Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

For Democrats and their weeping soulmates in liberal media, it’s “Mourning in America.”

Not morning – M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G.

But for those of us who voted for Donald Trump, today feels like the opening line of my father’s famous TV campaign commercial – “It’s morning again in America.”

The message of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 ad – considered one of the greatest political spots ever – was that after four tough years in office his policies had fixed America and restored the country to greatness.

I’m obviously feeling terrific about Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris and I’m not feeling at all sorry for her or her red-eyed supporters.

Some diehard Democrats and permanently deranged talking heads on CNN and MSNBC are already doubling down on their hate and vowing to fight, fight, fight against President Trump II.

But the only thing they are proving is that they didn’t learn any lessons from Trump’s sweeping victory and still don’t understand why their candidate lost.

It was not only because Harris had no political message of her own except a negative one – that Trump was a threat to our democracy and his MAGA supporters were garbage.

It was not only because Harris spoke in platitudes, hid from unfriendly media and unconditionally defended the Biden administration’s failed border and economic policies.

Harris also lost because she ran a campaign that was so angry and nasty that many Republicans were forced to take a second look at Trump and accept him despite his personal flaws and narcissism.

As a Reagan conservative, I was not in favor of Trump running for president as a Republican.

I basically told him that one day back in 2015, when he called me on the phone to ask me something about appearing on my radio talk show. (He was not aware that I was no longer doing it.)

“You know,” he said to me. “I think I’m going to run for president of the United States.”

“As a Democrat or a Republican?” I asked.

“Republican. Could I get your support?”

I told him my father warned me to never endorse anyone in the primary elections because you end up with 50 percent of the people not liking you, but I said I always support the nominee of the party.

“Well, do you think I should run?” Trump asked.

“Personally,” I said, “I think you’ll destroy the Republican Party. Do you have another question?”

We talked for a few minutes more and he said, “You know, if I’m elected and I had a Ronald Reagan Day at the White House, would you bring your family?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “And I would return the favor by inviting you to the Reagan Ranch with your family. Would you come?”

“Absolutely,” he said, and we cordially said goodbye to each other.

Trump ultimately destroyed the Romney-Ryan-Bush Republican Party of 2015 in many ways, just as I told him he would.

I think a lot of smart people foresaw the destruction part of the GOP, but I don’t think anybody foresaw the positive rebuilding part that has followed.

With his historic political comeback and his MAGA movement, Trump has created the Republican Party of the future.

He’s built a new coalition that includes Americans who have never really been admitted to the GOP’s big tent – blue-collar workers, blacks and Latinos.

Plus, he’s put together a multi-partisan all-star team that includes Elon Musk, internet giants like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, and exiled Democrats like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

Trump did destroy the old Republican Party. But now, thanks to his big win on Tuesday night, the new GOP he’s built will be in a strong position to fix the many things Joe Biden has broken.

Republicans have got the White House, the Senate and it looks like we’ll keep the House.

President Trump’s main job for the next four years is to maintain and grow its new coalition – and to finish his mission to make America great again.

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Copyright 2024 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

OK, my fellow Americans, time to choose.

Which dictator are you going to vote for on Tuesday?

Donald Trump, the alleged Hitler wannabe who the liberal media keep telling us is an existential threat to democracy?

Or Kamala Harris, the unelected choice for president of the Democrat Party who’ll give us four more years of bad ideas and using the justice department to jail her political opponents?

“Trump said he’ll be a dictator on Day 1” is a scary line Democrats and their cheering squad in the liberal media have been saying a hundred times a day for at least a year to scare low-information voters.

Trump’s tyranny is a terrifying possibility to people like the idiots on “The View,” Rachel Maddow and the deranged editorial writers at the Los Angeles Times.

They truly believe if Trump is re-elected, he will make himself a dictator, rip up the Constitution and throw anyone who’s ever said a cross word about him into a concentration camp – if he doesn’t shoot them first.

The pervasiveness of the Trump “dictator” quote proves how partisan and incompetent the mainstream liberal media are.

Deliberately taken out of context to slur Trump, it originated about a year ago when Trump was being interviewed by Sean Hannity before a live audience in Nebraska.

During a long discussion about being called a wannabe dictator by the media, Trump told Hannity on his first day back in office he would issue a bunch of executive orders like a dictator.

“I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” Trump said.

