Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Next Tuesday it looks like the people of New York are going to elect a socialist.

Unless there’s a last-minute miracle, the polls say Zohran Kwame Mamdani will defeat former governor Andrew Cuomo and become the mayor of America’s most populated and most important city.

Mamdani, 34, is a New York State representative and the wealthy son of an Indian Marxist scholar who was born in Uganda.

He has deservedly gotten a fair amount of criticism from even the mainstream liberal media for his hardcore socialist beliefs and his pro-Palestinian rhetoric.

He calls himself a “democratic socialist” and is a proud dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

But forget the Democratic part. Mamdani is 100 percent socialist – and far more radical than his hero, Bernie Sanders.

The DSA is the country’s largest socialist organization with about 85,000 members. About 250 members hold low-level elected offices, usually passing themselves off as Democrats.

The DSA is the real deal – anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-imperialist. But it really hates capitalism.

Its stated mission is to reject capitalism’s “private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction and brutality” and replace it with a “humane international social order” created through democratic planning, worker control and equitable resource distribution.

Ideally, the official party line goes, working people would democratically run the economy and society to meet human needs, not profits for the few, which means working people get universal access to food, housing, healthcare, childcare, education and meaningful work.

Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are the DSA’s biggest elected names so far, but Mamdani is about to eclipse them.

Though he has done his best to resemble Bernie Sanders, not Karl Marx, he’s a true believer in socialism.

He believes the government of New York City should own and operate a little or a lot of just about everything — housing, utilities and even grocery stores. All without earning the evilest fruit of capitalism – profits.

Needless to say, he also favors dumb things like wider rent controls, $30-an-hour minimum wage laws and free-fare buses. Plus, he wants fewer police in minority communities, wants to fund gender-affirming healthcare and wants to make New York a LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city.

Mamdani, unfortunately, is one of those blinded young ideologues who lives in a time warp without any history books. He and his generation don’t know what socialism’s ideas look like when they’re put into practice.

They still want to enact the failed and coercive socialism that made the Soviet Union an economic basket case for decades and still keeps the people stuck in countries like Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea impoverished and in chains.

Mamdani’s defenders insist he’s not a commie, of course. But my father would recognize him for the dangerous leftist he is behind his constant phony smile.

My father started fighting against the Communists in the 1940s when they were trying to take over Hollywood and he didn’t stop until the Berlin Wall started to crumble 40 years later.

He and the other members of the “Greatest Generation” witnessed firsthand how terrible communism’s brutal brand of socialism was. They fought it and defeated it.

Sadly, today’s naïve younger people are suckers for Mamdani’s communist-lite kind of socialism.

They support politicians like him and AOC without knowing how poorly socialism compares to free-market capitalism in the real world, or how it conflicts with America’s founding values of individual and economic freedom.

They also need to be reminded that millions of their grandparents and great-grandparents escaped the so-called paradises of socialism and communism and came to America.

In 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev boasted “We will bury you,” he was making the prediction that communism will inevitably triumph over capitalism for economic and ideological reasons.

On Tuesday, 70 years later, Mamdani will try to prove him right. Beware, 8 million New Yorkers, what you’re voting for.

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
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Making Sense By Michael Reagan

No wonder the dying legacy news media is increasingly distrusted and despised by the American people.

They spent much of this week tearing their hair out over “King” Trump’s White House construction project.

Trump’s idea to demolish the East Wing and build a grand $250 million ballroom got saturation coverage on all the networks.

It was treated like a national sacrilege by the failing Trump-hate media that fewer and fewer Americans can stand to watch.

The left-wing media’s biased reporters, pundits and partisan hacks cried all week because the “People’s House” was being trashed by a power-mad narcissist who had no respect for tradition, no taste and no class, etc., etc.

As usual, the liberal media were too busy attacking Trump personally to offer perspective, history or political balance.

