Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

“Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”

That famous – and accurate – quip is a perfect way to describe the dirty political deals that are made in secret to produce so many important pieces of legislation.

But the sausage-making metaphor also applies to high stakes summit meetings with world leader, like the ones President Trump has hosted lately in Alaska and D.C.

The whole world watched Trump’s face-to-face meet-up with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, which was the start of negotiations we hope will bring an end to the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine.

It was just as well that we didn’t hear what the world’s most famous leaders said or promised to each other behind closed doors.

Trump tweeted afterwards that it had been “a great and very successful day” and that everyone involved agreed that the best way to end the war was to skip the idea of a ceasefire agreement and go directly to working on a peace agreement.

Predictably, the mainstream liberal media bashed Trump before the talks for not shaming Putin as a dictator and for putting a thug like him on a world stage.

Then, shifting into negative overdrive, they declared the talks a failure because Putin didn’t instantly break down in tears, pull his tanks out of Ukraine overnight and give back the provinces his army holds.

As usual, our corporate liberal media were trapped by their blind hatred of Trump.

They couldn’t praise Trump for starting a complicated peace process that Joe Biden refused to try to do for three years while hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians died.

The liberal media and Democrats weren’t even willing to wait 24 hours to see how these initial peace talks play out or see what happens next when – or if – Putin and Zelenskyy actually meet.

The Alaska meeting reminded me – yet again – how the liberal media and everyone else in the Free World went bonkers in 1986 when my father walked away from the nuclear weapons summit in Iceland after Gorbachev demanded we scrap our Star Wars missile defense system.

You’d have thought my father had pushed the red button to start World War III, but a year later Gorbachev was in Washington signing an arms deal.

Ending the Russian-Ukraine war soon may be impossible for Trump or anyone else.

It’s going to take a lot of economic pressure from us and Europe to make Putin sign a peace deal and agree to pull out of eastern Ukraine.

We’ll have to threaten him with strict global sanctions that would prevent Russia from selling its oil anywhere on Earth and drive its already war-weakened economy into bankruptcy.

Anyone who’s truly on Ukraine’s side, as I am, wants Trump to succeed.

But it’s going to take a lot of balls – presidential balls followed by congressional balls – to make a lasting peace. And it’s going to have to happen behind closed doors.

The valuable lesson of the Alaska meeting, which we’ve been taught many times before but still have not learned, is how silly it is for Trump or anyone else to try to do these big and important negotiations in public.

It only gives the enemy media the chance to criticize the talks, make wild guesses about what was given away and dream up all kinds of negative scenarios and future disasters.

In Trump’s case, the liberal media can’t bear to say anything positive about him. Ever.

They still want him to fail at everything he tries to do – even if it means ending a terrible and tragic war.

Meanwhile, Americans have watched enough diplomatic sausage being made. From now on, all Ukrainian peacemaking negotiations here and in Europe should be in private.

The next time we see Putin, Trump and Zelenskyy together, if we ever do, should be when they announce there’s a peace deal – or no peace deal.

Until then, let’s please all shut the heck up.

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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

Mr. Trump, “Tear down that Putin!”

That’s something my father might say at this point if he were watching Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy still struggling to end the bloody war in Ukraine.

Trump is in Alaska to meet face-to-face with Putin. Zelenskyy is waiting in the wings to wait for the big guys to decide the future of his war-torn country.

Supposedly, our president is going to get tough with Putin, the dictator of Russia and ex-KGB guy who specializes in lying, making his political enemies disappear and sending tanks into neighboring countries.

Trump has been warning he’ll impose serious economic sanctions on Russia if Putin doesn’t agree to end the war he started in early 2022.

We’ll find out soon whether our dealmaker-in-chief’s trip was a waste of jet fuel or a breakthrough that leads to an immediate ceasefire and a permanent peace settlement.

For three years Putin and Trump reportedly have had warm and friendly phone calls about the war in Ukraine.

Putin has made promises about ceasefires and pullbacks, but he’s broken them and proved to be a liar.

It is time for Trump to take the gloves off. It’s time to out bully the bully.

In Alaska Trump should tell Putin, “Here’s the deal, Vlad. Do what we say or suffer the consequences.

“Quit with the fake threats about using nuclear weapons. It’s time to stop this terrible war that you started. It’s time for you to go home.

“I’m tired of middle-of-the-night phone calls. And I’m tired of my wife saying, ‘Honey, every time you talk to that SOB, 24 hours later he’s bombing the crap out of Ukraine.’

