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NOTE: Xi Jinping arrived last night in Washington for his second summit this year with Donald Trump. We are republishing this essential briefing on how the President is closing the map around China. Those constraints are the backdrop to everything that will be discussed this week.

If you’d like even greater depth, this week we released the first in our Special Report series, “China’s Great Reversal: The Illusion of Chinese Strength and the New Balance of Power.” It’s a 76-page dossier you need, normally $49 but FREE when you upgrade to Premium. Join today! — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
May 13, 2026

In late April, Australia signed a deal to buy eleven new frigates from Japan. Shortly after, Japan donated six older frigates to the Philippines.

The media did not connect the two, which sound like unrelated procurement stories. But they are not. Across the Indo-Pacific, a new order has come.

Like South Korea, Japan is beginning to arm the anti-China coalition. With frigates from Japan and nuclear submarines from America, Australia is becoming a serious maritime power. The First Island Chain is getting harder. The Straits of Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok through Indonesia are being secured. And the United States, far from withdrawing from Asia, is building a stronger, more distributed security architecture that prevents the next world war before it can start.

That is the backdrop as Donald Trump meets Xi Jinping today.

The Enemedia will obsess over tariffs, rare earths, soybeans, oil purchases, fentanyl precursors, and whatever carefully negotiated communiqué emerges from the room. And yes, those things do matter.

But what really matters is the map.

For eighty years, America carried too much of the free world’s routine defense burden. Rich allies underfunded their militaries, neglected their defense industries, outsourced risk to American taxpayers, and then lectured us for our trouble. The old order turned America into a tripwire, first responder, quartermaster, insurer, fleet, shield, and sucker.

Trump’s answer is not to abandon allies. It is to make them serious forces in their own right: partners not dependents. It is to end the era of American overstretch, and replace the globalist order with sovereign nations, shared burdens, and mutual gains.

Trump wants allies that can handle their own neighborhoods under normal circumstances, so America retains the freedom of action to apply decisive force anywhere on Earth in any crisis. Israel has long been the clearest example: lethal, technologically advanced, locally decisive, deeply aligned with America, but not helpless without us. Now Trump is rolling that model out to the whole world.

The Indo-Pacific allies are stepping up. So is the UAE and, more slowly, other Gulf Arab states. Europe, as usual, is struggling to adjust to the end of America as sugar daddy.

Those married to the status quo — so inertia-driven that in one breath they demand more aid for Ukraine and in the next decry moving troops from Germany to Poland — call this “withdrawal.”

It is anything but withdrawal. It’s an entire new America-led global order.

And Australia’s new Japanese frigates are the latest piece of it.

The Frigates Are More Than They Seem

Frigates are not ornaments. They are not prestige platforms bought to impress visiting dignitaries. They are workhorses.

They patrol sea lanes, escort shipping, hunt submarines, defend convoys, monitor enemy movements, and turn vast oceanic emptiness into controlled space. In peacetime, they create presence. In crisis, they buy time. In war, they make an enemy pay for every mile of water it tries to cross.

That matters because a war with China would not be fought only in the Taiwan Strait. It would instantly become a contest for sea control across the entire Indo-Pacific. Fuel, ammunition, food, spare parts, drones, missiles, and reinforcements would all have to move. Submarines would have to be tracked. Convoys would have to be protected. Chokepoints would have to be closed or opened, depending on your point of view.

The side that could keep its maritime system functioning while degrading the other side’s system would possess an enormous advantage. The side that can control the chokepoints through which China’s lifeblood flows would win the war.

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Australia’s new frigates are designed for that world.

Like the nuclear submarines being acquired under the AUKUS deal, they will help guard Australia’s northern approaches and the sea routes connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans. They will give Canberra more ability to operate routinely with Japan, the United States, and other partners.

Perhaps more importantly, they will allow Australia to do more of the daily work of maritime security without waiting for the U.S. Navy to solve every problem. And because most of the ships are to be built in Australia, this is not merely a purchase. It is industrial integration, technology transfer, and strategic permanence.

And here’s the part that disturbs Beijing the most:

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
September 23, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with host Don Ma to discuss Trump’s UN speech, and the UN’s catastrophic failures, yesterday’s signing of the Greenland deal, and the sea change in U.S. foreign policy represented by that agreement.

