Trump gave Americans what they didn’t know they needed



Donald Trump had publicly toyed with the idea of running for president many times before 2015. In fact, he even entered the Reform Party’s presidential primaries for the 2000 election. But the timing was never quite right — until it finally was.

Of the many actions and twists of fate that created the opening for Trump’s presidential candidacy, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 is an underappreciated one. Hailed by the conservative legal establishment as a win for free speech (on the merits, I would agree), in practice, it unleashed a flood of money into the American political system, fundamentally reshaping the landscape of campaigns and how they were conducted.

The man who had descended that golden escalator years earlier was still there, still fighting, still determined to strive and seek and find, and not to yield.

Suddenly, the candidates themselves mattered much less, along with political parties. What mattered now were the new players who emerged from the wreckage of campaign finance law.

Super PACs could raise unlimited funds from corporations and billionaires. Dark money nonprofits kept their donors’ identities secret while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on attack ads. Labor unions could now spend unlimited treasury funds on elections. A new class of mega-donors wielded influence that dwarfed anything seen in American politics since the Gilded Age.

Courting donors over voters

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman could pour millions into Democratic super PACs and dark money groups. The Service Employees International Union could spend tens of millions mobilizing voters and running ads. George Soros could funnel tens of millions through a network of left-liberal nonprofits to influence elections at every level of government.

Candidates became supplicants in this new ecosystem, spending their days not connecting with voters but courting billionaires at private fundraisers, their policy positions increasingly shaped by the preferences of their financial benefactors rather than their constituents.

Voters noticed. They saw their television screens dominated by attack ads funded by shadowy groups with names like “American Bridge” and “Democracy for America” — names that were meant to sound generically patriotic and like they might belong to a real civic organization. But hearing them triggered something of an uncanny valley effect.

These changes to the political landscape occurred against the backdrop of a recession that continued to drag on and revelations that the NSA was engaged in widespread domestic surveillance. The combination was toxic: a political system that felt increasingly bought and paid for by wealthy interests, an economy that wasn’t working for ordinary people, and a government that was spying on its own citizens.

RELATED: Soros and McCain: The unholy alliance hidden in plain sight

Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images

By early 2015, the presidential race appeared to be the ultimate expression of this corrupted system. On the Republican side, 16 candidates were scrambling for the affections of mega-donors, with Jeb Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC raising over $100 million before he even officially announced his candidacy.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was cementing her position as the Democratic front-runner by giving $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs and collecting millions from Wall Street firms through the Clinton Foundation. She embodied everything that had gone wrong with American politics: a former public official who had leveraged her government positions into vast personal wealth, maintaining close ties to the very financial interests that Americans blamed for the 2008 crash.

The prospect of a Clinton-Bush general election felt like the ultimate expression of a rigged system — two political dynasties, both thoroughly embedded in the donor class, offering voters a choice between different flavors of establishment corruption.

Social media-sanitized speech

Beyond the obvious problems of corruption, the influx of cash and new types of political players were merging with another phenomenon that was reshaping American politics: the rise of social media and its democratization of political destruction.

The 2006 “macaca moment,” when Virginia Republican Sen. George Allen’s use of an obscure North African racial slur (his mother was raised in Tunisia) was captured on video and uploaded to YouTube, had served as an early warning of how a single unguarded moment could end a political career. By 2015, politicians had learned to navigate this new landscape with extreme caution, delivering focus-grouped sound bites and staying rigidly on message to avoid giving their opponents — or the online mob — ammunition.

This created a feedback loop with the post-Citizens United donor class: Candidates became even more scripted and poll-tested because they couldn’t afford to alienate their financial backers with an off-the-cuff remark that might go viral.

Corporate donors and wealthy superfunders demanded message discipline and political correctness from their chosen candidates, adding another layer of constraint to an already sanitized political discourse. The result was that American politics had become unbearably dull, with American politicians speaking an entirely different language from the American people.

Enter Donald Trump

Into that world stepped Donald Trump. His ride down the golden escalator marked the beginning of a journey that would shatter the suffocating façade of American politics. That escalator ride was itself emblematic, the first of a decade-long series of glittering images that dazzled and dizzied the American public.

Trump’s political staff had tried to keep him from riding the escalator, arguing it would look “amateurish and not remotely presidential.” He overrode them, as he would continue to do at key junctures. Just as the political establishment fundamentally underestimated and misunderstood the man and his appeal, so did many of those who worked closely with him. Few have ever really understood Trump, as evidenced by the failure of so many Republicans who tried to imitate what they thought were his key points of appeal.

