Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

If you’re Back East watching the news coverage of the riots in Los Angeles, you probably don’t know what’s really going on out here.

That’s because, as usual, the national news media are doing a shallow and biased job covering the latest chapter in the country’s illegal immigrant deportation story.

The media have showed cars set on fire and crowds of protestors blocking freeways, waving Mexican flags, shooting fireworks at cops and slathering anti-ICE and anti-Trump graffiti on office buildings.

But people across the country aren’t getting a sense of how big or destructive they are, who the rioters actually are and, most important, who are the left-wingers organizing and funding them.

The media provide little context or political background about why the riots were not handled effectively by Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass.

The L.A. riots calling for the end of raids on illegal immigrants by ICE agents are big news. Many more anti-ICE protests are planned for Saturday in more than a thousand cities and towns, which makes Rachel Maddow very happy.

On Monday she claimed President Trump sending 4,000 California National Guard soldiers into Los Angeles is the first step in “an attempted authoritarian overthrow of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. government. The attempted imposition of a dictatorial regime….”

Maddow can’t help being hysterical. Her ratings are down 43 percent since Election Day.

But she and the rest of her liberal media friends never talk about why President Trump had to send troops to L.A. against the wishes of Newsom and Bass.

They were the ones responsible for failing to quickly and firmly end the chaos, destruction and violence when it first hit L.A.’s streets almost a week ago.

They refused to do their jobs properly by bringing in the National Guard, so Trump had to do it for them.

Since then, Newsom has been grandstanding and he and Bass have called for Trump to stop the ICE raids in L.A., which is a proud sanctuary city in a proud sanctuary state.

Watching Newsom and Bass each blaming Trump for sparking the deportation riots was no surprise. They blame Trump for everything bad that happens in their state. He’s the all-purpose excuse for their incompetence and failures.

The wildfires that swept through LA in February was a perfect example of how inept the Newsom-Bass tag-team is.

The fires were more destructive, unstoppable and deadlier than they should have been because of Newsom’s environmental policies and because Mayor Bass had badly mismanaged her fire department.

Bass has also underfunded and under-staffed her police department, which meant when the riots began she had to ask nearby towns for reinforcements.

Their help wasn’t enough, but she and Newsom hate Trump so much they were never willing to do what needed to be done – ask the president to send in the National Guard.

If you’ve been relying on CNN and MSNBC for your up-to-date riot information, by now you probably think a dozen protestors have been shot dead by the National Guard.

But the National Guard hasn’t interacted yet with rioters or shot a single soul.

Its role is not to arrest people. It’s to guard government buildings and protect the LA police so they can do their job of arresting protestors who commit crimes.

What most people don’t seem to understand, and what the media don’t bother to explain, is that serious law-enforcement problems occur when you have a sanctuary city.

If L.A. were a Red city where local police worked with immigration police, an illegal immigrant arrested for a crime would be taken to court and, if convicted, handed over to ICE for deportation.

In sanctuary cities like L.A. that doesn’t happen. When illegals commit crimes, they’re not handed over to ICE.

During the Biden years, L.A. had an irresponsible district attorney who’d dismiss the charges and turn the illegals loose. He’s gone now and the new DA is doing his job properly.

It’s too bad the mayor and governor won’t.

–

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

Dear President Trump.

It’s time to pivot on the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” you’re trying to get the House and the Senate to pass.

It’s not because your ex-pal Elon Musk has done a 180 and blasted it, bluntly but not so inaccurately, as “a massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” that “is a disgusting abomination.”

It’s not because Sen. Rand Paul thinks it doesn’t cut federal spending nearly enough, perpetuates Biden’s spending levels and adds too many new borrowed trillions to the future national debt.

Mr. President, you need to pivot because a major part of your Big, Beautiful Bill – the part that extends the 2017 personal tax cuts — is vitally important to the economy.

The bill also contains some much-needed provisions that tighten up our horrible immigration policy, especially regarding enforcement and border security.

