Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Don’t look at the stock market.

If you do look, don’t go looking for the highest bridge in your town.

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff fest has thrown the financial universe into a tailspin.

But the world is not ending. America’s economy is not on the road to becoming Kenya. And a new Toyota Corolla won’t cost $60,000 this summer.

Democrats and the liberal media are saying Trump’s new reciprocal tariff policy is going to wreck the economy. I’m sure someone somewhere is already calling it an impeachable offense.

It’s funny. A week ago, few Americans even knew how many “f’s” there are in “tariff.”

Today, thanks to Trump’s crash course on Wednesday, we’re all experts on how tariffs hurt or help the economy, how Canada’s tariffs on our lumber and eggs are sky high and how tariffs affect the snow melt in western Montana.

I don’t pretend to be a tariff expert. But I know most conservative and liberal economists – from Milton Friedman to Maynard Keynes – don’t like them.

They say imposing tariffs on imports looks good politically because they can protect your home country’s industries like steel from foreign competition and keep your factories and plants humming and hiring.

But at the same time, although it’s much harder to see, those same steel tariffs hurt every consumer of steel.

Carmakers and washing machine makers either have to pay higher prices for foreign steel or buy homegrown steel from domestic producers that costs more than it should and might even be inferior.

A tariff is essentially a border tax that is charged on the importation of goods from a foreign country. In a perfect world, they would not exist. Trade among nations would be as free, untaxed and friendly as the trade between Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But politics and nationalism have always trumped free trade. As we’ve learned this week, tariffs are a weapon used by virtually every free and unfree nation of every size to protect its industries, businesses and farmers from foreign competition.

In the 1800s we grew to become an industrial powerhouse behind a border wall of high tariffs built by Republicans that protected our wheat and cotton farmers and infant industries like steel.

But since World War II, tariffs have been a bipartisan power tool for every president.

In 1983 my father imposed a tariff of 45 percent on heavyweight Japanese motorcycles to protect Harley-Davidson’s hogs until the company righted itself.

Trump’s tariffs are nothing like President Hoover’s disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 that set off a tariff war among nations and worsened and prolonged the Great Depression.

But I have no idea what effect “Liberation Day” will have on either the economy or politics – and neither do you. In the short term, it’s going to be wild and crazy for the stock markets.

In the medium to long term, though, things will stabilize. They always do. Foreign governments will adjust their tariffs and so will we. In theory, reciprocation should work, but it’ll take time.

Since I’m not a billionaire and Trump is, I’m thinking he understands the economy somewhat better than I do.

As we’ve seen, his negotiating style on tariffs is the same rough-and-tumble, I-win-you-lose style he used when he was a crazy New York City real estate mogul.

We know he hates to lose. We know he enjoys calling the shots. We know that he says and does things my father and every president before him would never dream of doing.

But we elected Donald Trump in a convincing way. He’s our guy in charge. We should cheer him on. We should give him the space to put in place the many things he believes will Make America Great Again.

So everybody – and I mean everybody – should pray that he’s right about his tariff policy.

If he is wrong, and “Liberation Day” turns out to be a disaster, he, the Republican Party and the country will pay the price in the midterms.

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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

Watergate 2.0 it ain’t.

But no one denies that the texting leak in a group chat about an air attack on the Houthi terrorists was an embarrassing screw-up for the Trump administration.

No one seems to know yet exactly how Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg ended up being included in a secret Defense Department discussion about the pending military strike in Yemen.

Eighteen government officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and VP JD Vance were in on the group conversation, which was being held on Signal, an encrypted Internet communications network that government and media people rely on all the time.

The president was not on the chat, so he can’t be blamed by the liberal media for inadvertently adding the name of a prominent Trump-hating journalist to the list of participants.

Secretary Hegseth didn’t make the mistake, either. But national security adviser Mike Waltz did, and though he said he doesn’t know how it happened, he has taken responsibility for the goof up.

But owning up to the mistake was not good enough for the desperate Democrats in Congress and their pals in the media.

They’ve tried to blow up the accidental leak of unclassified but sensitive material to Goldberg into a major political scandal.

From all the political and media noise it has generated, you’d think Goldberg had been given privy to the details of General Eisenhower’s plans for D-Day or that he was learning how we were going to invade Iran in two days.

The chat was only about an air attack on Houthi missile sites in Yemen, like many others before it. But Democrats immediately called for heads to roll on Trump’s security team because of their incompetence – something they know a lot about.