Trump did not just break the system — he made the system break itself.

Within minutes of announcing his presidential run, he had violated every norm of politics, calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers while his rivals cowered behind carefully vetted talking points. Just weeks later, he attacked John McCain’s war record, declaring, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Any other candidate would have been finished before he started — donors would have fled, consultants would have resigned, and the media would have declared the campaign dead on arrival. But Trump had no donors to placate and no handlers to satisfy.

While his 16 Republican opponents were trapped in a system that demanded they speak in euphemisms and focus-grouped boilerplate, Trump could say exactly what millions of Americans felt but had been told was unspeakable in polite political society.

Though the media declared his campaign was toast, they couldn’t turn away from the spectacle. No one could.

Trump did not just break the system — he made the system break itself. The more outrageous his statements, the more coverage he received. Cable news couldn’t resist the ratings bonanza. Every controversial tweet became breaking news, every rally a must-watch live event. The media, who had long served as enforcers of political correctness and donor-approved messaging, found themselves amplifying the very voice that was destroying their gatekeeping power.

Trump’s Republican opponents remained paralyzed, unable to adapt or even understand what was happening under their feet. So completely did Trump dominate every news cycle that even Jeb Bush’s $100 million super PAC couldn’t muster a fraction of the attention for its candidate that Trump could with a single tweet — and for free. Trump also had help from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which deliberately boosted him during the Republican primary because, in one of the biggest political misjudgments in American history, campaign operatives thought he would be the easiest opponent to defeat in the general election.

The comeback

Trump’s first term came and went. I saw him at a low point, just ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. He was doing a rally in Mesa, Arizona, for the Republican ticket. Only the faithful were still showing up. He was characteristically running late. The desert sun was brutal, even in October. The only bottled water inside the security perimeter had been sitting in the sun all day and was boiling hot. During the wait, I had helped with several incidents of heat exhaustion. Those of us who remained were in a practically hallucinatory state by the time Trump came onstage.

He was obviously tired. Not just in a physical sense, but a deeper kind of tiredness. It was just two months after the FBI had raided his home, the latest in a long series of serious attacks by his political enemies. But he went on through the full act. The setting sun had painted the desert horizon a crimson red.

As the speech wound into its finale, I was reminded of Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a poem about an aging king gathering his faithful mariners for one more voyage, one more adventure into the unknown.

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” the poet wrote.

Trump may have seemed diminished, but he was not defeated. The man who had descended that golden escalator seven years earlier was still there, still fighting, still determined to strive and seek and find, and not to yield.

And so he did not yield.

Two years later, Trump would return to the presidency in what would be one of the most remarkable political comebacks in American history. The faithful who endured the brutal heat that October day had witnessed not an ending, but an intermission. The assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, became the ultimate test of his political resilience. Rising with blood on his face and fist raised, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he transformed what could have been his final moment into his resurrection, emerging from that brush with mortality — not diminished but reborn, rejuvenated, and more powerful than ever.

What Trump has given to America is not what we wanted — we didn’t even know what to want — but what we needed: a vision of greatness.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

Is the presidential election a simulation? These signs say yes



The date was July 10 — days before Donald Trump was nearly assassinated and Joe Biden suffered a Harris coup in all but name. I wrote that the near-animatronic Biden — a perfect candidate for digital augmentation or replacement, already the public face of a Borg’s worth of apparatchiks, managers, and functionaries — was beginning to look like America’s last human president.

Now, a bit over a month later, the whole election feels increasingly posthuman: a phony, a placeholder — just maybe a simulation.

Many technologists and members of the tech fandom like trying to convince you that life itself is one big simulation. It’s easy to do for several reasons, including not only the power of circular logic but the reality that so much of life is occupied with participating in different kinds of simulations (that is, model-based games, both entertaining and serious).

But the descent of the most important election of our lifetimes into a simulation grows more terrifying because, with each day that goes by, it makes all the more sense that only a simulated election would arise amidst a simulated existence. What did you expect?

Yet the main reason the simulation hypothesis is so potent is that so many people would like to live in a simulation — even if their goal is to try to control it or break out of it — because the spiritual challenge of actually beginning to live properly in a world created for our dominion by a loving God seems too daunting, strange, and lonely.

An excellent example of this sad situation is the presidential election itself. Consider how the Harris campaign is openly and transparently committed to running on “vibes,” “joy,” choreographed dancing, etc., and how enthusiastic — how relieved — so many supporters in the grassroots and in the media appear to be.

