Trump Must Avoid These 3 ‘Civilization Killers’ When Tackling the National Debt

From Daily Signal.com (May 26, 2025):

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to talk about debt, debt, debt.

All during the last few days, we’ve heard some startling news. Moody’s, the bond evaluator, for the first time in its history, since 1917, has lowered the credit rating of the United States government from Aaa to Aa1.

It didn’t do that during the 2008 meltdown. It didn’t do that during the Great Depression. It didn’t do that during 9/11. It didn’t do that during the Biden years when we borrowed $7 trillion. But it did it now.

At the same time, Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, will not lower interest rates even though there’s been a good jobs report, a good inflation report, a good corporate profits report. Gross domestic product is gonna be evaluated, apparently, upward and there’s been low energy cost. That mortgage is still 4.25% Fed rate to 4.5%. And that means mortgages are still 6.5%, 7%. And that housing market is slowing as a result.

And this has got President Donald Trump very angry, that they’re doing this, given the prior administration borrowed $7 trillion and helped run up from $29 trillion in national debt to $37 trillion, and left Trump with a $3 billion-a-day interest payment. So, he’s jawboning all this and trying to get down. So, what is Trump trying to do? And is it working?

Well, he’s the first president since Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House at that time, who’s talking about reducing a $2 trillion budget deficit, a $1.2 trillion trade deficit, and addressing a $37 trillion national debt. But is he actually doing it?

On the plus side of the ledger, you’ve got the Department of Government Efficiency. And DOGE in the first 100 days has identified about $160 billion in cuts. That’s encouraging if two things are following: if they can keep up that rate of identifying cuts and get up to the $500 billion or even $700 billion and maybe make 25% or 30% reduction in the $2 trillion deficit. And if the Trump administration exercises fiscal discipline.

The problem is twofold: that while he’s addressing verbally, rhetorically the debt and the deficit, you look at the big, beautiful bill under consideration and it’s going to have to pass or the Trump administration will be completely humiliated.

They need to get it through reconciliation but there are sizable increases in the defense budget from everything that’s justifiable, from salaries, from an Iron Dome-like missile defense—you name it. More drones—good. But it’s more money. And there’s more subsidies to farmers. And there’s not a lot of cuts—at least when balanced with the increases.

So, the budget deficit, for all the talk of DOGE and for all the talk of fiscal sobriety, might not actually go down. And if it doesn’t go down, the Fed may not lower rates. And if it doesn’t lower rates, then you still are stuck with a trillion dollars a year in interest payments. That’s killing us.

So, you’ve got to get that down. And the way Trump has to do it is just two ways: Either cut the budget or raise taxes—which will strangle the economy—or continue the tax cuts. And hope two things: that the tax cuts—the extension—will prime the economy, along with cheap interest rates.

And the question that we all have now: Is cutting taxes on tips, is cutting taxes on Social Security, is cutting taxes on first responder, etc.—all of which Trump has mentioned—is that really stimulus as opposed to, say, accelerated depreciation investment for businesses?

I don’t know the answer. But I do know, as a historian, that if you do not cut the deficit and the national debt and you have bond raters like Moody’s or the Fed that will not lower interest rates, you’re going to be in a crisis.

And in the antiquity—from Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance—there were three ways of dealing with unsustainable debt and are not good. They’re all civilizational killers.

No. 1: As the Weimar Republic did in Germany, you pay back what you owe in cheap dollars. They inflated the marks. And bankrupt really helped cause the depression. You can do that, pay back the $37 trillion in inflated dollars. It’s not a good option.

No. 2: You can confiscate private wealth. People do that all the time throughout history. That destroys the legitimacy of the government. And it makes private investors hide their money.

When I say confiscate wealth, you can already see articles in financial left-wing journals that say, well, maybe the trillionaire, billionaire, whatever term they use, oligarchical class will get credit, some Social Security or get some kind of credit for us taking some of their 401(k) money. Something like that. That never works. It never worked in Athens. It never worked in Rome. It never worked in Renaissance Italy.

The third is the most drastic and it’s a killer too and we’ve seen countries in South America try it. And that’s to renounce the debt. Just say: You know what? All you bondholders, you guys have U.S. savings bonds—40% of them abroad, you know, here in America—you have so much money anyway. We’re just not gonna pay you back—the government. We’re gonna renounce it and start from zero.

Who would ever buy a bond again if we were to do that?

