The Moment You Started to Like Donald Trump

posted by Stephan Helgesen at American Thinker 

Let’s be honest.  You know you like Trump, even if you hate him.  And I know the reason why.  You were brought up to avoid all people who exaggerated or stretched the truth or who portrayed themselves to be winners by denigrating the opposition.  Your parents taught you to be humble and not brag about yourself, even in those instances when it was warranted.  In school, your teachers routinely took you down a peg if you thought you were better than the guy who sat next to you.  If you felt you knew more than your teacher and showed it, you got detention and a letter about your behavior was sent home with you to your father.

In Boy Scouts, the Scoutmaster encouraged teamwork, and so did your high school football coach.  Individual sports such as gymnastics were also “team-driven” sports, and any wins that accrued were shared accomplishments with other team members.  After graduation, when you entered the world of business or academia, the same sentiments applied, except in business, especially if your job was to bring the bacon home to your company.  Salesmen were judged on their merits, and bonuses were given on performance.

This confused you.  Where was the team approach?  You didn’t complain, because you liked the extra money and the attention and the promotional possibilities, so you made a mental note about the duality of life lived in the real lane.  You read all the books on How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Peter Principle, and then The Art of the Deal.  While you liked them all, you were torn about following that seemingly larger-than-life example of typical American drive, Donald Trump.  He shocked you from time to time by his outlandish pronouncements and his mega-investments, but you soon realized that he had a formula that worked for him.  While you weren’t ready to roll the dice, take out a second mortgage to your home, and emulate him, you admired him in secret (because your friends were berating anyone who liked him).

But the unvarnished truth is that he was better than most people — at least among his competitors.  And why did you like him?  Because deep down, you know in your heart of hearts that Donald Trump is the personification of what America and Americans have been all about for a couple hundred years: bold, brash, full of bravado, fearless, driven, confident, risk-takers, and unapologetic for their triumphs.

That appealed to you on a primitive and historically-accurate and now grown-up level.  However, you couldn’t sign on to it just yet because you weren’t brought up that way (especially if you lived in the Midwest, like me) by your parents, your teachers, your coaches, and your pastor.  But while you remained confused about it, Trump kept on winning and he finally parlayed his success in business to the White House.  You voted for him, or maybe you didn’t, but you at least admired his pluck.  Then your peer group took over, and the shaming machine went into high gear.  Everyone who supported him was on the good and decent people’s hit list.  And because you wanted to stay out of the fight and not risk losing friends or family members to a political disagreement, you kept your mouth shut.

But it’s now become impossible for you to keep quiet.  You’ve seen how petty jealousy, envy, and the power-crazed political elites have targeted him for destruction, and if they succeed, you figure, they could come after you, too.  So you’re now taking a different tack.  You’ve decided that being proud of America, proud of her accomplishments and the principles that made those accomplishments possible, is nothing to apologize for.  You’re now willing to risk personal loss to achieve a more profound and lasting gain.  You’re okay with losing a few friends due to political and philosophical differences.  You’ve manned up and vowed not to cower in fear every time somebody says, “Didn’t you vote for Trump?”

It’s not been easy, making peace with your past, or realizing that what you were taught was the only way to live a full and satisfying life.  You now are more confident that the only way to solve problems is to confront them, openly and honestly.

You still think Trump should be more circumspect and choose his words more carefully, but you are also aware that in between his bouts of boastfulness and repetition, he is asking all of us to see what is right in front of our eyes and not be fooled by special interests, professional politicians, or even himself!  That is what you like about Trump.  He’s fearless, especially when he’s convinced about what he’s saying.  On the one hand, he’d like you to believe him without question, but on the other, he’s not afraid if you disagree with him and search the record for yourself.

Is Donald Trump the perfect leader, or was he the perfect president?  Absolutely not, but no one can claim that his leadership is a radical departure from the essential American character.  For proof, take a short journey back in time to the American industrial icons who built our companies and the giants of our research institutions who found cures for debilitating diseases.  Look at our pioneers and our presidents who risked everything, even their lives, to change our history.  Were some of them outlandish for their times?  Did some of their decisions create controversies that dogged them throughout their careers?  The answer is “yes.”