It’s beyond fakeness. The energy surrounding and permeating the campaign comes from the attitude that the old reality has been substituted away with a new artifice, one that takes up all the space where the reality used to be.

But the Harris campaign is just one piece of evidence among other facets of today’s uncanny and unsettling campaign season, all of which militate in favor of the hypothesis that the whole election is a simulation.

In a real election, Donald Trump’s near-assassination would receive wall-to-wall coverage. We would know everything about the shooter, his past, his associations, what he ate, what he did on the internet, everything. The seriousness of the reality of the situation would weigh like a heavy blanket on the race and the public mood. Heads would roll. Public officials would be up in arms.

Instead, the only significant proof that Trump came within a hair’s breadth of his live on-air murder is that he is now encased behind bulletproof glass on the campaign trail — a turn of events that makes the famously visceral Orange Man resemble an action figure in a plastic casing or a crisis actor on a greasy screen. Like the mentally absent bank teller behind the mandatory wall of inches-thick see-through barricade, Trump is becoming less a person and more an idea, a notion, an avatar — much as Biden did during his previous “basement campaign.”

The oddly contingent character of the rest of the election’s major figures generalizes the effect. Something is fundamentally off about Tim Walz, compounded by the rumors that dark revelations will force him off the ticket. The not-altogether-thereness of Walz presents JD Vance with a baffling scenario where he can’t really go toe to toe against his opposite number and must endure a disorienting wave of can-they-be-serious attacks driven by mid-00s photos of his youthful self goofing through that bizarro decade.

And then there’s Harris herself, who does seem to be publicly drunk as a rule, come to think of it — a damaging issue to wrestle with because … if she’s not drunk … what else is causing this behavior? A vibe of letting Harris twirl while the party scrambles behind the scenes hangs over the whole affair, giving it an outlandish, implausible tenor, all veneer. But what could they be scrambling to do? Isn’t Harris there because only she can tap the Biden war chest? Isn’t it impossible at this late date to make the nomination process any less “democratic”? Do the Democrats even want democracy any more?

And, after all, who is really in charge? Anyone? The simulation itself …?

Ronald Siemoneit/Getty Images

This is the path to madness, no doubt about it, and it’s widening, spreading, appealing to more and more people, from the bottom of the socioeconomic system to the top. Ever more Americans find themselves in the position of merely waiting, for the something that can happen before November to wipe all this pantomime away.

And as the waiting drags on, they find themselves hoping …

But the descent of the most important election of our lifetimes into a simulation grows more terrifying because, with each day that goes by, it makes all the more sense that only a simulated election would arise amidst a simulated existence. What did you expect?

“Welcome to the desert of the real,” Morpheus famously echoes Jean Baudrillard, the grand French theorist of simulation. We’ve succeeded in terraforming so much of our given reality from a garden into a desert. And from a desert we must learn to nurture reality back once again — beginning with the acceptance that it, along with all we have and all we are, is indeed given by a Lord we can never exceed, escape, destroy, or replace.

Massive Trump rally takes over New Jersey town; could the state FLIP RED?



The tide is turning as former President Trump dominates Biden in five crucial swing states. And his recent rally in Wildwood, New Jersey illustrates that perfectly.

While 40,000 attendees were expected, over 80,000 — some are even saying 100,000 — passionate MAGA supporters showed up.

“Joe Biden can’t even half fill up an ice cream shop when he stops by,” Pat Gray says, adding, “I mean there’s like four people there and that’s a big crowd for him.”

“But that man had 81 million votes,” he adds sarcastically.

During Trump’s speech at the rally, he made a prediction about New Jersey.

“As you can see today, we’re expanding the electoral map, because we are going to officially play in the state of New Jersey. We’re going to win the state of New Jersey,” Trump said triumphantly.

“I always talk about we have enemies on the outside and we have enemies from within. The enemies from within are more dangerous to me than the enemies on the outside. Russia and China we can handle, but these lunatics within our government that are going to destroy our country, and probably want to, we have to get it stopped,” Trump continued to an eruption of cheers from the crowd.

Gray is in agreement.

“If you were trying to destroy the country, what would you do differently? They’re doing it all,” he says.


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Democratic judge prevents voters from casting votes for Trump in Illinois



A Democratic judge ruled Wednesday that former President Donald Trump cannot appear on primary ballots in Illinois and that any votes cast for him will "be suppressed," citing his supposed violation of the 14th Amendment's "insurrection clause."