I know you keep calling the bill a “winner,” but it’s not as 100-percent beautiful as it should be. In fact, parts of it are ugly.

Its spending cuts are not nearly deep enough and accounting experts who may or may not be right or impartial predict your beautiful act will add between $3 and $5 trillion over the next decade.

In other words, though the bill has many good parts, it will not come close to putting a brake on our runaway federal spending train or doing what you promised in March during your speech to Congress – balance the budget.

But there is a way to push your bill through the messy Washington sausage machine, Mr. President, that would make fiscal hawks in your party like Senator Paul and Congressman Thomas Massie happy and make you a big winner.

First, you need to get House Speaker Mike Johnson to carve your Big Beautiful Piece of Sausage into two not-so big but still beautiful chunks.

You need to have Johnston separate the 2017 tax break extension part and the immigration part from the spending-cut part and save the all-important spending cuts for later.

Every Republican in the House and Senate who is against the bill today would vote in a heartbeat tonight for the tax breaks and tougher immigration policies. A few smart Democrats might too.

A pared down bill would assure the country’s future economic growth by getting the 2017 tax breaks codified by Congress.

And with no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime and no taxes on Social Security, think how you’d improve your historic 50% popularity and put a nail in the coffin of the Democrats.

If a not-as-big slice of your bill passed quickly – by July 4th? – it could also give you the political momentum you’ll need to get the last important slice of your Big, Beautiful Bill passed by the end of summer.

To help you pull this off, you could copy the deal my father made in the early 1980s when he was trying to get his historic tax cuts through a Democrat Congress.

Tip O’Neill was House Speaker, and because Republicans were so badly outnumbered my father needed support from him and a lot of other Democrats.

After a dinner meeting Tip and my dad had to discuss tax cuts, my dad said, as he was leaving, “Tip, tell your caucus that if any one of them votes for my tax breaks, I promise not to campaign against them in the next election.”

The deal worked.

Conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats – now extinct – and moderate Democrats – now an endangered species – voted to pass the Reagan income tax cuts. The economy soon went from deep stagflation to recovery and boom.

Mr. President, everyone always asks, “What would Reagan do?” Well, that’s what he did 40 years ago.

If you need to, you should be able to make a similar deal with Republicans or even moderate Democrats on your Big, Beautiful Bill.

You get a lot of little easy wins every day in the media, thanks to the violent crimes committed by the illegal immigrants who’ve become the Democrats’ core constituency.

But to win the tough fight over your Big, Beautiful Bill in Congress, you’ll have to pivot and make it less big. It’s something I bet Reagan would do.

–

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

Yo, Democrats.

We know your party is leaderless, idea-less and shrinking faster than Kamala Harris’ speaking fees.

We know Donald Trump already stole one of your core voting blocs, working-class men, and that your young black and Latino men defected to the MAGA movement in record numbers in the 2024 election.

We know you have a serious problem with attracting and keeping real men, and that it threatens the future of your broken party.

But are you so desperate – and clueless – that you have to spend $20 million and two years on a project called “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan”?

“SAM” as it’s called, is designed to come up with some good plans and fresh ideas to win back the male voters the Dems have worked so hard to drive away for the last decade or so.

The “SAM” project was a party secret until the New York Times outed it last week and subjected it to the bipartisan ridicule it deserved.

According to a Rolling Stone article that quoted a pair of the big brains behind it, SAM intends to “ ‘study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality’ in male-dominated spaces online (such as video games).”

In plain English, that means, “We Democrats have no idea what a real American man is.”

Democrats are in serious trouble. They have not lost millions of young white, black and brown men by accident.

For years they’ve been hating on males, telling them to be more feminine and less masculine, calling them misogynists and even telling biological men they can have babies.

Democrats also have told fathers that their daughters must compete in sports against bigger, stronger biological boys who identify as girls – and share locker rooms with them.

How many men do you know who think those ideas are cool or sensible – or manly? How many men among the millions watching an NFL game or a UFC fight on TV do you think agree?