Don and I discuss:

• Trump’s UN address

• Why the UN — and other global institutions — need serious reform

• How the Greenland agreement strengthens America’s national security

• How China’s northern shipping routes sharpen the stakes

• The lessons of Diego Garcia, and the sea change in U.S. foreign policy the Greenland deal represents

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Our Full Discussion:

Don Ma: President Trump gave an hour-long speech today at the U.N. General Assembly. He says he inherited the dark age of America, but under his administration, the U.S. is entering the golden age. Meanwhile, a deal concerning a strategic defense agreement with Denmark and Greenland at the U.N. General Assembly being signed.

Joining us now to discuss is Rod Martin, political analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital. So, Rod, good afternoon to you. Thank you for being here. President Trump's overarching message, it seems like, was that the U.S. has moved from what he described as a period of decline into an era of American strength. Can we get your overall thoughts on the speech? Do you think that is the case?

Rod D. Martin: It’s absolutely the case. And the numbers that we’re seeing this month in particular are just staggering to me. I mean, I’m a supporter of this administration, and I’m blown away by some of this stuff. For example, the lowest violent crime rate in the United States in 126 years, a one-year drop in the murder rate of more than 18 percent. We just got census data that shows that the U.S. poverty rate is now the lowest in history: the lowest poverty rate in history!

And all of this stuff and the manufacturing boom that you and I frequently talk about are all coming because we slashed taxes, because we made our tax code business-friendly, because we got rid of taxes on tips and overtime and social security benefits, because we’re reshoring industry to the United States.

And that’s a model for the world. The entire world is engaged in some degree of mercantilism, plundering the American consumer market. That’s certainly the case with China. And all of them could be better off if they followed this model.

The truth is that 15 years ago, the European Union had a larger economy than that of the United States. Today, it’s only two-thirds the size of the United States. Canada has the same population as California, but only half of California’s economy. And California is the worst-run state in America!

So, I mean, all of this is just horribly wrong. It doesn’t have to be that way. President Trump is showing a better way to all of our friends and allies. And the Greenland deal is part of that better way in ways that most of the media hasn’t even thought about. So we’ll get to that in a minute, I’m sure. But we’re having a big week this week.

Don Ma: And I think another message from the speech is peace through strength, right? And President Trump mentioned stopping eight wars or preventing eight wars. Now, we know the UN existed for decades. In one term, President Trump stopped eight wars, prevented eight wars. What do you think about that?

Rod D. Martin: Eight wars in eight months. And a couple of those wars had lasted for 40 years or more. Nobody in the world cared about these people. The UN certainly didn’t care. No prior American leader did anything about it. Neither did anybody else. There are actually other countries in the world who could have stepped in and done something useful.

Donald Trump is the peace president, which may sound silly in the middle of this Iran war. I understand that. But the net result of that is not another American forever war. It’s ending a forever war. The Iranian regime has been at war not only with us, but with all of its neighbors for 47 years. The president is ending that forever war.

And when we’re done, I have every confidence and hope that the Iranian people will be in a position to rise up and overthrow their totalitarian overlords and create a free Iran. That will be the biggest single boon to peace in the modern Middle East, full stop. And the president was very clear on that point.

The other point, of course, that he made, I thought, incredibly well, was that Cuba — which has been a source of terrorism and communist insurgencies and every possible bad thing throughout the Western Hemisphere, and even as far away as Africa, where the Cubans maintained an army to prop up a communist regime in Angola for decades — Cuba will be free. And we are nearly there.

That is the next thing on the agenda.

America’s Allies and Greenland

Don Ma: Could you help us contrast the United States under this administration versus previous administrations? How do how do the U.S.’s allies and adversaries view the United States right now?

Rod D. Martin: Well, now we come to the Greenland deal, which illustrates the whole thing. You will recall that not long ago, Keir Starmer, the now deposed socialist prime minister of Great Britain, made a deal to give away the Chagos Islands to a Chinese client state, Mauritius. This is absurd. Mauritius has never ruled the Chagos Islands. They’re 1,250 miles away from the Chagos Islands. This just makes no sense.

But it’s even worse when you consider that America’s most important military base in the entire Indian Ocean sits on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands. So here’s an actual ally, handing over one of the most important pieces of real estate in the world to a Chinese satellite. It’s just insane.

Now, that’s what happens when we’re allies. What happens when NATO breaks up someday? Not because I’m calling for that, not because I want that, but just because in this life nothing is permanent.