We are all products of our environments, our schooling, and our experiences.  That goes for the poorest and the richest among us.  But over time, many of us find the courage to follow the truth about ourselves and our leaders.  America is like a giant corporation that needs good management, good products, and good people to make them.  It also needs good salesmen to sell them and consumers willing to buy them.  And when it comes to the quintessential American product, we can argue all day about how it’s marketed, but we should never argue with the man who’s selling it, particularly when he believes in it himself.

X22, And we Know, and more- March 17

 

An Irish society, an unpaid loan and the hypocrisy of Letitia James

An Irish society, an unpaid loan and the hypocrisy of Letitia James (nypost.com)

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, here is a tale of financial shenanigans at the American Irish Historical Society, in which Trump-deranged New York Attorney General Letitia James is hoist with her own petard.

It involves a grand old building on Fifth Avenue, an unpaid loan, a fading family dynasty, a James Joyce theatrical production which almost ended in fisticuffs, and hypocrisy from the AG as obvious as a glass of green beer.

It all began when James Doyle, a wealthy Georgia businessman with a love of his Irish roots, joined the board of the nonprofit Society, whose jewel in the crown is a rare Gilded Age mansion at 991 Fifth Avenue, right across from Central Park and The Met. 

Over the years, financial mismanagement and misfortune had befallen the Society, and it was facing foreclosure. So, in 2017, the board turned to Doyle for a $3 million loan, structured like a private mortgage. He was told that the Beaux-Arts townhouse was worth $80 million that included valuable air rights.

However, the Society only made a few repayments and Doyle soon found things weren’t quite as they seemed.

The Society had been dominated for half a century by the Cahill family, and President Emeritus Dr. Kevin Cahill was accused of treating the townhouse as his own “private club,” with one of his four sons, Christopher, becoming its “well-compensated executive director,” according to the New York Times. Christopher earned $88,459 in 2020, and between $134,768 and $179,402 in previous years, according to IRS returns.

Cahill, a tropical-disease specialist said to have treated Pope John Paul II after he was shot, reportedly raised the money to renovate the mansion to its former glory when he took over in the 1970s. A stocky man with bushy white eyebrows, he would dress each year in morning coat and Irish tri-color sash to preside over the St. Patrick’s Day parade from its Fifth Avenue balcony. He held a grand annual gala where he would hand out gold medals to the great and the good.

Then, in 2019, his son Christopher, then 55, got embroiled in an ugly confrontation with the director of the Irish Repertory Theater, which was staging a play in the townhouse, adapted from the James Joyce short story, “The Dead.” 

“I’m going to kill you, Ciaran!” yelled Christopher, while lunging at the director after the performance, according to The Times.

The centre was facing foreclosure.

The Society’s financial woes and dysfunction had reached crisis point by 2021, when Cahill tried to sell the building for $52 million (later reduced to $44 million).

He died the following year, and in stepped the New York Attorney General, citing a petition she had received opposing the sale. 

She announced that, by state law, any sale of a nonprofit asset had to be approved by her, effectively kyboshing the plan.

“It’s an amazing place,” James gushed to the Irish Voice. “We had to save it, had to save it … One day people can come in there and enjoy it again.”

Which was all very well, but Doyle still was owed $3 million.

The AG appointed an interim Board of Directors and Doyle was persuaded not to try to collect his money or foreclose on the mortgage before July 2023. 

But by August 2023, he still hadn’t been repaid, so he initiated foreclosure proceedings — and promptly was blocked by the AG, who claimed the mortgage was invalid because he was a board member.

On Friday, Doyle launched a lawsuit against the Society and requested a subpoena be issued against James requiring her to produce a raft of documents, including anything relating to campaign events hosted at the townhouse or any contributions to her political campaigns from the Society or any of its members or directors. 

Doyle’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, alleges that James’ enthusiastic involvement in the Doyle case may be driven by “connections with the Defendant.”

