Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Hollywood can’t always be trusted to accurately portray reality or history, to say the least.

But I fully enjoyed watching the facts go by in the premier of “Reagan,” which I saw this week at the famous Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

“Reagan,” which stars Dennis Quaid as my father and opened around the country Friday, covers my father’s career from Illinois lifeguard to the American president who set out to bankrupt the Soviet Union – and did it.

It took an international team of freedom fighters like Maggie Thatcher and Pope John Paul II to bring down the USSR and end the Cold War.

But as the movie shows, it was my father’s rhetoric, his America-wins foreign policy, his Christian moral principles and his stubborn negotiating skills that led the way to the West’s victory over the Evil Empire.

“Reagan” is not a political movie. It’s not a rah-rah campaign ad for him or Republicans.

It’s a warts-and-all rendition of my father’s successes and failures in life and politics as told through the eyes of an old KGB agent (Jon Voight).

It includes his fight against the communists who were trying to take over the actors union in the late 1940s and the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s.

It shows how he became a Christian, how he stood up for his conservative beliefs and how as California governor he fought with the heads of state universities over campus protests in the 1960s.

“Reagan” shows that as president many of my father’s toughest fights were with his own advisors.

He ignored their advice when he issued his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin “to tear down this Wall” and he resisted their stiff pressure to sign away the Star Wars anti-ballistic missile system at his summit meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik.

One of the best scenes depicts something that could never happen in today’s partisan, hate-filled politics.

It shows how my father’s chief political nemesis – and great friend – Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was one of the first people to visit him in the hospital after he was shot.

O’Neill, who was carrying a rosary, kneeled next to the hospital bed and they prayed together – which is equally unlikely to ever occur again in our irreligious age.

A snotty review of “Reagan” in the Hollywood Reporter dismissed the movie as an “over-reverential” tribute.

The critic said it was too long and insufficiently “incisive” when addressing my father’s warts – proving that Tinsel Town’s knee-jerk bias against my father and his politics is alive and well.

That kind of negative review will no doubt please the wealthy liberal actors who still treat Ronald Reagan like a Republican ogre from the past.

But I bet few of them know that when he was president of their union, he was the one who led the fight to get them their first health care benefits and the residuals they enjoy today.

The critics’ opinions of “Reagan” don’t matter. It’s an excellent, 2½-hour history lesson that is wonderfully and respectfully done.

Quaid is great as my father. My mother Jane Wyman and Nancy Reagan are perfect. The music is great, too, including Bob Dylan’s rendition of “Don’t Fence Me in,” which he sings over the credits.

And make sure to stay until the end of the credits. They include photos depicting various moments in the movie, but the highlight is a letter written to my father by a child from Reykjavik who lived in the Hofdi House where the 1986 summit with Gorbachev took place.

I don’t appear in the movie or the credits, though I was interviewed about 15 years ago by the moviemakers who used some of the stories and quotes I told them.

I recognized many big moments in the movie because I was there when they happened. And it makes me proud that not only was I a witness to history, I lived part of it.

–

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

Thank goodness the Democrat Party’s magic act in Chicago is finally over.

For four days we’ve had to watch the liberal media drool over Kamala Harris and her unimpressive VP choice, Tim Walz, like they were the greatest team of presidential candidates since JFK picked LBJ in 1960.

We’ve had to listen to a parade of angry Democrats bigshots complain about what a broken, unfair and unfree place America has become and how Harris is going to fix everything and restore democracy.

We’ve had to hear a string of Democrat nobodies get up on stage and repeat and repeat all their party’s favorite lies about Trump, including the debunked, out-of-context claim that he said if he is re-elected he planned to become a dictator on Day One.

We also had to stay up late if we wanted to endure what could have been Joe Biden’s last major political speech.

Along with the usual Biden boasts, laughable exaggerations and strange, shouting delivery, it was an angry rant about the evils of Donald Trump and his threat to democracy. I swear it was so loud it’s still echoing in the Santa Monica Mountains out here in Los Angeles.

In case you didn’t notice, the Democrats in Chicago were angry about everything – inflation, the southern border, housing costs, street crime, corporate greed, student debt, Big Pharma, under-taxed rich people, etc.

Of course, they spewed the standard liberal non-solutions to these problems that will mean more big government programs, more regulations, more taxes and more “freebies for all” that will cost taxpayers trillions, spike inflation and balloon the national debt.