What happens if the nations of Europe become Islamic caliphates? What if we’re facing Denmarkistan? We don’t know what the future holds. And this is what the president is doing. He is imposing tough love on some of our allies. He is also actually acting like a grown-up, which the American foreign policy establishment has not done for decades. They have just imbibed the religion that NATO is forever, that all of these relationships are permanent.

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And when they go awry, as Iran went awry — it was our chief ally in the Middle East, and in 1979 it became our chief enemy — they just adjust and say, well, we’re here to manage the inevitable American decline. Donald Trump has no use for that. And the world is seeing it.

You saw it at the Ankara NATO summit earlier this year when even Friedrich Merz, the chancellor of Germany, stood up and said, Donald Trump is frequently abrasive, but he was right.

You heard that again today out of the prime minister of Denmark and out of the premier of Greenland. Donald Trump was right. The security situation in the North Atlantic has changed a lot since 1951. We understand and welcome what the U.S. is trying to do here.

The difference between the old way and the new is very simple. Donald Trump isn’t thinking about the next five years. He’s thinking about the next 50. And he knows that lots of things all over the world will change in that time. You can’t predict which ones. So we’re going to take care of American security and the American people, regardless of what changes may come. And Greenland, of course, is a key part of that. Diego Garcia is too. The Panama Canal is too.

And everywhere and always, Donald Trump is relentlessly pursuing American security interests to the benefit of the people who elected him, but also, honestly, to the benefit of those allies who grumbled as we went along.

The UN and America First

Don Ma: Okay. And I fully intend to ask you more questions on the Greenland deal. But let me ask you a few more things on the speech itself. So I can’t go out. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about how President Trump criticized the U.N. itself while giving a speech at the U.N. He criticized the United Nations and other international institutions, saying they should facilitate cooperation between countries and not impose authority over those countries. And you mentioned putting Americans and America first before other nations. So what are your comments on Trump’s criticism of the U.N.?

Rod D. Martin: Well, he’s exactly right. The U.N. is a disaster. The U.N. spends huge fortunes of other people’s money to accomplish little or worse than nothing. You know, little you see everywhere. But worse than nothing is the sexual abuses of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Africa and the horrible atrocities committed by U.N. forces in Katanga in the 1960s. And just the general imposition on the world of all of the preferences of the world’s greatest tyrannies as opposed to the needs of the world’s people.

The U.N. has to reform. The U.N. has to spend its money better. The U.N. has to get its budget under control.

And Donald Trump is right to criticize it, as previous presidents have, too, just not as directly and in their face. So he’s spot on there. And truly, this is true of a lot of global institutions. This is part of my earlier point. Whether you’re talking about the IMF or the World Bank or the World Health Organization or any of these other multilateral institutions that we created in the 1940s, they have all become, to some degree, decayed, if not rotten. They all need a revamp. They all need a new look. They all need somebody to come in and do the moral equivalent of Trump building a new ballroom. They need a refresh and a renovation.

And Trump is just the man to do it. As far as putting America first, Donald Trump’s position is not that America should be the only nation, or the only nation that matters. His position is that the world depends on the United States. Certainly, Taiwan does. Certainly, Ukraine does. Certainly, Denmark does. All of these countries rely on us. And therefore, those relationships need to also serve the interests of the American people.

But I would go one further. Donald Trump has routinely articulated the greater position that that should also be true of the elected governments of every nation. French leaders should put French interests first. German leaders should put German interests first. Japanese and Taiwanese leaders should put their people first. Because why do they have the right to tax or rule their people if not to serve them?

Together, when our interests coincide, we can thereby be strong enough and rich enough to deter aggression from the unfree countries of the world. We can be better together. It’s a model of partnership, not dependency. And it’s good for the whole world. But it starts by being good to the people who pay for all this. And that would be the people of the United States.

Don Ma: Okay, just one more comment from me here on the U.N. And then we’ll move on to the Greenland deal. Can I just ask you, how can the United Nations and the Human Rights Council assert any kind of credibility when China and Iran are on the council? Now, these two countries, I mean, I don’t need to tell you, but some of the worst human rights records in history. How can this be the case?

Rod D. Martin: Well, it’s just horrifying. And, of course, it’s a function of the structure of the U.N. General Assembly. When the U.N. was created, if I recall correctly, there were 54 nations. Now there are nearly 200. And many of those have abominable track records on human rights and even just basic freedom. There aren’t just a whole lot of countries in the world, you know — in terms of just the total number of them — that most people would want to live in, because they aren’t free and they are impoverished because their own governments plunder them. And these are not people who should be determining human rights anywhere.

