News Vérité

Before launching into my follow-up to yesterday’s post about Donald Trump and his seque into a war with Iran that went astray, let me reaffirm that I am a three-time Trump voter. In 2024, I supported him because of various views and programs he espoused, including lowering taxes, securing the border and deporting illegals, building up the military, ending the Green Scam, and getting men out of women’s sports. He has delivered on all of those (with the Iran mistake draining the military of assets), but at the same time, I have found that the way he goes about pursuing his goals is often suspect and unseemly. That’s why, in my headline to this article, I have narrowed the Trump approach to getting his way to two avenues. One is to create criminals in the public eye out of those who block him or disagree with him. This criminalization usually takes the form of insulting and denigrating posts on Truth Social, but sometimes leads to actual legal action, such as with John Bolton, a former aide now facing possible jail time. The other is to create a smokescreen — which I’m calling camouflage — to cover up what’s really going

Department of My Bad: Oops, yesterday I gave Donald Trump too much credit. I actually believed, and put my belief into print, that Trump had had an epiphany about the Iran War mess, and that penance was near, to be revealed in his actions going forward. This assessment germinated in — as you can see from my original post — his comment about no all-out bombing on the Islamic Republic unless they killed one of ours. This, I thought, indicated a wake-up call that could result in a cleansing of Trump’s political soul. Wrong! After watching Trump on TV today, I realized that he could never feel or admit that he had ever done anything wrong, nor think that he has to make any kind of amends. He will simply, in all circumstances, blame someone else, starting with the nation’s media, which he calls the Fake News. Therefore, I am now concluding that Trump is merely in a political pickle of his own making, but one with deep and foreboding consequences. Simply put, the entire world is now worse off than when the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran began. Not only is the Strait of Hormuz closed, choking off oil and

This is a follow-up to my news item yesterday about President Trump getting Israel and Hezbollah to agree to quit killing each other. Reports have it that Trump used some foul-mouthed language to convince Bibi Netanyahu to forego plans to invade Beirut as a final step to eradicate the terrorist cell operating in Lebanon at Iran’s behest, i.e., the aforementioned Hezbollah. According to Axios (believe them if you like, but I see no reason not to), Trump, in his call with the Israeli Premier yesterday, told him: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” By way of backdrop, Iran has demanded that any ceasefire include Hezbollah and Israel. Otherwise, Iran says, there can be no moving forward on a peace deal, let alone a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to open the Strait of Hormuz and continue further negotiations. Netanyahu, by many accounts, is the force that got Trump involved in the Iranian conflict to begin with. Following a public uprising in Iran, for which Trump promised that “help is on the way,” the president saw an Iranian bombing campaign as the

When Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, the United States was deeply polarized. The country was locked in the Cold War abroad, and at home, fierce debates raged between New Deal Democrats who wanted to expand government programs and conservative Republicans who wanted to completely dismantle them. Eisenhower’s solution was The Middle Way (sometimes called “Modern Republicanism”). It was a political philosophy that rejected extremes on both sides. He described it as a path where “the government does not avoid its responsibilities to the human individual,” but also “does not assume that the federal government is the only instrument for solving all human problems.” In short: be conservative when it comes to money and the economy, but liberal when it comes to human beings. The Core Pillars of the Middle Way To understand how Eisenhower balanced these competing ideas, it helps to look at how he handled the biggest issues of his presidency: Reining in Government Spending Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative. He believed that a runaway national debt and high inflation were just as dangerous to national security as a foreign military threat. Balancing the Budget: He worked hard to balance the federal budget, successfully achieving