The Democrats at the convention were so blinded by their Trump derangement and anger at Republicans that they performed an incredible magic act that Penn and Teller would envy – they made the last four years disappear.

Based on the wild and crazy things they said all week, Democrats apparently think it’s still 2020 and Donald Trump is still president.

Someone – ideally, the majority of voters this fall – should break the bad news to the Democrats: It’s 2024 and you guys are the ones who’ve been in charge for almost the last four years.

It’s your party’s heroes – Biden, Harris and Schumer, woke Blue State governors like Walz and Newsom, and scores of progressive big-city mayors and district attorneys – that are responsible for most of the inflation, the rise in street crime and homelessness, the terrible wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the rest of the government screw ups at home and abroad.

The Dems have been pushing “joy” and “freedom” as their campaign theme. But they also stressed how angry they are and how dangerous Dictator Trump is to democracy.

No one reminded the audience of the undemocratic way the party’s bosses handed Harris the nomination.

Or the undemocratic way they rigged it so not one person voted for her in a primary.

Or the undemocratic way they pulled a secret coup to get Biden to “retire” – after their polls told them if Joe ran the party was going to get crushed in down-ballot races across the U.S.

It’s not like Kamala said she was sorry for all the bad things that have been done to America while she and Biden have been in charge.

Or reminded us that it’s really 2024, not 2020.

–

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

For Democrats this historic election is about only one issue – Trump.

Whoever wins the White House, it won’t be because of issues like high inflation, trillion-dollar annual budget deficits or the humiliation of Afghanistan.

It’s going to come down to one simple but big thing – How many Americans love Kamala Harris and how many hate Donald Trump.

Democrats know that if they can convince voters to hate Trump more than they hate high interest rates, higher taxes and the open border, Harris will win.

It won’t matter if she makes a fool of herself in a future interview with Jake Tapper, has a disastrous TV debate with Trump or never says an unscripted word to a journalist between now and election day.

Republicans, meanwhile, know that if they can convince more voters to love Trump, he wins.

Trump is strong on the core Republican issues, and he already has the MAGA Nation solidly in his corner.

But to defeat Harris he needs to get millions of other non-Republican voters to love him.

He has to win over the independents, the suburban women and the conservative Democrats who’ve had their fill of Biden-Harris failures at home and abroad.

Only Trump can capture the hearts of the noncommitted. But to do it, he needs to make some serious changes.

He needs to stop arguing like a teen-age boy over his crowd sizes. It’s stupid – and no one but him cares anymore.

He has to stop calling Kamala Harris dumb. It may be true and it may get the people who already love him excited.

But nicknaming Harris “Lyin’ Kamala” is not the best way to endear yourself to voters who are still uncommitted.

Trump should let his 30-second campaign ads deliver the dirt and the insults, not him.

He should concentrate on tying her to all the policy failures of the last four years – everything from cancelling college loan debts to the war on covid.

He should hit her on how she blew it as the Border Czar.

And he should constantly remind people how Harris lied to the public by pretending Biden was sharp as a tack – right up until he proved he was no longer capable of running for re-election.

But to win more love and affection, and the election, Trump has to tone down, lift up, soften and streamline his campaign style and his core message.

He needs to realize it’s 2024 – not 2015. His rambling, jokey, folksy, 90-minute speeches no longer cut it.

Instead of feeding his addiction to his followers’ applause, he should be delivering punchy, 30-minute speeches that discuss the dinner-table issues people care about and talk about – inflation, illegal immigration, schools, war and taxes.

Nobody cares about tariffs. Nobody. Most people don’t even understand what they are.

He needs to find a great speechwriter like Peggy Noonan or Ted Sorensen and become more like Reagan or JFK and less like Trump.

It may still make him feel good to be speaking to adoring crowds of 40,000 like it’s 2016 again.

But if the uncommitted voter at the dinner table isn’t clearly hearing his message today, and isn’t deciding that Trump deserves a little love, Trump is going to lose.

He needs someone to write him a short, sweet but powerful stump speech targeted at Republicans and the uncommitted voters the GOP needs. He should deliver it over and over again — and he should stick to what is written on the teleprompter.

Democrats had problems when Biden went off script. He would say things that would even make Nancy Pelosi cringe and force the White House to clean up his weekly gaffes.

Well, Trump’s no different. When he goes off script, he makes a lot of faithful Republicans cringe. The uncommitted voters he’ll need to win in November are much less forgiving.