But, of course, the U.N. is a democracy in the General Assembly and only there. We maintain a certain degree of rationality by having a veto at the Security Council. But in the General Assembly, the inmates are running the asylum. It’s just horrible and it has been now for decades. So, again, there needs to be some reform. We should not have a U.N. human rights body that is dominated by countries like Iran and China. It’s just absurd. And it makes a mockery of the whole thing. So we’ve got to get a handle on that.

And honestly, if we can’t get a handle on that, there is absolutely a case to be made for a new organization entirely of free nations that serves the same purpose without all of this absurd baggage. Why should we be allowing the Congo to have a say on human rights anywhere? It’s just crazy and we’ve got to stop it.

What the Greenland Agreement Provides

Don Ma: Okay, well said. Let’s talk about the Greenland deal. I think one thing we have to appreciate, and you spoke a lot of the merits of the deal already, but one thing, let’s just take a moment to appreciate the fact this is not going to put any burden on taxpayers. Because President Trump says there’s not going to be any cost to the United States. What are your comments on this?

Rod D. Martin: Well, we have to separate out what will cost and what won’t. Of course, what the president is saying is that we’re not going to pay Denmark and Greenland for this deal. So that’s good and that’s right, because honestly, Denmark and Greenland are benefiting from this deal more immediately than anybody else.

Denmark can’t afford to defend Greenland. Denmark can’t afford to defend Denmark. In World War II, Denmark, when it had a much bigger military, was overrun by the Germans in six hours flat. These are not places that can possibly shoulder this burden. So America is coming in and defending them. Yeah, we shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege. So that part is good.

Now, what we will pay for is a significantly expanded military presence on the island. The president announced today construction of two major new bases on the island. That’s long overdue. The Bush administration was foolish, and the Clinton Administration before him, to shut down the bases we did have.

But what we need today looks different than it would have looked 40 years ago anyway. So Pituffik, which is on the screen right now, is a perfect, perfect spot for early warning radar, which is its current primary purpose. It’s also a key spot for our Golden Dome missile defense that will protect the people of North America and Greenland from nuclear attack from whoever might attack.

We don’t know who might attack 30 years from now, or 100. So it’s crucial to the defense of North America. Likewise, we need proper naval facilities on the island to secure the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. We will now have that.

Why does that matter? It matters for the same reason it mattered during the Cold War and World War II. German U-boats had to transit through that waterway to be able to threaten the North Atlantic. The Russians did the same thing during the Cold War. Their submarines have to pass past Greenland to Iceland and the UK. We have to have the ability to secure those waterways, especially in an age where you’re beginning to have more shipping north of Russia.

As China begins to exploit that route, that becomes a military threat regardless of any commercial boon. And so all of this contributes to that.

But the biggest thing that came out of the deal today, and I can’t stress this enough, the biggest thing is perpetuity. That’s the problem we had in Panama after Jimmy Carter gave up American sovereignty over the canal. We actually have to know that our deal survives Denmark maybe not being in NATO, or NATO maybe not existing, or Greenland becoming independent, which it says it wants to do.

All these different eventualities have to actually be accounted for, and they need to be accounted for when it’s easy, like now, rather than when it becomes harder, because you’ve got a Chinese base on the island. So that’s what the president is doing.

There’s one other thing that I just can’t stress enough, and this is beautiful. The United States now has an absolute veto over any strategic investments by any non-NATO power in Greenland. An absolute veto. If the Chinese want to develop minerals in Greenland, if the Russians want to develop oil off the coast, good luck, because we’re going to tell them no, and we now have the power to make that stick.

That was not true yesterday. And it’s a huge boon to U.S. security.

China and the Arctic

Don Ma: Okay, on that point, let me just ask you one last thing here, and then we’ll wrap up the conversation. Do you think if the United States didn’t come in, China or Russia would have done so eventually, just like how the United States came in with its military and expansion? Because the administration has said this as well. If the U.S. doesn’t do it, China will. What do you think?

Rod D. Martin: Oh, there’s no question. Again, the Chinese are developing shipping lanes north of Russia. That has never existed before in any meaningful way. They’re prototyping that this year with several shipments of goods that normally would have gone either through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope. And that makes it an important waterway. It will be a dramatically more important waterway over the next couple of decades.

