Make America Normal Again

As the Trump presidency moves forward, we learn more about how out-of-whack our country has become.

Imagine a doctor opening up a patient for a routine procedure. As he gets to work, he sees something horrific. There were no signs of the larger problem, but now it is staring him in the face. The doctor cannot ignore the issue and changes gear. Rather than doing a quick surgery, he brings in others to perform six hours of invasive, life-saving treatment.

Americans knew that the U.S. was not at its best. Whether the decline began under Clinton, Bush or Obama is hard to say. Most Americans felt that something was off but I doubt that many of us realized how bad things had really become. As Donald Trump and his administration move forward, the amount of rot that infests the U.S. government and its constellation of connected individuals and organizations is beyond comprehension. For more than a decade we have given up on balancing our budget until Donald Trump promised to do so in his State of the Union speech. What we are learning nearly daily about the parallel, money-wasting America that we did not know is disgusting. The problems are not only on the Democrats' side. The destruction comes from Republicans, Democrats, heavy donors, NGOs, foreign countries, and bureaucrats. The resistance to the release of the Epstein files is, in part, due to the fact that many powerful and connected individuals associated themselves with his heinous behavior and lifestyle and want to keep their participation under wraps.

One sees in Washington patterns of self-enrichment at the expense of the interests of the American people. Whether the subject is the Biden pay-to-play business that made all of the Bidens rich or the legal insider trading of our representatives or the USAID-style financing of individuals and organizations with the right people getting a piece of the action, all that is done is not to make America safer, better or more competitive. That which is done is to self-enrich and take care of your friends. When Elon Musk and his DOGE posse tell us daily about eight-figure outlays that they have discovered and canceled, they are in essence telling us a story. Somebody with connections applied for U.S. funding. Whether the source was USAID, Ukraine payments, or an executive office budget, is mostly irrelevant. If the members of Congress needed to fund the activity or the relevant bureaucrats saw an upside for them personally or for their ideological goals, then the gravy train could leave the station. Millions for trans activities on the other side of the globe. One hundred billion or maybe more of Ukraine funding that included paying Ukrainian pensions that no one can account for. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that cannot live without governmental financing. While regular Americans went to work, tried to bring up their kids, did their best to make ends meet, paid their taxes, and lived according to the laws, an entire octopus of lawmakers, government officials, billionaires and special interests did whatever they wanted—on the taxpayers' dime. The scale of fraud, waste, double-dealing, and theft may just reach Musk’s goal of $1 trillion. While they were blowing America's money, these same people regulated Americans' lives to the point that living or owning a small business became a complex headache.

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Whereas Tea Party nonprofits were bullied by Lois Lerner and the IRS, if you supported trans or BLM, liberal politicians, war in Ukraine, or anti-Trump/Netanyahu/Bolsonaro/fill in your conservative politician here politiking, you could find money in Washington. As Mike Benz pointed out, the U.S. government, through USAID grants, paid journalists to attack the U.S. government. As the government grew larger and bureaucrats acted without oversight of Congress, anything could happen. You could set up a college department of trans studies in Afghanistan. You could fund anti-Netanyahu protests in Tel Aviv. You could work hand-in-glove with Brazilians to make sure that Bolsonaro loses the election. If you had the right connections and world view, you could get money for anything—and keep a chunk of it for yourself. Forty million went to Wuhan because Fauci and Collins could not be bothered with Barack Obama’s ban on gain-of-function virus research in the U.S. Oh, you’re paranoid! You’re crazy! But some have noted that Joe Biden’s pardon of Dr. Fauci is from 2014, the exact year when he and NIH began to farm out such research to China and Ukraine. That is no coincidence.

So while normal Americans went to church and worked a couple of jobs to keep the lights on, those in Washington or who had connections to the right people there were living high on the hog. Donald Trump was right to begin his address by noting that nothing he could do would make the Democrats happy. Blackrock is taking over port management in Panama from Chinese companies, which by definition are an extension of the Chinese Communist Party. That sounds good for U.S. security, but the Democrats could not care. They have replaced the well-being of the United States as their foremost concern with a laundry list of policy positions that they ideologically like. The U.S. Senate could not produce 60 votes to pass a law that would prohibit biological males from competing in women’s sports. If you had told a senator from the 1970s that you would need such a law, he would have told you that you were daft. But here we are, and every single Democrat voted against women having a shot at the gold. Their trans ideology is more important to them than their concern for 50 percent of the American population. Take any subject that they care about—green energy, Ukraine, globalism, open borders, trans, DEI, etc. and they will support it and throw money at it, even if a vast majority of the American people are expressly opposed to it.

Because so many in government, the press, NGOs and liberal circles were in on the game, when Donald Trump makes an effort to Make America Normal Again, there is anger and shouting. How dare he demand that I return to the office! Who is he to make me explain what I did on the federal dime last week? How can he get away with sending the army to actually protect a functional border? Things that in the past were no-brainers like making hiring dependent on merit and not color are considered to be insane by people who for over 30 years completely recalibrated what was right and true.

How far off has the left’s moral compass gone? I saw a short video of a young woman saying “Good job Hamas. Keep it up.” Can any decent human being, even one opposed to the state of Israel, accept rape, decapitation, torture, and wholesale civilian murder as legitimate tactics? The left has abandoned America and religious-based values. Donald Trump’s goals as he outlined in front of the nation would have been uncontroversial  30 or 40 years ago. Today, his drive to normalcy is simply revolutionary.