“If you don’t stop the war in the next 48 hours and pull your guys out of Ukraine, I’m going to cut off your oil exports and cut off your international banking. I’m going to bankrupt you and give Ukraine everything they need to defend themselves.

“You get nothing now. We’re not negotiating with a guy who went to war illegally and runs a country that’s putting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children your soldiers kidnapped up for adoption on the Internet. That’s a war crime. We’re done with you.

“We’ll talk later about whether you can keep any part of the territory you’ve captured in eastern Ukraine – after you go home.”

It’s time we set the ground rules for bringing about peace in Ukraine. Not Putin.

What happens in Alaska should be like what happened in 1986, when my father met Mikhail Gorbachev at the arms control summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.

All his experts had told Gorbachev when he went to meet my father that the Americans always give in, which up to then was basically true.

But when Gorby said part of a nuclear arms deal meant that we had to give up our Star Wars missile defense system, my father shocked Gorbachev and the world and said, “Nyet.”

It’s time for us to say “Nyet” to Putin.

Now is not the time for us to go backwards – or for Trump to “go wobbly,” as Maggie Thatcher said to George H.W. Bush in 1990 when Bush was wondering whether to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

No one is afraid Trump will go wobbly. He’ll be happy to impose international sanctions that will bankrupt Putin’s Russia, whose war-weakened economy is in bad shape.

My dad never said it out loud in Iceland, but he basically made it clear to Gorbachev that “You can play my way, or I can bankrupt you.”

Trump can make that same promise to Putin in Alaska – and he should. The war in Ukraine he said he’d end in 24 hours if he became president has gone on for far too long.

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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

Everyone gets what President Trump is trying to do in Texas.

He’s pushed the state’s Republicans to redraw the boundaries of its congressional districts now instead of at the end of the decade so the GOP can pick up five more U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterms.

Trump understandably wants his MAGA Revolution to have four full years to make America great again.

Another five seats in the very red state of Texas could expand the GOP’s narrow majority in the House and thwart Democrats’ pipe-dreams of legislatively sabotaging the last two years of Trump’s reign.

It’s encouraging to see Trump getting his party to play major league hardball for a change, but he’d better be careful.

Remember the old saying “What goes around comes around”? It’s bipartisan.

In 2013 Democrats running the U.S. Senate thought they were smart to change the rules for confirming federal judges from a two-thirds vote to a simple majority.

But when Republicans regained control of the Senate, they used the so-called “nuclear option” to confirm enough conservative Supreme Court justices to build a 6-3 conservative majority. Democrats have been crying ever since.

Trump’s push to get five more House seats for Republicans may work in the short run, but it also might backfire.

His scheme has riled up the governors of already well-gerrymandered blue states like California, New York and Illinois who are threatening to retaliate by doing some more gerrymandering of their own.

So far, the turmoil in Texas been a political win for Republicans, thanks to about 50 Democrat lawmakers. They made fools of themselves by flying like a flock of chickens to Illinois instead of voting against a bill they knew they couldn’t stop.

They should have played the game of democracy by the rules.

They should have stayed home and voted, accepted defeat and then gone to the courts to see if they could win their case there. Running away so there wouldn’t be a quorum for a vote was a media stunt that only delayed their inevitable loss.

The Texas Democrats should have taken a cue from the Republicans in California’s Assembly. They have been hopelessly outnumbered by Democrats in Sacramento since the birth of Christ.

They can’t stop Democrats from passing their crazy and destructive bills or pass a sensible bill of their own. But they don’t pull stunts like running out of the state.

Meanwhile, though you rarely if ever hear it from the biased national liberal media, Donald Trump and Republicans didn’t invent gerrymandering last week.

Since America was born, major political parties have practiced the dark arts of drawing crazy amoeba- and snake-shaped lines on the maps of their states to create safe voting districts for themselves.

Gerrymandering is part of the reason there are 11 blue states with zero Republicans in the U.S. House today.

In 2024 Trump got between about 32 percent and 48 percent of the vote in those 11 smallish states, which include Delaware, Vermont, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Mexico and Connecticut.

Other lopsided states with millions of un-represented Republicans living outside big cities include Maryland (1 Republican and 7 Democrat House members), Illinois (3 Republicans and 14 Democrats) and California (43 Democrats and 9 Republicans).

