Cagle World

The president rolled another flash grenade onto our political stage this week, and it sent the Trump Hate Media into a predictable tizzy.

Trump was called a racist – for the umpteenth time – because he said he plans to use an executive order to put an end to birthright citizenship.

Birthright citizenship, made possible by the 14th Amendment, is the automatic granting of U.S. citizenship to any Mexican, Chinese, Russian, Kenyan or Martian baby who is born on American soil.

I made up the Martian part, though it’s probably true.

But thanks to a relatively recent and very liberal misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, even though the baby’s parents are non-citizens, if they are born in America they get full U.S. citizenship.

For the rest of their lives these so-called “anchor babies” are given the right to live and work in the United States and collect benefits, just like anyone born in Beverly Hills.

Even better for the lucky foreign babies, when they turn 21 they can start applying for green cards to bring in their mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents and Facebook friends to America.

I made up the Facebook part.

But it sounds like something President Trump might say when he is arguing that anchor babies need to be outlawed because they create the “chain migration” that allows extended family members from foreign lands to end up living in the U.S..

Not that you learned it in high school, but the 14th Amendment, known as one of the Reconstruction Amendments, was passed after the Civil War in 1868.

The first sentence of the first section reads:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Not that you learned it in college, but the 14th Amendment was specifically written to grant full citizenship rights to all former slaves and their children and to prevent the states from writing new laws depriving them of those rights (which, shamefully, the Southern states did when they passed their racist Jim Crow laws in the late 1800s).

Not that you learned it from the media, but the 14th Amendment was never intended to automatically award U.S. citizenship to the babies of foreign parents who happen to be here when their child was born.

It certainly wasn’t meant to create the “birth tourism” business, which is run by Russian and Chinese companies that make it possible for wealthy foreigners to visit the United States for a month or two so their newborns arrive on our soil.

It was reckless of President Trump to throw out his “anchor baby” grenade a week before the important midterm elections.

It only gave the Trump Hate Media and Democrats another chance to bash, blame and mock the president.

The media never tried to explain how something written to protect slaves 150 years ago had morphed into an open legal door for birthright citizenship.

The liberal media never got around to talking about how the “birthright clause” has created the growth of a birth tourism industry.

And President Trump’s media enemies sure didn’t remind us that before the Democrats were against getting rid of anchor babies, they were in favor of getting rid of them.

We badly need immigration reform that is smart for America, not harmful.

I hope Trump can win his latest battle.

Ultimately it’s going to be up to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether birthright citizenship for foreign nationals as we’ve known it for decades can be ended with a few strokes of his executive pen.

But there’s little doubt that birthright citizenship is wrong for the United States. So are anchor babies.

It’s time for us to fix the constitutional loophole that created them. It’s also time for our schools to do a better job of teaching American history.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Guess which future leader of the United States said this about illegal immigrants in 2006:

“We are a generous and welcoming people, but those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law.

“And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders we simply cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undetected, undocumented and unchecked.

“Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of immigration law.”

Donald Trump, right?

Not exactly.

Try rookie U.S. Senator Barack Obama.

Remember the good old days of about a decade ago, when Democrats were in favor of strong borders and the strict enforcement of immigration laws?

Until Trump was elected, the Obamas, Clintons and Schumers of the land gave tough-sounding speeches on illegal immigrants and argued in favor of strong borders.

But Democrats have been against Donald Trump’s famous border wall since Day One.

They insist over and over today that they are in favor of humane immigration reform, not open borders.

Yet look what happens when a “caravan” of as many as 14,000 men, women and children from Central America marches toward the United States with the intention of invading us.

The Democrats’ solution is to warmly welcome the immigrant invaders into our country, give them plenty of free government help, let them go free while they process their asylum claims for a year or two – and encourage them to register as Democrats as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Democrats and the liberal media are quick to call Trump uncompassionate and a racist for wanting to use the U.S. military to prevent a mob of poor illegal immigrants from crashing our border.