Trump, who was laughing, made it clear he was referring only to executive orders and Day One. “After that,” he said, “I’m not a dictator.”

That was all the ammo the liberal media needed. Even though it was clearly a joke, the idea that Trump wanted to become a dictator for a day went viral with little or no context.

If the mainstream media were honest, and if they did their job fairly, they would have made it clear that every president has been a “dictator on Day One.”

Every incoming president issues executive orders as soon as they can, often to overturn the executive orders of the previous president.

In his first 100 days in office, Biden signed more than 60 executive actions, 24 of which were direct reversals of what he considered Trump’s bad policies. Ten involved immigration.

The most controversial ones included halting funding for the construction of Trump’s border wall, cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline and imposing a mask mandate on federal property.

Did that make Joe Biden a dictator and a threat to our democracy? Maybe. But no one in the liberal media said so because they agreed with what Herr Biden did.

When Trump reverses dozens of Biden executive decisions, which I hope he will get the chance to do in a couple of months, the shamelessly partisan media will again call him Hitler 2.0.

The liberal media have been trying to scare the public about Trump’s alleged Hitler complex and love for authoritarians for nine years.

They have been faithfully supporting the Democrat Party’s playbook of fear for decades. Remember how the media told voters in 1980 that my father was going to start World War III and cut your grandma off Social Security?

On Tuesday we’re going to elect a new president to replace the one we really haven’t had for several years.

By this time next week, we’ll have a new “dictator in chief.”

It can be the incompetent, inexperienced and serially incoherent person who’s spent the last four years helping Joe Biden screw up the economy, immigration, foreign policy and the war on covid.

Or it can be the ex-president who makes lots of jokes, says dumb things now and then but ran the country smoothly and safely once – and can be trusted to do it again starting on Day 1.

–

Copyright 2024 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 amateurs running the Kamala Harris campaign have finally hit bottom.

They tried dealing the “Trump is Crazy” card, the “Trump is Exhausted” card and the “Trump is a Threat to Democracy” card.

But Harris’ poll numbers just kept sinking and Trump’s only kept getting stronger.

The upward turn of fortune for Trump that has Democrats in a panic is not because he was shot or because he suddenly transformed himself into Mitt Romney 2.0 or Mister Rogers.

It’s because the whole country has been getting a better look at Kamala – and has seen what a goofy, unprepared, fourth-rate candidate she is.

For the last few months, the vice president has slowly exposed her wordy but empty self on very public but friendly places like “The View,” Howard Stern’s radio show and “60 Minutes.”

Thanks to her windy incoherence, circular non-answers to friendly journalists’ questions and constant lies about Biden’s mental decline and Trump’s positions on things like abortion, she has looked more and more like a sure loser.

She’s the political equivalent of the flaming Hindenburg, I think I heard Greg Gutfeld quip.

Her inevitable crash became so obvious to her desperately incompetent campaign people that they had to play their dirtiest ace in the hole – the Hitler card.

At a phony CNN “town hall” Wednesday night, while ducking easy and predictable questions from chummy Anderson Cooper about her failed border policies, she called Trump the political f-word – “fascist.”

Doubling down, she also tweeted that Trump “wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution. He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.”

And people wonder why low-IQ people who hate Trump crawl up on roofs or hide in bushes and try to assassinate him?

On top of Kamala’s deranged Hitler slurs – which the liberal media don’t seem to be bothered by much – she constantly criticizes Trump for his real and imaginary character flaws.

You know, it’s really kind of scary how she talks about the importance of character when hers is so flawed.

Forget her “spotty” record as a progressive prosecutor and attorney general in California or her super-liberal record in the U.S. Senate.

She has just been outed for plagiarizing large chunks of her criminal justice book and some of her legal writings. Plus, Kamala reportedly “borrowed” a story about a woman who saved a young girl from sex-trafficking and claimed it for herself.

And, to be very clear, she is obviously lying when she continues to claim she saw no decline in Joe Biden’s mental condition until he was “couped” by the Democrat power-brokers who crowned her the party’s candidate.

She still keeps saying Biden was fine, when we know he was not. So please, Kamala, can you stop talking about character, stop lying and spare us the stupid Hitler analogies?

Someone once said that when you start to invoke Hitler to support your argument, it proves you’ve already lost.

It’s not that Trump has already won the election. But he’s obviously going one way and Harris is going the other.

