(DCNF)—Another week and another first for Donald J. Trump. No doubt, this is one he would be willing to pass on — the first criminal trial of a former president. But like all things in Trump world, it reveals more about his enemies than it does the 45th president.
For decades, pollsters have been telling us the electorate yearned for a third way, a nonpartisan who wasn’t wedded to either party and would represent the vast middle. Along comes the brash, imperfect real estate developer who had worked with both sides of the aisle in “the art of a deal.” The media elite loved it, especially the most salacious exploits of the prowling Manhattan mogul.
That is right up until presidential candidate Trump embraced a reformulated version of America First that turned out to be a direct threat to those global media empires. You know, the ones who profitably ran all those Big Pharma ads while “reporting’” on COVID. It wasn’t long before the crude tapes and “hush money” stories started rolling in.
Indeed, Trump’s real sin was his desire to return to the economic and foreign policy nationalism that had been summarily quashed by globalists in both parties. And it was a grave enough transgression to warrant his destruction by any means necessary.
Yet the unhinged, shrill attacks combined with the shredding of a president’s constitutional protections — whether his right to free speech, due process or private property — has revealed a number of disturbing truths about the American political system that are no longer so easily hidden.
This is Trump’s real legacy.
- The Republican party is not a political movement — it is a club that exists for the reelection of its members. America’s institutions are falling apart (from the border to the classroom to the boardroom) while inflation is hollowing out the middle class. But the top of the GOP’s agenda is adding another $100 billion in foreign aid to a $34 trillion national debt. It’s a stark reversal from the old right, whether Eisenhower in Korea; Nixon in Vietnam or Reagan in Lebanon — they all knew how to cut their losses. House Speaker Mike Johnson even removed border protection from a bill that was sure to pass given a Republican establishment in both chambers that perpetually pounds the war drum. Buoyed by a perverse Lincoln-Project political consultancy swamp that serves its donor class and you see how political movements die when people start to make money off them.
- The Democrat Party is most certainly a political movement. Never has the abuse of power been more ruthlessly self-evident. And it has nothing to do with Trump’s idiosyncrasies or crass demeanor. It has everything to do with the threat he presents to a Democrat hierarchy used to getting its own way from opponents who have been trained to stand down—even in the face of unprecedented social anarchism that is transforming western civilization. It took Trump, not the political intelligentsia, to realize the West was dying, figuratively and literally. Identity politics and the attack on the traditional family are the means to an ignominious end. And if this Socialist Wokeness Party was willing to destroy a generation of young people with lockdowns and puberty blockers, they’re certainly willing to destroy one man by debasing the rule of law.
- The “deep state” is far deeper than anyone imagined. President Dwight Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” farewell address wasn’t just about the massive power of the defense lobby and its political influence, but all the other scientific and technological institutions of a burgeoning national security state. Understand, we just handed out billions to the folks who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and then used Big Tech to lie about it. Our allies know who runs things on Capitol Hill so they feel free to plot any conceivable tripwire that will drag America into war — from breaking a promise not to expand NATO to escalatory attacks in the Middle East knowing full well they will elicit a response to which we will respond. But the machinations of intel officials are not limited to intervention abroad, threatening our sons and daughters with nuclear holocaust. No, Trump’s legacy has clearly demonstrated the Clapper & Brennans of the world are willing to manipulate our own political affairs as well.
- The media really are the problem. To be sure, the “lawfare” is so fundamentally unconstitutional that it surely “shocks the conscience.” But the most insidious aspect to the Democrat legal abuse is the media’s willingness, dare we say, eagerness, to promote it. It doesn’t matter that higher courts have already begun to overturn corrupt lower ones, all that matters is the headline generated by the Biden press office disguised as your favorite newsroom. The neoconservative descent into rabid never-Trumpism is part and parcel of the uniparty gaslighting. In any despotic revolution, once the war is won, the guns confiscated and the political opponents are all in jail, the thought police swoop in. But in the Trump era, the press corps didn’t need persuading. Look no further than the astounding number of corrections, retractions and legal settlements. But combined with Big Tech’s toxic echo chambers, the damage had already been done.
In fact, one could easily make the argument that it’s 2020 all over again. The Republican Party is busy enabling its abusers while Democrats are locking Trump down. This time with false legal charges instead of a Chinese coronavirus.
If the late, great United States comes to pass, Trump won’t be the only political prisoner lamenting, “you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Former Congressman Jason Lewis is the author of “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press.” This article was originally published on the author’s Substack page, which can be viewed here. Lewis is also the weekday host of Jason Lewis Live on Patriot.TV.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.