CNN, NBC, the New York Times and their ilk won’t put Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or Hillary Clinton on the spot by asking them point-blank how they’d handle the “caravan.”

But if they asked me, I have an idea they wouldn’t like too much.

Our military should meet the economic “refugees” at the border, give them all the arms and ammo they want and bus them back to their home countries where they can overthrow their bad governments and gain their human freedoms.

The Democrats’ generous open-door policy toward illegal immigrants has already cost California taxpayers billions, caused social and economic problems and made it a sanctuary state.

Things are only going to get worse after Nov. 6 when Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to be elected governor.

Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco whose policies turned that city into a homeless campground, thinks it’s just great that 14,000 economic “refugees” from Central America are marching toward Texas.

Like Democrats across the country, Newsom has no issue to run on except hatred of Donald Trump.

A victory for him over Republican John Cox will speed up California’s death spiral and prove how incredibly stupid my state’s electorate is.

Democrats have nothing positive to offer America, either.

Their only hope is that voters hate Donald Trump so much they’ll give Democrats control of the House of Representatives so they’ll be able to impeach President Trump and block his policies.

It’s a shame they are so blinded by their hatred of the president that they are willing to throw away GDP growth of 4.2 percent, historic low unemployment and lower taxes in exchange for what – a borderless country and Bernie Sanders-style socialism?

The Democrats’ hatred reminds me of the time someone asked Israel’s Golda Meier when she thought there would be peace in the Middle East.

She said it would only happen when Palestinians start loving their children more than they hate the Jews.

It’s the same for America in 2018.

Our political civil war will end only when the Democrats start loving their country more than they hate Donald Trump.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

The midterms are coming up in a couple of weeks, in case you hadn’t noticed.

I’m living out here in California, but I’m sure the same thing is going on across the country.

All the Democrats in federal and statewide races are not running for anything, they’re all running against Donald Trump.

It’s a pretty desperate – and stupid – strategy by the Democrats that’s based on their deranged hatred of President Trump.

It hard to watch the Dems illogic.

To be against Trump means you have to be against lower income taxes, against an economy growing at 4.2 percent, against unemployment being down to 3.6 percent, against more blacks and Latinos working than ever before and against more people getting off food stamps.

Here in California, where we have Gavin Newsom running for governor to replace Jerry Brown, it’s especially absurd.

Newsom is the former mayor of San Francisco, a city now known around the world for its squalid homeless encampments and sidewalks covered in used drug needles and human feces.

Thanks to the social policies of Newsom and his fellow “progressive” Democrats, one of the world’s prettiest cities has literally been turned into a s-hole. Los Angeles is not far behind.

Democrats’ one-party rule has also wrecked a once great and Golden State. Our state taxes are obscene, our infrastructure is crumbling, our poverty rate has soared, our public schools — once ranked first in the country – are now No. 46.

Over-taxed and over-regulated businesses are fleeing in droves to Nevada or Texas. People are moving out because they can’t afford to live here anymore.

And meanwhile, you have the super-liberal Newsom – who’ll make Jerry Brown look like my father — running for governor by running against Trump?

Unfortunately, Newsom is probably going to win. He’s up by 5 points over Republican John Cox, which isn’t that bad in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 54 to 26 percent.

But the Republican National Committee has given up on California. It’s spending no money to help Cox.

It’s extremely frustrating to watch how Democrats around the country have turned the midterms into a referendum on Donald Trump’s persona.

They and their biased friends in the mainstream media make the president out to be pure evil.

As I’ve said a million times, you might not like Trump personally or like what he says or tweets.

But you don’t have to sleep with him. Or eat dinner with him. Or visit his house.

Trump’s economic success cannot be denied – unless you work for CNN or MSNBC.

Isn’t America better off after his first two years? Isn’t the economy better? Don’t you have more money in your pocket after taxes? A bigger 401(k)? A better job?

The Democrats will try to un-do everything Trump has done.Do you realize what will happen if they retake control of the House of Representatives for the next two years?