At this point in SignalGate, or whatever the liberal media is calling it, Trump needs to take a cue from Ronald Reagan.

During the time my father was going through Iran-Contra, when the liberal press was calling for his impeachment, he handled it the smart way.

He decided to take full responsibility for the arms trafficking scandal. “It’s on me,” he basically said. He took the political heat – but then he and his administration stopped talking about it.

The Iran-Contra headlines faded away quickly after that and the liberal New York-DC media machine went on to find other things to criticize him for.

If President Trump and his people keep talking about Signal-gate, the media will keep talking about it. And keeping the issue alive in the media just opens the door to more questions – and new troubles.

SignalGate is nothing even close to Iran-Contra. It’s a 100% U.S. Prime Nothingburger.

President Trump called it “a minor glitch” – which it was — and said it won’t happen again. That should have been the end of it. “No harm, no foul,” as they say.

But we know the Democrats and the media will keep what President Trump called “a witch hunt” and a “distraction” in the news as long as possible.

That’s why the best thing Trump and everyone who works for him can do now is simply shut up about SignalGate.

If they are asked another question about the Houthi group chat by an enemy reporter or friendly one, they should just say, “Asked and answered. Next question?”

–

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’re for cutting waste and fraud in government – until you cut waste and fraud.

They’re for stopping the war in Ukraine – until you try to stop the war.

They’re for a strong border – until you close the border they left open.

Who are they?

The professional Trump Haters, of course.

The people who blindly hate Donald Trump for a living – Democrats and what’s left of the liberal media – have truly lost it.

It used to be a joke that “If Trump cured cancer, Democrats would defend cancer.” But that joke has basically come true.

Whether it’s allowing biological men in women’s locker rooms, supporting sex-change surgery for 12-year-olds or outlawing plastic straws, Democrats have staked out a bunch of politically suicidal positions on so-called “80-20” issues that 80 percent of Americans oppose.

Democrats are not just doubling down on the dumb progressive stuff that cost them the White House and the Senate. They’re also taking turns saying really stupid things about Elon Musk and Tesla.

Democrats used to be in love with Musk when he was one of them. But then he, his brain and his billions defected to the Trump camp.

Worse than that, he volunteered to help Trump carry out his mission to cut waste, fraud and abuse from the bloated federal government.

When Bill Clinton and Barack Obama touted their plans to do that, as we’ve seen in old video clips on X, it was treated as a worthy and important political goal.

But when Trump and Musk are doing the same thing today, admittedly with great glee and at greater speed, it’s being portrayed by Democrats and the Trump Haters in liberal media as a crime against innocent bureaucrats.

It’s the haters who won’t stand up and condemn the terror tactics that have left Teslas burning in dealers’ lots or shame the creeps who are keying Teslas or “doxing” Tesla owners online.

I didn’t vote for Obama or Joe Biden, but I didn’t hate them. I hated their policies.

With Trump haters, it’s the reverse. They hate him so vehemently and irrationally that they automatically hate his policies too, even if they are similar to what theirs used to be.

Modern Democrats, not the old Jim Crow kind, used to be known for things like free speech, law and order, strong borders, world peace and minding our own business overseas.

But all that flipped years ago when Trump came along. Democrats and the liberal media became deranged. Now they’re in the late stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

They’re starting to say really stupid stuff that only makes them look more politically out of touch with voters, if that’s still possible.

For example, failed VP candidate Tim Walz told Gavin Newsom that he gets a little “boost” every time he sees Tesla’s stock go down.

The Minnesota governor, like other Trump Haters who cheer Tesla’s falling stock price, either doesn’t know or care that when that happens people’s pension plans get hurt. So do the 401(k)s of ordinary folks.

On CNN, investor Kevin O’Leary called Walz “beyond stupid” for his joke. He said Minnesota currently holds 1.6 million shares of Tesla worth $350 million in its retirement fund.

“What’s the matter with that guy?” O’Leary asked. “He doesn’t check the well-being of his own constituents. What a bozo.”

But let’s be fair with Walz. He may or not be a bozo. Voters decided that for themselves last fall.

But Walz, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and a chorus of other elected Democrats have been using a lot of vulgar language lately in their scripted anti-Trump tirades.

It may look like just the latest foolish tactic designed by their party to show the public just how deeply upset Democrats are at what terrible things Trump, Musk and the DOGE gang are doing to the USA.