So, bottom line is incumbent upon the Trump administration to make real cuts and show progress that you’re reducing the annual budget deficit and more importantly, you have mechanisms to grow the economy.

Final note. We have a lot of confidence—this administration—that tariffs will give revenue and maybe also help reduce the budget deficit. I’m not sure that’s happening. Only 1% or 2%, maybe 3% of the $5 trillion in federal revenue today is made up by tariff income. Even with these huge new tariffs, if they’re actually reified, you might get a trillion dollars. You might get a trillion dollars over 10 years. That’s $100 billion out of $5 trillion in revenue. So, I’m not sure we can count on tariff income at all.

What we should count on is cut, cut, cut. Seek a balanced budget and grow the economy with tax cuts that encourage investment and economic expansion. [source]

Yea, those three tactics are very bad. America doesn't want to be Weimar Republic or even Zimbabwe for that matter. Hyperinflation will economically kill a nation. Another good analysis by VDH.

Forgiveness Is Not an Act of Weakness

From Breakpoint.org (June 15, 2022):

Earlier this year, a very secular publication came to an unexpected conclusion. Vox ran a series of articles under the title “America’s Struggle for Forgiveness,.” In it, they wrote, “Grace might be the holiest, most precious concept of all in this conversation about right and wrong, penance and reform—but it’s the one that almost never gets discussed.”

Even in the most morally exhausted cultural moments, like ours, there are signs of life. Made in God’s image, with eternity in our hearts, we’re desperate for answers to our deepest questions and for purpose to help us make sense of our lives. We search elsewhere but, ultimately, only the Gospel offers what we need.

At the same time, at least when it comes to forgiveness, Christians are struggling as well. In any context, because it always involves fallen human beings, forgiveness isn’t easy. In this cultural moment, so deeply divided at such fundamental levels and with so much at stake in the issues, it can seem impossible. How can we reconcile the idea of forgiveness in a world overrun by evil? How can we be examples of forgiveness, both forgiving and seeking forgiveness, to a world that so desperately needs to see it?

First, we need to be clear on what forgiveness is and isn’t. The way Jesus’ command to “love your enemies” is often used in order to silence Christians who hold unpopular views completely misses the point. Too often, we get the impression that we need to apologize not merely for failing to live out Christian ethics, but for holding Christian ethics in the first place, as if Christian witness is compromised by Christian morality.

Second, Christians must embrace the idea of forgiveness. There’s a fear in many corners of the Church, particularly those engaged in standing for righteousness in this cultural moment, that concepts like “forgiveness,” “gentleness,” or “compassion” are signs of weakness. Certainly, many Christians have been gutted of courage at the exact moment Christian courage is so badly needed. But asking for or offering forgiveness is not necessarily a sign of weakness. In fact, in a culture devoid of it, Christians have something essential to offer people, families, institutions, and cultures.

Plus, we don’t have a choice. For Christians, a gracious posture is not an option. In Romans 12, Paul instructs Christians to “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” He also commands us to “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” Holding to truth and righteousness and being gracious to others are not mutually exclusive options. Both are required for Christ followers.

We must not pretend people are somehow “doing good” when they are not, or that evil ideologies that hurt the innocent are somehow anything less than evil. In Jesus’ words, we will be “exclude[d]” and “revile[d],” and have our names “spurn[ed]” as “evil” for His sake, not because we’ve done anything wrong but because we’ve followed Him. As Jesus’ teaching about church discipline and instructions to the disciples to “shake the dust of unbelieving towns off their feet” suggests, the goal of Christian witness can only be faithfulness. Whether or not we are liked is of little importance.

Which means, as Steve Cornell with The Gospel Coalition recently wrote, forgiveness is different than “reconciliation.” We can and must extend forgiveness, and we ought to be agents of reconciliation. However, because reconciliation always involves someone else, it isn’t merely up to us. Not only does it take two to reconcile, but when people actively pursue evil, boundaries are necessary.

The real battlefield of forgiveness is not just in external behavior. It involves the heart, which God sees with piercing clarity. It may involve asking for forgiveness, even from ideological opponents who are on the wrong side of a given issue. It will mean forgoing vengeance, even while seeking justice and extending love to those extending hate.

In God’s economy, this is not weakness. It is the strength rooted in Christ whom Himself proclaimed, “Father, forgive them.”

A wonderful example is Barronelle Stutzman, a co-recipient of this year’s Wilberforce Award. For years, she’s been the target of the state of Washington, misrepresented in the press, slandered, and sued for refusing to custom design flowers for a same-sex wedding. Only last November, after nearly a decade, was her legal case finally settled.