The president won’t be signing Republican legislation, he’ll be vetoing Democrat legislation.

The Democrats are able to peddle their Hate Trump message for one reason — they get 24/7 help from the biased mainstream media.

The liberal media bash the president every day, demeaning his successes at home and abroad.

The only places you regularly hear reports about our strong economy are on the Fox cable channels, Newsmax or conservative talk radio.

So, my advice to America’s voters for the midterms is pretty simple.

If you want your city to become a homeless hell like San Francisco, vote Democrat.

If you want your state to become a fiscal and social wreck like California, vote Democrat.

If you want to return to a stagnant economy, higher taxes and open our borders to caravans of illegal immigrants from Honduras, vote Democrat.

Unless you’re dying to know what it’s like to live in Venezuela, you’ll be sorry.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

The Democrats and their parrots and lapdogs in the liberal media never stop accusing people on the right of being racists, sexists and homophobes.

But if you pay even the slightest attention to what the left says and does, you know that they are the real bigots.

They’re the ones who thought it was real funny – and perfectly OK – when a “Saturday Night Live” skit on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings last weekend used the word “queen” and other gay-world references to imply that Republican Senator Lindsay Graham was secretly gay.

The left are also the ones who didn’t complain the other night when Don Lemon laughed along with his panel of CNN nobodies as they mocked Kanye West for being President Trump’s “token Negro.”

If any Republican or Fox News host ever referred to someone like Lemon “queen” or called him CNN’s “token Negro,” they’d be branded a racist homophobe by the liberal media and forced off the air forever.

The latest example of the left’s devious wordplay is its new definition of the word “mob.”

Tucker Carlson, who said the mindless anti-Kavanaugh protesters banging on the Supreme Court’s doors last week reminded him of zombies from the Netflix series “The Walking Dead,” correctly called them a “mob.”

But CNN and their liberal ilk disagreed.

As far as they are concerned, only right-wingers can become a dangerous mob – like the angry Tea Party activists who showed up and shouted at political meetings back in 2010.

Creepy Antifa kids disrupting traffic and harassing old folks in Portland?

Gangs of progressive screamers showing up in restaurants to publicly harass Republican officials or politicians?

The leftwing media say they are not really “mobs.”

They’re principled, youthful protestors trying to build a kinder, gentler, socialist world for every American who’s not rich enough to buy their own car.

The voting public is not fooled by this double standard in the liberal media.

They know it’s not Republicans who are telling their people to chase politicians or pundits out of restaurants.

They know it’s Democrats like Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Irresponsible Democrats like her are going to get someone killed – a Republican someone.

It almost happened last year when their attacks on President Trump and Republicans incited some “progressive” nut ball to start shooting Republican congressmen practicing at a Washington baseball field.

Now, thanks to the Democrats’ ugly smear campaign against Judge Kavanaugh, Republican senators like Susan Collins and Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders need security guards 24/7.

It’s not the new Supreme Court Justice who’s evil.

It’s the Democrat Party and the nasty “progressives” who’ve taken it over and are willing to say or do anything or destroy anyone to bring down President Trump.

Maybe this is not something new. Maybe the Democrats have always been this evil.

Maybe my father foresaw the future when he said in the early 1960s that he didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the party left him.

Where are the Hubert Humphreys, Scoop Jacksons and Daniel Moynihans? Where are great Democratic statesmen of yesterday? They don’t exist.

The Democrat Party is no longer the Party of FDR. It’s the party of destruction.

Sometimes it almost makes me glad that my father is not alive to witness this sad state of our politics – or FDR. Or Lincoln. Or the Founding Fathers.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

The Kavanaugh Nightmare is almost over.

For almost three weeks Judge Brett Kavanaugh – a good father, a good man, a brilliant conservative legal jurist – has had his reputation permanently trashed and dragged through the mud by Democrats and their willing accomplices in the liberal media.

No political charge or fake allegation was too slimy for the Democrats, who were never going to vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh.