This week, while she was still attacking him for being a wannabe dictator on Day 1, Trump cheerfully and brilliantly pulled off a visit to a McDonald’s that 300 million people watched on social media.

He’s also set to go on Joe Rogan’s great podcast and be heard by another 10 million or so.

Those were two things I’m sure Harris could never do. She would never serve fries at a McDonald’s – and apparently never has. And she wouldn’t spend 3 hours with Joe Rogan without a teleprompter.

Let’s all pray she doesn’t have the chance to spend four more years with us.

–

Copyright 2024 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

It’s the usual partisan story.

Folks who love Kamala Harris and hate Donald Trump thought she did fine in her interview with evil Bret Baier on Fox.

Folks who love Trump and hate Kamala thought she was the same unqualified presidential candidate they’ve been watching for three months.

But anyone in the middle, any truly independent or still undecided voter watching Fox, would have been left thinking a bunch of negative things about Harris.

She didn’t look or act the least bit presidential. She recited her usual platitudes. She said nothing new or newsworthy or profound.

She dodged Baier’s opening questions about her responsibility for the millions of illegal immigrants who’ve poured across our open Southern border under her watch.

She doubled down on her claim that Joe Biden’s body and brain were as sharp as ever.

About the only thing she did well was repeatedly pivot and attack Trump as a dictator and the source of all that ails America – as if he’s been the one who’s been in charge the last four years.

I’m no head doctor, but Kamala showed symptoms of serious Trump Derangement Syndrome.

A terrible mental disease, TDS blinds you and is known to make you hate Trump more than you love your country. Its lingering side-effects explain a lot about why Kamala is so out of touch with reality.

It apparently has made her forget that Trump was already president for four years – and didn’t throw his opponents in jail, try to destroy democracy or start any new wars.

It also has made her forget that when he was in office the economy was chugging along, unemployment was low and inflation was 2 percent a year.

Best of all, our southern border was not wide open so that millions of unvetted illegal immigrants could stream into our big cities like New York or overwhelm small towns like Springfield, Ohio.

It was too bad the Fox interview was cut so short – deliberately – by Kamala’s nervous handlers, who were offscreen and wanted to stop the beating she was taking.

Baier no doubt had many other hard questions to ask about things like her party’s internal “coup” that kicked Joe Biden into retirement, FEMA’s recent failures and some of the lies and super-wokism of Gov. Tim Walz, her terrible VP choice.

I would have liked to see Baier ask Kamala to explain why so many black voters – especially younger men – are suddenly showing their love for Trump.

It’s not because they hate women, as Obama scolded them this week.

I think it’s because they’ve finally had enough of the Democrat Party taking their votes for granted and doing so little for black Americans in return.

For the last 60 years, Democrats have been in and out of power in Washington and running big cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.

What exactly have they done to make black lives better?

Have they made cities safe by reducing crime and stopping the gang killings?

Have they created great schools to teach their kids?

Have they created school voucher programs to give black parents the chance to put their kids in private or parochial schools or home school them?

Have they changed the federal welfare policies that for decades have undermined the formation of two-parent black families?

No to all of the above.

But it’s not just that black men are waking up to being fools for the Democrats and becoming Republicans.

More and more of them are hopping on the Trump Train because they like the uniquely crazy engineer. Harris will never understand that transfer of allegiance or know what to do about it because she’s too busy hating on Trump.

At the end of her Fox interview, she got really angry and showed the whole country how much she hates him.

It might have pleased her supporters, but it was not something a candidate for the most important job in the world should ever do.

–

Copyright 2024 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

Jeeze.

In just one day everyone in the country saw why the people in charge of the Democrat Party want to keep Kamala Harris off TV.

And in just one day everyone in the country saw why Donald Trump wants our sitting vice president on TV as much as possible.

The Trump campaign wants Harris to make a hundred more unscripted appearances on her media tour – even on safe, friendly and embarrassing liberal political places like “The View,” the Howard Stern radio show and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

On “The View” Harris didn’t merely deliver her usual canned political BS and toss out a few of her trademark Word Salads. She created a free killer ad for the Trump campaign.

It happened when one of the leftist ‘Ladies of the View” asked VP Harris if there was something she would have done differently in the last four years.

Harris said “there is not a thing that comes to mind” – and then boasted how she had been a part of most of Biden’s important decisions.