The worst case is deep blue Massachusetts, where Trump managed to get about 32 percent of the vote.

It’s fitting, I guess. Massachusetts is the birthplace of the term “gerry-mandering,” thanks to one of its slickest early governors, Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 infamously drew a voting district in Boston that looked like a salamander.

Perhaps it’s a tribute to Gerry’s pioneering political skills that today Massachusetts has nine U.S. House members and not a single one is a Republican.

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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 doesn’t matter how much Trump does to help America become great again.

Whatever it is, we know the liberal media and Democrats will still instantly go negative and blast him for hurting someone.

Remember in the spring when Trump announced he was going to negotiate new tariff levels with every country on the planet and put America economic interests first for a change?

All we got from Democrats and the liberal media were the usual howls of negativity and Trump hatred.

They said he was an economic illiterate. He was going to spike inflation and make American consumers pay higher prices on our BMWs, iPhones and tomatoes.

We’re still waiting for that crippling “tariff inflation” to arrive.

And so far, it seems U.S. and foreign corporations are eating the cost of the tariffs themselves and not passing the higher prices of imports on to consumers.

In the meantime, the federal government already has collected $150 billion in tariff revenues and there are many more billions to come.

Because of Trump’s personal crusade to level the global trade playing field and end decades of Uncle Sam being treated like a rich sucker by the rest of the world, scores of countries have decided to lower or equalize their tariffs with ours.

Plus, some major foreign companies have announced plans to build new factories in the USA to avoid tariffs. Others have agreed to invest hundreds of billions in our economy.

None of those good things mattered to Trump haters though.

Now this week Trump has come back from Europe with a huge trade deal that equalizes our tariffs with the EU at 15 percent on most products and opens the EU’s huge market for the first time to many more of our exports.

On top of that, Trump got the EU to promise to purchase $750 billion worth of our oil and natural gas over the next three years and buy $600 billion worth of military equipment.

That sounds like a fairly great deal for our workers and our economy, and it is.

So how did the hate groups running the New York Times and Washington Post react to Trump’s victory in Europe?

They were bummed. They couldn’t give a token cheer for Trump or the U.S. They downplayed and nitpicked at the deal.

The Times and the Post actually worried that the cost was too great for the EU. They thought Trump had made 27 economically sluggish countries the latest victim of his bullying.

The haters will never accept that Trump has done anything good for the country. To their deranged brains, he is and always will be a dumb, out-of-control dictator.

But Trump really is a smart businessman. He behaves and thinks like a savvy businessman, not a politician or a bureaucrat.

He doesn’t drag things out or study them to death. He acts. And he’ll usually say what almost every sensible American thinks but is too scared to say out loud.

For example, he’s not afraid to call Al Gore a climate nutjob, which he is, or state that wind turbines are ugly wastes of government money that kill birds, hurt the environment and should go extinct.

For decades we’ve heard Republicans, independents and even some sensible Democrats say what America needed was a president who was a good businessman.

Well, we’ve got one now.

He’s been acting like the businessman in chief, making executive decisions so fast his deranged critics can’t keep up with him.

Sometimes he does or says the wrong things. Sometimes he’s too mean to his enemies – or friends.

But he’s bold, decisive and not afraid to make big and important things happen – which is what you’d expect from the first CEO of America.

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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

When Stephen Colbert became a financial disaster for CBS, its execs fired him.

For good measure, they also killed the “The Late Show,” the network’s failing 33-year-old flag-ship late-night program.

CBS could have axed Colbert now and replaced him with a cheaper host from Hollywood’s limitless stable of professional Trump haters.

They still might do just that if Colbert continues to use his show for the next 10 months to deliver F-bombs to President Trump.

But for now, the network is keeping the insufferable Colbert at his desk until next May.

Colbert, who for years has hated on Trump every night, is now being held up by his deranged fans as a brave First Amendment warrior and victim of Trump’s dangerous “dictatorship.”

According to some Colbert fans, the bosses at Paramount, which owns CBS, fired Colbert because Paramount needed the Trump administration’s approval for its plan to merge with Skydance Media (which the FCC has granted).

Other fans are signing “Save Colbert” petitions and mourning his firing like he was a living saint. Some of his talk show competitors, including Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and Jon Stewart, have even appeared on TV to show their brotherly support.

And a liberal journalist in love with Colbert at the left-wing Guardian newspaper really lost it.