They were interested only in destroying his life and keeping the Supreme Court’s ninth seat open until they got back in power in the Senate.

Kavanaugh is lucky he’s a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, because if he doesn’t make it on to the U.S. Supreme Court, he probably won’t be able to get another job.

Thanks to the Democrat hit-men and women, he won’t even be allowed to coach his daughters’ basketball team.

The Democrats have presented the whole country with a prime-time example of how their politics of personal destruction works.

Anything wrong you ever said, wrote or did all the way back to grade school is now eligible for a public smearing by the Democrats and the liberal media.

After what happened to Kavanaugh, why would any conservative ever want to be appointed to anything?

I’ve lied in my lifetime. Is my life going to be ruined?

I kissed Connie Frieberg in my backyard. She was 8-years-old and I was 8-years-old.

What does that mean today under the Democrats’ new rules? Was that a sexual assault?

I also confess that I drank beer in high school, went to boy-girl parties and played drinking games in college.

Those things have been a rite of passage for American boys – and girls – forever.

But if you’re a Republican, the Democrats have now redefined them as crimes or proof that deep-down you are a bad adult.

I feel very sorry for Judge Kavanaugh and his family and the hell the Democrats put them through.

It’s a shameful chapter in American politics that made what happened to Judge Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas look like a PTA meeting.

Democrats were morally and politically wrong for smearing Kavanaugh as a serial rapist and a teen-age drunk.

But President Trump was equally as wrong for making fun of Kavanaugh’s accuser, professor Christine Blasey Ford, at a rally in West Virginia this week.

Whether or not Ford was telling the truth about being sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh in high school, it was not up to the president to publicly knock her.

It was also not very smart.

A lot of people in this world have been sexually assaulted or raped, both male and female, and many of them were offended when President Trump mocked Ford.

I hope he didn’t seriously offend any Republican senators ,’ especially moderates Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski or flaky Jeff Flake.

At the time I’m writing this, no one knows how that trio is going to vote.

If Kavanaugh makes it to the Supreme Court, he should thank God and Senator Lindsay Graham.

But if he loses by a vote, he should blame President Trump – simply because, per usual, he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

It was a long, embarrassing day of drama, tears and ugly partisan bickering.

But by the end of Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, I came to the conclusion that both Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford had told the truth.

I believed Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh never sexually assaulted Ford in 1982, when they were both teenagers.

And I also believed Ford really was sexually assaulted at age 15 – but not by Kavanaugh.

Some of my fellow Republicans have made the mistake of holding up Ford’s fuzzy or selective memory in her testimony as proof that she was not telling the truth about being sexually assaulted.

They shouldn’t.

When you are sexually assaulted, as I was repeatedly as a boy by a camp counselor in 1954, it can permanently mess up your memory.

The last time it happened to me, when I was 8 or 9, it occurred in the apartment of the man who abused me.

I don’t remember how I got home that night.I can’t tell you where his apartment was.

But I can tell you in detail what it was like being in his dark room where he developed the photos he took of me.

It does a giant disservice to Dr. Ford and the rest of us who’ve been sexually assaulted to distrust our imperfect memories of such a traumatic event.

But the greatest disservice to Dr. Ford – and Judge Kavanaugh – has been done by the Senate Democrats who sat on her allegation for weeks and then leaked it to the national media at the last minute.

For ten days Ford and Kavanaugh and their families were thrown into media Hell, had death threats made against them and were targeted on social media by the sleaziest operatives of both parties.

Watching the Senate Democrats’ play their slime-ball politics yesterday was an embarrassment to the Judiciary Committee, the U.S. Senate and the people of the USA.

At times it was pathetic.

We had to watch grown senators acting as if they had never been in high school or college.

We had to watch senators like Richard Blumenthal desperately trying to use goofy teen-age blurbs from a 1982 high school yearbook to prove somehow that Kavanaugh was a teen-age alcoholic who had sexually assaulted Dr. Ford in a blind stupor.