But as any good shrink could tell you, shouting and spewing dirty words is just another sad symptom of late-stage TDS.

–

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

We’ve all seen the outrageous stats for the Department of Education.

Until Donald Trump’s White House hit man Elon Musk sicced his Department of Government Efficiency on it, the Education Department had an annual budget of between $238 and $268 billion and employed about 4,100 bureaucrats.

This week, the department my father tried to kill in its infancy 45 years ago laid off about 2,000 Education Department employees. What will happen to all the billions the doomed department spends each year still must be figured out by DOGE.

Most of it – $68 billion to $150 billion – goes to higher education in the form of student aid. The rest is divvied up among K-12 schools ($40 to $60 billion) and smaller amounts for things like special ed and early childhood education.

Liberals are making the Education Department sound like it’s indispensable to America’s present and future.

But everyone in D.C. has always known that despite its huge budget, it doesn’t run classrooms or teach kids a thing. It funds public schools indirectly by sending the tax money Congress gives it back to the states, schools and students.

The Education Department has spent trillions on education in 45 years. Literally. Many other trillions have been spent by states and localities. And what has America got in return? More teachers, more administrators and dumber kids.

Fewer and fewer of our students can read or count at their grade level. In global rankings we come in 36th in math and 13th in reading. Our minority and poor kids are the biggest victims. Trapped in terrible city schools, too often they “graduate” with zero skills and no future except as a lookout for a drug gang.

The bureaucrats at the Education Department have slightly increased the number of poor students who get access to college and special programs, but it’s been at a huge cost.

It’s not just the money they’ve wasted. They’ve protected a rigid and outdated system of schooling and done nothing innovative or revolutionary to help our kids get smarter or give parents more choices.

Parents are not blameless for the failures of our public education. They’ve put up with lousy schools, lousy teachers and lousy school boards for decades, even in the red suburbs.

It took pornographic children’s books being placed in their kids’ school libraries before conservative parents woke up en masse and staged a political revolt.

One thing that has always bugged me about parents is that so many of them are afraid to hold their kids back a grade.

They are willing to risk their kids’ educations in the long run because the stigma of keeping their child back is too great, even if it’s exactly what he or she needs.

I was lucky as a kid to have smart parents who did what was right for me, not what looked good for them among their famous Hollywood friends.

For a bunch of personal and scholastic reasons, my father and my mother Jane Wyman had me repeat fifth grade in Los Angeles and 11th grade at a boarding school in Arizona.

It was not always easy for me or them at the time, but their decisions changed my life.

By the time I was a senior in Scottsdale, I was the smartest kid in the class, a member of the National Honor Society and the star quarterback who led our football team to the state title.

I finally became a success in school because my parents were wise enough to treat me like an individual, not a member of a group. So sometimes the best answer for a kid is what my dad and mom’s answer was – “Repeat the grade.”

At this point, no one is certain if the Trump-Musk tag-team will ever fulfill their campaign promise to make the Education Department disappear forever, but we can pray for a miracle.

One thing we know for sure, however, is that the unnecessary department Jimmy Carter created in 1979 has flunked out. It deserves to die and make my dad’s dream come true – 40 years too late.

–

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’s speech to a joint session of Congress this week – one of the longest to in recent times – was terrific.

It was a 90-minute political walk-off home run. It was funny and entertaining and I loved every minute. I could have watched another hour. My father would have loved it, too.

The speech showed Trump at his best and most confident – and having fun.

And it drove more nails into the Democrat Party coffin by exposing for the deplorable human beings they really are.

A few minutes in, Trump pointed over to the Democrats and predicted that no matter what he was going to say, he knew they were never going to stand up or applaud.

They not only proved him right, but for the next hour and a half they showed the whole world what nasty and heartless partisans they were.

The Democrats also broke new ground in party stupidity Tuesday night when they held up and waved their little protest signs that said “False” or “Musk Steals” whenever Trump paused for his applause lines.

But the Democrats really hit bottom when Trump introduced the mothers and families of girls who had been raped and killed by illegal immigrants that were in the country because of Biden’s failed border policies.

As predicted, the Democrats didn’t stand or clap or shed a tear.

And when that sweet 13-year-old boy with brain cancer was surprised with an honorary membership in the Secret Service, it was the night’s most eye-watering moment for everyone in the chamber – except for the hateful Democrats.

Later, when Democrats chose rookie Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan to give their response to Trump’s speech, she took the opportunity to use my father to criticize the way Trump spanked Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy in public in the Oval Office last week.