She praised him as “the reverend father of late-night TV: principled, authoritative but hardly ever self-righteous, deeply faithful to the American project, steadfastly believing in the decency of others.”

She and Colbert’s other 1.9 million nightly idolaters are pathetic. They have no idea how poorly their hero compares to great late-night stars like Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman.

Those giants didn’t spew their own politics every night – or at all. They weren’t predictable partisans whose opening monologues were nasty political attacks.

No one knew for sure how Carson, Leno or Letterman voted or what their politics were.

Their guests were liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, Gore Vidal to William F. Buckley Jr., and they were treated with equal respect – and gentle humor.

And let’s face it. The only reason Colbert, Kimmel and Fallon are allowed to bash Trump every night with their lousy jokes is because that is what their corporate bosses want to hear.

CBS was willing to lose $40 million a year on Colbert’s “I Hate Trump Hour,” which has a $100 million budget and 200 employees who average about $250,000 a year. What they do all day is a mystery, but it’s proof that CBS is the bloated corpocracy it has always been.

The other late-night hosts don’t cost nearly as much as Colbert, but they’re doomed too.

The obsolete late-night format has been in a death spiral for almost a decade. Ratings have fallen through the floor, which is why their ad revenues are reportedly down 50 percent since 2018.

TV needs to attract eyeballs, specifically eyeballs between the advertising-coveted ages of 25 and 54. But late-night ratings are in the toilet.

Colbert has the highest late-night ratings on the broadcast networks, but all of them are blown away by Fox News’ “Gutfeld” and its 3.1 million nightly viewers.

“Gutfeld’s” top ratings are partly due to the show’s conservative-libertarian politics and partly because it comes on at 10 p.m.

But what makes Greg Gutfeld’s show so entertaining and profitable is that it specializes in conservative merriment and fun, not anger.

Yes, it is a non-stop hour of mocking liberals. But it is not non-stop hate – and it’s more interested in entertaining people than delivering propaganda or throwing childish F-bombs at politicians.

Carson, Leno and Letterman made you laugh, not mad. They had fun every night – and it showed.

They and their bosses knew it was bad business to hate one party or politician because it would quickly drive away half of their audience.

They didn’t want a Red audience or a Blue audience. They wanted the biggest audience they could get. And unlike Colbert, they wanted to make people laugh, not angry.

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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 only taken 45 years for my father’s dream to come true – at least in part.

But thanks to Donald Trump, a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, the Department of Education is finally being dismantled.

My father called for the DOE to be abolished when he ran for president in 1980.

It didn’t happen, of course, and he couldn’t make it happen because Democrats ran Congress.

Creating a Cabinet-level DOE in 1979 was Jimmy Carter’s gift – some might call it a bribe — to the hurtful teacher unions, which have since paid back Democrats with millions of votes and billions in campaign donations.

The DOE was an unnecessary, wasteful and harmful federal intrusion into an area that was rightly and sensibly controlled by states and localities.

Liberals loved it because it gave them billions to spend on their dirty work.

But almost every conservative Republican presidential candidate including Trump promised to abolish the DOE – but never did or could.

By 2024 the DOE employed 4,133 bureaucrats. It spent an annual budget of $268 billion. Now it’s down to 2,183 people and falling.

DOE doesn’t hire teachers and it doesn’t concoct or impose curriculums on school districts.

Most of the billions it spent last year – $160 billion, in fact – went for college loans, direct student aid and things like Pell grants for college students.

Special education for younger school kids cost $16 billion and Covid-19 recovery grants still ate up $55 billion, for God knows what.

Most of DOE’s budget is spent in the form of sending checks to states and localities – which another federal bureaucracy like the Small Business Administration can easily do. Other federal agencies can do the rest of the paperwork DOE’s been doing.

Federal bureaucracies are harder to kill than Dracula. And any attempt to cut them back even 10 percent, as we’ve seen, is greeted by Democrats and the liberal media like it’s a national tragedy.

In the case of the DOE, whatever it has been doing all these years to help the poorest students learn their ABCs and their times tables hasn’t worked.

We’ve all heard the sad statistics from the public schools in our big blue cities: for one example, three-quarters of the kids in Chicago don’t read at grade level and 83% don’t meet proficiency in math.

But here’s a bunch of even more depressing numbers I found.

According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, “70% of all incarcerated adults cannot read at a fourth-grade level, meaning they lack the reading skills to navigate everyday tasks.”