–

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

You might still have questions about how the Biden Coup of 2024 went down.

Or maybe you still want to know who has really been calling the shots in the Biden administration during Joe’s afternoon naps.

But it looks like you’ll have to wait for the historians.

The liberal journalists who control our mainstream media don’t care how Joe Biden was dethroned by his own party – not now and not when it happened.

They don’t care that Vice President Kamala Harris – the reigning laughingstock of American politics until ten minutes ago – was undemocratically planted atop the Democrat Party ticket in secret without a single vote by anyone in a primary.

They don’t really care who “persuaded” Biden to step down.

Was it Obama? Pelosi? The Clintons? A gang of rich donors? All of the above?

Did they threaten to remove Biden under the 25th Amendment because he was unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office? Or because he was going to lose?

Don’t ask our so-called journalists to find out for us.

They’re the same partisans who’ve spent four years protecting Biden and pretending he was as sharp as Winston Churchill.

They’re also the same ethical folks who knew all along but didn’t care that Harris, Schumer, Pelosi and all the other Democrats were lying to them about Biden’s visible mental and physical decline.

But that’s ancient news.

Now we’re headed down the final stretch of the race for the White House.

We all know who the liberal so-called journalists are rooting for and who they’re going to do their best to hurt.

Overnight, they’ve already transformed the ditzy Harris into the wildly popular Maggie Thatcher of the progressive left.

So far, so-called journalists seem perfectly OK with Harris’ handlers keeping her away from press conferences, a la Biden.

Harris’ handlers don’t want reporters asking her to explain her flip flopping, San Francisco-liberal positions on things like fracking, defunding the police and free healthcare for illegal immigrants.

Those are serious issues she’s most likely to answer by cackling nervously or uncorking one of her goofy word-salads.

Meanwhile, so-called journalists are pretending Harris’ VP pick, Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz, is a wise and caring moderate from the American Heartland.

To their Trump-blinded liberal eyes, Walz looks like the next Harry Truman.

He’s not the petty tyrant who pushed strict and dangerously dumb policies during the COVID lockdowns, including forcing thousands of elderly people who had caught COVID to go back into their nursing homes.

He’s not the governor who set up a snitch line for people to call and report kids who were violating social distancing rules by being outside shooting baskets.

He’s not the woke weirdo who okayed tampons being placed in boys bathrooms in schools or said awful things like, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

Will our so-called journalists ask Gov. Walz any tough questions about these and other shortcomings?

Will they ask him why he waited several days before sending in the National Guard when the BLM riots were putting Minneapolis to the torch in 2020?

Will our so-called TV journalists bring Gov. Walz in for live Sunday morning interviews and ask why he quit the National Guard just when his unit was called up to go to Iraq?

Will they ask him why he likes to give voters the impression that he went to war in Iraq when he didn’t?

Will our so-called journalists give Walz the J.D. Vance treatment?

Will they talk to whistleblowers and dig around in his past for DUIs and embarrassing letters and texts?

Don’t anyone hold their breath waiting for Harris and Walz to get the scrutiny and hard questions they deserve from our so-called journalists.

For the last four years they have tortured Trump in every way possible while protecting Biden and helping him hide his decline from the public.

Anyone who thinks our so-called journalists are going to do their jobs honestly and fairly for the next 12 weeks hasn’t been paying attention.

–

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

This week our lame duck President Joe Biden came out of hiding and called for some major changes in how the U.S. Supreme Court operates.

His proposals — another election-time pander to his party’s progressive base – were liberal, pie-in-the-sky ideas that everyone knows will never materialize in the real world.

They included getting Congress to impose term limits and a binding code of ethics on justices, neither of which could get the required votes in a divided Congress.

Biden’s most foolish idea of the week, however, was his call for a constitutional amendment to strip the president of immunity for crimes committed while in office.

He dubbed it the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” but if he were an honest president, he would have called it the “Let’s Hang Donald Trump Amendment.”

The proposed amendment states that the Constitution “does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as President.”

Biden’s constitutional Hail Mary is DOA, of course, because it would require the approval of 38 states and the House of Representatives.

Everyone knows what tricks Biden and the Democrats are up to with the Supreme Court.

Changing its size by adding more justices and imposing term limits of 18 years are bald partisan attempts to gain control of a conservative branch of government that stands in the way of their “progressive” pipe dreams.