Trump’s ballroom – though paid for by himself and private donors – became his latest crime against democracy. “A metaphor for what he’s doing to our freedoms” became my favorite dumb Democrat talking point of the week.

The White House is a big, old historic and complex place. Like any home, it constantly needs to be repaired, restored or updated. And its temporary occupants have not exactly always taken tender care of its structure or household contents.

Any home-schooled kid or conservative media person could tell you that for two centuries a parade of presidents and first ladies have added, subtracted and rearranged the inside and outside of the White House to their tastes.

Sometimes they were minor, like Obama’s basketball hoop, Clinton’s running track or Nixon’s bowling alley and conversion of the White House swimming pool into a press briefing room.

Other times they were major remakes, like Andrew Jackson’s addition of the North Portico, Teddy Roosevelt’s 1902 construction of the West Wing, William Taft’s addition of the first Oval Office, and FDR’s adding of a second floor and indoor pool to the West Wing and later building the East Wing in 1942.

Truman completely rebuilt the interior of the White House. Jackie Kennedy received thunderous multimedia applause for redecorating the White House. And Ford made minor updates or improvements without being attacked by anyone.

Admittedly, but to no one’s surprise, Trump’s project is bigger, pricier and bolder than anyone else’s. But Republicans in the White House always get rough treatment from the liberal media.

When Nancy and my father arrived in 1981, Nancy discovered to her horror the White House did not even have a complete set of china.

She had to mix different sets of dishes at State dinners. But after she ordered a $209,508 set of Lenox china, the liberal press ripped her for her luxurious tastes and called her “Queen Nancy.”

It didn’t matter to the media that she had raised every cent from private donations. A national recession was going on and she was a rich Republican.

If Trump weren’t a Republican, or weren’t Trump, he’d be praised to the heavens for creating a free, much-needed ballroom space for large events at the White House.

But instead, the liberal media, which never fails to find a negative angle for anything Trump does, jumped on the downsides.

They worried that wealthy donors were buying influence with the Trump administration, or that Trump was tearing down the White House walls to distract the country from the government shutdown or the Epstein Files.

The American public is no longer fooled by the legacy media’s BS. They’ve watched Republicans being treated unfairly for more than half a century.

The liberal media never stopped saying my father was going to start World War III. They repeatedly called him a racist who hated the poor.

My father didn’t lose sleep over what the enemy liberal media said. He didn’t care.

Neither does Trump. But if he ever does find himself bothered by the media, he should take my father’s advice: “Don’t worry. The day you die they’ll all tell you they loved you.”

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
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Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Will the ceasefire deal Donald Trump brokered in Gaza last?

Will the end of the fighting between Israel and Hamas finally bring peace to a bloody and tragic corner of the Middle East after 77 years?

Let’s pray so.

There are still a lot of hard problems to be sorted out – including the disarming of Hamas, the rebuilding of Gaza and the creation of a Palestinian government.

Trump’s prime role in bringing about the ceasefire in Gaza is already being discounted by the mainstream media.

And the Biden Democrats – who did nothing to stop the slaughter when they were in power – are now claiming they laid the groundwork or wrote the blueprint that Trump merely implemented.

But Time magazine last week called the Gaza ceasefire deal “historic.” It said that if all goes well – a very big if – it could be the signature accomplishment of Trump’s second term.

Again, let’s pray so.

I think what Trump and his hand-picked negotiating team have made happen could turn out to be the equivalent of what my father did to bring down the Berlin Wall.

Historians – the liberal ones, naturally – and our East Coast media always liked to downplay my father’s leading role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

They often went out of their way to give extra credit to Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev – and anyone else they could think of – for toppling the USSR.

Those other Cold War heroes were important, for sure.

But without Ronald Reagan’s almost religious personal crusade to defeat the Evil Empire, the wall would not have come down when and how it did – peacefully, without anyone firing a shot.

It’s the same deal with Trump.

Without his drive to find a way to end the killing, without his full support for Israel, and without his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Gaza deal would never have gotten done.