Democrats are the ones whose definition of a man includes transgender Admiral Rachel Levine and the nonbinary “they/them” Biden appointee who was fired after getting caught three times stealing expensive women’s luggage at airports.

Democrats can’t understand why Greg Gutfeld has become the king of late-night talk shows. But all they need to do to find out is ask the guys watching Gutfeld every night why they can’t watch nerds like Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert for five seconds without wanting to shoot a hole in their TV screen.

The greatest example of the Democrat Party’s misunderstanding of men, of course, was its choice of Gov. Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’ running mate. They chose him because he perfectly fit their woke, womanly image of a real man.

But guess what? Real men don’t order tampon dispensers to be put in high school boys’ bathrooms.

Democrat strategists tried to turn the prancing Walz into a real man who was an experienced pheasant shooter, but Walz looked so awkward handling a shotgun that the photo stunt backfired and every real man in America saw through the fake.

If the Democrats knew anything about men, they would have stuck Walz in a Ford-150 Raptor like mine and had him driving across the Baja at 50 mph.

The fact that young black and Latino men are coming to the Republican Party in droves is the direct result of the Democrats demonization and feminization of men.

Young men of every color know Donald Trump isn’t perfect, to say the least.

But they also can tell he’s a real American guy, not a fake who drives a Prius to save the planet, could never throw a ball ten feet or like Walz thinks it’s manly to own a 1979 International Harvester Scout.

In short, the young men flocking to the Republican Party can tell that President Trump has a real pair. The guys running the Democrat Party, who lost theirs years ago, can save $20 million by calling up Trump and asking him what it feels like.

–

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

They say love is blind.

But so is hate.

The political world we live in today is so full of hate a lot of our fellow Americans can’t see straight.

Not just hate for Donald Trump. Not just hate for your friends and family who don’t hate Trump as much as you do. It’s hate for Fox News and Newsmax, too.

Some liberals hate Fox so blindly, in fact, that for four years they refused to believe anything it reported about Joe Biden’s steep mental decline.

Not that they ever poked their heads out of their liberal media silos and actually watched Fox or Newsmax for 20 minutes a month, mind you.

If they had done that, they might not have been so shocked by this week’s “bombshell news” from CNN’s Jake Tapper that Joe Biden was so out of it for four years that he was barely able to be the president.

On Tuesday Tapper hit the media talk circuit to flog his super-publicized book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”

On what has become his fake apology tour, Tapper and his less famous but more honest co-author, Axios’ White House reporter Alex Thompson, have been flogged pretty well themselves.

Tapper, pretending to be truly sorry for his multiple failures as a trusted journalist, was especially shamed and battered – unmercifully but deservedly – by his old friend, the great Megyn Kelly.

Standing in for dozens of other liberal mainstream print and electronic journalists who betrayed their profession by covering up or denying the mental demise of President Biden, Tapper and Thompson were also gently interrogated by fellow liberals like Joe Scarborough, Katie Couric and the folks at NPR and elsewhere.

So far Tapper has not done what any honest journalist should do – break down in tears on camera, confess his partisan sins and ask the American people to forgive him and his equally dishonest colleagues for their collective and dangerous cover up.

But Tapper knows he doesn’t need to ever go that far. After all, most of his peers hate Trump as much as he does and therefore they fully support what he did or didn’t do.

Fox viewers weren’t the least bit shocked by Tapper’s book, of course. They have not been fooled for four years, they’ve been informed.

Fox, Newsmax, conservative podcasters and late-night Fox comedian Greg Gutfeld constantly showed video of Biden’s gaffes, stumbles and strange behavior while CNN and the other liberal legacy media said they were fakes, deviously edited them or never mentioned them at all.

Fox viewers always knew journalists like Tapper and the Democrat pundits and official White House spokespeople were lying when they said Biden, though constantly AWOL, was hard at work and “sharp as a tack.”

They didn’t know the embarrassing details of Biden’s decline that are in Tapper’s book or the other scandalous details that no doubt will be revealed when other White House “journalists” who’ve kept the truths about Biden’s mental health secret from the public publish their own books.