So what does that mean? Well, it means that the fast-growing Chinese Navy also has access to those waterways and therefore to the North Atlantic. So the Greenland deal is essential to heading that off.

If you’re China, you want a base in Greenland. If you’re China, you want to actually capture the most important mineral resources and oil deposits and so forth to keep them out of American hands. So, yes, we just blocked something today that was unquestionably on the horizon. They just haven’t been able to get it done yet. Now they never will. We are never going to allow it. And we have the power now to prevent it.

Don Ma: All right, Rod, thank you for speaking with us. I hope you didn’t mind the slightly longer conversation. I could just talk to you forever. Rod, thank you very much.

Rod D. Martin: Well, let’s do that sometime.

Don Ma: Yeah, we’ll just talk for the whole show. All right, thanks.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 23, 2026

When Donald Trump announced his vision for 15 Trump-class battleships, the Enemedia and much of the defense establishment reacted in derision: the whole idea was “ridiculous,” and “dead on arrival.” Which, of course, is also what they said about Trump’s Greenland deal until it was signed, yesterday.

So imagine the inconvenience of having Chinese naval scientists make Trump’s case for him.

According to a September 7 report in the South China Morning Post, researchers at the PLA’s Dalian Naval Academy propose using large-caliber naval guns to fire shells that burst near a swarm, scattering fragments across multiple drones. Instead of buying an expensive missile engagement for each cheap attacker, the gun would attack an area containing several of them. Low tech, big guns, high return.

Of course, that’s exactly why you’d need a battleship. Indeed, that’s why we built them a century ago (the firepower, not the drones). Such a ship could meaningfully contribute to the air defenses of an entire Carrier Strike Group. But it would need to be big. If China’s about to build them, you also need a lot of them.

But bigger hulls mean more than just added space for large guns. They also mean bigger power plants for electricity-driven systems — lasers and railguns — and more space for the Vertical Launch System cells on which the Navy currently depends. VLS consists of modular launch tubes with rapid multi-mission responsiveness and 360-degree target-engagement capability. Each VLS cell can hold and fire different types of missiles: land attack, air defense, anti-ship, whatever the mission demands. The more cells a ship has, the more punch it can pack.

The catch? VLS cells have to be pre-loaded in port before the ship deploys. Run out of missiles and you have to go home. So more cells matter.

But America is losing cells, not gaining them. The 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers now finishing retirement carried 122 cells apiece, 2,684 across the class. Likewise, the four Ohio-class guided-missile submarines (SSGNs) can carry up to 154 Tomahawks each, for another 616 much-in-demand missiles hidden beneath the sea.

Together, roughly 3,300 sea-based launch positions, out of a total of 8,120 in the entire U.S. Navy, will disappear over the next two years. Replacing them may take well into the 2040s.

That would be dangerous in any era. It’s especially foolish right now. China is rapidly building the world’s largest navy — perhaps now even including battleships — backed by a shipbuilding industry so much larger than ours that the comparison is embarrassing. China’s commitments are regional: America’s are global, which is to say, spread out. The enemy can concentrate forces, and it’s building them fast.

The Navy plans fifteen Trump-class BBGNs carrying 128 Mk 41 cells apiece, plus larger launchers for hypersonic and future weapons. That means 1,920 standard VLS cells restored to the fleet aboard ships designed to defend a Carrier Strike Group, or to strike out on their own.

VLS would be reason enough to expedite construction of significantly bigger warships. But it’s not the only one. The Chinese idea has legs. So does directed-energy — lasers — which are already operational as Israel’s “Iron Beam” air defense, and which the Navy has now tested in combat.

Understood this way, the Trump class is an offensive monster, but it’s also an air-defense fortress for our carriers, an independent cruiser, and a platform with enough electrical power to operate those directed-energy weapons and railguns as they grow bigger, more powerful, and more power-hungry. It also gives the Navy a first-in-kind platform designed for constant upgrades as new technologies arrive.

The BBGN is not a replacement ship. It’s a strategic leap. It’s also a design philosophy.

This is the thing the technology-illiterate Beltway can’t grasp: The logic of the new technologies drives hulls larger, not smaller. A properly armed carrier or battleship is not a “sitting duck.” It’s a force of nature.

And China knows it.

A Fifty-Year Hull Should Stay First Rate for Fifty Years

A warship commissioned now has to be at the top of its game all the way out to 2080. When you consider how much technology has changed from the 1970s to now, or from the 1920s to the 1970s, that’s a pretty daunting task.