Trump has demonstrated to our allies and our enemies – and to Venezuelan drug smugglers — that he means business. Unlike Biden and Obama, he doesn’t just talk tough or draw lines in the sand that he never intends to defend when they are crossed.

It’s a shame Trump can’t use his negotiating skills to repair the damage Gov. Newsom and his Democrats have done to hurt my home state of California and home city of Los Angeles.

This state is wealthier than most countries. But it is a politically made disaster. It’s over-taxed, over-regulated and overflowing with illegal immigrants.

The downtowns of its biggest cities are home to tens of thousands of drugged out homeless or crazy street people who live in squalor and scare away tourists and ordinary citizens.

Trump has already sent National Guard troops to Memphis, Washington and Los Angeles to help ICE round up and deport illegal immigrants who’ve been breaking the law or hurting people. He wants to do the same in San Francisco.

Courts have tried to stop or delay him from sending soldiers to cities to fight violent crime, help ICE with immigration enforcement or protect federal buildings. They’ve ruled it’s an overreach of his executive powers.

Now the liberal supervisors in charge of the county of Los Angeles – which is home to nearly 1 million illegal immigrants – have shown how nuts they are by declaring a state of emergency in response to the ICE raids that are arresting illegals.

The declaration allows the county to give tax money and aid to help the families of deported illegal immigrants deal with the impact of ICE raids.

The supervisors say Trump’s actions “have created a climate of fear and disrupted daily life,” but as usual the liberal politicians have it backwards.

They and their fellow Democrats in City Hall and Sacramento are the ones who’ve wrecked daily life in Los Angeles and broken our beautiful state.

It’s so bad, if Trump became our governor in 2028, even he wouldn’t be able to fix it.

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
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Making Sense By Michael Reagan

It was fun watching Kaitlin Collins of CNN the other day as she marveled at Donald Trump’s boundless energy and accessibility.

Collins recently said Trump – unlike his sleepy and media-shy predecessor — hardly ever sleeps and is super-accessible to the press.

But I doubt if Ms. Collins has suddenly decided that Trump isn’t so bad after all.

The CNN anchor and the rest of the liberal mainstream news media will never forgive Trump for his New York-size ego, his unfiltered talk, his mean public persona or his great sense of humor. And the most deranged of them will never stop believing he is a fascist who’s intent on becoming a dictator, which is absurd.

No matter what our president does, the liberal media will never treat him fairly. Evidence of that is their nightly outrage over Trump using ICE to aggressively round up and deport the millions of illegal immigrants his predecessor so warmly welcomed to our country.

Trump obviously has not done everything right or smart – especially on tariffs, for example. Federal spending and budget deficits are still way too high. And his threats to use the FCC against broadcasters whose people or programs are critical of him is not good or wise.

Still, though the left doesn’t get it and never will, Trump is on track to be one of our most historic and game-changing presidents.

In case you haven’t noticed, he is a Washington outsider, someone who generally wants to disrupt, break up or weaken the federal government’s power and scope, not enlarge it.

Unlike his predecessors in both parties, Trump is always seriously looking to cut taxes, get rid of dumb regulations and energize the economy.

It’s a big reason the liberal media and the socialist left hate him. Another reason is that he’s been getting a bunch of conservative things done that Republicans have been promising to do since I was a teenager.

Overseas, unlike the neocons who’ve been running the state department for the past 30 years, Trump has been personally working for peace, not for starting foolish wars that we and our grandchildren have to fund or fight.

Trump claims he’s settled or prevented six or seven wars. OK, maybe he’s exaggerating his role in those settlements.

But it doesn’t matter. The liberal media is never going to give him credit for bringing about a single peace deal or for even trying.

Meanwhile, has there ever been a president more open, more transparent and more accessible to the press than Trump?

The sad thing is, given the bias and dishonesty of the liberal news media, half the country never gets to see Trump making fools of them in real time.