Fox viewers didn’t know that the White House and the Biden family were hiding Biden’s advanced prostate cancer, either.

But a lot of people did know. And it’s a good bet we’ll soon learn that some of them were journalists like Tapper who kept it to themselves because they hate Trump more than they love their country.

It’s not far-fetched to say that hating Trump is the deadly cancer in the Democrat Party and the liberal media that no chemotherapy can cure.

–

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

President Trump flew to the Middle East this week and announced more than a trillion dollars’ worth of economic deals between the U.S. and countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The investment deals with Qatar could reach $1.2 trillion. Qatar Airways has agreed to buy 210 Boeing jets worth $96 billion. Saudi Arabia also signed deals – more than 150 of them – that are worth another trillion.

Not a bad week’s work.

Trump also delivered a historic speech on Tuesday in Riyadh that called for America to flip 75 years of its geopolitical strategy on its head.

He said it’s time for us to start using commerce and diplomacy instead of wars and bombs to bring peace, stability and prosperity to the Middle East.

But what was our liberal media obsessed with? A previously owned airplane.

Thanks to the Trump Hate media, the news we heard most about this week was the gift to Trump of a used $400 million Boeing 747 from the Qatari royal family.

Despite the outrage, however, the huge jetliner will not actually be Trump’s personal plane.

It will not be parked at Mar-a-Lago to fly him to one of his weekend golf outings. And unless he buys it first, he won’t be able to sell it for cash or give it to Putin.

If it’s gutted, retooled and outfitted with all the secret communications gear and high-tech security devices Air Force One needs, which reportedly is unlikely to happen, the previously owned plane would essentially serve as a $600 million flying company car for the White House.

The Boeing 747, which should be ready for JD Vance when he becomes president in 2028, is by far the most expensive presidential gift ever. But every president has received presents from foreign leaders or their governments.

My dad was given a ton of them, including an elephant. The president of Mexico gave him a horse. The animals are long gone, but a sampling of his gifts is on display at the Reagan Library.

So is the Air Force One that my father and five other presidents traveled on from 1973-2001. A Boeing 707, it’s on loan from the Air Force, which still has ownership.

What bothers me most about the media weaponizing the Qatari’s gift of the airplane is the media could have spent more time covering the impact of Trump’s historic, action-packed trip.

Along with the business and defense deals he and his team announced with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Trump included announcements he was lifting sanctions on Syria and, on Thursday, that Iran is ready to sign a nuclear deal with the U.S. in exchange for our lifting of economic sanctions.

The business deals are great news for the homeland. They are going to create thousands of jobs at Boeing and its subsidiaries and at other American places.

But more important in the long run was what Trump said in his big speech on Tuesday about his goal for America to use commerce to bring lasting peace and prosperity to a part of the world that has had far too little of both for a century.

Speaking of criticism of our traditional role as the sponsor or participant in the Middle East’s bloody “forever wars,” I saw an interview with Joey Jones, the Fox contributor who had most of both legs blown off by a mine in 2010 while serving with the Marines in Afghanistan.

Jones said for the last 20 years we’ve had all these wars in the Middle East that were supposed to be about nation building and fostering democracy — and we lost them all.

He said he doesn’t want to see his 15-year-old boy sent overseas to fight in another unnecessary war that takes us 15 years to lose.

Maybe it’s time to do it Trump’s way, Jones said. I bet most Americans agree. So do I.

–

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, May 15.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Based on the spin the liberal media put on Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office this week, you’d think we were in the Great Depression 2.0.

Or that we had lost World War III to Russia.

Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs – that was pretty much all we heard from the leftwing pundits this week.

It’s true that Trump’s “tariff terrorism” has caused a lot of uncertainty in the U.S. stock markets and global trade.

It’s true that U.S. stocks crashed more than 10 percent right after “Liberation Day.”

But it’s also true stocks have already recovered most of their losses, so forget those hysterical claims that Trump destroyed trillions of dollars’ worth of everyone’s 401(k)s.