Or using another yearbook entry to make the absurd case that Kavanaugh and his friends had gang sex with a specific female schoolmate – whose name Blumenthal mentioned.

The Democrats on the committee didn’t care who their dirty tricks or sleazy accusations hurt – Ford and her family, Kavanaugh and his family or Kavanaugh’s high school friends.

My greatest worry Thursday morning was that Judge Kavanaugh was going to come out and act like he did on Fox earlier this week in the Martha MacCallum interview – like an altar boy.

He didn’t. He came out firing.

He had to do something he never had to do before in his life – defend his honor from partisan dirt bags.

He did an absolutely incredible job considering how hard the Democrats were working to destroy his reputation and stop his nomination.

Thank God, the Republicans stopped using that dull woman prosecutor they brought in to gently question Dr. Ford while the Democrats on the committee took turns trashing Kavanaugh.

That was a monumental mistake that largely let Dr. Ford off the hook.

When the woman prosecutor began questioning Kavanaugh, the whole country was starting to fall asleep.

Thank God, Sen. Lindsay Graham stepped in and delivered a powerful rant that called out the Democrats for their delay tactics and attempts to make Kavanaugh into a teen-age Bill Cosby.

All in all, Judge Kavanaugh acquitted himself very well yesterday.

Now his fate is the hands of the Senate Republicans. May God help him.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

,9

with Michael Shannon

It’s surprising that a White House incapable of organizing a two-car funeral – if you believe the mainstream liberal media – is presiding over the most robust economy the U.S. has had in years. One could almost say it makes America great again.

Strange, isn’t it? The Obama administration boy and girl geniuses were managing up a storm when it came to the economy, yet growth was sluggish, wages stagnant and economic optimism was nowhere to be found.

Then the Trump clown car crashed into the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and all hell broke loose. And that’s in a good way. A man the OpMedia assures us is one drool away from assisted-living or one tantrum away from a rubber room may achieve 3 percent growth in the economy, something that hasn’t happened since 2005.

It’s almost enough to make you question the credibility of the liberal media!

And still President Trump gets zero credit from the usual media suspects. The only time they take a break from trying to find a pixie dust trail leading to “Russia collusion” is when they try to find equally elusive evidence that Obama is the cause of our present economic growth.

Let’s run down a few of the statistics courtesy of a roundup from The Hill. In August the economy added 201,000 jobs, which was more than predicted.

The unemployment rate stayed at 3.9 percent, which is an almost 18-year low.

Wage growth edged up 2.9 percent, which is “the fastest growth since the recession ended in June 2009.”

Even better for deplorables, “the bulk of the wage gains are coming for workers who earn lower wages, which is a good sign since pay raises have been slow in those areas during the expansion.” This means Trump’s immigration policies, designed to stop the flood of low-wage illegals, are beginning to have an impact on paychecks.

When there is less competition from Tijuana, employers are forced to pay wages that make sense in Tulsa. Even better for workers who have been out of a job for a long time, employers are going to be adding internal training or apprenticeship programs to train the workers they need, instead of being picky and waiting for the already trained to walk in the door.

It’s important at this point that the Trump administration doesn’t listen to cheap labor whiners and increase the flow of employer-sponsored visas that import cheap foreign labor.

In the meantime, if the president is waiting for credit for delivering the expanding economy he promised during the campaign, he’s going to be waiting a long time. We hope he finds the fact he is making America great again to be more than a little consolation.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

The stories of chaos, craziness and betrayal going on inside the Trump White House are nothing to worry much about.

White House staffers attempting to influence, question or thwart a president’s ideas or goals are as old as George Washington, Richard Nixon ,’ or Ronald Reagan.

As we’ve recently seen, it’s just a lot easier today for un-named White House insiders to get their criticism or embarrassing stories instantly published.

It doesn’t matter how dubious the journalism is, or who writes it. If it’s anti-Trump, it’s always fit to print.