Cook County Circuit Judge Tracie Porter's decision was heavily influenced by arguments made in December by the Democratic-appointed justices on Colorado's Supreme Court who ultimately prevented voters in the state from casting votes for President Joe Biden's top rival.

While the Illinois Appellate Court or Illinois Supreme Court might take up the case, the U.S. Supreme Court's forthcoming ruling in Trump v. Anderson could very well sink this and all such disqualification efforts across the country.

Background

Trump filed nomination papers and a statement of candidacy to appear on the ballot for the March 19, 2024, Republican primary in Illinois on Jan. 4. The same day, five men represented by the leftist advocacy group Free Speech for People filed a petition to have the Republican removed, claiming he "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, protests.

The bipartisan Illinois State Board of Elections took up the petition last month and appointed a hearing officer to mull it over.

The hearing officer, Judge Clark Erickson, concluded that Trump engaged in insurrection and was, as a result, disqualified under Section 3. However, Erickson conceded that state election code did not empower the Electoral Board to rule on the merits of the challenge, noting that such a decision ought to be left up to a court.

The board declined Erickson's recommendation as well as the suggestions Trump engaged in insurrection and that Section 3 applied to the president. The board ultimately decided on Jan. 30 to dismiss the challenge and to permit Trump to appear on the ballot.

Dissatisfied with the outcome, the five men ostensibly seeking to disenfranchise their fellow voters filed a petition for judicial review before the Cook County Circuit Court.

Ruling

The Democratic judge acknowledged in her Wednesday ruling that the question of whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to the president "is subject to contradictory and controversial interpretation" and that only the Colorado Supreme Court has so far applied it to the chief executive.

While the "Colorado Supreme Court's ruling in Anderson v. Griswold, decided on Dec. 23, 2024, [sic] is not binding precedent, [it is] rather persuasive law," wrote Porter. So persuaded, Porter embraced the Colorado Supreme Court's hotly debated interpretation of Section 3.

Satisfied with the petitioners' evidence allegedly implicating Trump in insurrection and having retroactively applied Section 3 to the Republican president, Porter determined that the petitioners' request should have been granted "as they have met their burden by preponderance of the evidence that [Trump's] name should be removed from the ballot."

The Democratic judge then reversed the State Board of Elections' decision, claiming it was "clearly erroneous."

Porter did, however, note that her ruling will likely not be the final say on the matter.

Response

Ron Fein, legal director of the leftist group that represented the petitioners, characterized Porter's decision as a "historic victory."

"Every court or official that has addressed the merits of Trump's constitutional eligibility has found that he engaged in insurrection after taking the oath of office and is therefore disqualified from the presidency," added Fein in a joint statement.

"Judge Porter's reasoned decision contributes to the growing consensus of courts recognizing and condemning Trump's decisive role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol," said Caryn Lederer, the DEI champion serving as attorney for the petitioners. "The decision recognizes the importance of rule of law and upholding the mandate of the U.S. Constitution."

A spokesman for Trump indicated that the Republican front-runner will appeal Porter's ruling.

"The Soros-funded Democrat front-groups continue to attempt to interfere in the election and deny President Trump his rightful place on the ballot," Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said in a statement. "Today, an activist Democrat judge in Illinois summarily overruled the state's board of elections and contradicted earlier decisions from dozens of other state and federal jurisdictions. This is an unconstitutional ruling that we will quickly appeal."

Trump's legal team has until Friday to appeal the decision, just as it has already appealed his disqualification in Maine and Colorado — two states holding primaries Tuesday where the Republican's name is all but ensured to appear on the ballots.

Trump's appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court's decision has already made it to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on Feb. 8. Based on the bipartisan skepticism over the Democratic-appointed court's ruling, there's a good chance that the removal will amount to a short-lived exercise in partisan symbolism.

Left-leaning Justice Elena Kagan posed the question earlier this month, "Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination, not only for their own citizens, but for the rest of the nation?"

"It'll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election," said Justice John Roberts. "That's a pretty daunting consequence."

Justice Brett Kavanaugh stressed that such disqualifications have "the effect of disenfranchising voters to a significant degree."

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How Democrats could plan their own January 6 'insurrection' if Trump wins



Democrats are notoriously lazier than conservatives, but not when it comes to keeping Donald Trump from becoming president again.