You mean like blowing open the southern border and letting 10 million illegal immigrants come in, Madame Vice President?

You mean like that smooth Afghanistan withdrawal Biden pulled off? Those tyrannical lockdowns and covid vax mandates? Those trillion-dollar deficits?

The ladies were so busy slobbering over Harris’ presence and pitching softballs – and beach balls – to her that they never thought about those troubling questions.

The VP’s dumbest statement – proudly tying herself to the Joe Biden record of failure at home and abroad – became a Republican campaign ad within the hour.

Meanwhile, on Stern’s show she was grilled about how long she worked out in the morning. The pair also shared their love of MSNBC’s deranged Joe Scarborough.

On Colbert’s sad late show Harris cackled insanely, sipped a Miller Lite and auditioned her newest fake accent – a Jamaican one to go with her black and Latino accents.

She also professed her love for America and the American people. Haven’t you heard, Stephen, they have aspirations and dreams and an incredible work ethic?

Wednesday was also the day “60 Minutes” was outed on the Internet for secretly improving one of the answers Harris gave to veteran CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker in her rambling, incoherent interview with him last weekend.

When Whitaker originally asked how much control the United States has over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Harris gave one of her patented, head-hurting, run-on answers that Grok AI would take a week to decipher.

But when segments were live-streamed in the middle of the week it turned out someone at “60 Minutes” – surely not Whitaker – had attached a shorter, punchier answer to the Netanyahu question.

By Thursday CBS was not commenting. The Harris campaign was swearing it had nothing to do with the edit. And the Trump campaign was calling for CBS to release the unedited transcript of the entire interview.

This week we watched a candidate running for president of the U.S. prove she’s not qualified to run a local school board.

She can’t think clearly on her feet – or in a talk-show guest chair. She has no ideas of her own, except progressive ones from 2019 like banning fracking that she has flip-flopped on.

Can you envision her at a NATO conference next year or answering questions at a press conference about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East?

If she’s elected, God forbid, she’ll still have no answers for anything until someone feeds them into her teleprompter.

At the end of the day, all she knows for certain is “I’m not Joe Biden” and “I’m not Donald Trump.”

–

Copyright 2024 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

Tim Walz did a lot better than I thought he would in his debate with J.D. Vance on Tuesday night.

Walz didn’t knock himself out of the race like Joe Biden. And he flashed some of the human skills and policy smarts that got him elected and re-elected as a congressman and governor by the good people of Minnesota.

But Vance clearly won – throwing the baseball equivalent of a one-hit shutout.

He quickly took charge of the debate and showed the 40 million Americans tuning in he was the smart guy who went to Yale, and Walz was the former high school football coach who used to be a 4th grade teacher and can’t be trusted with dates or the First Amendment.

After these big debates, to find out who “won,” I always like to look at the initial reactions.

In the post-game analysis of the Vance-Walz encounter by the TV pundits and reporters, it was obvious to everyone except Rachel Maddow and her Trump-deranged ex-Republican panelists on MSNBC that Walz was simply not in Vance’s league.

A lot of people I talked to thought the same thing. In fact, a few said we’ve got the wrong people at the top of the tickets. It should be Vance and Walz, not Trump and Harris.

Walz is obviously not presidential material, but I agree Vance is. So do Republicans like Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy who were planning to run for the White House in 2028.

In the long run, those wannabe presidents were the biggest losers Tuesday night.

They now all know that in four years they’ll have to get in line behind Vance, who, in two hours of prime time, showed the country that he was not the dangerous HillBilly Hitler the liberal media and Democrats have been branding him for two months.

The New York Times and the left-liberals at MSNBC claimed Vance spent the night lying about a bunch of things, which is probably a good sign that he was hitting the right targets.

But he answered all the policy questions well. He didn’t interrupt or insult Walz. He was careful not to be mean to the two liberal women moderators who immediately showed whose side they were not on – which was not his.

But he ably defended himself and was quick to challenge the moderators after they fact-checked him for saying the Haitian immigrants that have swamped Springfield, Ohio, were illegals.

As usual, the “Stolen Election of 2020” – the Achilles heel of Donald Trump – showed up at the debate.

When Vance was asked if he thought Trump lost the election in 2020, he made an unforced error by not saying “yes.” It was a fair question and Vance’s refusal to admit that Trump lost may come back to haunt him in a few thousand Democrat campaign ads over the next four weeks.