And he points out the uncanny similarities between his client’s predicament and the notorious case James brought against Donald Trump for supposedly inflating the value of his properties to get a better mortgage, “although her office is now taking a polar opposite position.”

The lawsuit alleges that Doyle was given “fraudulently inflated valuations” of the townhouse, putting its market value at over $80 million. Dr. Cahill and the Society’s current President-General, James Normile, “made representations to [Doyle] that the building had ‘air rights’ and could be built, or rebuilt, higher than its current height. 

“In reality, there were no ‘air rights’ and the actual value is closer to $20 million. [The Society] made a gross over-valuation” of the townhouse, which induced Doyle to make the $3 million loan.

“Tish James said, ‘nobody is above the law,’ which should include Tish James, who seems to have actively aided and abetted in the Art of the Steal,” Parlatore told The Post.

“This organization fraudulently inflated the value of their building to induce my client into giving them a mortgage which Tish James is now trying to help these fraudsters avoid having to repay. 

“The theory of fraud Tish James accused the Trump Organization of engaging in is identical to the fraud she is aiding and abetting here.” 

James has come down on the side of the Society against its lender, Doyle. And yet, in her signature case of People v. Trump, she took the opposite position, holding that “where an organization inflates the value of a property to obtain a loan, that is fraud, even where the lender was aware of the actual value and was paid in full,” Doyle’s lawsuit says.

Trump was punished with a $355 million fine. So delighted was James by the verdict last month that she started live-tweeting Trump’s daily interest bill: “+$114,553.04.” 

Parlatore points out that the Society inflated the value of its property to obtain a loan, just like Trump was accused of doing, but the difference was that Doyle could not conduct the sort of “sophisticated due diligence” that Deutsche Bank did. Therefore, unlike Trump’s lenders, Doyle didn’t know the true value of the townhouse. 

An even more important difference is that Trump paid back every penny he owed, but the Society never paid back Doyle. 

As the old Irish proverb says, forgetting a debt doesn’t mean it’s paid.

Joe Biden Does Not Understand America

posted by Derek Hunter at Townhall 

Sometimes I find myself wondering which is likely more accurate: that President Joe Biden has no idea what he’s doing, or that President Joe Biden is striving to destroy the economy and much of what made America the greatest nation in history in the first place. It’s a tough call, it really is. The only conclusion I can draw is that he – Joseph Robinette Biden, the 46th President of the United States – has a fundamental lack of understanding of our country. From that starting point, everything kind of makes sense. 

One of the President’s favorite lines on the campaign trail, or in any speech, really, goes something like this: That’s not who we are as a nation. 

The topic doesn’t matter, the point is always the same – build up a strawman, burn him down by declaring the popular will of the country is on his side, whether it is or not. Abortion, race, taxes, spending, the issue doesn’t matter, the polling data doesn’t matter, if it is in opposition to what the President wants, it’s “not who we are.”

But I’m not sure a man who has not worked in the private sector since he was a teenager ready to throw down with Corn Pop has any real understanding of what the United States is as a country. We are the culmination of our life experiences, and you can’t really experience life by proxy. Being an elected official your whole life is not reality, it perverts your reality.

Having a perverted reality has never stopped any politician from speaking out as though they are an expert about subject on which they know nothing. How many times can Bernie Sanders introduce insane bills that would destroy businesses – like his 32 hour work week at the same pay bill – before people recognize his most successful foray into the private sector saw him kicked out of a commune for laziness? 

President Biden believes “the rich need to pay their fair share of taxes” while ignoring the fact that his son did not pay millions of dollars in taxes on many more millions of dollars in income, and he seems perfectly fine with that. His government is seeking to force Americans to buy electric vehicles they don’t want and can’t afford, to run on a power grid that can’t support all the chargers that don’t exist. 

I’d say you can’t make this stuff up, but you can – the imagination is an amazing thing – only no one would believe you.

A fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work and how businesses work will lead to Solyndra – the solar company the Obama/Biden administration blessed with $535 million in federal loan guarantees before they went belly up – or, more recently, Proterra, the electric bus company the Biden administration favored before its collapse. Imagine a world where we look with relief at the collapse of Proterra because it only cost us $10 million? But that’s what you get with political leadership, no matter their age, that has never worked in the private sector.

Now, the President has come out against the purchase of US Steel by Nippon Steel because Nippon is a Japanese company. I’m no Andrew Carnegie, but I do know the offer from Nippon was about twice any other offer, which means they’re doing better in the steel industry than other suitors. That, I would think, would be what you’d want in a company buying your “teetering on the edge” employer because it likely means a more stable future. 

But the Steelworkers Union opposes the deal because Nippon is Japanese. Suddenly the steel industry is the auto industry in the 80s movie “Gung Ho.” 

With Joe Biden running point on the opposition, and the Steelworkers Union pulling the strings, they’re going to “principle” themselves right into the unemployment line. 

Biden also likes to position himself as the “experienced diplomat” compared to other politicians but telling one of our closest allies that they can’t make a significant investment in the U.S. because it might buy him a couple more votes in a swing state doesn’t sound very diplomatic to me. 

I’ve never seen a union come out against securing jobs long term, nor have I known a President to endorse the concept of an ally nation keeping a major employer in a swing state in business as a bad thing. This election is shaping up to be a weird one.

The US Steel situation is just the latest example of the Biden administration doing things that leave you scratching your head. The only rational explanation is that, no matter how many times he reads line about who we are as a country off a teleprompter, the President of the United States does not understand the concept of America. Either that or he doesn’t care. Neither option is particularly good.

The United States Isn’t the World’s Trash Can

If America is to be restored, its citizens and politicians alike must once again revere her. The border disaster is only one manifestation of America’s broken psyche and Democrat contempt for America.

by Drew T. Allen for American Greatness

After botching Laken Riley’s name during the SOTU address—calling the murdered 22-year-old nursing student Lincoln Riley—President Joe Biden embarked on an apology tour. However, he didn’t apologize for confusing Laken with Lincoln, the head football coach at USC. Nor did he offer any heartfelt apology to the aggrieved family, whose daughter was murdered by an illegal from Venezuela.

Biden also didn’t express any remorse that his open border policies were responsible for the death of yet another innocent American. No, he apologized for calling the illegal who murdered Laken Riley while she was jogging an illegal.

“I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal.’ It’s ‘undocumented.’” Biden said during a televised interview on MSNBC before answering “Yes,” when asked, “you regret using that word?” If that wasn’t bad enough, Biden then claimed that illegals built the country.

The exchange should be featured in every Trump campaign video between now and November because it offers a crystal clear juxtaposition between Trump’s America First movement and Biden’s America Last. The former respects the American citizenry and the latter has contempt for them.

In the same interview, Biden said, “What I won’t do, I’m not going to treat any of these people with disrespect.” Of course, while Biden won’t dare disrespect even criminal illegal murderers, he has no problem disrespecting Gold Star families, comforting them by lying to them in some sociopathic effort to upstage their own grief.

Biden, for example, told Cheryl Rex, whose son Marine Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola was one of 13 U.S. service members who died in the Aug. 26, 2021, bombing at Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, that he understood her anguish because his son Beau Biden came home “in a flag-draped coffin.” Beau died from cancer in a U.S. hospital.

Biden won’t treat illegals with disrespect, but he’ll attack American citizens that support Trump as a “threat to this country,” and once called the unvaccinated “unpatriotic,” a “radicalized minority,” and falsely blamed the pandemic on these Americans, calling it a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

Biden routinely disrespects, disparages, and threatens American citizens. “You need something else than just an AR-15,” to challenge the U.S. government, Biden has told the American people on multiple occasions—even while he publicly advocates the banning of AR-15s.

Biden doesn’t respect the Supreme Court. He admonished the Justices during his SOTU address for overturning Roe v. Wade. Nor does Biden respect the law or the Constitution. Biden infamously defied the rule of law when he acknowledged that his eviction moratorium wouldn’t “pass constitutional muster” while pledging to do it anyway.