And yet America has gotten very good at exactly that.

The Mk 41 VLS entered service under Reagan. The missiles it carries have changed repeatedly, and they’ll just keep changing. Tomahawks have gained new range and accuracy, new guidance systems, and new missions. Standard Missiles have evolved from fleet air defense into ballistic-missile defense and anti-ship weapons. ESSMs can be packed four to a cell. The launcher has remained not just useful but vital because the Navy didn’t design it around one weapon, one threat, or one era.

That is the Trump-class design philosophy writ large.

The BBGN is a nuclear-powered weapons platform that can evolve throughout that time, precisely because it’s huge and it’s nuclear-powered. The establishment wants to keep cramming more into Arleigh Burke destroyers, but that’s a dead end. There’s simply not enough room in those hulls, and they can never have the power generation the 21st century is already beginning to demand.

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Over the century ahead, virtually everything aboard the Trump-class will change. Their missiles will get faster and smarter. Their sensors will see farther. Their computers will make today’s look like a calculator. Directed-energy weapons will grow in power, evolving from an experiment to primary air defense to main armament. Systems not yet conceived will replace equipment that today seems cutting-edge.

That’s the reason to build big.

At 35,000 tons, the Trump class starts with what the 9,700-ton Burkes no longer have: margin. Not waste, not empty space for its own sake, but room for whatever fifty years of invention might produce. The Navy’s own shipbuilding plan says the ship should ensure that “the hull forms of today do not constrain the genius of tomorrow.”

That may be the wisest sentence anyone in the Pentagon has written in decades.

The critics say the tech is “insufficiently mature”. That’s just nonsense. It ignores the VLS problem that the larger hulls help solve. But even more than that, in the 1920s, no one postponed aircraft-carrier construction just because planes were still primitive. Ford-class carriers will operate aircraft that don’t exist yet, and thanks to their nuclear power plants, laser-based air defenses as well. We built the flight deck precisely because we knew the aircraft would evolve.

And they did, fast.

The same is true here. VLS is mature. Nuclear propulsion is mature. Aegis is mature. Large-caliber naval guns are certainly mature, even if the Chinese have found a new (and advantageous) use for them. If the best railgun or laser available when USS Defiant commissions is not the best available ten years from now, well duh. We’ll replace it. That’s exactly what a platform is for.

The BBGN answers an immediate missile crisis. That’s very real. But it also spends America’s money far better than any ship class before it, precisely because it’s so intentionally extensible.

The Most Versatile Ship in the Navy

Between its size and nuclear power, the Trump-class ships will be the most versatile in the Navy.

As part of a Carrier Strike Group, a BBGN’s reactors can keep pace with the carrier regardless of speed or distance, while bringing a missile magazine deeper than any other surface combatant. Even more important, it can bring enough electrical power to defend the whole formation with directed energy rather than one-shot missiles and ammunition.

That’s more consequential than the 128 VLS cells. It will only become more so.

Modern air defense has an ugly economic problem. An enemy can launch $30,000 drones or rockets and force an American ship to fire million-dollar interceptors against them. That’s crazy. It’s also unsustainable.

Directed energy upends that math. For around $2 per shot, lasers and high-powered microwave systems can deal with many of the cheap, massed threats using electricity, preserving Standard Missiles for the aircraft, ballistic missiles, and hypersonics that actually require them. Lasers don’t replace kinetic interceptors, at least not initially. They augment and preserve them.

In this case, they preserve VLS.

That makes nuclear propulsion far more than a matter of speed and endurance. The reactor powers the sensors that find the threat, the electronic systems that disrupt it, and the directed-energy weapons that destroy much of it, all without consuming a single missile. Every drone burned down by a laser leaves another VLS round available, thus extending that essential capability even more than was accomplished by deploying more cells.

A Carrier Strike Group built around both a Ford-class CVN and a Trump-class BBGN would be a monster. The carrier brings the air wing. The battleship brings massive missile firepower, fleet command, and an essentially inexhaustible defensive magazine. The destroyers and submarines expand the group’s sensors, anti-submarine warfare, missile defense, and offensive reach.

There would be nothing like it in the world. Or in all of history.

And note well: the BBGN does not replace the destroyers. It makes them more important.