And let’s wait a while before we declare Trump’s tariff policy a total disaster that will bring on a recession.

Because of him, a bunch of countries have already come to D.C. to strike new tariff deals with us. Others are lining up.

Meanwhile, let’s remember that “The First 100 Days” of a president’s time in office are actually meaningless.

The print media first used the term in 1933 with FDR as a way to cover the avalanche of executive orders he signed and the progressive legislation he pushed when he took office.

But decades ago “The First 100 Days” became just a handy excuse for the media to assess or judge the accomplishments of a new administration.

According to the liberal media, Trump’s (second) first 100 days in office were – surprise, surprise – a total fiasco.

Of course, it’s a given that the liberal outfits and their liberal journalists hate everything Trump has done.

Slamming the Southern border door shut virtually overnight without the help of Congress didn’t impress them.

Neither did the campaign to round up and deport the worst of the illegal immigrants.

Neither did working to end the bloody war in Ukraine, siccing Elon Musk and DOGE on government waste and corruption or ending Biden administration stupidities, like the EV mandates.

The liberal media don’t care if Trump cuts taxes on tips or on Social Security payments or does any of the dozens of things he promised – and is trying to do now as president.

So far, he’s issued more than 143 executive orders and counting. But this week the media focused on tariffs, tariffs, tariffs.

But guess what? By Labor Day nobody will care what our tariffs are with Canada or China or Chad.

What we should care about is what happens now – or next.

Is Congress going to pass Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that locks in his tax cuts and his border security and energy policies?

Is the slaughter in Ukraine finally going to end? Will the U.S. and China settle their tariff war? Will inflation continue to slow and interest rates fall back to 3 percent?

By the way, if what the liberal media think of the first 100 days of a president’s term actually mattered, my father would have never been around to help end the Cold War in 1987.

In April of 1981 his approval rating with the public was a solid 67 percent. But the liberal NY-DC media establishment was already starting to mock “Reaganomics” and predicting the failure of his tax cuts and deregulation policies.

Though the 1982 midterms went terribly for Republicans in the House, by 1984 my father’s supply-side economics and optimism had turned things around and he won 49 states.

So let’s all be patient for once – and realistic. We know the liberal media and the Democrats will never stop their daily negative attacks on Trump.

The deranged Maddow Wing of the media and AOC and her little gang of progressives will still call him a dictator, as if that makes him one. And they’ll claim he’s created a new Constitutional crisis every other day.

But what they’ve said this week about his first 100 days didn’t matter. It’s the next hundred days that will count.

–

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 is Vladimir Putin going to sit down and make peace with Ukraine?

Don’t hold your breath.

The United States – Donald Trump, really – has been pushing hard for a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end their bloody, World War II-style war.

Only Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can make peace happen.

But the two leaders each made trouble this week by subverting the negotiations and making President Trump angry.

Zelenskyy blurted out, foolishly, that as part of any deal he would not allow Russia to keep control of the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Meanwhile, Putin’s military launched its deadliest bombing attack on the capital city of Kyiv since last July, killing a dozen civilians and wounding 90.

Zelenskyy has made lots of trouble with his public statements, but Putin is the main enemy of peace.

He’s the one who started the fighting. He’s the invader. He’s the one ultimately responsible for a war that’s killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides and thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians.

But Vlad the Invader has gone relatively unpunished for his war-making. The economic sanctions we’ve put on his country have created little pain and were easily circumvented.

And anyway, it’s not Putin and his ruling elite who are suffering from the high inflation rate and soaring food prices. It’s ordinary Russians.

Putin, who won’t agree to an unconditional ceasefire, obviously thinks he’s going to “win” the peace talks. As President Trump has said coldly but accurately, Putin’s the one who holds all the cards.

Putin will most likely get to keep Crimea and the eastern parts of Ukraine that his army occupies now. And he’ll pay little or no price at the peace table for the aggression we let him get away with.

Trump is probably right to say that if he had been in office in 2022 instead of Joe Biden there would have been no invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

But as incoherent as Biden was at a crucial time, the war was not only his fault.