Biden’s ideas to radically change the Supreme Court are not just dangerous to the country, however, they’re proof of how dumb he and his fellow Democrats are.

When is it going to dawn on them that the laws they pass in Congress to punish Republicans or Donald Trump today will inevitably come back to bite them in the butt tomorrow?

Their biggest blunder, and the lesson you’d think they’d never forget, was in 2013 when the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate under Harry Reid decided to change the rules for approving federal judges.

Democrats at the time were frustrated because Republicans in the Senate were blocking the confirmation of about 100 of President Obama’s judicial nominees and other federal appointees.

So Reid changed the Senate’s filibuster rule (which said a super-majority of 60 votes was needed to end unlimited debate on any piece of legislation) to no longer apply to lower-level federal judges.

Lowering the required confirmation vote to a simple majority – 50 senators – was a sly political move at the time. But it was also extremely short-sighted.

Soon afterwards, Republicans took control of the Senate and the new majority leader, Mitch McConnell, decided to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, too.

Whoops.

Apparently, Democrats had assumed the White House, the Senate and the House would be controlled by Democrats for the rest of eternity.

But then Donald Trump came to town and followed the new rules the Democrats left him.

He ended up with three new conservative Supreme Court justices – who couldn’t have gotten over the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle in a million years – being confirmed by simple majorities.

Ever since, Democrats and the media have been slandering the Supreme Court’s Republican majority as partisan, unethical authoritarians and calling for the high court to be expanded or radically changed.

Democrats have been desperate to find a way to add more progressive justices to the Supreme Court so they could outnumber the six conservatives who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

And, just recently, in Trump v. United States, the Democrats went nuts again when the court ruled 6-3 that presidents have immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office.

Biden, the Democrats and the deranged liberal media were super angry because the high court supposedly let Trump off the hook.

But given the Biden family’s shady business activities, I’d think Joe would be a big fan of presidential immunity. As that old saying goes, “What goes around comes around.”

–

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

We had two big speeches from Washington on Wednesday.

Neither one was very encouraging for those of us who worry about our fragile democracy and the futures of our kids and grandkids.

Bibi Netanyahu gave a great speech in the House of Representatives, defending Israel’s war in Gaza and trying to rally support from U.S. politicians – i.e., Republicans, mostly.

Many Democrats stayed away from Bibi’s speech or cut out early, like Senator Chuck Schumer.

They were afraid to offend the left-wing Democrats that have fractured their party by supporting the Palestinians in Gaza and arguing against further U.S. military aid for Israel.

Rashida Tlaib at least showed up, but she was spotted in the audience holding a sign that read “guilty of genocide” on one side and “war criminal” on the other.

Tlaib’s sign echoed those being carried by the “mostly peaceful” 2,000 anti-Israeli protestors outside, five of whom were arrested for breaking into the Capitol Building.

As for the Democrat Party’s brave and principled leaders, one was conspicuously absent – VP Kamala Harris.

The party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee couldn’t attend Bibi’s speech. Conveniently, she had to deliver a very important address to the historically black sorority Zeta Phi Beta.

President Biden was AWOL, too.

While Bibi spoke, he was either having his nap or practicing his Wednesday night Oval Office speech where he explained to the nation why he was selflessly “handing the torch” to young Kamala.

I watched Biden’s “torch” speech. It was pitiful. He looked worse than he did in his disastrous TV debate with Trump. He could barely read the teleprompter.

The Biden hero-worshippers on “Morning Joe” saw a selfless hero and swallowed every word and cliche their beloved president said.

But I saw a sad man who’s not going to make it to the end of his term – or maybe not even to the convention.

Meanwhile, it drove me crazy on Wednesday to watch the vandalism being committed by the anti-Israeli protestors in Washington.

American flags were taken down and replaced with Palestinian flags at Washington’s Union Station. An American flag was set on fire by protestors. Pro-Hamas graffiti was everywhere.

Even the replica of the Liberty Bell outside the train station was defaced with hateful and obscene antisemitic graffiti. We know nothing will happen to the 200 rioters who were arrested in Washington.

On Thursday afternoon Harris – the person who helped bail out rioters in the “mostly peaceful” Summer of Love in 2020 – finally got around to condemning the “despicable acts by unpatriotic protestors.”

But there was little outrage from other top Democrat Party people and their friends in the major liberal media.

