American Thinker

by Ted Noel

    “You break it, you bought it.” So goes the sign on the rack where that ceramic figurine sat before you fumbled it. It’s in shards, and your wallet is about to get a lot thinner with nothing to show for it.

    Now that the election is behind us, it’s clear that the person who single-handedly broke the republic is John Thune. He needs to own his failure. Instead, he’s trumpeting the “accomplishments” of “Senate Republicans.” I wish that it were true. He has even announced that he will run for Senate party leader next year. That’s how you spell “oblivious.”

    Yes, they passed the Big Beautiful Bill. That didn’t happen because of Thune-berg. The President did the cheerleading and arm-twisting. Greta John is claiming credit when he refused to lead. He said there wasn’t enough time to pass the SAVE America Act—for an entire year. His priority was to go home and tell his constituents how wonderful he was. He was being a “gentleman member” of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

    In the words of Rush Limbaugh, that’s Barbra Streisand! John Boy actively obstructed the President by keeping the Senate in pro forma session at intervals that prevented Trump from making any recess appointments. So, calling him a Republican is doing a disservice to a presently dishonorable party. He’s more interested in getting a pass to the Senate floor than in preserving our great country.

    Next, Thune never brought any bill to the floor codifying border security. He refused to fight. The filibuster is terrible optics for the party opposing what a large majority of the citizenry supports. But he never entered the battle. And the SAVE America Act would have given the Republican voters a reason to vote Republican. It might have even prevented the blowout we suffered.

    In the war for America, there is only one proper exit strategy: VICTORY! The Democrat party has only one goal: absolute, unchallengeable power. To do that, they will happily add Democrat enclaves as new states, just to get reliable Democrat Electoral College votes. They will pack the Supreme Court to turn it into a Democrat rubber stamp. They will abolish the presidency, the Senate, and turn a House committee into an all-powerful politburo.

    Don’t tell me that this can’t happen because of the Article V rules or some other reason. The moment they control all three elected parts of the government, they’ll pack the Court.

    Once they pack the Court, anything they want will become the rule of the day. They will brook no objections, and concentration camps are not beyond the realm of possibility. If all this comes to pass, the only foreseeable outcome is civil war between Red and Blue states, and that’s unfortunate. Kurt Schlichter’s Kelly Turnbull series may become reality.

    One obstacle remains: Donald Trump. And he still gets the Dark Academy Award as Worst Supporting Actor for this debacle. That’s right. I’m a Trump supporter, but he had a large role in this electoral disaster.

    First, he made himself easy to hate. His tweeting served a purpose, but he went overboard with name-calling. There’s a time for restraint, but he didn’t understand that. He got elected because he loves America and is real, not a politician.

    Along this same line, putting his name on the Kennedy Center made him look bad. He probably could have gotten repairs financed by Congress, but by putting his name on the Center the way he did on his hotels, he looked like a petty megalomaniac.

    Most voters don’t spend much time looking beyond the network news, and Trump didn’t look presidential. The proposed arch at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery was just the icing on that cake.

    Trump’s basic problem is twofold. First, he has mostly excellent instincts to put America First. But he does not seem to have any sort of fundamental philosophical foundation. And that leads him to do stupid things.

    He has endorsed several candidates simply because of their loyalty to him, not because of their individual qualities as a candidate. Ken Paxton, Michael Whatley, and Darline Graham come to mind. All of them lost big, and Trump’s misperception that his endorsement would overcome personal incapacity led to the losses.

    Trump’s second big flaw is that he only seems to understand The Art of the Deal. He presumes that whomever he is dealing with will negotiate and then act according to the deal reached. In doing so, he radically misperceives his opponents.

    The more benign adversaries in today’s America are the Democrats, who reneged on the deal they made with Ronald Reagan, leading to larger budget deficits despite even higher tax revenues. Since then, they haven’t given us any new reason to distrust our assessment of their dishonesty. Abigail Spanberger’s day-one reversals in Virginia reinforce that conclusion.

    On foreign policy, Trump has made the same errors. He was right to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities before they could be used against America. But he did it on instinct. He failed to explain why he escalated a war that Iran had been smoldering for 47 years. Yes, 47 years.

    Iran declared war on the US when it overran our embassy in Tehran. That was sovereign US territory. Since then, we’ve had repetitive terrorist actions: Iran financed, at least in part, the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, the USS Cole bombing, the Khobar Towers bombing, the World Trade Center Bombing, and then 9/11.

    While its actions weren’t a traditional war to conquer terrain, they were still a war, and one on a global scale, and we needed to end it. But Trump just acted, assuming Americans would see and accept the reasoning without being told.

    His greater error was that, when he had committed to ending the war by terminating the enemy’s ability to prosecute it, he didn’t finish it promptly. Instead, he committed W’s “Mission Accomplished” unforced error.

    We didn't finish the war in two weeks, as advertised. Then he went start-stop-start...supposedly to negotiate a settlement. But his lack of a philosophical foundation bit him in the butt.

    Islamists have two attributes that doomed Trump’s approach. First, they are jihadis who believe that if they die in jihad, Paradise awaits. That’s not a loss to them, so Trump’s threat has no power against them. Second, their taqqiya principle allows them to lie without consequence to infidels.

    Trump mistook them for honest brokers and fell for their subterfuge. It prolonged the war instead of delivering a devastating defeat to the Islamists that would allow the populace to rise up and take over.

    This sort of dithering has also disappointed the base on legal action. He has been back in the White House for almost two years, and not one Deep State player has even been seen in a perp walk or at a defendant’s table, much less in an orange jumpsuit.

    That is a manifest dereliction of his duty to America. The argument that these cases take a long time to build falls on deaf ears. Turning my hearing aids up is no answer to evil conspirators freely walking the streets.

    Trump made this mistake with Hillary in his first term and has compounded the felony. He must explain to the Attorney General that long deliberation is not acceptable. Until those miscreants see real justice, all claims will ring hollow, and Dems will continue laughing at us since they haven’t suffered.

    You can be real, and you can be ruthless. You also need to understand that the Democrats and Iranians are not your loyal opposition. They are both evil enemies and must be treated with the extreme prejudice they have earned.

    Ted Noel is a retired physician who posts on social media as Doctor Ted and @Vidzette on X. He also posts occasional longer pieces on Substack.