapon, he wouldn’t tell the reporter what he would do because he&#8217;s the president, and he&#8217;s not going to tell some dumb reporter what he&#8217;s going to do because it&#8217;s a stupid question. That is correct.
Speaking of other good things, President Trump also had some words about Biden&#8217;s attempts to shut down drilling for oil off pretty much all of America&#8217;s Eastern seaboard on his way out. Trump said, we like to produce energy in America. American energy independence has made us less dependent on some of the worst places in the world. That is a good thing. And Biden is throttling America&#8217;s energy independence.
A great press conference.
He’s better than he ever was.

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