Bob Woodward’s gossipy best-seller “Fear” was built mostly on anonymous sources, unattributed quotes or second-hand anecdotes. Omarosa’s crazy White House tell-all “Unhinged” was only slightly less credible.

But the New York Times hit a new low in its war on Trump last week.

It published an anonymous op-ed piece written by a Trump adviser who claimed that he and some of his fellow White House “resistance” members were so concerned with the president’s actions and mental state that they contemplated using the 25th Amendment to remove him.

Maybe it’s all true. Maybe it’s all BS. We’ll find out the real story someday, but it’s certainly not new.

After my father was shot in 1981, some of his top advisers were seriously worried about his mental stability.

According to Bill O’Reilly in “Killing Reagan,” they considered using the 25th Amendment to remove him on grounds of mental incapacity and even gave him a test.

My father passed the test with flying colors and, according to the history books, did his job pretty well afterwards.

No one read about those concerns my father’s advisers had about his mental state in a New York Times op-ed piece as they were occurring.

Likewise, no one read about how he trumped his top advisers on his decision to invade Grenada.

When he called a White House meeting to vote on the idea, the final tally was 7-3 to not invade. My father was one of the three.

Two days later, the world woke up to see TV images of American forces capturing the island.

When one of his shocked advisers called and said, “Mr. President, I thought we had a vote and we decided not to go,” my father said, ‘Yes. we did. But my vote cancelled your seven.”

No one at the time read about that “fight” with his White House staff in the papers, just as they never learned how his advisers tried to prevent him from speaking two of his most famous lines.

They kept deleting “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall” from his Berlin Wall speech and they also tried to stop him from referring to the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire.”

The most important “fight” my father had with his advisers came in 1986, however, when he met with Mikhail Gorbachev at the nuclear missile summit in Reykjavik.

Everyone in the liberal media desperately wanted him to sign a nuclear arms treaty with the USSR — any treaty.

My father’s staffers were worried about his political legacy. Preferring a weak deal to no deal at all, they urged him to sign a treaty he did not think was good enough.

My father shocked his advisers, the media and most everyone in the Free World by saying “nyet” to Gorby in Iceland and walking out of the summit without signing anything.

Everyone in the liberal media thought he was nuts, of course. But his decision turned out to be a great geopolitical move that became a key turning point in the Cold War.

If the Washington Post had published an anonymous op-ed from one of my father’s worried advisers at the time, I bet history would not have turned out so well.

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

I love Lindsay Graham.

The witty South Carolina senator, who’s usually more entertaining than most comedians, has been one of the highlights of the otherwise depressing televised Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Graham put it perfectly Thursday morning.

He said some people had been coming up to him and asking if this week’s ugly display of disruptions, rude moronic outbursts from the gallery and Democrat grandstanding had become a circus.

“I’m here to defend circuses,” Graham said, pointing out that it was safe for parents to take their kids to the circus but not to let them watch Senate confirmation hearings – as Judge Kavanaugh found out Tuesday when his daughters had to be taken out of the raucous chamber.

The Democrat circus’ acts included rookie Corey Booker of New Jersey pandering to his base with his cliched leftist ravings.

Then on Thursday, Booker dramatically announced that he would deliberately break the Senate’s rules and release “confidential” documents that would risk his expulsion from the Senate.

Booker, who showed the whole country why he’s never going to be the second coming of Barrack Obama, was given several hours of glory by the Liberal Resistance Media even though they knew the “confidential” emails he exposed had already been cleared for release.

It’s been sad to watch what dumb things self-serving Senate Democrats like him are willing to do to discredit a highly qualified nominee like Kavanaugh.

Booker and my senator, Kamala Harris of California, were more interested in creating “tough guy” videos for their 2020 presidential runs than engaging in serious constitutional discussions.

The Democrats are acting like circus clowns, because they and their progressive allies in the liberal media are scared to death of Judge Kavanaugh.

He’s not their kind of guy. He’s someone who wants to strictly follow the Constitution, not evade it or misinterpret it or rewrite it.