The left media reacts to what he says and reports it later in their news cycles the way they see it — and the way they choose to spin it.

Whether it’s ICE arresting illegals in LA or sending National Guard troops to Chicago or Washington, where I hear it’s now safe to go out to dinner at night, the MSM’s news is always slanted in the same direction – against Trump.

This weekend, he is apparently going to go to Israel and Egypt to take part in what everyone hopes will be the first step in a historic and lasting peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

An immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and a return of all hostages reportedly is part of the deal, which would never have happened without Trump’s intense involvement.

If lasting peace is achieved, Trump deserves to be rewarded with a Nobel prize. Will his crucial role in making peace happen be recognized by Democrats and the liberal media?

Let’s hope so.

I bet many of his haters will say Trump only did what he did because of his ego – because he wanted a Noble Peace Prize.

But to that I say, “So what?” The important thing is, he and his boundless energy stopped the killing and destruction in Gaza.

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

It’s almost like the news media is trying to get us to hide under our beds in fear.

From CNN to USA Today to Fox and beyond, all we hear is, “There’s a shutdown! There’s a shutdown!”

Of course there’s a bloody federal government shutdown.

It’s the end of September, isn’t it? It’s federal budget-passing time, isn’t it?

It’s the season when our great political leaders in Congress finally have to stand up tall and decide who in the federal government will get the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars we don’t really have and will be borrowing for our grandchildren to pay off.

For most Americans, shutting down the federal government means nothing. First off, it’s an empty threat that rarely ever happens – the last time was 10 years ago. (America survived, by the way.)

Almost every year at this time we hear the same scary and sad media stories about the threat of federal parks closing and federal employees – aka, bureaucrats – being furloughed and not getting their paychecks until the deadlock is over.

But shutting down the federal government for a few days or even weeks doesn’t seriously affect the lives or the livelihoods of most Americans.

If it weren’t for the big TV networks and print dinosaurs like the Washington Post acting like it was the end of the world, most Americans wouldn’t even know that the federal government has been closed for the last two days.

It’s the usual story – the usual dumb “government shutdown” story that I swear I’ve written about 10 times before. The characters are just a different collection of spineless and incompetent Republicans and Democrats in Congress who can’t or won’t make the right decision.

As usual, instead of sensibly passing a multi-trillion budget to fund the federal government one small chunk at a time, they kicked the entire 2025-2026 budget can down the road like a gang of little kids until the fiscal deadline – September 30.

This year the funding fight is over the extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies, but it’s always something partisan and stupid. Democrats okayed a similar bill nine months ago, but they won’t OK this one largely because they hate President Trump so much they can’t see straight.

So now the Schumers and the Thunes and Johnsons and Jeffries are pointing partisan fingers of blame at each other.

They’re trying to force the other side to capitulate and sign a gigantic one-piece omnibus budget bill that contains all the legislative crap, boondoggles and self-serving bills both parties couldn’t get passed on their own during the year.

No one knows how long this latest self-inflicted shutdown “crisis” will last – probably into next week. And you can bet any settlement will just push the next budget showdown “crisis” back to Thanksgiving week or on Christmas Day.

Meanwhile, the propagandists at CNN are already writing hysterical things like “The ramifications of Capitol Hill’s deadlock are steadily rippling across a broad swath of American lives.”

As examples of these supposedly dire threats to American lives, CNN pointed out that New York can’t afford to keep the Statue of Liberty open and the DC court system won’t be able to issue marriage certificates.

CNN and everyone else in the media’s shutdown spook show know how this one will end. Everyone in the federal workforce will get their back pay. And America will survive, despite the predictable failures of Congress.

If we really want to stop these seasonal shutdowns, I’ve got an idea that might help.

How about a piece of legislation that says when a government shutdown occurs, the first nonessential federal “workers” to lose their pay are members of Congress?

It’s hard to be optimistic, given Congress’ sorry track record, but I’m looking for a member of the Senate or House who has enough courage to write it – and a party that has enough courage to pass it.