And according to the Literacy Project Foundation and Invisible Children, “between 60% and 75% of prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Up to 19% are considered completely illiterate (unable to read at all).”

In other words, our overflowing prisons are composed of the under-schooled alumni of our public education system.

Our criminal population is living proof that way too many of our kids “graduate” from high school without knowing anything but how to handle a Glock.

One of the reasons so many students are unprepared to make an honest living and live happily ever after, says “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe, is that for decades we have over-emphasized the importance of college prep courses and eliminated vocational arts from high schools.

If you’re old, you remember when high schools had shop classes that taught kids how to use tools and build and fix stuff. The classes worked.

Kids who were not suited to get a BA in Icelandic poetry were set off in the direction of community colleges, trade schools and apprentice programs and ended up having well-paying, life-long, blue-collar careers in construction and important trades like plumbing.

Public schools and the DOE have been failing America’s poorest kids for decades. Parents know it. It’s why private schools and Catholic schools and homeschooling among blacks have grown in popularity.

Skipping public school is no longer a bad thing. It’s the smartest way to avoid your kids getting a diploma they can’t read.

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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

Here in the sanctuary city of L.A., it’s political theater as usual.

On Monday, Mayor Karen Bass complained on camera about the sweeping immigration enforcement raid in the city’s MacArthur Park by ICE officers and the Border Patrol.

She stormed over to the park with a gaggle of friendly media and confronted the immigration officials – after they had made the dangerous park safe for her, of course.

Calling ICE’s action to clear MS-13 gang members out of the park “a political stunt,” Bass demanded the agents leave. She later told the media the sweep was “un-American.”

For those who don’t know, MacArthur Park used to be a peaceful green oasis in the city where you could take your kids for a picnic on a Sunday afternoon.

But in recent years it’s been virtually captured by homeless people, drug addicts and violent gangs.

Hopefully it should be a safer park now that ICE and President Trump are cleaning up the immigration mess that Joe Biden left us.

The sad thing is, Mayor Bass’ grandstanding and angry rhetoric is not unique among Democrats.

The top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, has compared ICE to the Gestapo and says its agents should not be able to wear masks while they are arresting illegal immigrants. Some Democrats think it’d be cool to shoot ICE agents.

Instead of wasting everyone’s time putting on stunts and saying stupid things about ICE, I have a better idea for Democrats like Bass, Jeffries and influential black leaders like Obama, Oprah and LeBron James.

They should be leading a national crusade to solve the ongoing national tragedy in the black community that my Pittsburgh friend Bill Steigerwald calls “The American Slaughter.”

Steigerwald (clips.substack.com), is an ex-journalist and book author who has been studying America’s annual homicide statistics.

This year the good news is that so far homicides in our top-30 most murderous cities are down an average of about 21 percent from 2024.

It’s true even in Chicago, where the predictable gang shooting sprees on July 4th weekends are faithfully covered each year like baseball scores by the national media.

The July 4th weekend toll this year was “only” 11 dead and 42 wounded — less than half of Chicago’s 2024 numbers. And as of July 1, total homicides are 100 behind last year’s pace.

For decades Barack Obama’s home turf of Chicago has been a notorious killing field for young black men.

Steigerwald’s back-of-the-envelope estimate is that at least 300 men and boys have been murdered in Chicago every year since 1995 – a total of nearly 10,000 victims.

Terrible as it is, Chicago’s annual death toll makes up only a fraction of a national slaughter of young black men that has been happening for decades.

Based on Steigerwald’s figuring, at least 5,000 young black males have been murdered each year across the USA since 1995.

For the math impaired, that adds up to the shocking and tragic total of 150,000 dead young black men – killed almost exclusively by other young black men, senselessly, and usually with handguns.

One hundred and fifty thousand homicides is a figure almost impossible to believe – or ignore.

Steigerwald says that “reducing this perpetual urban slaughter should have been the chief concern of black leaders and the legacy news media for decades.”

But he says black leaders didn’t want to talk about the slaughter and the national media – which still hasn’t discovered its scope – didn’t want to ask them what they were going to do about it.

Steigerwald says don’t expect any “black leaders, movie stars, politicians or important media figures” to “jump in front of the cameras and declare a national crisis or call for a national crusade to slow the mass killing of their sons.

“They’ll do what they’ve always done — call for more gun control or blame poverty or racism or slavery or bad cops or food stamp cuts.”