Referring to how the president reacted angrily when Zelenskyy tried to sabotage him in front of the media by reneging on a deal he had agreed to that would have ended the slaughter in Ukraine, Slotkin claimed Ronald Reagan “must be rolling in his grave” at the way Zelenskyy was treated.

Sorry, Senator. Not even close.

My dad would have backed up what Trump did to Zelenskyy 1,000 percent. And your claim that Trump would have lost the Cold War is also a truckload of partisan BS.

What Zelenskyy tried to do to Trump was just like what happened to my dad in 1986 at the Reykjavík Summit in Iceland when he met with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev.

They had reached an agreement in private about a path to limiting each country’s strategic nuclear weapons. But then, when Gorbachev appeared before the news cameras, he tried to pull a fast one a la Zelenskyy.

He said any arms agreement had to be dependent on the U.S. ditching its “Star Wars” space-based missile defense system. My dad, who ran for president in part because he was sick of seeing the U.S. give in to so many Soviet demands, said “Nyet” and walked away.

In the same way the liberal media ganged up on Trump last week for “betraying” Ukraine, in 1986 the entire liberal mainstream media – then concentrated at NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Times and the Washington Post – acted like my father started WWIII.

The liberal establishment media no longer have those evil political powers today, thanks to the Internet. X alone is more influential than all of print. No one east of Philly cares what the New York Times thinks about anything anymore – which is a good thing.

Speaking of X, this tweet I posted summing up my son Cameron’s opinion of Slotkin’s attempt to use his grandfather to bash Trump speaks for the Reagan Family:

“They literally hated him (Grandpa) while he was alive. A Democrat was in charge before him … and he never got us out of the Cold War. Democrats pandering to mindless people by invoking grandpa’s name is (bleep).”

–

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

Since when did bureaucrats become a victim class?

The answer to that one is easy – as soon as Donald Trump began his crusade to reduce their numbers.

Before Trump and his chainsaw-waving new sidekick Elon Musk began attacking our nation’s bloated federal workforce, there were about 3 million people supposedly working hard for American taxpayers.

They’re not all bureaucrats – not all overpaid, under-worked paper-pushers in tiny offices doing unnecessary work – and the number of federal workers has been stuck around 3 million for decades.

Governments large and small obviously need some employees to do things like keeping tabs on who is paying their taxes and making sure their too many laws and excessive regulations are being followed.

But from the recent cries of Democrats and what’s left of the incredibly shrinking liberal media, you’d think every single federal worker is vital for the proper functioning of America.

You’d also think every park ranger, IRS agent and Department of Education bureaucrat was a tip-top employee whose daily work ethic was stronger than Trump’s or Musk’s.

In fact, as my father knew, bureaucracies are worse than Dracula. They produce nothing of value to the economy, never die and grow bigger and stronger, no matter who is president.

When my father once said, “The closest thing to eternal life is a government program,” he was thinking of bureaucracies.

What Trump and Musk are doing is treated by the liberal media like some radical MAGA policy, but it’s not.

Until Trump’s attack on government waste and fraud miraculously turned bureaucrats into human sacred cows overnight, even Democrats understood that bloated bureaucracies were bad.

Though Trump’s deranged critics in the media don’t know it or have conveniently forgotten it, in the early 1990s the tag team of Bill Clinton and Al Gore made a huge deal out of cutting back government waste and inefficiency when they took office.

Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” crusade did work – for a while.

By 1999 it reduced the federal workforce by 339,000 positions. You can see young Bill and young Al announcing their get-tough plans on YouTube. They sound like my father.

Unlike the progressive partisans of today, the mainstream liberal media of the 1990s didn’t attack Clinton.

The New York Times didn’t write editorials calling him a heartless Southern heel and the big networks didn’t send TV crews out across America to interview the innocent laid off bureaucrats with big mortgages who were being “victimized.”

By the end of Clinton’s second term, the federal workforce was still about the same size as it had been. Barack Obama made similar promises about cutting waste, etc., etc. – promises he never kept.

Since then, the federal government has not been cut, streamlined or made more efficient with things like updated computers for the IRS or air traffic controllers who reportedly still use pencils and paper. AI? Are you joking?

Democrats and the dying liberal media hate Trump and Musk so much they now defend bureaucrats, love the IRS and support not-very liberal things like government censorship.