Through the whole, exhausting process, Barronelle extended nothing but kindness, even to the person behind her legal nightmare, longtime customer and friend Rob Ingersoll. “I did not turn down Rob,” she wrote in 2016. “I turned down an event. And if Rob walked into my store today, I would hug him and I would serve him for another 10 years.”

That same gracious attitude only became more evident in the years since. Through it all, she steadfastly refused to betray her faith while still showing gentle kindness toward those who oppose her. Anyone who knows Barronelle Stutzman would never confuse that posture with weakness.

Rather, she’s a living, breathing example that Christians can have both unrelenting conviction and a tender heart of forgiveness. We need not choose between them. [source]

Amen.

Trump’s Way of War

From AM Greatness.com (March 3):

War is the use of arms to settle differences—tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material—between organized groups. It is unchanging. The general laws of armed conflict stays immutable, given the constancy of human nature.

However, the manner in which war is conducted remains fluid. New weapons, tactics, and strategies elicit counterresponses in an endless cycle of tensions between defensive and offensive superiority.

That said, has President Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America’s foreign enemies?

We saw glimpses of it during his first term, when he eliminated Iranian general and terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani and ISIS terrorist grandee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In the former case, he preferred hitting the cause rather than the effects of Iranian terrorism in Syria and Iraq, while making it clear that he had no intention of striking the Iranian mainland and entering into a tit-for-tat “forever war.”

In large part, he was successful. Iran never quite replaced the venomous Soleimani. And despite tired threats, its performative art responses did not kill any Americans, and they were seen by Trump as venting and not worth a counterresponse.

In the case of the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump likewise went after the catalyst of ISIS terrorism. But he also bombed ISIS into near nonexistence in Iraq, since, unlike Iran, it lacked the financial and material resources of a state sponsor of terror, and it had no independent ability to make weapons or finance its terrorism.

In 2018, Trump probably killed more Russian ground troops (more than 200?) than America had during the entire Cold War, with his furious response to the Wagner Group assault on a U.S. Special Operations base near Khasham, Syria. Yet the defeat of Russian mercenaries also led to no wider conflict.

In these three cases, Trump successfully portrayed his antagonists as the unprovoked aggressors, employed overwhelming force to eliminate them, and declared them one-off occurrences with no need to punish the ultimate source or sponsor of the aggression with further force, and he was largely successful in limiting subsequent attacks on American installations.

In Trump’s second term, he widened his doctrine of “preventative deterrence” with operations to remove Venezuelan communist strongman Nicolás Maduro, along with two separate bombing campaigns against Iran.

While the second Iran operation is now in progress, it may resemble the earlier two in a number of facets.

Trump again portrayed Venezuela and Iran as unpunished past and present psychopathic aggressors. He went after Maduro, whom Biden had largely ignored, for his past of exporting gang-bangers and criminals across the Biden-era open border and for using Venezuela’s cartel connections to profit from American deaths.

As for attacking Iran, Trump cited the theocracy’s past terrorist attacks on Americans and U.S. allies, its effort to assassinate Westerners, and its unwillingness to abandon plans to create a nuclear weapon.

What, then, are Trump’s new ways of conducting war?

1. Geostrategy. Always behind these seemingly unconnected events—and other nonkinetic moves like warning Panama about Chinese intrusions—strategic concerns loom. The common denominator is usually isolating China from strategic spaces, allies, and oil—and Russia in a lesser sense.

Loud and terrorist, but ultimately impotent, proxies of strategic enemies—Cuba, Iran, Venezuela—are preferable targets. They are not just easily identified enemies given their past anti-American violence; they are also targeted because their demise offers a global display of the weakness of their distant patrons and underwriters.

2. Wars of Reckoning. Trump always frames his interventionism as reactive and long overdue. It is a sort of “reckoning war” for previously overlooked crimes that his predecessors had ignored but are often seared in the American mind. “Preemptive” or “preventative” wars, these strikes may be. But Trump himself avoids the baggage that those adjectives of aggression convey in the collective American memory.

3. War among Negotiations. Trump’s way of warmaking is usually an extension of ongoing negotiations (e.g., over Iran’s nuclear weapons or Maduro’s subsidies to terrorists and drug trafficking). So, during discussions, he offers various exit ramps to his adversaries and publicly laments the possibility of violence.