Vance – like Trump – should just accept what happened in 2020. They should admit Trump lost fair and square and move on – even if they don’t believe it.

They should treat the 2020 results like a bad strike call by an ump that costs your team a World Series game. Bad strike calls happen all the time.

You can complain and cry about it all night when it happens. But they’re never going to replay the game — just like they’re never going to replay the 2020 election.

Overall, Vance looked and acted presidential. What I liked best about him is that he can relate to the public.

He is a likable guy. He doesn’t yell at you. He’s not like Ron DeSantis, for example, who’s a great governor but who’s stiff and not relatable.

In both the short run and the long run, Vance was the big winner on Tuesday night. He easily out hit and out pitched Walz. He won his reputation back from the liberal media. And no matter what happens a month from now, he might have already won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for 2028.

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Copyright 2024 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

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

That simple question to America’s voters was coined in 1980 by my father when he debated Jimmy Carter on TV.

Part of my father’s closing statement, it probably won the night for him.

Since then it’s become a question that has been asked to voters in some form or another in every televised presidential debate.

My father followed it up with several other rhetorical questions that are just as relevant today as they were 44 years ago:

“Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? …

“Is America as respected throughout the world as it was four years ago?”

“Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?”

I’ve got some similar questions for the voters today who can’t decide on Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

“Are you safer today than you were four years ago?”

“Are you safer today with major wars going on in the Middle East and Ukraine?”

“Are you safer today with Vladimir Putin rattling his nukes at us and Iran threatening Israel?”

“Are you safer today with an open Southern border and 10 or 12 million undocumented immigrants, questionable asylum seekers, Venezuelan gang members and terrorists scattered who-knows-where across the USA?

“Are you safer today in San Francisco with thousands of homeless and mentally disturbed people sleeping and getting stoned on fentanyl on the downtown sidewalks?”

“Are you safer in Springfield, Ohio, where 20,000 Haitian migrants have suddenly moved to town?”

“Are you safer today in Los Angeles, where petty criminals go unpunished by district attorneys and a Metro bus was just hijacked at gunpoint at 1 a.m. by a guy who shot a passenger to death?”

“Are you safer today at your favorite mall with the smash and grabs and hijackings or in downtown Beverly Hills wearing your best jewelry?”

There are a bunch of other “four years ago” questions voters could be asked.

“Are your kids safer on college campuses?”

“Are you safer if you are Jewish at NYU? If you own a small business in what’s left of Minneapolis? If you go to the parking lot after a Cubs game without a pistol in your purse?”

Kamala Harris dodges my dad’s “four years ago” question and every one of its variations every chance she gets.

She usually does it by babbling something idiotic about how she grew up middle class.

Or by boasting how she wants people who are much richer and smarter than her to pay their fair share of taxes.

Or by fibbing about how she sweated over the french fry fryer one summer in the Bay Area at an unknown McDonald’s where no one remembers her.

But, hey.

If you truly feel safer today than you did four years ago, and if it’s not because you’re a political fat-cat being driven around Washington in an armored limo by a well-armed ex-Navy Seal, then go ahead, vote for Harris for president.

But if you think things like street crime and border security have gotten out of control, there is another choice.

You might think he’s a jerk, a bully or a narcissistic billionaire who is a Russian agent and truly wants to become a dictator.

You might not like how he made his fortune or how he says mean things like “Crooked Hillary” about your heroines.

But from 2016 to 2020 he did a lot more things right for America than wrong.

And because he’s a little predictable and talks tough, our foreign enemies are even more frightened of him than the dumb pack of scaredy-cat ladies on “The View.”

So trust me. Love him or hate him, four years ago we Americans were much safer – locally and globally – under Donald Trump. And we’re going to be in really big trouble if we don’t give him four years more.

–

Copyright 2024 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

It’s usually good to be a purist, but not in politics.

Purism in politics is not feasible.

The Republicans in the House proved that for the millionth time this week when they tried to pass the Save Act by attaching it to a CR – a continuing resolution is a bill that extends the funding of the federal government and prevents a government shutdown.

CRs are what have to happen almost every year when Congress fails to pass its annual budget to fund the government — something that it’s constitutionally required to do by October 1.