While our streets and campuses are crawling with leftwing protestors and pro-Palestine vandals, Democrats are still yammering about the “insurrection” of January 6 and worrying about the existential threat Donald Trump supposedly poses to our democracy.

The Democrats constantly warn everyone about Trump being a wannabe dictator. But I’m tired of hearing them say they are trying to save democracy while they continue to step all over it.

I’ve seen what Democrats did to Biden — and it wasn’t very democratic.

He was no doubt threatened by his party’s bosses with the 25th Amendment – “Get out, Joe, or we’re gonna throw you out. Kamala’s moving in.”

Biden’s victimization by his own tribe was nothing new.

In 2016 Democrat chiefs screwed Bernie Sanders out of the nomination and put the fix in for Hillary. In 2020 they made every other candidate step aside so Biden could win.

Now in 2024 they’ve essentially tossed a president out of office and replaced him with his VP – with no votes taken by anyone.

So don’t tell the Trump-deranged liberal media, but Democrats have been having their own insurrections for years.

They’ve been taking place behind closed doors, and they were decided by political insiders and Washington elites who are unknown to the public.

They’ve been scaring everyone that if Trump is reelected, there goes democracy. But guess what folks, in the Democrat Party it’s already gone.

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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

“This isn’t my father’s Secret Service.”

That’s what I immediately tweeted in response to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

Little did I know.

Every day, drip by drip, we get more proof of the incredible incompetence of the agency that is supposed to prevent the kind of shooting that happened in broad daylight near Pittsburgh.

While we wait for the inevitable shocking new revelations about the attempt on Trump’s life, he, his family and millions of other people are saying they believe it was not just luck but an act of God that saved his life.

I bet his experience will have a long-lasting effect on him that will be similar to the profound impact Ronald Reagan’s shooting had on him 43 years ago.

My father and millions of other people believed it was an act of God that saved his life from being ended by the hail of bullets fired by John Hinckley.

We’ll have to wait a year or so to see how Trump reacts, but my father’s near-death experience is why he dedicated the rest of his administration – more than seven years – to God.

One of the lasting effects of surviving an assassination attempt was always knowing that several others were also shot and wounded by bullets that were meant for him.

I remember flying from Washington back to California on Air Force One with my father on Good Friday of 1988. As we were landing, he was counting out the number 9 on his fingers.

I asked why the number 9 was significant. He said, “In nine more months, I’ll no longer be President of the United States.”

“Is that something you’re truly looking forward to?” I asked.

“I am,” he said.

“Ever since I looked out the rear window of my limousine on March 30 of 1981 and saw people laying in their own blood from bullets that were meant for me, I haven’t gone to church on a regular basis, if at all, because I worry about putting people in harm’s way because someone’s after me.

“I’m looking forward to no longer being president so I can, on any given Sunday, begin going to church again to visit my Lord and Savior. That’s why I counted the Number 9.”

After my father left office January 20, 1989, he never missed church on Sunday again. Even when he could no longer go because of his Alzheimer’s, the pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian would come up and minister to him.

I think Donald Trump may be changed by the same haunting thought that people were killed and wounded with bullets meant for him and he wants to reduce the chance of it ever happening again.

It’s interesting to compare the ways Trump and my father reacted to their shootings that reflected their different personalities.

Trump stood up with his fist in the air and defiantly yelled, “Fight, fight, fight.” He basically said, “Screw you, whoever did this.”

My dad handled his more serious injury with humor – with quips like, “Nancy, I forgot to duck” and “I hope all you doctors are Republicans.” And his warning to me the next morning was, “If you ever get shot, don’t be wearing a new suit.”

Both men reacted in ways that were true to themselves. They showed courage. They humanized and personalized a horrible event.

It was like, “You missed me. I’m still Ronald Reagan. I’ve still got a sense of humor.” And “I’m still Donald Trump. You can’t kill me or my movement.”

Both men in their own natural ways endeared themselves to the American public and the world. And in Trump’s case, the iconic images of his defiance and bloodied face virtually clinched his victory in the fall.

–

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

Being far away from home in Iceland and Britain for the last two weeks was perfect timing.

Just as President Biden was proving to the whole country that he’s incapable of being president for another four years, or another week, I left the madness of American politics and flew off to Europe for a vacation cruise.

As I often have had the pleasure of doing, I traveled with my travel-agent wife Colleen and a bunch of her clients. This time, though, we also took along my two kids Cameron and Ashley and their families.