I could go on and on about all these aforementioned examples and others that I’ve meticulously chronicled in my book America’s Last Stand: Will You Vote to Save or Destroy America in 2024? and about how the country prioritizes criminals and illegals over law-abiding and tax-paying American citizens—at least under the leadership of Biden and Democrats.

Biden is not an American president—he does not represent or defend the American people. He views himself, as does the Democratic Party, as an ambassador to foreign nations. Biden will claim illegals built the country while he pillages the paychecks of hard-working American citizens to house, clothe, and feed those who have contributed nothing—the illegals he so reveres.

Biden and the Democrats have turned the United States into the world’s trash can—a place where foreign nations can send their rubbish. This systemic prioritization of the world’s foreign populations over U.S. citizens—their needs and desires over American needs and desires—is a complete perversion of the actual purpose of the U.S. government.

Our government’s job isn’t to do what’s in the best interest of Haiti, El Salvador, or any other country. America isn’t the world’s penal colony, homeless shelter, rehab, or charity. Our government’s job is not to help the world’s poor or to take in unwanted rapists and murderers from third-world countries. It isn’t to import the uneducated masses from around the globe. Our government’s job is to do what’s in the best interest of America.

America is not a trash can. It is the greatest nation in the history of mankind—“the crown jewel of humanity,” as I call America in my book— and we are great because of our past commitment to something called a “meritocracy.”

The purpose of U.S. immigration isn’t to help immigrants but to help America and Americans; it’s not to help improve other countries but to improve this one. Furthermore, being an American is a privilege, not a right, for any foreign-born individual. Entry isn’t guaranteed but is earned by answering this simple question: What are you going to do for America?

Instead, disrespectful illegals are pouring into America, screaming, “What is America going to do for me?” a demand prompted by the policies of Biden and Democrats, who have turned the United States into a nation without standards or self-respect. America is the Ferrari of countries, but Joe Biden and the Democrats view America as a Serbian Yugo—a junk car without value and to be treated with abject disrespect.

If America is to be restored, American citizens and politicians alike must once again revere her. The border disaster is only one manifestation of America’s broken psyche and Democrat contempt for America, but it should make it crystal clear that 2024 really is America’s Last Stand “and marks the third major test, which will determine whether America survives or dies.”

NYC Subway Shooting Is What Happens When Lawlessness Collides With ‘Tolerance And Diversity’

The men involved in the New York subway shooting this week were nonwhite. That creates a problem for the pro-crime left. 

Eddie Scarry reporting for The Federalist

Because both men involved in the harrowing New York City subway shooting that took place this week are nonwhite, the pro-crime left is going to have to think very hard about how to frame this story without acknowledging the skin color of either the perpetrator or the victim.

Actually, never mind. It’s apparently already decided they’re going with the tried and true “it’s the damn guns!” line.

During a press conference immediately following the incident, subway system CEO and Chairman Janno Lieber rushed to get ahead of any obvious questions about how and why this happened. “When you bring a gun on the train and you start a fight, it’s just — it’s not right and it’s absolutely outrageous,” he said. “That’s what happened here. Someone brought a gun on the train and started a fight. That’s why we need to keep fighting against guns.”

Suffice it to say, that is not what happened here.

At the start of rush hour on Thursday, according to New York police, a 36-year-old black man, identified by reports as Dajuan Robinson, approached a 32-year-old male passenger in a “provocative” and “aggressive” manner. Bystander video, which circulated on social media, shows Robinson yelling at the man, whom he apparently believed to be of Latin descent, “I’ll beat you up,” “F-ck your kind,” and “F-ck your race.”

Police said that at some point, Robinson had displayed either a knife or blade. The 32-year-old, who had been seated, then stood to square up against his aggressor. The two circled each other for a moment before a brawl broke out. Shortly into the fight, a woman approached Robinson from behind and stabbed his lower back at least once. In the video, Robinson’s shirt visibly turned red with blood, and after the two men were separated by yet another male passenger, Robinson struggled to maintain balance. “You stabbed me,” he said, adding, “I’m bleeding,” and, “I got you.”