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

After watching the spiritually uplifting and politically momentous memorial service for Charlie Kirk last Sunday in Phoenix, I suddenly realized something.

I now know three great people who actually lived the Lord’s Prayer instead of just reciting its famous words, as so many of us do once a week when we’re in church.

Hundreds of millions of people on Earth know the Lord’s Prayer – or a version of it.

It’s a central Christian prayer that is attributed to Jesus in the Bible. It is considered a blueprint for how we should honor God in Heaven and practice good, ethical and loving behavior toward our fellow humans here on Earth.

The Roman Catholic version is:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Some Protestant church translations of the prayer use the words “debts” or “sins” instead of “trespasses,” but the major point Jesus was making is the same: we should forgive those who have harmed us just as God the Father forgives us for our “trespasses” against him.

I think most of us just fly past that “forgive those who trespass against us” part without considering what it means. How many of us really stop and think about those people who have done mean or harmful things against us that we’ve never forgiven?

The three great people who lived the Lord’s Prayer are my father Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and now Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow.

Erika publicly forgave the young man who assassinated her husband, who deprived her two children of their father, who destroyed her happy life and left her a grieving widow.

What Erika did so beautifully in front of the whole world reminded me of what my father did in 1981 after John Hinckley tried to assassinate him.

Before he went back to the White House to resume his duties as president of the United States, my father forgave Hinckley. In fact, he wanted to go visit Hinckley in prison to offer his forgiveness in person, but the Secret Service would not allow it.

A few months after my father’s near-death experience, a Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Agca tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.

Before the pope – now Saint John Paul II – went back to work at the Vatican, he publicly forgave Agca. Two years later he even visited Agca in his prison cell.

After their brushes with death, and after their decisions to forgive the men who shot them, the pope and my father spoke together often and met in person four times.

One Catholic, one Protestant, two survivors who were destined to change the world, they ultimately formed a spiritual bond between them that I believe made it possible for them, Thatcher and others to eventually bring down the Berlin Wall.

I truly believe none of those historic events would have happened if my father and the pope had not first honored God and forgiven their trespassers, because I believe when you honor God, God honors you.

When Erica Kirk forgave her husband’s assassin on Sunday, she also was honoring God. I now believe that God will honor her and bring her the things she wants to accomplish here in America and in her life.

Like my father and Pope John Paul II before her, Erika Kirk put the Lord’s Prayer into practice.

We, as Americans, need to learn a lesson from the three of them. The next time we go to church, don’t just recite the Lord’s Prayer. Live it.

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He will return with a new column on Friday, Sept. 24

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

I was obviously a fan of the 31-year-old conservative political activist who captured the hearts and minds of millions of college kids and built Turning Point USA into a potent force that helped put Donald Trump back in the White House.

But my daughter Ashley, 42, was much more familiar than I was with Kirk’s political and cultural message that stressed old-fashioned family values, Christian faith and reasoned debate with his ideological enemies.

A mother, a Catholic school teacher and the wife of an LAPD officer, Ashley was hit hard by the murder of a good young man she feels was the conservative voice of her generation – the digital generation.

By Ashley Reagan

My generation and I learned a lot about politics from Charlie Kirk.

I was first drawn to the baby-faced conservative during Trump’s first election in 2016. I never saw him in person, but I followed him on social media and almost every time he visited a college campus I watched on YouTube.

You could always tell he deeply believed what he was talking about, whether it was the importance of the Second Amendment, the evil of abortion or the absurdity of biological men having babies.

His Christian faith was strong and unapologetic. So were his moral convictions. He lived with such intent, with such purpose, and it showed in everything he did.

When you watch somebody like that, it’s almost mesmerizing – which is why I think he had the impact he did on young people.

One of my favorite things he talked about was his role as a husband and father, and the importance of a husband working hard to take care of his family financially so his wife can stay home and take care of the children.

