Most influential conservative ever? Trump sets a blazing pace



Donald Trump, who survived multiple assassination attempts and criminal prosecutions, pulled off the most impressive political comeback in American history when he took the oath of office Monday. During his inaugural address, he lambasted Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, forcing them to sit through a list of their failures. The 47th president made sweeping promises, including sending troops to secure the border, returning manufacturing to the United States, and avoiding unnecessary wars. Everyone expected bold rhetoric but wondered if Trump would back it with action. He did not disappoint.

After fulfilling his ceremonial duties and thanking his supporters, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders. He pardoned more than 1,500 individuals charged in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021, some of whom remained in prison awaiting trial. Many had faced nonviolent charges or had been investigated without actually entering the Capitol. Trump also withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, which he blamed for mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic. In another order, he directed the federal government to recognize only two genders and removed diversity, equity, and inclusion policies from relevant agencies.

Rapidly rolling out his agenda would give Democrats less time to recover and limit the ability of sympathetic media outlets to manipulate public opinion.

Immigrants at the southern border discovered that the CBP One app — used by the Biden administration to facilitate an invasion of the United States — had been shut down. News crews filmed migrants in tears after their screening appointments were canceled.

Meanwhile, Trump issued an order freezing federal civilian hiring and designated foreign drug cartels operating in the United States as terrorist organizations. He also imposed a 90-day pause on all foreign aid to reassess those programs. Ideally, they will be eliminated entirely.

Most significant for the nation’s future, Trump signed an order to end the destructive practice of birthright citizenship. Currently, anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically considered a citizen, regardless of their parents’ legal status. But this was never the intention of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War to clarify that freed slaves were, in fact, American citizens.

Under Trump’s new directive, if a child’s parents are in the country illegally or only under temporary status, that child will not be deemed a citizen. The measure aims to end the “anchor baby” phenomenon, in which foreign nationals enter the country on a temporary visa, have a child who becomes a citizen, and then leverage that status to remain in the United States.

This change is crucial because it dramatically affects voting patterns. New immigrants tend to favor Democrats, which is why the left pushes so hard for open borders. Although illegal immigrants cannot vote, their children born on American soil gain citizenship. Democrats were playing the long game, hoping that a large influx of illegal immigrants now would translate into political victories later, when those children came of age and started voting. By restoring what he considers the 14th Amendment’s intended meaning, Trump has blocked this strategy, making it more likely Republicans will prevail in fair elections.

Trump’s day-one blitz of executive orders sends a strong message, but it marks only the beginning. The left remains stunned by his sweeping victory, though its disorientation will not last forever. Progressives tried every tactic — from labeling Trump a Nazi to attempting to bankrupt him, remove him from the ballot, imprison him, and even kill him. All those efforts failed, and the American people returned the billionaire to the White House with a clear mandate. Progressives continue their accusations of racism and fascism, but the energy and power behind those charges have largely evaporated.

Trump must maintain an all-out offensive while his opponents remain weak and demoralized. Although executive orders can make a splash, they can also be undone with the stroke of a pen.

The birthright citizenship question will head to the courts — opponents have already filed a raft of lawsuits — and the administration must be ready to defend its position vigorously. At the same time, achieving lasting change through legislation is critical, though the president will likely battle members of his own party as often as he fights Democrats.

In his first term, Trump encountered constant opposition from personnel within his own executive agencies. Now older and more experienced, the president recognizes the importance of securing Senate confirmation for key appointees to ensure his second administration’s success.

Trump has also pledged to abolish certain government agencies, such as the Department of Education, and to implement major law enforcement steps, including the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Rapidly rolling out this agenda would give Democrats less time to recover and limit the ability of sympathetic media outlets to manipulate public opinion.

Trump made a strong showing on his first day back in the White House. The left remains stunned by the scope of defeat and can only offer modest resistance to his agenda. Unlike his first term, the president now benefits from powerful media allies — such as Elon Musk — and a staff fully attuned to the obstacles he faces. The time for action is now.

