Democrats, Republicans, and MAGA patriots—we live in a three-party system gamed against the American people.
I wrote months ago about Steve Witkoff being the weakest link in the Trump 2.0 administration. He apparently told the president that the hangings in Iran would not take place, so the murderers just killed the people they captured in the jails. He has added Qatar, Turkey, and Pakistan to the "Board of Peace" that is supposed to run Gaza after the war. Those three countries are Islamic hatefests, dedicated with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. The Hamas guys in Doha must be laughing their billionaire pants off: Israel won, left them with half of Gaza, and the guys who will run the place will let them rearm and control the "technocratic committee" that is the facade for Hamas' continued control of the Strip. Bravo, Steve. Keep doing business deals with your son in Qatar. It's no surprise that your underling praised the Hamas guys he met. What's there not to like about psychotic mass murderers and rapists? Israel and others have now figured out how low Witkoff is. When Erdogan demands that Hamas give up its weapons, I'll post an apology. Let's hope it's not too late to pull a win out of Gaza.
President Trump has accomplished a great deal during the first year of his second administration. Border closed. Two and a half million illegal aliens ejected. Hundreds of billions in tariff revenue collected. Low inflation. Five and a half percent GDP growth. Trade deficit cut in half. A whole bunch of peace deals. Maduro watching NFL games in New York. Donald Trump and his people have done more in a year than most presidents accomplish in four. Yet, there are speed bumps. And they are primarily in the U.S. Senate. Many of his appointments are not getting approved. And some of his most important legislative efforts are hung up. The president and his advisers have vociferously told Sen. John Thune and the Republican members of the Senate to ditch the filibuster and vote on key legislation with a simple majority required to pass. Thune ain't budging, and it's not clear to me that all of the 53 Republicans in the upper house would vote to pass the president's program. Murkowski, anyone?
And here we have come to the major problem facing the United States: we have a three-party system. The Democrats have moved fully from the party of Kennedy and Clinton to the commune of AOC and Bernie Sanders. The Republicans have not made the full jump from the country club set of Paul Ryan and John McCain to the fortress of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. If there were two lifeboats in the water and the USS Capitol was sinking, Thune and company would be much happier in Bernie's lifeboat than that of Trump. They have no interest in election integrity. Heck, one day they also might want to use the loopholes of early voting and mail-in ballots to cheat; why get rid of such a handy option? Also, they want the Democrats to come back so as to return the DOGE cuts so their wives will have their NGO windfalls that Elon Musk so impertinently canceled. Donald Trump and John Cornyn might both share an "R" after their names, but they also share two eyes, ears, legs, and arms. The non-Trump wing of the party has no interest in the president's program to make America stronger, reduce the deficit, increase local manufacturing, or remove illegal aliens from the premises. No, their only interest is in making a ton of money and making sure that their friends get some, too. They could not care less about Biden's overrun border or America's overrun credit card.
What Donald Trump has asked of the Senate would make an Israeli laugh. Proof of citizenship. A picture ID. Voting in person. These are such trivial steps and so basic here in Israel, and in most countries of the world, a visitor would wonder why they would need to pass a law to get these obvious pieces of the puzzle in place. As Elon Musk and many others have pointed out, the only reason why one would not want these features in elections is in order to cheat. Don't sell us the nonsense that people are too stupid to go to the DMV and get a photo ID. And don't tell us that people are so mobility challenged that they have to vote by mail. More and more stories are coming out about 2020 manipulated ballots or huge numbers of ballots showing up after the polls closed, and voila, they were all for Joe Senile Biden. That the Democrats don't want these election guardrails makes perfect sense: their policies are an anathema to most Americans, who don't want higher taxes, open borders, and electrical cubicles on wheels. Obviously, Donald Trump and his MAGA wing in Congress want the protections so as to guarantee fair elections. But what does the Thune branch of the party want? It wants that DOGE gravytrain turned back on, and they won't get it from an honest election that brings more people like Donald Trump to Washington. They are happy to let the Democrats cheat and win; that's how they and their friends can become filthy rich, while the Republic goes down the drain.
President Trump, Vice President Vance, and others have demanded that the Senate Republicans pass the SAVE Act, even if it means gutting the filibuster. The Republicans in Congress do not care that over 80 percent of American citizens want photo IDs in order to vote. For them, the people are noise in the background, and that is what separates them from Donald J. Trump. Sure, one could write off his McDonald's appearance or his ride in the garbage truck as mere election shtick. But the one thing that you always see with Donald Trump is that he knows how to connect with people. Whether he drops in on a wedding at Mar-a-Lago or chats it up with assembly line workers in Detroit, Donald Trump is a people person. He cares about the soldiers. He wants Americans to make ends meet. There are some similarly-thinking Republicans in the Senate, but you wouldn't need a very big car to drive all of them to the Capitol. The remainder are like Ryan and McCain, creatures of Washington whose interests and those of the American people would make a Venn Diagram with no point of intersection. They don't care about election integrity or dealing with the massive budget losses. Some of the dinosaurs in the building have sat in those chairs as multiple presidents added over $20 trillion in debt. Did they rend their clothes? Did they demand a Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment? Nope, they just kept going back to USAID to find out if their wives' NGO for tracking bat droppings in southern Peru received its $200 million grant. While their stated positions are not the same as the lunatic Left, their goals are the same: personal power and self-enrichment, with We the People as a mere afterthought.
They no doubt think that they are geniuses, but what comes around goes around. As people will no longer believe in election results, they will find other ways of establishing government. There are hundreds of millions of firearms in the hands of American citizens. If they feel that they have been jilted, they will figure out how to get real leadership and not the phony type that comes from Xeroxed ballots arriving at 3 in the morning.
Thune and company are playing a dangerous game. If the U.S. cannot have fair and safe elections, then the Republic will look a heck of a lot different in 10 years' time.