We Reagans had an especially great time in Iceland.

On Reykjavik’s scenic waterfront we visited the Hofdi House, where my father made world history in 1986.

You’d never suspect that the modest white-washed building was where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev first met and began the arms talks that would eventually bring a peaceful end to the Cold War.

We traveling Reagans also soaked ourselves in Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa whose mineral-rich warm waters are said to be as therapeutic as they are relaxing.

During our trip I also relaxed by watching England and Spain win their soccer matches against the Netherlands and France and make their ways to their showdown in the finals of the European cup. And I saw a lot of the Tour de France on TV.

I deliberately paid very little attention to the daily turmoil, panic and 24/7 BS-ing going on back home in the Democrat Party after Biden’s terrible debate performance against Trump.

I knew the liberal media had turned on their hero Old Joe.

I knew they were pretending to be angry with the Biden administration for misleading them about the alarming extent of his mental decline, when the news media have known about it for years and wouldn’t report it because they were protecting him.

But I was on a pleasure cruise, not a torture ship. So I refused to talk about American politics at dinner or watch it on TV. I also stayed off Twitter and social media.

Now that I’m back home in Los Angeles, I realize I didn’t miss much. The Biden question – does he have to drop out of the race or can he stay in? – has little to do with the undeniably diminished state of his brain or body.

Biden has been a pretend president for four years. It’s the people around and behind him who are calling the shots. They’re the ones writing the scripts and using him as the front man for Obama’s third term.

For the Democrat Party pooh-bahs, it’s all about beating Donald Trump in November and holding on to their power.

Actually, though, it won’t matter who wins, Biden or Trump. Whoever controls the Senate is who is going to control the country’s politics for the next four years.

If the Republicans don’t take the Senate from Democrats, Trump would be at the mercy of Chuck Schumer and he’d get nothing passed.

If Biden wins but Republicans take over the Senate, which, on paper, looks like a good bet, then anything Biden wanted would be blocked by the GOP Senate.

In other words, gridlock in Congress will reign. That’s the reality.

If the country were not in such a Biden-made mess, gridlock would be a blessing.

But the border is wide open and both parties in Washington are wrecking the future with their drunken spending and trillion-dollar annual deficits.

Those and other problems need to be fixed, not kicked down the road for another four years.

Everyone’s talking about Trump’s high poll numbers. That’s hopeful. But even if he wins by a landslide, if Republicans don’t get the Senate it won’t mean a thing.

To paraphrase that crazy old Cajun James Carville, the GOP campaign slogan for 2024 is “It’s the Senate, stupid.”

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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

Going into Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on CNN, the big question was whether Biden could last 90 minutes.

We found out he couldn’t last 90 seconds.

On Thursday night everyone saw what’s left of the president’s brain and body – and it was not just a disastrous political moment for Joe Biden, it was a sad one.

It wasn’t just that his voice was hoarse at the start.

It wasn’t because of his confused and muddled answers or his five-second freeze about 13 minutes in, which he ended by uttering the mysterious words “we beat Medicare.”

It wasn’t his slack-jawed look, his vacant stare or his usual gaffes or lies about inflation or Afghanistan or his southern border policy.

It wasn’t because of CNN’s split-screen set-up. Or its moderators or their questions, which were actually pretty fair.

It wasn’t because a new and improved Donald Trump suddenly showed up to out-debate Biden with a bunch of Reagan-sharp conservative policy ideas.

Trump was the same old Trump, firing off the same messages, complaints and charges of Democrat corruption and incompetence that we’ve been hearing since 2015.

Nope. It was Joe Biden himself who was responsible for the entire disaster.

He was so awful he would have lost the debate even if Trump hadn’t shown up.

As Brit Hume wisely said afterwards on Fox, nothing either man said about inflation, the border or any other issue mattered to the millions watching.

It was simply about seeing 90 straight minutes of the real Joe Biden in action.

He had no notes with answers to pre-arranged questions. No aides whispering in his ear. No handlers to quickly escort him backstage. No media pals to edit his words or ignore his gaffes.

Over at Fox, Sean Hannity was barely exaggerating when he called Biden’s performance “the biggest trainwreck” of any presidential candidate ever.

The president’s performance was so damning, so pathetic, that Fox’s professional smart-aleck Jesse Watters said he actually felt bad for Biden.