If Trump maintains this rapid pace, he is poised to become one of the most influential conservative presidents in American history. But if he hesitates or loses focus, the left will seize the opportunity to revive its flagging movement.

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Putin congratulates 47th president, says Russia ready for peace talks with Trump team



Top officials from around the globe reached out to congratulate President Donald Trump on his return to office Monday, in many cases sneaking in their respective asks to the leader of the world's pre-eminent superpower. Among them was Russian President Vladimir Putin, who indicated that Russia was open to discussing "long-term peace" in Eastern Europe.

During a September town hall interview, Trump warned that "we're heading into World War III territory" because of the war in Ukraine, adding that unlike the "clowns" in power, he would "heal the world."

Trump was ridiculed then and on numerous other occasions for suggesting that he would bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table and the war to an end.

"This is a war that should have never happened. It should have never happened. ... It's a shame," Trump said after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in September. "We'll get it solved. It's a very complicated puzzle, very complicated puzzle, but we'll get it solved, and people [will] get on with their lives. Too many people dead."

Although reportedly poised to pour 8% of GDP and 40% of total federal expenditure into continued defense and security spending, Putin appears ready for an end to the fighting.

'The peace through strength policy he announced provides an opportunity to strengthen American leadership and achieve a long-term and just peace.'

"We see statements by the newly elected US President and members of his team about the desire to restore direct contacts with Russia, interrupted through no fault of ours by the outgoing Administration," Putin said in a meeting Monday with elements of his security council. "We also hear his statements about the need to do everything to prevent a third world war. Of course, we welcome this attitude and congratulate the elected President of the United States of America on taking office."

After claiming an openness to establishing "smooth relations of cooperation" with the U.S., Putin noted, "We are also open to dialogue with the new US Administration on the Ukrainian conflict."

Putin stated the goal of such talks "should not be a short truce, not some kind of respite for regrouping forces and rearmament with the aim of subsequently continuing the conflict, but a long-term peace based on respect for the legitimate interests of all people, all nations living in this region."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy similarly congratulated Trump on his inauguration and noted in a statement that the 47th president "is always decisive, and the peace through strength policy he announced provides an opportunity to strengthen American leadership and achieve a long-term and just peace, which is the top priority."

Following President Joe Biden's suggestion that Putin "does not want any full-blown war," Russian forces stormed into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. After 1,061 days of fighting, which has brought death to hundreds of thousands and displacement to millions of people — Russia now occupies roughly 18% of the country.

'Politics is the art of compromise.'

While both nations reportedly came close to negotiating an end to the conflict in early 2022 — where Russia's primary requirement was that Ukraine stay indefinitely out of NATO — the talks fell apart. The New York Times indicated that Russians killed the negotiations with a toxic clause that would have given Moscow a veto on military interventions by the U.S. and other nations on Ukraine's behalf. The Kremlin alternatively suggested that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was responsible for killing the talks.

In the years and months since, Kyiv and Moscow have worked to maximize battlefield advantage and territorial coverage at least in part to negotiate ultimately from relative positions of strength. Zelenskyy, however, told the French paper Le Parisien last month that Ukraine does not have the military wherewithal to retake the territory presently occupied by Russia.

"If today we don't have the strength to win back all of our territory, maybe the West will find the strength to put Putin in his place ... at the [negotiating] table and diplomatically deal with this war," said Zelenskyy.

Putin told reporters in December that "politics is the art of compromise. And we have always said that we are ready for both negotiations and compromise."

He previously noted, however, that while amenable to "reasonable compromises," the "outcome should be in favor of Russia."

The Times noted that negotiations will likely require consensus not only on territorial recognition, troop withdrawals, and on Ukraine's potential international affiliations, but also on a host of secondary questions regarding, for instance, the matter of reparations and who will rebuild Ukraine's toppled cities; what will happen to the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants for Putin; and whether the U.S. will lift its sanctions on Russia.