Meanwhile, failed leaders like Mayor Bass will continue to rant about how ICE’s enforcement is hurting her wrecked sanctuary city while real crime and the bloody American Slaughter goes on and on.

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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

If you really want to appreciate America, leave.

That’s right. Get out. Go somewhere you’ve never been for two weeks. See how the rest of the world lives.

It’s not until you travel out of the U.S. that you really learn how wonderful and great our country is.

I just came back from a trip to Spain, France and Italy on a cruise ship that I took with my wife Colleen and 40 of her travel clients.

I’ve been lucky to travel with her to many foreign places while she does her job.

I’ve been to the best cities and countries in Europe. Paris, Madrid, Rome, Budapest. I have been to more exotic places like Cairo, Singapore and Taiwan.

You obviously can learn a lot more by traveling to another country that you’ll never learn in a million years of watching videos or reading books.

It’s great to meet their people and learn about their history and culture. But some of their rules and policies are not quite as liberal as good old USA’s.

For instance, when you go to Cairo you are impressed to learn that Egypt has no drug problem. Then you find out it’s because if you’re caught trafficking heroin or cocaine, you can get the death penalty.

Ditto for illegal drug traffickers caught in the squeaky-clean city of Singapore. Its authoritarian government is so strict there’s a mandatory death penalty for trafficking more than 30 grams of heroin.

Singapore is infamous. Just spitting on the sidewalk can still get you fined nearly a thousand U.S. dollars or tossed in jail and importing and selling chewing gum is illegal.

Learning about those kinds of negative things while traveling in another country makes you extra-grateful you’re an American.

So does paying $7.68 for a gallon of gasoline in Italy or Spain, which makes California’s outrageous $4.50 price per gallon look like a bargain.

Sometimes when you live in a city like Los Angeles or New York and never leave it’s easy for us to forget how great America is.

All you see and hear about in the local and national media are complaints and problems and crises – too little affordable housing here, too much crime there, too many illegal immigrants here ….

But if you go far away and see what other countries are like and see for yourself what their people have or don’t have, you’ll get it. You’ll get America’s greatness.

You’ll be reminded of the freedom and prosperity we have. And you’ll understand why millions of foreigners today are still willing to risk their lives or pay a fortune to get here.

Because so many Americans never travel outside of their home states, cities or even area codes, they begin to think everywhere in America is just like their neighborhoods.

They have no idea what it’s really like to live in LA or New York or why tens of millions live there. Everything they hear about those places from the news and entertainment media is negative or outrageous.

Heck, there are spoiled kids who grow up in certain zip codes of California who think the whole country is made of people like them driving around in Teslas, living in $3 million houses and eating $25 hamburgers.

Those kids have no idea what life is like in Peoria or Pittsburgh and the only way they will ever find out anything is to actually visit or at least pass through those kinds of Flyover places.

Traveling in the United States – especially by car – is the best way to understand how free America is, how big and beautiful it is, how rich and healthy it is and how good its people are.

And traveling to foreign countries is one of the best ways to appreciate the greatness of America.

It’s why every time I return from one of my trips overseas with Colleen, I go, “Oh my God, I’m home. It’s so great to be American.”

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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

What were the Democrats in New York thinking?

Eight months after being humiliated by Donald Trump, they’ve chosen a devout socialist to run for mayor of arguably the country’s most important city.

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old leftwing state senator who defeated disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, sounds like Fidel lite. But he’s already been branded a “Communist lunatic” by President Trump.

Among the many bad ideas Mamdani successfully ran on were promising to open city-owned grocery stores, imposing more rent control and raising taxes on the rich people who haven’t already split for Florida.

The Democrat Party is beyond sad. It hates Trump so blindly it is willing to nominate a mayoral candidate who is to the left of AOC and her fellow regressives.

On a national level, the party’s latest act of self-harm is calling for President Trump to be impeached again.

This time it’s because he didn’t call up Congress and tell them he was going to drop a six pack of 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend.

Everyone – except the Democrats and their PR outlets CNN and MSNBC – knows why Trump kept his plans quiet: Democrats can’t even be trusted to keep top military secrets – especially if they’re Trump’s.

It’s been much worse with Trump, but leaking to the media to do a Republican political harm is a Democrat tradition.

I remember the time a balding young U.S. senator named Joe Biden told my father that if he had our military plan a covert operation he didn’t agree with, he’d leak it to sabotage it. Good thing Trump wasn’t commander in chief on D-Day, I guess.

