American Thinker

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

    We were wrong. I’ve got to admit it right up front.

    Our optimism about the economy, our confidence that most Americans were thankful to President Trump for having halted mass migration at our Southern border on Day One, were all wrong.

    We trumpeted Trump’s achievements over the past 20 months, from tax cuts to tariffs to increased NATO defense spending and getting Europe to cover the cost for the Ukraine war (instead of the American taxpayer).

    And that’s not to mention the Greenland Deal. And ending eight wars. And $22 trillion in direct foreign investment in the United States. And driving the transgender nonsense to the fringes of our culture where it belongs.

    We thought those accomplishments were self-evident. But they were not.

    On the contrary, every day the President, his administration and federal agencies such as ICE were denigrated, castigated, and vilified by the formerly mainstream media and on millions of social media channels that have increasingly taken their place as news sources for younger Americans.

    And then came the Iran war, and the totally predictable rise in oil and gas prices.

    Even conservatives griped about the price at the pump. My friend Morgan Murphy, a former DoD spokesman, retired U.S. Navy Captain and Afghan war veteran, went on Newsmax TV with me to kvetch about how the Republicans were just missing the point.

    “We all just want to be able to buy our wives or girlfriends pumpkin spice lattes and to fill up our F-150s for less than $150,” he said.

    Republicans should have been hammering home every single day how their policies had actually made things more affordable, such as tax cuts for working and middle-class Americans. But they didn’t.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson has accepted the verdict and has stepped down. Not so his cocky and clueless counterpart in the Senate, John Thune.

    Thune has been saying all week how great the Senate Republicans performed over the past two years, so he just can’t quite understand why seven of them got hacked to pieces on Tuesday.

    He doesn’t seem to have heard about the SAVE America Act, the one thing Senate Republicans could have done to ensure that our elections were safe and secure by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.

    Look at these election results. A rock-rib Republican state like Texas swung 25.77 percent to the left over the 2024 election, with all 254 counties swinging to the left.

    Mississippi swung 22.9%, North Carolina 22.8%, South Caroline 22.4%. And in all of those states, “safe” Republican senators got shredded on election day.

    I find it hard to believe that Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who turned out 4.5 million Republicans to vote for him this year, got beaten by a Democrat no one had heard of and whom he outspent by 5 to 1.

    Abbott beat Democrat challengers in 2018 and 2022 with roughly the same numbers, 4.5 million votes for Abbot and 3.5 million for the Democrat.

    This year, Abbott still got his 4.5 million votes (so no lack of Republican enthusiasm, apparently), but out of nowhere 1.6 million new voters appeared and voted for the Democrat.

    I have no idea how that happened and none of the explanations I have read so far makes any sense. But I trust that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullen is on the case.

    Michigan is another one that makes no sense to me. Abdul El-Sayed (not his real Muslim name) managed to alienate a good portion of the Democrat party base, in particular Jewish Democrats and young black males. He also alienated nearly half of the Arab American population in Michigan, Christians and Muslims, who fled from Islamist oppression.

And yet, he won by just over 7%. How is that possible

    Not once during the campaign did he appear with his Sharia-clad Muslim wife. But once he won he trotted her out.

Happy now, Michigan

    And then came vice-president JD Vance, who blamed the election losses on the Jews for having snookered Donald Trump into the Iran war, and on the war itself.

    My guess is that JD smells blood in the water, and he thinks it is not his own.

    Ari Fleischer, press secretary for George W. Bush, had the perfect response, in my view.

    “The problem was not the Iran War. It was the cease fire. If you start a war, you need to win it and finish it -- otherwise don’t start it.”

    And who pushed and pushed for that ill-fated ceasefire  JD Vance, along with Steve Witkoff.

    Over the summer, JD was telling us we could just “walk away” from the entire region, without having defeated Iran, and everything would be just fine.

    Jew-hating does not make for winning campaigns with Republican. Maybe JD can hang out in Qatar with his buddy Tucker Carlson. But if you ask me, he just made a monumental political miscalculation, and he couldn’t help himself.

    Because it was a tell. He just revealed to us who he really is.