The Democrat politicians and TV pundits who hate Trump so much that they can’t think straight – and who truly believe that Trump is Hitler 2.0 – were in shock after the debate.

CNN’s shamelessly biased White House correspondent, Jonathan Karl, who made sure to mention that Trump was “a machine gun of lies,” said what was obvious to his fellow panelists: It was a very bad night for Biden.

They could no longer kid themselves – i.e., lie to themselves – that their hero was mentally and physically capable of running for reelection (or running the country now, if they had been honest).

They could no longer pretend that in private their hero was as sharp as Maggie Thatcher, as a sad and suicidal-looking Joe Scarborough was still insisting on MSNBC Friday morning.

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told the liberals on CNN’s post-debate panel that Biden’s entire campaign was now in the toilet.

To everyone except Democrat Party groupie-for-life Donna Brazile, Biden was almost certainly done for. He was clearly not competent. But who could replace him on the ticket?

He can’t resign now because even diehard Democrats would not want VP Kamala Harris to become president for a weekend.

Would Biden accept the nomination for president at the convention and then retire and let his party come up with a new candidate who’s willing to lose to Trump?

Gavin Newsom? Gretchen Whitmer? How about the nightmare of Hillary?

Whatever bad happens to the Democrats in the fall will be well-deserved.

Biden was hung out to dry in front of millions by his party’s leaders, his Obama team handlers, and his loving wife.

They knew he was doomed to fail in a televised debate with Trump. They’ve known for years exactly how diminished Joe Biden is.

They and their partners in the liberal media have been pretending for three years that he is still the old Joe Biden.

He never was – and now the whole world knows it.

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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

Who do the liberal ladies of “The View” think they’re kidding?

This week Joy Behar and her ragged troop of pretend political pundits were again acting terrified by the specter of Donald Trump – aka, Adolf Hitler 2.0 – returning to power this fall.

Behar, who used to be a comedian, was as serious as an insurrection.

She and her Tuesday show’s special guest, none other than MSNBC’s insufferable St. Rachel Maddow, worried that if Trump is elected again he would take revenge on them and take their shows off the air.

Or sic the IRS on them. Or worse. Make them watch “Hannity” every night.

Maddow, who has done more to degrade the value of a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford than any American since Bill Clinton, really let her sloppy journalism hang out when she made up this quote from Trump.

She said, “I think it’s bad to have somebody saying, ‘Give me as much power as you can in this country so I can use it to go after other Americans, so I can use it to go after these subhuman internal enemies and I will destroy them.’

“That’s just not a good system for anybody, and I don’t think anybody is safe if that’s the sort of basis on which he wants to get more power.”

Maddow, Behar and the other victims of Trump derangement syndrome in charge of the liberal media sphere constantly slime Trump as a wannabe dictator.

Too blind to see that Biden has actually been doing all the tyrannical things she imagines Trump will do, Maddow recently said to CNN’s Oliver Darcy that she was worried Trump would send people like her to “a massive” camp.

You wish, Rachel. So do the suits at MSNBC.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Maddow and fake journalists like her are secretly praying for a return to power of Donald Trump.

I think she secretly hopes he will do the same banana-republic-type things Democrat presidents like to do, whether it’s using the IRS, the FBI and the CIA as political weapons or finding new ways to put their Republican opponents in jail.

Even Maddow and Behar have come to realize by now that the more the Biden administration and the liberal media go after Trump in underhanded and partisan ways, the higher his polls go.

Trump has been charged with crimes invented by corrupt local Democrat district attorneys and judges who’ve dragged him into kangaroo courts, slapped him with gag orders, forced him to post a $175 million bail and convicted him of three dozen low-level felonies.

But he hasn’t been hurt with voters. In fact, it’s the reverse.

The more Trump’s political enemies go after him, the more they try to prevent him even from campaigning, the more popular he’s gotten with his MAGA base, independents and minorities.

Maddow, Behar and their ilk on MSNBC and CNN desperately need Trump to be elected. They know the future of their shows is threatened far more by the decline of their ratings than four more years of President Trump.

To survive, they need to become victims of Trump – to become political martyrs. They yearn for it. They want mugshots of their own. Their careers and their wallets depend on it.

In fact, I bet Maddow has already started daydreaming about doing her show from inside an American gulag while her distraught fans protest at the gate in their “Free Rachel” t-shirts.

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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.