That traditional position earned him a lot of flak from liberals, but he didn’t care.

Another thing I liked about Kirk was that he wasn’t afraid to talk straight to the college kids who disagreed 180 degrees with him politically.

He debated with them eloquently in front of unfriendly crowds. He was never malicious. He never raised his voice. And he was never disrespectful.

The liberal media made him out to be some radical rightwing extremist, but he wasn’t.

When he articulated what he believed and why he believed it, you saw that everything came from facts and knowledge – and often from biblical facts.

He had a wealth of knowledge about many things. I felt like he gave you the armor you needed to go into those hard political conversations with people on the other side and be able to back up your positions with solid facts and arguments.

I’ve never had the death of somebody like Kirk affect me like this. I didn’t know Charlie. He was not a family member. He was not my friend.

Then I realized I was so devastated by his murder because he was our generation’s voice. He’s been a conservative voice for so many people that don’t have a voice or who are too scared to have one – especially nowadays.

I also realized he was a political and moral powerhouse for all of us. Though I’m a little bit older, he was our age. He was a dad. He had two little babies. For my generation his loss broke our hearts, but his influence lives on.

His movement will grow even bigger now that he’s been killed for his political beliefs. The left can’t stand hearing conservatives call Kirk a martyr.

On my dad’s X account someone said Kirk was not a martyr because he didn’t know the gravity of what he was doing.

But he knew he was risking his life. He knew people wanted to kill him. But he didn’t back off his beliefs or hide from the public.

Someone else put up a quote on X written by philosopher Soren Kierkegaard I think accurately predicts how his influence on my generation – and future younger ones – will continue: “The tyrant dies, and his rule is over. The martyr dies and his rule begins.”

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Maybe we do need a Civil War 2.0 – with guns.

Our politics has become so partisan and so nasty, using guns to settle our national political differences may soon end up being the only solution.

It’s bad enough no one agrees with what the other side is saying anymore.

But now when one side says something spectacularly horrible or “subtly” wishes harm on their opponent – and I’m thinking specifically about the prancing governor of Minnesota – no one on their side has the common decency to criticize them for it.

Tim Walz made a goofy loser of himself last fall as Kamala Harris VP pick. And on Labor Day he showed why he’s still the reigning buffoon of the Democratic Party.

Speaking in front of a partisan and apparently masochistic crowd in Duluth, Walz made a creepy joke based on the viral social media rumor that Trump had died because he had not been seen in public for four days.

Making weird faces, smiling, Walz said such a day would come.

“The last few days, you woke up thinking there might be news,” he said, with a nod-nod, wink-wink look on his contorted face.

“Just saying, just saying — there will be news, sometime. Just so you know, there will be news.”

Everyone knew what Walz was doing. He was playing to the sick and barely suppressed hopes of his audience and Democrats everywhere that President Trump was really dead.

It’s no secret. The deranged liberals want Trump to die – like yesterday. Like last summer. Twice.

That’s what they and 90 percent of the major media silently pray for every day – or would if they knew how to pray.

Democrats know they can’t defeat Trump on the political playing field — not with their starting team of certified losers like Walz, failed governors like my state’s Gavin Newsom and a bench of minor league nobodies from Illinois and Pennsylvania named Pritzker and Shapiro.

They can’t outsmart Trump. All they can do is mock his health and not-so-secretly wish he would die.

The only decent Democrat I saw who criticized Walz for his lame and tasteless stand up was Harold Ford Jr. – apparently the party’s last moderate – on the Fox News show “The Five.”

Republican politicians like Tom Emmer, the majority whip in the House who’s from Minnesota, blasted Walz, who has made himself an easy target since the day he was picked as Harris’ VP.

Emmer tweeted that “mocking President Trump’s health is a new low, even for you. Wishing ill on others doesn’t make you a leader—it makes you small. Minnesotans deserve better.”

