No, President Kennedy, We Can't Do the Hard Things Anymore

The Iran War and addressing major structural problems in the U.S.

President John F. Kennedy laid out his vision of the U.S. reaching the moon before the end of the 1960s during a talk at Rice University. In his famous speech, he said that America chose to go to the moon and “do the other things” because they were hard. That was an incredible admission: the U.S. did not shirk from challenges because they looked impossible. From the Panama Canal through the atomic bomb and going to the moon, Americans looked at the impossible and asked when we start. It was an inspiring time, and it was during those days that the SR-71, Boeing 747, and many other amazing planes were born in parallel to NASA’s inspiring efforts to put men on the moon and bring them safely home. Can we still do the hard things today?

Before Paul Krugman became a liberal lunatic in the days of George W. Bush, he made an insightful description of the U.S. government. He said that it was essentially an insurance company with a very large and powerful army. And in some ways he was right: much of governmental spending is for various “entitlement” programs like Medicaid and Medicare ($2 trillion a year). Yes, we feel entitled, and the budget deficits get bigger. While the Pentagon receives around 16 percent of the $7.4 trillion federal budget, Treasury and Health and Human Services receive much more. The former for debt service, the latter for entitlement programs. Unfortunately, this debt service is going to become a larger outlay over time. Elon Musk tried to use DOGE to tame the budget, and the Republican Congress refused to convert his cuts into law. And that is where President Kennedy’s bold statement gets stuck in the mud.

Everyone knows that if one wants a balanced budget or even a little surplus, the major place to cut the spending is in the welfare and entitlement programs. But no politician lacking a death wish wants to go toe-to-toe with the aging American population. Imagine running for Congress and addressing a crowd at a local retirement home. You tell them that you will reduce Social Security payments, raise the age for its benefits, and make reimbursements from Medicaid and the like means-tested and thus much harder to receive. You would be lucky to get out with your clothes still on your back. So the massive $40 trillion debt, like the Iran “problem,” worsening educational outcomes, and other major structural problems are not addressed and annually kicked down the road for some future brave but unnamed president and Congress to address.

I don’t know if the recent midterm elections were kosher or not. It’s hard for me to believe that all Texas counties became more blue, and I don’t understand how Democrats apparently got 17 million more votes than in 2024. But for the purposes of this article, let’s assume that dissatisfaction with the Iran War contributed in some way to poor Republican results. Was it the war itself or the drawn-out nature of the JD Vance/Steve Witkoff MOU that prevented the war from ending in the early summer? We’ll ignore that point and focus on a different one. Since Jimmy Carter, every president has known — and stated — that Iran is an international problem and needs to be dealt with because it represents a national security risk to the United States. But nobody dealt with it. Carter tried a desperate hostage rescue that ended in failure. Obama gave the mullahs pallets of money and signed a great deal for them to get sanction relief and still end up with a working bomb in the future. Joe Biden did much the same. Donald Trump was the first and only president to make a serious effort to end the Iranian nuclear bomb threat. Anyone who has not lived in the Middle East may not understand how crazy these people are. They would gladly trade a nuclear explosion in New York for half of their country being annihilated. The Russians never thought that way. The Iranians do. Every suicide bomber is praised in the Arab world, though he is dead. In their eyes, he is a martyr — so what if he died? He took some Jews or other infidels with him. An American has a hard time thinking of detonating himself and killing people whom he does not know. They don’t. And remember, Iran was behind IEDs that killed and maimed a lot of American servicemen in Iraq.

So Donald Trump addressed an intractable problem, and his thanks (on the assumption that the election was honest….) was getting drubbed at the ballot box. So what happens when a future president wants to completely restructure the budget to make it balanced? How is that one going to go over when many people find their co-pays up and their governmental support reduced or canceled? If the claims from the recent elections that throwing out illegals was a negative for the administration, how does the U.S. deal with untold millions of people who should not be in the U.S. in the first place? Can only a lame duck president in his last two years deal with difficult and unpopular problems? Have we reached the point where any calculating politician will kick the can down the road on any threat to the U.S., internal or external, because dealing with it will bring electoral pain? Churchill got the boot before the end of the war. It was said that Stalin was shocked that the British threw out the guy who saved their country. Churchill stood fast against the Nazis, but it came at a large economic and social price for the British citizenry. They repaid him when they threw him out and chose Clement Attlee as his replacement, though years later he did return to the premiership.

The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they looked for a chief executive and not a king for the new country. And while having periodic elections gives the electorate a veto on the behavior of our elected representatives, it also gives the latter a good reason not to do the hard things. If the Iran War had ended in July with a complete U.S. triumph, the return of the Shah’s son, and oil prices going back down, the Republicans might be celebrating right now. Donald Trump is a true champion when, even after the recent midterm results were known to him, he said that he would do it again — because he knew that the Iranians were on their way to a bomb and that bomb was on its way to Tel Aviv, London, and Washington. Very few politicians would have the guts to take on the mullahs, and even fewer would see the effort through in order to prevent the lunatics from getting a nuclear device and destroying the world as we know it. I don’t think that the war is over yet. The fat lady sings when the Iranian leadership swings.

If JFK were alive, he’d be wearing a big red MAGA hat like his nephew, RFK Jr. He was a patriot, hated communism, and was ready to defend the U.S. from foreign threats. He would have appreciated Donald Trump doing the hard things like throwing out illegal aliens, fixing wild trade imbalances, and dealing with Iran’s efforts to attain a working atomic bomb. Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn’t do the hard things because their goals were more personal than national. They aided and abetted the mullahs by providing cash, as well as weakening key sanctions. They couldn’t do the hard things because they were interested in self-enrichment and personal glory. Fighting the IRGC would have brought them neither. Good on Trump.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are once again respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.

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