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As War Rages in Europe and the Middle East, Biden Delivers Farewell Foreign Policy Speech Suggesting He Made the World Safer

A raging war in Ukraine and a smoldering Middle East did not stop outgoing president Joe Biden from touting his foreign policy successes in a farewell State Department speech on Monday. His administration, Biden said, successfully averted major conflicts across the globe and left the United States "more capable" and "better prepared" than ever before.

The post As War Rages in Europe and the Middle East, Biden Delivers Farewell Foreign Policy Speech Suggesting He Made the World Safer appeared first on .

Biden wants to put a gloss on his foreign policy failures — these failures included



President Joe Biden, apparently keen to rewrite history before fading into it, will reportedly seize on the opportunity Monday to once again characterize his disastrous presidency and foreign policy blunders as successes.

According to the the Associated Press, the deeply unpopular 82-year-old Democrat is expected to claim in his capstone address regarding his foreign policy legacy that he and his administration restored American credibility on the world stage and strengthened critical alliances supposedly strained by his predecessor's prioritization of American citizens. Biden is reportedly also planning to suggest that he provided the world with a "steady hand" during his four scandal-plagued years in office.

Biden's Monday speech at the State Department's headquarters will bookend his first major foreign policy speech on-site where he suggested on Feb. 4, 2021, both that "the muscle of democratic alliances ... have atrophied over the past few years of neglect and, I would argue, abuse" and that the U.S. under President-elect Donald Trump had ceased to stand "shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies and key partners."

In addition to promising to advance the security of the American people ahead of letting well over 10 million foreign nationals steal into the homeland, Biden said that he would be effective in dealing with Russia and counter communist China's "aggressive, coercive action," as well as end the war in Yemen, which is covered in the Obama administration's fingerprints.

Biden, Democratic lawmakers, and their devotees in the liberal media emphasized at the outset of his presidency that the "adults [we]re back in charge," President-elect Donald Trump serving as the point of comparison.

Trump, embracing Ronald Reagan's "peace through strength" approach in his first term, previously

  • brokered the formal normalization of diplomatic relations between various Arab states and Israel;
  • made good on past administrations' promises to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem;
  • whacked Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi;
  • signed an executive order temporarily banning nationals from six Islamic terrorism hotbeds from traveling to the U.S.;
  • pressured NATO allies to meet their financial obligations in the way of defense spending;
  • put North Korea’s Kim Jong-un on notice with the threat of "fire and fury like the world has never seen";
  • negotiated a new trade agreement with South Korea and an updated version of NAFTA with Canada and Mexico;
  • withdrew from the 2015 Paris climate accord and United Nations Human Rights Council;
  • largely defeated ISIS in Syria;
  • pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement;
  • reoriented the U.S. national security apparatus from a Middle Eastern focus to instead a focus on competing with communist China;
  • levied tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods;
  • re-established the Quad partnership with Australia, India, and Japan; and
  • managed various other foreign policy successes, including breaking from his predecessor's longstanding custom of starting a new war.

With his alternatively "steady hands" on the reins, Biden steered Americans into danger and American foreign policy through embarrassment after embarrassment.

For instance, Biden botched the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Amid the confused exit during which the U.S.-backed Afghan government imploded, an Islamic terrorist — who reportedly had been released amid the chaos just days earlier from the Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base — detonated a suicide bomb on Aug. 26, 2021, at Abbey Gate, the last route open for Afghans into the Hamid Karzai International Airport, killing 11 U.S. Marines, a soldier, a sailor, and hundreds of Afghans, and leaving 45 other U.S. service members wounded.

Beside endangering service members and leaving multitudes of Americans behind, Biden also left the Taliban with over $7 billion worth of military equipment.

One intelligence assessment estimated that among the hardware left behind for the Islamic extremist regime were 2,000 armored vehicles and 40 aircraft, including UH-60 Black Hawks, scout attack helicopters, and ScanEagle military drones.