In other words, if Congress doesn’t pay its bills when they are due, it has to whip up a temporary spending bill to keep the federal trillions flowing in their fat pipelines.

But Congress misses its budget deadline so religiously, it’s become an annual bad joke. In fact, in the last 47 years, it’s met its deadline a whopping three times.

The Save Act, by itself, was a perfectly good idea.

Backed energetically by Donald Trump, it was a federal law that would require that people show proof of citizenship to register to vote.

But attaching the Save Act to a spending bill as a way to force Democrats to pass it was always doomed.

To no one’s surprise, on Wednesday the bill was defeated in the House 202-220, so now it’s back to Square One.

Congress has less than two weeks to pass a bipartisan plan to stave off a government shutdown that would, of course, be blamed on Republicans and/or Trump by the media.

Messing around with the Save Act to make Trump and a few purists happy was always a bad idea.

Now is certainly not the time for Republicans to be purists. It’s not the time for conservative principle-signaling, either. It’s time to be pragmatic and focus on winning.

Republicans – and the entire country and the world — can’t afford to lose the House, the Senate and White House to socialist nutjobs like Harris and the progressive Democrats.

It’s impossible to exaggerate what a disaster it would be to our country, our economy and our besieged Constitution if the Harris-Walz gang takes control of all three centers of federal power.

That’s why Republicans have to focus on what’s most important – winning in the fall and taking back control of Washington – and forget the pursuit of purism.

Purism only works when you control both halves of Congress and the White House.

If you don’t have full control, you have to be pragmatic – which is another word for being realistic.

Republican leaders in the House added a voting bill they knew Democrats and the moderates in their own party were never going to support.

They knew the Save Act wouldn’t pass, but they did it anyway because they wanted to make Trump happy. OK, that’s what Trump wanted.

But you don’t always get what you want – especially in politics.

Would I have liked to see the Save Act pass? Yeah, absolutely.

But not if it would have meant shutting down the government and not electing Trump or a GOP majority in the House or Senate.

Then Republicans would be completely out of luck. So would be the whole country.

It is just eight weeks before a huge election and Republicans were willing to play around with shutting down the government just to make the purists happy? How stupid was that?

Threatening a shutdown was not the way to victory. Now it’s time for Republicans in Congress to get real – and get pragmatic.

The Democrats are focused on getting elected and controlling both parts of Congress and the White House. Republicans better get in that same mode.

After Republicans get control of the House, the Senate and the White House, then talk to me about the pursuit of purism.

Meanwhile, if you want to know how well purism works in politics, ask your favorite libertarian presidential candidate.

–

Copyright 2024 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

Trump or Harris?

The pundits and so-called political experts in the liberal and conservative media are still arguing over who won Tuesday’s presidential debate.

They’ll never agree. And they’re all so biased and partisan, they can’t be trusted to be honest anyway.

But both sides did seem to agree on one thing – ABC News was the biggest loser. By far.

Whatever shred of legitimacy ABC’s news-gathering operation had left, which wasn’t much, it was destroyed in full public view during the Trump-Harris debate.

For 90 minutes millions of potential voters watched David Muir and Linsey Davis repeatedly help Harris and hurt Trump.

As we all know by now, the duo “fact-checked” Trump five times – often unfairly or inaccurately.

They fact-checked Harris zero times. Plus, they never pressed her to explain her socialist-lite economic plans or how she changed from being a San Francisco progressive to a Biden centrist on every major issue.

And without a single challenge, they let her spew a handful of old, fully debunked Democrat Party lies about Trump.

For example, Muir didn’t say a peep when Harris repeated the lie that Trump said neo-Nazis and white supremacists at Charlottesville were “very fine people.”

Meanwhile, every direct question put to Harris was dodged and left unanswered, starting with the first one: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”

That question and others merely served as jumping off points for Harris to unleash a string of personal attacks on Trump to make him angry and defensive.

She painted him as a wannabe dictator, a multi-felon and an embarrassment to America.

She poked him with claims that his MAGA rallies were boring and said foreign leaders told her all the time that they didn’t respect him.

The rest of the time Harris recited empty platitudes and cliches about how she’s going to save the middle class from the economic problems that she pretends she and her boss Joe Biden have not created.

ABC disgraced itself with its shoddy and dishonest journalism, but what Muir and Davis did was nothing new or surprising.