In a report from the Atlantic, Democrats are apparently weighing the option of “coming back with a vengeance” and refusing to certify a Trump win — ironically, on January 6, 2025.

“Isn’t that an insurrection?” Pat Gray asks. "Isn’t that what we’ve decided?”

“If there’s no law in Georgia, there’s no law in New York, no law in D.C., and they decide on January 6 to ‘come back with a vengeance’ — you know there will be demonstrations all over, and then they overturn the election,” Glenn Beck says, disturbed.

However, while the legal attacks on Trump have been relentless and from every angle, Stu Burguiere thinks it can actually affect the former president positively.

“I think it’s going to be cemented that a lot of this was just crazy political attacks, and that’s what Trump politically needs to convince people of, he needs to be able to get people over that line and think, ‘This actually was unfair,’” he explains.

Glenn agrees, especially considering the result lawsuits have had on other politicians.

“I’ve heard since Bill Clinton, that when you persecute somebody like this, and you’re unfair, and you use the court system to go after them, what happens with the black population, Pat?” he says.

“They’re sensitive to it,” Pat says, before Glenn agrees, “And they will rally around that person.”

To hear more, watch the clip below.


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Why the Supreme Court should STAY OUT of the Trump/January 6 debate



The effort to put Donald Trump behind bars is relentless — or as Mark Levin says, “Grotesque.”

And it’s only escalating.

The Supreme Court has now announced that it will hear an appeal that could have a big effect on the January 6-related case against him. But while this case has to do with charges of obstruction of an official proceeding, there’s another case that the Supreme Court could hear.

Special counsel Jack Smith is demanding the Supreme Court rule on Trump’s claim of executive immunity as soon as possible.

“These dimwits, they say, ‘Okay, we’ll consider your argument. Trumps’ lawyers, you have one week to respond, go,’” Levin tells Glenn Beck angrily.

“This guy, Jack Smith, the courts are bending over backwards to accommodate this guy. He wins every single motion, Trump loses every single motion in front of this radical Obama judge,” he continues.

One of Levin’s bigger concerns regarding the Supreme Court is John Roberts, who he says is a “huge problem.”

“John Roberts is like this guy Michael Luttig. They hate Trump. They’re Republicans, but you know, they’re proper Republicans. They don’t like the tweeting, you know? They don’t like the language,” Levin explains.

At the end of the day, Levin does not believe the Supreme Court should involve itself.

“The Supreme Court should not take this case up,” Levin says definitively. “They sure as hell don’t speak for 80 million people. And so the judiciary, I would argue, is doing severe damage to this country allowing incredible interference in this election process.”

John Roberts isn’t the only one on the Supreme Court Levin is worried about.

“You really have three tremendous constitutionalists, then you’ve got a couple of RINOs, and then we got the hardcore-left Democrats,” Levin tells Glenn.

At the end of the day, all the cases brought against Trump are being brought for a very specific reason.

“The problem with all this is this lower court judge and this prosecutor all know that they’re setting Donald Trump up for a conviction. So when he runs for office as president in the general election, the media and everyone else will keep calling him a convicted felon,” Levin says.


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These are Trump's chances to RUN and WIN from prison



It’s not looking good for Joe Biden.

Former president Donald Trump is now leading the sitting president in polls in nearly every battleground state.

The fact remains that the Democrats will stop at nothing to see Trump imprisoned — but that doesn’t mean he won’t win.

According to the polls, the former president now has 22% support among African-Americans, which would be a modern-day first for a Republican. He had only 8% support from the same demographic in 2020.

In 2020, Trump’s Hispanic support was at 36%. He now has 42% in a poll of Hispanic swing state voters.

“Generally speaking, it’s showing that the multicultural base of the Democratic party is eroding in a major way,” Stu Burguiere tells Glenn Beck and Pat Gray. He notes that inflation, among other things, has hit these populations quite hard.

Trump is leading in these polls even as he’s testifying in the New York trial for the fraud case brought against him.

In the same poll, only 6% of swing state voters would change their minds if Trump was convicted and sent to jail.

“It’s going to be a difficult task to achieve to be elected from prison,” Stu says.

Glenn notes that if he were to go to jail, it might actually help his case for president.

“It might actually help him in the African-American community. Not because they want, you know, somebody who’s, you know, a felon in. They see injustice,” Glenn says.

He explains that the African-American community would be more likely to get behind him in prison, because many of them have been “used and abused by the system and thrown into prison.”

“They connect with the oppression,” Stu agrees.


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