Last week a small crowd of over-emotional liberals who apparently used to watch Joy Reid every day showed the country how out of touch “progressives” are.

A few hundred – probably what’s left of MSNBC’s core audience – were on the National Mall screaming and holding up posters attacking Trump and Musk as tyrants and Nazis.

From their deranged point of view, attacking government waste and fraud and cutting government bureaucracy is now a war crime.

Let’s hope Trump and DOGE succeed in shrinking government in a serious and lasting way and figure out how to save a trillion or two bucks a year. The historical record is not good, unfortunately, which is one reason we have a national debt of $35 trillion.

We the people have been the victims of government for decades. It’s time government feels the pain. Now the bureaucracy is the victim of DOGE. What comes around, goes around. God bless DOGE.

–

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

Just how desperate can Trump’s enemies get?

Last week, Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren were in full meltdown mode because President Trump and Elon Musk were being so mean to our bloated federal bureaucracy.

She and the liberal media are outraged over Musk’s ruthless chain sawing in Washington and act like he’s seized power from Trump in a coup.

But Musk is the American hero conservatives and libertarians have been waiting for.

He has started doing something with his Department of Government Efficiency that politicians from both parties have talked about and promised to do for decades but never got around to doing.

The South African-born genius has hired a gang of young computer toughs to help DOGE find and root out the waste, fraud, rot and abuse that infests alphabet agencies like USAID, the IRS and the Department of Education.

The longtime commuters on the federal gravy train, i.e., Democrats, are incensed, calling for resistance, filing law suits, threatening impeachment and saying a lot of dumb things in public.

Sen. Warren referred to Musk’s young wizards as flunkies. Her hysterical colleague Chuck Schumer called them a shadow government.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times calls Musk’s geeks “lost boys” and says “With a pitiless and mindless velocity, they are running roughshod over the government – and the globe.”

Sniff, sniff. Our poor $7 trillion government.

Democrats and their liberal media allies have now become the official champions of faceless bureaucrats – the heroic defenders of America’s newest victim-class.

Someone sneered that one of Musk’s smartest “unvetted” young geeks, the unfortunately nicknamed “Big Balls,” was just a 19-year-old. How could someone that age be an expert in anything, they asked?

How could kids that young be trusted with access to the sensitive personal and financial data stored in government computer files at places like Social Security?

Apparently, the fogies stumbling around in Congress don’t realize that Musk’s “lost boys” are the professional versions of the kids who’ve been fixing our computers and teaching us adults how to use them for 25 years.

The liberal fogies apparently are so protective of the gargantuan federal government that they’ve also forgotten who won World War II.

Who do they think was flying those B-17s over Germany? It wasn’t 74-year-old senators from Brooklyn or snarky New York Times columnists. And many of those boys who died on Iwo Jima were barely 20.

And I recall that most of the soldiers we sent to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq to fly helicopters and fly $50 million F-16s were also in their teens or barely past voting age.

It’s obvious that Democrats and the liberal media really do believe there’s no federal government agency or department too bloated, too wasteful, too corrupted or too broken to kill or even have its budget cut.

Not FEMA, not the IRS, not the Pentagon, not the FBI, not the FAA, not NASA…. Not even USAID, which the Musk-Trump team has already killed and gutted.

USAID did a lot of good, its defenders whimper. So what if it blew millions of taxpayer dollars on stupid things like lesbian comic books for Peru, and harmful things like funding the Wuhan lab where COVID-19 originated?

USAID was DOGE’s first win. This week Musk’s lost boys are digging into the Department of Education’s computer files and emails to see where the waste, dirt and bureaucratic stupidity is.

The liberal news media are in a constant state of collective terror, of course, and deeply concerned that the sacred privacy of our precious educrats is being violated. Too bad no one cares what they say anymore.

The Department of Education is another worthy target for obliteration. In its 44-year lifespan its bureaucrats have spent nearly $1 trillion dollars on “education” while our kids’ math and reading test scores have only gone down.

Four decades ago my dad wanted to kill Jimmy Carter’s payback to the teachers unions, but a Democrat Congress never let him. I’m sure I can hear him rooting for Musk and his lost boys.

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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

Abolish the Department of Education.

Control the Panama Canal.

Defang the mullahs of Iran.

Do those issues sound familiar?

I’m not talking about what’s on Donald Trump’s “to disrupt” list today.

I’m talking about issues my father had to confront in 1980 when he was running for president against Jimmy Carter.