I hope the American people see the Democrats for what they are – sore losers with no ideas and no plan.

They still want to impeach the president even though there is no impeachable offense.

Bob Woodward’s gossip book “Fear” came out this week, and the Trump haters went nuts. But most of it was old or fake news and there is nothing impeachable in it.

It’s the same deal for that anonymous op-ed from a Trump staffer that the New York Times ran on Wednesday. There’s nothing new or impeachable in it, despite the desperate excitement of CNN, the Washington Post and Joe Scarborough.

Every president’s administration has had people who don’t agree with his behavior or policies. A few of them will leak or snitch or lie to the media.

What we have today in Washington is that there are lots of anti-Trump people who can get printed anywhere. It doesn’t matter what the New York Times’ op-ed or Woodward’s book says, however, because there’s still nothing impeachable.

For those people who say they don’t like Trump personally, I get that.

Paying off two women to keep their silence about things that happened long before he was elected is not a good reflection on his personal morals. But it’s not an impeachable offense.

We know President Trump brings a lot of deserved criticism on himself.But again, I remind you: No one liked Ty Cobb and he’s in the Hall of Fame.

So let’s put this in perspective – which the liberal media rarely ever give us. After less than two years of President Trump, the economy is booming. Unemployment is down. Taxes and regulations have been cut.

In the end the president is doing everything he promised he’d do – including naming strict constitutionalists to the Supreme Court and other federal benches.

This week we’ve been watching Trump’s legacy being constructed. It’ll live on at the Supreme Court for decades, because, as a recent president said, “Elections have consequences.”

So while Booker and the other members of the Democrat circus cry and make clowns of themselves on national TV, let me be the first to congratulate Judge Kavanaugh on his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

,9 Mr. Trump’s Good Friend Jeff

Along with his many other daily Tweet targets, President Trump can’t stop beating up on Jeff Sessions for being a lousy attorney general.

When it comes to Sessions, the president leaves no petty pebble un-thrown.

This week, Trump supposedly was heard telling his aides that he didn’t like Sessions’ Alabama accent or the fact that he didn’t go to an Ivy League school like the president did.

Trump isn’t the only Republican who’s unhappy with Sessions, who obviously should have told the president before he was hired that he was planning to recuse himself from the Russian collusion investigation.

Trump supporters and the conservative media have been clamoring for the president to force Sessions to resign since day one.

They want the president to hire a new attorney general who’ll rein in special counselor Robert Mueller or, better yet, they say, fire him.

They want someone who’ll also name a special counsel to aggressively prosecute Hillary Clinton for destroying her emails, or to fully investigate the political corruption we’ve learned thrived at the top of the Obama administration’s FBI and intelligence agencies.

Any other cabinet member who had been criticized and demeaned so many times in public by his president would have cleared out his desk and left a year ago.

So why hasn’t Sessions resigned?

I think it’s because he is a lot smarter than people – and maybe even the president – think he is.

I think he knows that by staying at his attorney general’s job, he is actually helping President Trump politically.

Sessions, who as a senator was one of Trump’s earliest and most vocal supporters, knows that as soon as he’s gone his boss will appoint a new attorney general whose litmus test would be to promise to fire Robert Mueller ASAP.

Whether Mueller deserves to be fired is not the issue.

Neither is the fact that President Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton or hack the Democrat National Committee’s computers.

But the second Sessions is canned or resigns, the president will be accused of obstructing justice by everyone on the planet except Vladimir Putin.

Democrats, Republicans and the mainstream media will be united against him.

It wouldn’t matter how innocent President Trump is of colluding. It would look like he was trying to obstruct justice.

He’d be severely hurt politically – as would the Republican Party in the midterm elections this fall.

Jeff Sessions has to know all of this.

I think he knows that by not resigning until the Mueller investigation is over he’s protecting the president from himself and from doing major political harm to the GOP.

Despite suffering 18 months of verbal abuse from his tough boss, Sessions just could still be one of President Trump’s best friends.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].