In our presidential TV debates, it’s always three liberals against one conservative Republican. You’d think after four decades or so, the GOP would know that by now and plan accordingly.

Trump certainly knew he was going to be on an unfair playing field. But he was woefully unprepared for a serious, issue-packed debate.

He should have concentrated on slamming Harris for her terrible record on the border and attacking her for the radical positions on immigration, abortion, fracking, taxes, defunding the police and gun rights that she held until about 15 minutes ago.

And it would have been very simple at the beginning of the debate for Trump to say to the moderator, “Can you please have her answer that question?”

Instead of going on offense, however, Trump was goaded into going on defense.

A victim of his own ego, he took Harris’ bait almost every time, reacting to her personal attacks and rehashing his personal grievances about the 2020 election. He answered angrily, not presidentially. He even yelled.

As my son Cameron said during the debate, it seemed as if Trump was delivering two-minute excerpts from one of his big outdoor rallies, where he can riff for two hours in front of an adoring mob of MAGA heads.

I agree with those who say Trump won on substance and Harris won on style – if you can call her fake laughs and vague non-answers “style.”

Except for his opening and closing statements, Trump clearly did not have a good night.

But in the end, it doesn’t really matter who won the debate – which is now old news. It was not intended to persuade the voters who already blindly love or hate Trump or Harris.

It was intended to persuade the undecideds – the independents, the Nikki Haley lovers. And on that score, Trump blew it by being Donald Trump.

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Copyright 2024 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

“He was on our radar.”

How many times have we heard that after a mass shooting at a high school or a shopping mall?

We heard it for the umpteenth time again this week after a disturbed 14-year-old kid in Georgia took a rifle to school and killed two students, two teachers, and injured nine others.

“He was on our watch list,” the local police said to no one’s surprise.

A year ago, after the FBI’s radar picked up Colt Gray reportedly making threats online that he was going to “shoot up a middle school tomorrow,” the feds tipped off the county sheriff.

Colt and his father, Colin Gray, were questioned about the anonymous and unsubstantiated tip.

Colt assured a county investigator “he never made any threats to shoot up any school.”

His dad told the investigator that Colt had mental issues, but he was a good kid who’d never even joke about doing a terrible thing like that.

His dad also assured the police that though he had hunting rifles in the house, Colt did not have unfettered access to them.

The investigator said that he urged Colt’s father last year “to keep his firearms locked away and advised him to keep Colt out of school until this matter could be resolved.”

Case closed – until the tragedy of this week.

Colt was not kept out of school. His dad failed to prevent him from getting his hands on a rifle – and in fact, gave Colt the AR-15-style rifle he used in the shooting as a Christmas present months after he was visited by the investigators.

The police “radar” failed to stop the shooter – again. And four innocent people are dead.

Realistically, there’s not a lot that parents can do to “fix” a child like Colt, who has serious mental troubles and is a potential threat to others.

Parents can admit the truth and not be afraid of being shamed as a “bad parent.” They can seek professional care or put their child in a mental health facility, though when he turns 18, he has the right to get out.

But there is something very important that sensible and caring parents can do to prevent or reduce the number of future mass shootings.

It’s really not complicated. It’s simply putting the family’s pistols and rifles in a gun safe and making sure your kids don’t have the access code.

Even better, it’s getting all of your guns completely out of the house by giving them to a relative or friend to hold for you until your child grows up, gets control of his brain and stops being mad at the world.

Unfortunately, irresponsible or clueless gun-owning parents like Colt Gray’s father are not rare. They play a role in so many mass shootings that prosecutors and the courts are starting to make them pay for their carelessness.

Earlier this year a Michigan couple became the first parents convicted in a mass school shooting.

Because they missed so many chances to prevent their disturbed 15-year-old son from getting a handgun and killing four schoolmates in 2021, they were sentenced to 10 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

As the AP said, they were guilty of failing to secure a “newly purchased gun at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health.”

And Thursday night, as this was being written, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation charged Colt Gray’s father Colin with second degree murder and involuntary manslaughter “for knowingly allowing his son Colt to possess a weapon.”

Parents can play an important role in preventing tragic shootings like the one this week – which would never have happened if our “radar” worked the way it should – by knowing when to take their children’s guns away.

They should do their own “gun control” before the government tries to use mass shootings as an excuse to take all our guns away.

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Copyright 2024 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.