It’s hard to believe, but 44 years later we’re still having problems with the same things – the security of the Panama Canal, the wasteful U.S. education department and the threat of a radicalized and militarily dangerous Iran.

Ronald Reagan did a pretty good job when it came to defeating the Soviet Empire and ending the Cold War.

But he couldn’t reverse the three “gifts” that Carter and his administration left for him when he took office.

My father tried to keep his campaign promise to shut down Carter’s baby, the Department of Education, when it was still in its crib.

He cut its budget and its duties, and in his 1982 State of the Union Address he repeated his promise to dismantle it, but the Democrats running Congress thwarted him.

The argument he and Republicans made – that education is a matter for state and local people to handle – is as sound as it ever was.

But the Republican Party gradually lost interest in getting rid of the education department and the goal was dropped entirely by George W. Bush’s administration.

Today it employs about 4,000 bureaucrats, has an annual budget of $79 billion and spends most of its time handing out “free” federal bucks to schools and universities and managing student loan and student-aid programs.

Needless to say, like every federal agency you can name, it does a lousy job.

Yet, despite its record of failure, the Department of Education is treated like a sacred, essential and permanent fixture of the federal government.

When Trump threatens to issue an executive order to abolish it, Democrats, the liberal media and the education industrial complex go nuts and make it sound like he is trying to abolish the Constitution.

Let’s wish Trump luck. I know my dad would.

Ditto for our regaining proper control of the Panama Canal. My father strongly opposed the Carter administration’s decision to transfer it to Panama.

He argued that the U.S. was its rightful owner, but he never won that fight and over time the majority of Americans stopped caring about it.

The Panamanians still operate the canal and get the revenues.

The influence of the Chinese Communist government is worth worrying about and Trump has correctly said we have the right to reassert our control as a matter of national security, if necessary.

Earlier this week it looked like new Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had gotten some concessions from Panama’s government that would allow U.S. warships to use it for free, but that’s apparently still up in the air.

As for Iran, another “thanks a whole bunch” is owed to the ghost of Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy of weakness.

My dad opposed the way Carter did nothing to stop the Shah of Iran from being deposed by the mullahs and ever since they have been a thorn in our side, a generous patron of Islamic terrorism and a danger to peace in the region.

The Obama and Biden administrations made Iran a potential nuclear threat by failing to enforce sanctions and allowing it to accelerate its nuclear program and fund terrorism.

Today Iran is bigger, badder and stronger than it was 44 years ago.

It and the whole Middle East — from what’s left of Gaza to Syria and Iraq – is still a bloody, complicated and intractable geopolitical mess that haunts us every day.

You don’t have to be Ronald Reagan’s son to think he could have made things turn out better.

–

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

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

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The fires that destroyed so much of Los Angeles have dropped off the national media’s front pages.

The wildfires are no longer a serious threat. President Trump and the camera crews have come and gone.

And tens of thousands of Los Angeles fire victims are now out of America’s public eye and trying to do the impossible — put their lives back together.

But how do you do that when you suddenly have no house, no belongings, no neighborhood, no infrastructure, no retail stores, no hope of rebuilding any time soon – only memories?

Last week, when President Trump came to L.A. to see the devastation for himself, he learned about the incompetence of the politicians and fire officials that made the wildfires more destructive than they should have been.

He scolded Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass for their failure to do their basic jobs.

But shaming the local politicians won’t help the woman I saw on TV who was searching for a memory in the scorched rubble of the house her father built 60 years ago.

Shaming the local politicians won’t make it easier for her to find a contractor to take the charred remains of her life to a landfill.

It won’t make it easier for her to find a new place to live, either. Or do the paperwork for building permits, or fight with her insurance company for a payout that comes anywhere near the monetary or emotional value of the house she lost.

The problems faced by thousands of burned-out homeowners and renters like that woman are unimaginable.

Some people literally lost everything. I know someone who lost the valuables they had put in a safe deposit box at the Palisades branch of Bank of America.

When the bank burned down their cash and jewels – which were not insured – melted.

The wildfires that took 29 lives, destroyed more 15,000 homes and did tens of billions worth of damage were nothing new for Los Angeles.

In fact, if you read the newspaper stories about the wildfires of 1938, or see film footage of the famous Bel-Air Fire of 1961, the 2025 L.A. fires look like a disaster movie you’ve seen before.