CNN contributor and podcast host Scott Jennings called Walz “a massive piece of ….” on the air and other Republicans piled on, justifiably. The liberal media’s battery of biased pundits was AWOL, per usual.

Even if Trump had not already survived a pair of assassination attempts, what Walz did was as unfunny as it was reprehensible.

Threatening out loud to kill the president will earn an ordinary citizen a visit from the FBI and possibly a stretch in prison.

Wishing out loud that the president would die is politically childish and disgusting, but it’s legal.

Walz lost his mind over Trump long ago – along with the rest of his shrinking party of losers.

As someone whose father was shot and almost died, I don’t think there’s anything funny about a president getting shot or wishing and hoping a president is dead.

If Walz had made that creepy joke about my father back in the day, I wouldn’t have gone on TV to criticize him. I would have flown to Minneapolis, gone straight to his governor’s office and kicked the … out of him – with a feather.

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The liberal media and Democrats reacted in their usual kneejerk way to this week’s shootings at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.

They didn’t pin the blame on the monster who took the lives of two school children and wounded 17 others, including 14 kids, as they attended a Mass on the first day of classes.

They didn’t blame the shooting on the killer’s mental health, extreme anger at the world or his anti-semitism and love of Hitler and Timothy McVeigh.

They didn’t dare say that the shooting of innocents could have had something to do with the killer reportedly regretting his transition at age 17 from a male to a woman in 2019.

And you can be sure no one on the left ever considered the possibility the actions of a deeply depressed, confused and hate-filled young man might be the result of being on dangerous antidepressants like Zoloft or stimulants like Ritalin.

He may or may not have been on psychiatric drugs, but it is true that more than 20 mass shooters in our recent past were reportedly taking them when they went off on their killing sprees.

But liberals say the idea drugs have had anything to do with previous mass shootings by young men is so crazy only Republicans and nuts like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could believe it.

U.S. Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota is especially deranged about guns and mass shootings.

She said RFK Jr. should be fired just for saying the powerful drugs given to treat children with gender dysphoria could be partly to blame for some school shootings and the idea deserves to be studied.

Smith is a Democrat, obviously. That means she and her soulmates in Congress and the media already know the exact cause of every school shooting long before they happen.

It’s always the same thing – guns, guns, guns.

They continually chant there are too many of them in the U.S. – maybe as many as 500 million guns (fewer than .oo0o4 of which are used each year to kill someone.)

And they say the reason it is so easy for evil or insane mass killers to get their hands on high-powered firearms is because gun control laws are kept so weak by Republicans.

Smith and other Democrats claim conservatives focus on non-gun causes like mental health and antidepressants to distract from doing something to solve the problem of too many guns.

But do they and the liberal gun-hating media know that the percentage of households with guns was much higher in 1950 than it is today? Of course not.

When Truman was president, there was at least one gun in about 50 percent of all American homes, according to a 1959 Gallup poll. Today, despite all the anti-gun propaganda you hear, that number has dropped to one gun in 37 percent of homes.

Sure, there are more than twice as many Americans today and hundreds of millions more guns. But even personal gun ownership has fallen to about 32%, according to Pew.

None of these interesting gun-ownership facts matter to liberals. Guns are inherently evil. Period. They believe, as a matter of faith, that guns automatically create crime and murder, not the people who misuse them.

But if too many guns cause mass school shootings, why didn’t they occur 75 years ago, when more American households had guns?

Since the 1950s and 1960s our society, our culture and our politics have changed in too many good and bad ways to count or do anything about.

But I think one important problem we have today is how we treat our kids. Too many parents won’t face up to the fact that their kids are mentally ill.

Instead of therapy, though, they give their kids permission to be angry at the world. Parents need to be there for their kids 24/7 to help them deal with their mental problems and grow up securely and safely.

They shouldn’t be giving permission to their kids to be dangerously angry at the world all the time. And obviously they should protect them from the leftwing media – and not let them anywhere near a gun.

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Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.