Meanwhile, American naval and expeditionary assets show up and amass to ramp up the pressure. Trump does not wait for negotiations to fail, but usually offers a deadline to his adversaries. And then he simply informs his advisors of the point at which the enemy has no intention of seeking a peaceful settlement. A strike follows. [read more]

Another great analysis by VDH. He gets the POTUS.

The rest of the ways of war:

1. The Culpable Apparat. Trump prefers top-down war. That is, he starts his attacks by targeting the enemy apparat, not its lesser henchman. The aim is both to disrupt its command and control and to separate an enemy leader from a population deemed not necessarily culpable.
2. No to Nation-Building.
3. No Boots on the Ground.
4. Exit Strategy? There is an exit strategy of sorts, partly rhetorical and partly real—but usually arbitrarily declared by Trump himself. He alone starts the shooting and stops it according to his own definition of when the war begins and ends. The enemy has a vote, of course, but Trump frames the conflict in ways that lessen his say.
5. No to Internationalism.
6. Deterrent Displays. Trump uses his strikes as global reminders of American prowess. He showcases the USS Gerald R. Ford mammoth carrier, the largest warship in the history of conflict.
7. American Self-Interest.

How America’s Recycling Program Failed—and Scarred the Environment

From FEE.org (May 31, 2022):

In March 2019, The New York Times ran a shocking story exploring why many prominent US cities were abandoning their recycling programs.

“Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy,” Times business writer Michael Corkery reported. “In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill.”

Philadelphia and Memphis were not outliers. They, along with Deltona, Florida, which had suspended its recycling program the previous month, were just a few examples of hundreds of cities across the country that had scrapped recycling programs or scaled back operations.

Since that time, cities across the country have continued to scrap recycling programs, citing high costs.

“The cost of recycling was going to double, and the town wasn’t going to be able to absorb that cost,” said Dencia Raish, the town clerk administrator for Akron, Colorado, which ended its program in 2021 and now sends “recyclables” to a landfill.

While many Americans likely are distraught about America’s failed recycling experiment, a new video produced by Kite & Key Media reveals that abandoning recycling—at least in its current form—is likely to benefit both Americans and the environment.

A Brief History of Recycling

Like many problems in American history, recycling began as a moral panic.

The frenzy began in the spring of 1987 when a massive barge carrying more than 3,000 tons of garbage—the Mobro 4000—was turned away from a North Carolina port because rumor had it the barge was carrying toxic waste. (It wasn’t.)

“Thus began one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history,” Vice News reported in a feature published a quarter-century later, “a picaresque journey of a small boat overflowing with stuff no one wanted, a flotilla of waste, a trashier version of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship doomed to never make port.”

The Mobro was simply seeking a landfill to dumb the garbage, but everywhere the barge went it was turned away. After North Carolina, the captain tried Louisiana. Nope. Then the Mobro tried Belize, then Mexico, then the Bahamas. No dice.

“The Mobro ended up spending six months at sea trying to find a place that would take its trash,” Kite & Key Media notes.

America became obsessed with the story. In 1987 there was no Netflix, smartphones, or Twitter, so apparently everyone just decided to watch this barge carrying tons of trash for entertainment. The Mobro became, in the words of Vice, “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.”

The Mobro also became perhaps the most consequential load of garbage in history.

“The Mobro had two big and related effects,” Kite & Key Media explains. “First, the media reporting around it convinced Americans that we were running out of landfill space to dispose of our trash. Second, it convinced them the solution was recycling.”

Neither claim, however, was true.

The idea that the US was running out of landfill space is a myth. The urban legend likely stems from the consolidation of landfills in the 1980s, which saw many waste depots retired because they were small and inefficient, not because of a national shortage. In fact, researchers estimate that if you take just the land the US uses for grazing in the Great Plains region, and use one-tenth of one percent of it, you’d have enough space for America’s garbage for the next thousand years. (This is not to say that regional problems do not exist, Slate points out..

Mandated recycling efforts, meanwhile, have proven fraught. [read more]

Chinese Spy Balloon Used US Internet to Communicate as it Soared Over Nuclear Silos

From The Gateway Pundit.com (Dec. 29, 2023):

Last January the Biden administration knew about the Chinese spy balloon traversing across the continental United States, from Alaska to the Carolinas, but sought to conceal this from the American public.

A newspaper photographer first spotted the balloon over Montana.

The Chinese spy balloon first entered US airspace over Alaska in late January.