The same dry hillsides, the same exclusive neighborhoods and the same kind of expensive homes were consumed by the same kind of wildfires that were fueled by un-cut brush and spread by hurricane-force winds.

The 1961 fires in Brentwood-Bel-Air took 484 homes owned by famous movie stars of that era, and my dad’s brother Neil, but the 2025 fires were much bigger and more democratic.

A total of about 40,500 acres of Los Angeles burned. The Eaton Fire, where 17 deaths occurred, wiped out working-class and middle-class neighborhoods in Altadena and destroyed roughly 4,300 single-family homes, plus schools, churches and businesses.

We now all know the Mother Nature story — wildfires driven by hurricane-force winds are unstoppable.

But now we also know the LA government story — an important reservoir was empty. Fire hydrants were not working or missing entirely.

Fire departments were understaffed, underfunded and poorly led. Thick brush on the hillsides was not cleared by the county.

We’ve seen that government horror movie before, too. In 1961 the state blamed the Bel-Air fire on the failure of LA County to remove brush buildups or pass regulations prohibiting wood shingles on homes in wildfire-prone areas.

Two days of rain have helped firemen contain the wildfires, but everyone knows they will be back.

The big question is, will the people in charge of state and local government do what’s necessary to prevent them from starting or make them less destructive?

And if those people don’t do their jobs, will they be fired? Will politicians or bureaucrats be held accountable for their failures? No. But there will another fire.

(My sympathies and prayers go out to the victims of the tragic airplane crash in Washington, D.C. Wednesday night.)

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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 was a good thing Ronald Reagan didn’t win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1976.

It’s also a good thing Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

It’s strange to say, but both of their losses turned out for the better – for themselves and, so far anyway, for our country and the world.

In my father’s case, as I’ve written before, if he had become president in 1976, he would not have been able to pull off his historic accomplishments – winning the Cold War without a fight, fixing the U.S. economy and making America strong and great again.

In 1976 the rest of the world was not ready to help my father tear down the Evil Empire. There was no Maggie Thatcher, no Pope John Paul and no Lech Walesa to join his crusade.

And when 1985 came along, instead of getting ready to negotiate those nuclear arms talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, my father would already have been out of office.

Other parallels between my father and Trump are easy to find.

Both were entertainers, natural showmen who understood and used the persuasive power of the camera and the media.

Both were shot and narrowly escaped death. Both believed they were saved by God to serve a higher purpose.

The most important parallel, though, is how Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both bounced back after the rough-and-tumble political trials and tribulations they suffered during their first four years in office.

Both received clear electoral mandates in their re-election campaigns so they could carry out their original missions of making America great again.

Based on what we’ve already seen in Week 1 of “Trump, Part 2,” it looks like he and the rest of the U.S. are going to be better off in the long run because he lost to Biden in 2020.

Biden royally screwed up everything he touched for four years, as President Obama warned us he probably would.

The American people suffered greatly because of Old Joe’s domestic screw-ups, but the people in Ukraine and the Middle East suffered tragically because of his foreign policy failures.

Trump’s incredible political comeback has saved us from the Democrats and their bad ideas for now, and put him in position to accomplish what he promised to do when he took office in 2016.

Back then, he couldn’t “Make America Great Again” because he didn’t know what he was doing yet and didn’t know who his enemies were in Washington and the Republican Party.

He was essentially an accidental president, a Beltway outsider who was often sabotaged by his own party and constantly under attack by the FBI, the Democrats in Congress and the liberal national media.

But as he proved with his history-making comeback, Trump spent the Biden nightmare years learning how to strengthen and broaden his MAGA movement and out-fox the enemy media.

He survived the lawfare of Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice and the bullets of would-be assassins. He made bold alliances with former Democrats like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk and attracted millions of new votes from blacks, Latinos and even young people.

Like my father did in 1980, Trump won a clear mandate from the people in 2024.

He now has enough political and moral power to reverse or kill the harmful economic policies and woke social policies that Biden and his back-stage handlers enacted.

On Wednesday and Thursday President Trump was on top of the world.

He was still merrily signing a stack of executive orders and fulfilling his many campaign promises — everything from pardoning the January 6ers and banning central bank digital currencies to ending DEI in the federal government and ordering the release of the remaining JFK, RFK and MLK Jr. files.

In 1984 my father’s campaign was able to run and win 49 states on the brilliant theme of “Morning in America.” On Tuesday, I and tens of millions of other Americans woke up feeling like it was “Morning in America Again.”

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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.