Robinson then started fumbling through a jacket he took off at the start of the altercation, pulled out a gun, and cocked it. Passengers scrambled to the other end of the train car, and eventually, four fired shots can be heard on the video. According to police, the 32-year-old man was able to take the gun from Robinson and shoot him in the head, landing him in the hospital in critical condition as of Friday.

In his remarks at the press conference, Lieber lamented the disruption the incident brought to what he described as “the world’s greatest experiment in tolerance and diversity” (aka New York’s sewage-level mass transit system).

As of mid-February, crime was up more than 20 percent on the subway compared to the same time in 2023. It’s gotten so violent, exacerbated in large part by the unabated influx of migrants, that last week, New York’s Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered some 1,000 additional state policemen and National Guard members to patrol the system. This is on top of the extra 1,000 law enforcement officers New York City Mayor Eric Adams dispatched to the subways in February.

The collapse of law and order isn’t an unfortunate coincidence to that “great experiment in tolerance and diversity.” It’s a direct consequence of it. The city and state’s Democrat leaders believe the public should tolerate the crime, violence, and blight. That’s why they’ve legalized so much of it and prosecuted so little of it. They believe hordes of penniless, criminal migrants only add to the city’s diversity. That’s why they house, feed, and clothe so many of them and turn away none of them.

If they didn’t believe it, Lieber would have said something about it. Instead, he prattled about guns. “[T]he real victims are the people I saw in those videos who are having a harrowing time because they are on the train with somebody with a gun,” he said. “Even if he’s fighting somebody else, they’re afraid for their lives. They’re just trying to go about their lives. So get rid of the guns. People want to have disagreements, that’s going to happen in life. But when a gun’s involved, we can’t live with it.”

In other words, if not for the gun, it was all just a happy display of “tolerance and diversity.” Just something that’s “going to happen in life.” Only a racist bigot would say otherwise.

Enjoy that great experiment, New York.

'You will be history soon': Internet slams Joe Biden as he pledges $3.3B for 132 projects to 'right historic wrongs'

 'You will be history soon': Internet slams Joe Biden as he pledges $3.3B for 132 projects to 'right historic wrongs' (msn.com)

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: President Joe Biden took to X (formerly Twitter) announce his plans to invest in environmental justice for the upliftment of minority communities on Saturday, March 16, 2024.

According to CNN, Biden made the initial announcement during a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, March 13. The $3.3 billion funding will drawn from the infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act signed by the President earlier in his term.

It will be utilized in projects across 40 states, which will "increase access to health care, schools, jobs, places of worship, and other essential services and opportunities, and will strengthen communities by covering highways with public spaces, creating new transit routes, adding sidewalks, bridges, bike lanes, and more," read a White House fact sheet.

President Joe Biden announces plan to invest $3.3B in 132 projects 

From the official X account of POTUS, Biden shared a clip from his Milwaukee speech, where he is seen saying, "For generations, Black, Brown, and Native American, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian communities weren't fully included in our democracy or our economy."

"Yet by pure courage, heart, and grit, they never gave up," he continued. "They pursued the full promise of America. We're recognizing that history to make new history," he added.

Biden continued, "We've got to recognize the truth of our history – to make new history. This week, that's what we did, investing $3.3 billion in 132 projects to deliver environmental justice, opportunities, and right our historic wrongs in communities across America that've been left behind."

 

Internet slams Joe Biden after his announcement

Netizens, however, were not content with the President's announcement, with one social media user writing, "Your history is a European settler-colonial project that committed genocide and ethnic cleansing on an indigenous population in the name of white supremacy and land theft, so supporting Israel is basically just a repeat, there's nothing ‘new' there." 

 

"What about the dead Americans you left behind in Afghanistan?" asked another.

 

"You will be history soon Joe!" One individual wrote.

 

"For the love of God man, stop spending money on we don't need or want," stated another user.

 

"Man you're working overtime spending money this election year! You still won't legally win again," commented another person.