I recently got home after a vacation in Europe. I was in Spain, southern France and Italy and didn’t see a single anti-American riot or “I hate Trump sign.”

Unlike our homeland’s deranged Democrats, Europe’s leaders and peoples seem to be learning to appreciate Trump’s decisive and bold dealmaking skills.

Maybe they’ve realized America finally has a president again who’s got a pair and is not afraid to stick up for his country’s interests first.

One reason the Cold War lasted 45 years was because Democrats were in charge of foreign policy for so long.

From Carter to Clinton through Obama and Biden, Democrats practiced the Rodney King school of foreign policy – “Can’t we all just get along?”

It took a strong president like my father to come along and end the Cold War – by setting out to win it. Now we’re seeing “peace through strength” and “America First” work again with Trump.

Democrats and never-Trump Republicans can’t stomach Trump’s TV persona or the rough and rude way he does business, even if it stops a bloody war.

But Trump is Trump. He’s not a politician. He’s a hard-nosed son of a gun who had to deal with the corrupt, dirty business and political climate in New York.

And thank God for that tough attitude. It’s what it takes to succeed in Washington and to win at negotiating with world leaders who are often well-armed dictators and thugs who hate us.

We just saw how NATO members reacted to Trump 2.0. After decades of taking advantage of the U.S., they suddenly want to make Trump happy by forking over a fair share of their GDP for their own defense.

“You want 5% of GDP Mr. Trump, you get 5%. OK? We’re gonna call you ‘Daddy.’ Is that enough, Daddy, just 5%?”

Trump is on a hot streak at home and overseas. It’s obvious now that in the long run the best thing that ever happened to him — and our country – was losing in 2020.

His first term in Washington was a steep learning curve for Trump. From 2020 to 2024 the disastrous Biden presidency was a learning curve for the country — except in New York, where Democrats clearly didn’t learn a thing.

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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 could just be me, but 2025 is starting to look like 1980.

If you’re old enough to remember back that far, my father was campaigning against Jimmy Carter and Iran was in the headlines.

In November of 1979 Iranian students had seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and were still holding 66 Americans hostage.

President Carter was under intense pressure to get the Americans freed, but negotiations and a military rescue mission failed.

Carter looked weak and ineffective, which he was. The mainstream media of the time – just three TV networks, PBS and the establishment print press – were leading with the hostage story every day.

The hostage crisis in Iran turned out to be the central issue of the 1980 election. My father capitalized on it and domestic issues like high inflation to roll to an easy win.

In that 1980 campaign, my father was in many ways a more dignified, more conservative prequel to Donald Trump and the messages Trump would run on in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

My father talked about making America great again and peace through strength, and the liberal media was united against him for his anti-communism.

They smeared him incessantly as a scary, trigger-happy warmonger who was itching to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union or bomb Iran into a parking lot.

But my father was clever in the 1980 race. He made sure to never spell out exactly what he planned to do about the hostages or what he planned to do to Iran if he became president.

He was asked about the hostages all the time by the media, but he kept the country – and, more important, the Iranians – guessing.

He just stood back and let the left’s wild claims about all the military things he might do to Iran do the scaring for him.

Not being specific paid off.

On the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, the nervous Iranian mullahs released the hostages – and for the next eight years my father never blew up the world a single time.

Now look at what’s happening. Iran is again the big story overseas and we again have a president who everyone on the left thinks is going to start World War III tomorrow.

The left is terrified about what Trump might do militarily to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Will he OK the direct use of our air force or airborne troops to help Israel win its preemptive war with Iran? Will he use one of our bombers to drop a 30,000-pound bunker buster or two on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities?

Who knows?

You don’t hear Trump denying anything, right? He just keeps everyone guessing – especially the Iranians.

Is his dogged public uncertainty one of his “art of the deal” tactics to get Iran to come to the negotiating table? Probably.

In 1980 not saying anything and allowing the liberal media and the left to sell the Iranian mullahs the idea that their country might soon become a parking lot worked very well for my father.

Today we’ve got the media selling the similar idea that Trump is dangerously out of control and is going to bomb Tehran back to the Stone Age.

Whether Trump is inadvertently lifting a page from the Reagan playbook, or doing it deliberately doesn’t matter.

Presidential uncertainty worked well for my father. It helped to get the hostages free.

Let’s hope and pray that Trump’s infamous unpredictability ends this crisis so Iran becomes nuke free.

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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.