Biden proved unable or unwilling to extend a steady hand to the hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenians of the former Republic of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, who were violently displaced in recent years by the Islamic Azerbaijani regime.

Azerbaijan, which the Biden administration has provided with military assistance despite its alleged war crimes and torture of Armenian prisoners, launched a blitzkrieg on the Armenian enclave in September 2023, killing hundreds of people, destroying churches, and forcing the Christian population to flee, in many cases on foot.

The apparent ethnic cleansing took place within days of a State Department official suggesting that the U.S. would not "countenance any action or effort, short-term or long-term, to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh."

'The United States is in a worse geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.'

Azerbaijan was not the first aggressor nation to realize that Biden was big on talk and light on action.

Despite Biden's "steady hand" and foreknowledge of an imminent "incursion," Russia invaded Ukraine under the Democratic president's watch, this time on a scale far exceeding its previous invasion of Crimea during the Obama-Biden years. Biden has slapped Russia with numerous sanctions, poured over $175 billion into the occupied nation, and risked a direct shooting war with Russia by authorizing Ukraine's use of long-range American missiles, yet an armistice in the region remains out of his reach.

During a press conference ahead of the invasion where Biden suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin "does not want any full-blown war," the Democratic president stressed that Putin "is trying to find his place in the world between China and the West." It appears that with the Biden administration's persistent nudging, Putin has found a close friend in communist China — constituting another major foreign policy blunder.

Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, noted last year that:

It is U.S. President Joe Biden's foreign policy that has helped turn two natural competitors into strategic collaborators. A forward-looking approach would have avoided confronting Russia and China simultaneously, lest it drive the two nuclear-armed powers into an unholy alliance. But Biden has managed to lock horns with both Moscow and Beijing simultaneously, though it should be noted that his China policy is comparatively softer and more conciliatory.

Like other critics, Chellaney noted that U.S. sanctions on Russia have effectively transformed Beijing into Moscow's banker and more than doubled trade between the two nations.

Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said in October 2024 that Beijing's relationship with Moscow would be strengthened in the coming months, as Russian gas exports to China continue to surge and the BRICs organization continues to grow in strength relative to American-led economic organizations.

Just a year into Biden's presidency, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted that "the president's weakness on the world stage has only emboldened our adversaries to become more aggressive in their rhetoric and their actions."

Over the past four years, China, America's preeminent adversary, has ramped up its attacks on American cyber infrastructure and sovereignty, evidently thinking little of Biden and his occasional tough talk.

The Wall Street Journal revealed in September, for instance, that the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group Salt Typhoon compromised at least eight American telecommunications companies, including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI said in a joint statement, "We have identified that PRC-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies to enable the theft of customer call records data, the compromise of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders."

Chinese hackers with ties to the communist government also stole at least 60,000 emails from State Department accounts during Biden's tenure; gained access to the computer networks of a major American transportation hub; and compromised Treasury Department computers.

Brushing Biden's "steady hand" aside, Beijing has also sent spy craft over the mainland U.S.; operated illegal police stations on American soil; threatened diplomats; and dispatched agents to execute espionage and political destabilization missions.

"The United States is in a worse geopolitical position today than it was four years ago," Stephen Wertheim, a historian and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently told CBS News. "The United States is immersed in a massive war on the European continent with serious escalation risks; it's back to bombing the Middle East with no end in sight; and it has entered into a full-spectrum strategic rivalry with China."

"The United States cannot expect to prioritize China while remaining the leading military power in Europe and the Middle East. If the United States truly wants to prioritize China, it needs to pull back elsewhere," added Wertheim.

Biden told USA Today in an interview last week, "I hope that history says that I came in and I had a plan how to restore the economy and reestablish America's leadership in the world."

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Former Israeli Military Officials Float Audacious Plan To Strike Iran in Final Days of Biden Presidency

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The post Former Israeli Military Officials Float Audacious Plan To Strike Iran in Final Days of Biden Presidency appeared first on .