The USA has failed to protect Ukraine since 1994, ever since Bill Clinton signed the Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed its sovereignty and security if it gave up its huge arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Everyone signed on to that security assurance agreement – us, Ukraine, Russia and the UK. But the guarantee didn’t stop Russia from annexing the Ukraine Peninsula.

President Obama rolled over for Russia in 2014 and let it take Crimea because he didn’t want to aggravate Putin. And in 2022 Biden hardly made a peep when Putin’s tank columns were gathering at the Ukraine border.

For more than two decades Putin has won again and again in negotiations with us because he never tells the truth or keeps his word. His word means nothing.

But when it comes to Ukraine, the word of the United States is not worth much either. We swore to protect it, but we didn’t – not even from its most obvious threat.

It’s easy to understand why Zelenskyy gets mad in public. For three years he’s been fighting a one-sided war he could never win. It’s only his civilians and children who’ve been dying. Only his cities that are in ruins.

He and his countrymen have a good reason not to trust the United States. They’re only in the terrible position they’re in because we – i.e., Clinton, Obama and Biden — put them there with our bungled diplomacy and weakness.

Now it’s time for Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy to just shut up and let the negotiators negotiate an end to a tragic slaughter that never should have started and never should have dragged on for three years.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to stop the war in Ukraine. But based on the history, I’m pretty sure the only winner in the long run besides our military industrial complex will be Putin – to America’s eternal shame.

–

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

Was Kilmar Abrigo Garcia a MS-13 gang guy? Yes, allegedly.

Was he here illegally? Yes.

Did two judges rule that the evidence showed he was a member of MS-13 and should be deported? Yes.

Has President Trump ruled that MS-13 is a terrorist organization? Yes.

Then adios, Mr. Garcia.

You win a free flight to a terrible prison in El Salvador, your native country. You were lucky you were able to live here illegally for 14 years.

I’m not against immigrants – legal ones.

I’m all for due process and fair trials for even the most heinous criminals.

But I don’t think illegal migrants are entitled to the protections of the Constitution the second they step on U.S. soil.

And I don’t want illegal immigrants living in the United States like Garcia who are members of gangs that kill and mutilate people.

Garcia was deported to El Salvador by mistake a month ago. But I don’t care how many disabled kids he has, or how many construction jobs he supposedly worked, he deserved it.

The deportation of Garcia was the biggest story of the week in the liberal media for one reason only – Donald Trump is the president.

Trump and his people were portrayed, as usual, and without historical context, to be uniquely cruel for the cold and unconstitutional way they treated Garcia.

Yet presidents Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden each deported illegal immigrants during their reigns – by the millions.

One of them – guess who – was so enthusiastic about deportations the ACLU dubbed him “Deporter-in-chief.”

Most of the illegal immigrants were quietly deported by the pre-Trump presidents with minimal or no due process – that means no judges or hearings or media were involved.

In 2013 the ACLU “reported that 83% of deportations (363,279) were ordered by immigration officers, not judges, denying individuals a chance to present evidence or access legal counsel.”

The immigration policies of our former “Deporter-in-chief,” aka Obama, sound familiar.

While Obama’s focus was on “felons, not families,” his administration was criticized because “even long-term residents and parents of U.S. citizens were sometimes deported without adequate hearings, especially in border zones.”

One of those deportees was Nydia.

She was “a transgender woman with asylum status who was deported twice without proper review” and her case “highlighted systemic failures in screening for legal protections.”

Poor Nydia.

I’ll never forget the national media’s nonstop concern over her plight at the hands of the Nazi-like immigration officials working for the “Deporter-in-Chief.”

Of course, that media attention never happened.

This week Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen made a big deal of his solo trip to El Salvador to try to spring his “constituent” Garcia from a scary gang prison.

The media covered it like he was a Navy Seal going to Gaza to single-handedly rescue our hostages from Hamas.