The balloon soared over nuclear silos and military installations across the US with Joe Biden’s full approval.

The balloon was shot down over the Atlantic just off the coast of the Carolinas.

According to the Pentagon, the spy balloon carried explosives to self-detonate, was 200 feet tall, and weighed thousands of pounds.

Earlier this week it was reported General Milley also knew the spy balloon was collecting data as it flew over the continental US but kept this from the American public.

Now this…

According to CNN, the Chinese spy balloon used US internet to communicate as is soared over the United States and gathered information.

CNN reported:

US intelligence agencies found that the Chinese surveillance balloon that transited the United States in early 2023 used an American internet service provider to send short, periodic transmissions of data related to navigation and location back to China, according to a US official.

This connection was one of the ways that the US was able to track its location and gather information on the balloon as it transited the United States, the source said.

CNN was not able to identify the internet service provider. CNN has previously reported that officials said the balloon was capable of communicating with Beijing as it traveled across the US.

NBC News first reported that the balloon used a US network to communicate with Beijing.

The network connection was not used to transmit intelligence back to China, according to the official. The balloon stored that information for later, including imagery and other data, which the US has since been able to study after shooting it down in February.

[source]

Of course it did. The Chi-Coms made a mockery of Briben.

Trump Says Russia Stole Hypersonic Rockets

From Newsmax.com (May 24, 2025):

President Donald Trump on Saturday complained about hypersonic rockets "stolen" by Russia, reports Newsweek.

"Eight cadets here today took on the challenge of designing their own hypersonic rocket," Trump said during a West Point commencement address in New York.

"Oh, we can use you building them right now. You know, we had ours stolen. We are the designer of it. We had it stolen during the Obama administration. They saw — you know who stole it? The Russians stole it. Something bad happened.

"But we're now, we're the designer of it," he added.

"We're now building them, and lots of them, and earlier this year, they launched it into space, setting a world record for amateur rocketry. Can't get you in there fast enough."

Wearing a red "Make America Great Again" hat, Trump also told the 1,002 members of the class of 2025 at the U.S. Military Academy that the United States is the "hottest country in the world" and underscored an "America First" ethos for the military.

He said the cadets were graduating at a "defining moment" in Army history as he accused political leaders in the past of sending soldiers into "nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us." He said he was clearing the military of transgender ideas, "critical race theory," and types of training he called divisive and political. [source]

Probably. China is known to steal America's technological patents, so, why not Russia and other rogue nations?

Kim Jong-un Confiscates Pet Dogs During North Korea’s Food Shortage

From Breitbart.com (Aug. 18, 2020):

“Authorities have identified households with pet dogs and are forcing them to give them up or forcefully confiscating them and putting them down,” a North Korean source told the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo on August 12.

“The dogs are also being sent to zoos or sold to restaurants where dog meat is eaten,” the source added. In addition to North Korea, dog meat is eaten by humans in some parts of China and South Korea.

Kim Jong-un issued a ban on pet ownership in July, denouncing the practice as “a ‘tainted’ trend by bourgeois ideology,” the source said. The Communist North Korean regime touted the pet ban as Kim’s way of protecting the country against capitalist “decadence,” according to Chosun Ilbo.

“Ordinary people raise pigs and livestock on their porches, but high-ranking officials and the wealthy own pet dogs, which stoked some resentment,” the source said.

According to the report, the Communist regime enforced the pet ban and confiscation amid a worsening nationwide food shortage and economic crisis. World powers have imposed various economic sanctions on North Korea for years in an effort to denuclearize the hostile nation. The struggling country further isolated itself by shutting its borders earlier this year in an effort to control its Chinese coronavirus outbreak.

The North Korean regime officially denies the existence of any coronavirus cases in the country, but has taken several drastic countermeasures to prevent the spread of the virus, suggesting that it has been battling a massive outbreak for several months. In January, North Korea closed its borders and schools and began placing thousands of people in quarantine. In late June, North Korean officials locked down the nation’s third-largest city, Chongjin, after a serious coronavirus outbreak was detected there, according to reports. The government also recently said it would extend its border closures through 2021.

In June, the U.N. warned that food insecurity in North Korea had worsened during the coronavirus pandemic due to the country’s closed borders, reporting that some people were “starving” as a result. Over 40 percent of people in North Korea were considered “food insecure” prior to the pandemic, with many people in the country suffering from malnutrition. [source]

Welcome to Communism! No wonder the citizens are trying to illegally enter China. It’s that bad.