The Trump Dividend

Peace through strength also is prosperity through strength

Jim Geraghty tweeted something yesterday that seems obvious outside the Beltway:

I would note that Trump’s unexpected attacks against Venezuela and Iran have added to his own personal version of the “madman theory.” Nobody knows what Trump will do in the near future, in part because Trump probably doesn’t know himself. Nicolás Maduro thought so little of President Trump that he mocked him with a little dance. He’s probably not dancing in his cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center this morning. Last October, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sneered that Trump’s speech to the Knesset was “empty words” and “buffoonery.”

The ayatollah could not be reached for comment, nor could his son.

Oh, Mister Geraghty, President Trump knows exactly what he is doing. As my youngest niece (a grandparent herself now) told me a decade ago: Trump is crazy. Crazy like a fox.

By refusing to take Trump seriously, Maduro and the Ayatollah learned nothing from Hillary’s disastrous presidential run in 2016. She spent August that year relaxing with donors while Trump hit the hustings with rallies. She called Trump supporters deplorable—only to spend election night screaming at staffers for blowing it. Her behavior was deplorable.

Hillary was the entitled wife of someone famous who demanded to know, “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?”

She found out too late. Now Trump’s schooling today’s adversaries.

Well, the ones who survived Breakfast at Khamenei’s on February 28.

By the way, why were they eating breakfast? I thought Ramadan was supposed to be a time of fasting.

The problem for dictators is their foreign intelligence officers read and believe the American press. They believe Trump is a buffoon, bully and coward. They believe the New York Times is middle-of-the-road. They believe National Review and Fox News are conservative news outlets.

The foreign spy agents buy the propaganda and sell it to their leaders. It is almost as if MSNBC (now MS NOW) was in cahoots with Trump all along to portray him as a joke.

All too late the despots learn Trump’s actions speak louder than their words.

Arresting Maduro and extraditing him to the USA gave Trump control of the nation with the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Add Iran’s oil and the USA’s and by the end of the year, President Trump will control the one-third of the world’s proven oil reserves.

America, Iran and Venezuela now produce 17% of the world’s oil with a potential to produce up to 23%, which is why Trump prevented the destruction of oil production in bombing Kharg Island.

Trump has the military might and the fortitude to embargo countries. Between the lack of oil and the fates of Maduro and Khamenei, Cuba’s regime is in talks with Marco Rubio, a son and grandson of Cuban exiles, to ditch communism.

We will know Cuba’s free when Cuban TV airs episodes of I Love Lucy again.

But there is so much more to the story. B-2s and Space Command proved the worthlessness of Red Chinese radar and Russian air defenses. Their international military sales should nosedive.

Israel on the other hand will sell many an iron dome. I trust that the Israelis will install kill switches. Remember the pagers?

Meanwhile, our frenemies in NATO are awakening to find a United States that is no longer interested in defending Europe. The European Union defies us and mocks our president without a thought given to how this plays to the half our country—the part that provides most of our military personnel.

Britainistan has a cuckold leader who arrests Englishmen for waving their flag. They refused to give Trump permission to use Diego Garcia. Good luck enforcing that Rule 5 thingy if Russia ever gets a real army. But Putin will be long dead by that time. He’s an idiot. I mean who loses the flagship of their Black Sea Fleet—the Moskva—to Ukraine?

Trump is large and in charge. The press now must deal with the fact that no matter how hard the news organizations try, they cannot spin Trump’s victories into losses.

The Financial Times reported, “Donald Trump has warned that NATO faces a very bad future if US allies fail to assist in opening up the Strait of Hormuz, sending a blunt message to European nations to join his war effort in Iran.

He said, “It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there. If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”

We don’t need the oil. Europe, Red China, South Korea and Japan do.

Trump explained the American resentment of Europe snubs, telling FT, “We have a thing called NATO. We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us . . . But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us. Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.”

Kurt Schlichter tweeted, “The story is not that NATO allies won’t help defend shipping in the Persian Gulf. The story is none of them have the capability to meaningfully do so.”

Don’t get me wrong. Not every NATO ally is a Euroweenie. Canada is just a weenie.

But Petr Němec tweeted, “Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has decided to dispatch the Czech cruiser ‘Krteček’ to the Persian Gulf, making the Czech Republic the sole EU nation to join the U.S.-led coalition.”

Biden gave Ukraine $188 billion in aid—enough to pay for the first 100 B-21 Raiders which will replace the B-2s we now have. The new ones will cost much less, require less expensive maintenance and will do a better job.

The press is trying desperately to turn Operation Epic Fury into Viet-Iran.

The New York Times reported, “Two weeks into a war against Iran that he chose to launch, President Trump faces a stark choice—stay in the battle to achieve the dauntingly ambitious goals he has set, or try to extract himself from an expanding and intensifying conflict that is generating damaging military, diplomatic and economic shock waves.

“He has quickly discovered that both options are deeply problematic, littered with consequences that he and his team downplayed when he plunged the United States, alongside Israel, into the biggest war in the Middle East in nearly a quarter-century.

“He can continue to fight a weakened enemy that has nevertheless proved adept at extracting a fast-rising economic price for the United States and its allies, tying the global energy markets in knots and striking a dozen countries across the region.”

Wake me when the price tag hits $188 billion like Ukraine’s did. Putin isn’t our problem. Iran is.

The Tokyo Roses at NYT nonsensically wrote, “An emboldened theocracy is still in power, apparently commanded by the ayatollah’s injured son, who has already sworn to continue deploying Iran’s asymmetrical capabilities, from cyberattacks to planting sea mines and conducting missile strikes on targets in the region. The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps paramilitary force and the militias that killed thousands of protesting Iranians on the streets in January remain in place.”

Emboldened? The ayatollah refuses to show his face in public and the IRGC and Iran’s morality police are hiding as well.

As all this is going on, President Trump hosted the leaders of 12 Latin American countries at Mar-a-Lago to work on a new group, the Shield of the Americas. Only capitalists need apply as the Donroe Doctrine takes hold and Red China loses its clout in the Western Hemisphere.

The world is changing for the better and Donald Trump is the man changing it.

In the henhouse of life, it is good to be the fox or at least as crazy as one.