Van Hollen said his main goal was to meet Garcia to make sure he was in good health, which he did. But he ended up looking like a fool when it turned out that the innocent “Maryland father” was a two-time wife beater and a MS-13 member in good standing.

Democrats want the courts to force Garcia’s return so that he gets due process, but the Trump administration claims it can’t bring him back, so stay tuned.

The hysteria over the “unjust” deporting of an “alleged” MS-13 member shows how desperate the Democrats are to find an issue they can use against Trump.

The real trouble for Democrats is that they have no leaders in Congress and almost no voter support.

All they have are a pair of raving socialists — ancient Bernie Sanders and his young sidekick Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York Times claims Bernie and AOC are energizing the corpse of the Democrat Party with their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

Maybe. But they may have wasted their time when they crashed the Coachella music festival in the California desert last weekend and ranted onstage about social justice to an elite crowd that had paid $600 a ticket to get in.

Everyone was so stoned or drunk on $22 drinks, I bet they don’t remember a word the pair said about how hard they’re fighting for poor people.
–

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

You may have noticed there was a really good sale on stocks this week.

Hope you were able to grab some bargains after the markets crashed on Tuesday and before they bounced back on Wednesday.

The Trump tariff global roller-coaster hurtled down 3 or 4 percent again on Thursday afternoon, so it’s safe to say that our wild stock market ride is not over yet.

My simple advice – and I’m not a registered stock broker, by any means – is not to panic.

Don’t sell your stocks when they go into a sudden free fall. Hold on, trust the market and try to take advantage of the temporary flash sale on solid stocks like Microsoft.

The last century has been dotted with crashes. But in the medium-to-long run stocks have always recovered, just like they did after 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008 and the covid lockdowns of 2000.

Historically, trusting the American stock market has been a much safer bet than trusting our political leaders.

But in the case of President Trump, I think we should trust him to get us out of what he’s gotten us into with the global tariff war he’s started.

Trusting Trump sounds a little crazy. But in case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t think and act like a typical politician.

Sure, he occupies the White House. Sure, he likes to sign those executive orders. Sure, he knew how to get elected – twice.

But he still thinks and acts like what he is and always was – a hard-nosed New York City real estate tycoon who’s had a lot of financial ups and downs himself before ending up a billionaire.

For some reason, Trump loves tariffs and William McKinley’s 19th century protectionist trade policy.

Every famous economist you’ve never heard of says tariffs are bad. But Trump has been calling for them to be used to protect American manufacturing since the 1980s when he was buying full page ads in the New York Times to say it.

Until he proves otherwise, I’m going to bet on him and his team making the global economy a freer and fairer place for America to do business.

As for Trump singling out China for extra-high tariffs, I think there are parallels between what he is doing with China and what my father did with the old Soviet Union.

In the mid-1980s my father had to negotiate a nuclear arms agreement with the USSR and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Democrats in Congress, the liberal mainstream media and virtually every one of my father’s advisors thought he should go to Iceland and do what all the presidents before him had done in the Cold War – be nice, give the Soviets whatever they wanted and shortchange the U.S..

But my dad didn’t play nice. When he refused Gorbachev’s request to trade away the development of our “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system, everyone, including Gorby, was shocked.

All of my dad’s enemies thought he had made a nuclear war impossible to avoid.

But Gorbachev, who knew my father’s long-range goal was to wreck the USSR’s weak economy by forcing it into an arms race it couldn’t win, faced reality and folded his cards.

China is Trump’s Soviet Union. China is our only global threat, economically and militarily.

Trump is using my dad’s playbook. He’s getting tough on China in ways no previous president has – including himself in his first term.

He’s putting China into a corner, economically, and saying, “If you want to be treated well by us, and if you want to be a player in the global economy, from now on you play by our rules.”

We can be mad at Trump for causing the market to tank our 401(k)s. We may all pay a bit of a price in the short run, but if we don’t pay it now, it’s going be a much higher price in the future for our kids and grandkids.

For decades, we’ve played nice with our adversaries and we got taken advantage of. Finally, we have another president who says, “Screw you. We’re playing hardball.”

–

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.