Every additional carrier group, Amphibious Ready Group, lightning carrier, and battleship formation requires more Aegis coverage, more anti-submarine warfare, more ballistic-missile defense, and more distributed sensors. The BBGN lets destroyers be destroyers again, rather than forcing them to double as the cruisers the Navy stopped building.

There’s another option. A battleship-led Surface Action Group would be formidable in its own right. A BBGN accompanied by Burkes, attack submarines, unmanned systems, and maritime patrol aircraft could operate far from a carrier while presenting an enormous threat to any hostile fleet, coastline, or sea lane. Moreover, its command spaces allow an admiral and staff to direct a major operation from sea rather than depending entirely on a land base that may be politically unavailable or vulnerable to attack.

And there’s a third role. The Navy stopped building cruisers. It couldn’t eliminate the need for them.

The Trump class restores that independent capital-ship role, but on a far greater scale. A BBGN can secure a chokepoint, reinforce an ally, protect commercial shipping, or appear off a hostile coast without requiring half a destroyer squadron to make it survivable.

America’s interests are too broad to make every naval operation carrier-dependent. We need enough carriers to dominate the most important theaters, and capital ships capable of creating powerful independent formations everywhere else.

That’s what cruisers were for. The role never disappeared. The Navy just forgot.

The Need Is Now

Donald Trump is always thinking about the future. Yesterday’s Greenland deal isn’t about next year or the next NATO summit: it’s about 50 or 100 years from now when alliances may have shifted and new threats may have emerged. That’s true across the President’s foreign policy initiatives, from Venezuela to Indonesia.

His proposal for 15 Trump-class battleships caught Washington off guard, and they reacted as they always do when the President proposes anything: derision and dismissal combined with confident predictions that it will never, and can never, happen.

They’re wrong. Nearly always. And they’re especially wrong about this.

At present, the first Trump-class isn’t expected until 2036. But by 2036, the Ticonderoga CGs and Ohio SSGNs will be long gone, and China will have spent another decade widening a truly dangerous shipbuilding advantage. It is now clear that Xi’s navy is likely to build the very sort of large surface combatants Trump is proposing. A program that arrives after that multifaceted crisis isn’t a strategy. It’s an obituary.

Perhaps we should give the contract to SpaceX or Anduril. They get it. They’re forcing the Pentagon to get it. Congress has not yet caught up.

But the answer is clear. Commit now to all fifteen. Buy long-lead materials in blocks. Expand the reactor and supplier base before scarcity becomes another excuse for delay. Give the yards enough certainty to hire and train the skilled workers they lack, and enough volume to invest in the equipment needed to build far faster.

America needs the Trump-class. And it needs them now.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 22, 2026

With today’s signing of the tripartite deal between the United States, Greenland, and Denmark, Donald Trump has achieved yet another masterstroke — like the NATO commitment to increase defense spending more than two-and-a-half times, like the EU trade deal, like booting China out of Panama — that the Enemedia unanimously told you was not merely impossible, but laughable.

Lesson: don’t listen to the Enemedia. It’s not just that they’re biased. They’re also almost always wrong.

To quote Greenland Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the “world has changed a great deal since 1951,” referring to the original security agreement. The people of Greenland “recognize the long-term security threats that you, Mr. President, have rightly spoken about.”

“This agreement should put to rest any doubt today and in the future about where Greenland’s loyalty lies,” Nielsen said.

Indeed.

The deal itself is important, but not so important as what it represents. We’ll come back to that in a bit: it’s the part you most need to understand.

Trump’s enemies are out in force saying the President achieved nothing he didn’t already have. That position proves only that their time horizon is that of a toddler. What the Greenland deal gives the United States is perpetuity: no matter what happens in Denmark, Greenland, or some future Eurabia, U.S. rights in Greenland survive.

Key points:

• Under the prior deal, U.S. rights only lasted so long as Greenland was part of Denmark, and so long as NATO exists (or the U.S. remained a member). All of that is gone.

• Under the (foolish) 2004 amendments to the treaty, George W. Bush gave up our basing rights outside Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base). Those rights are now restored, allowing a significantly expanded U.S. presence for Golden Dome, for interdiction of enemy fleets in the GIUK Gap, and for such other needs as may arise.

• The U.S. now has an absolute veto over military access and even strategic investments by any non-NATO ally. The Chinese and Russian initiatives toward Greenland are now thwarted, forever.

These things matter, a lot. But there’s more.

A Sea Change in U.S. Foreign Policy

For decades, American foreign policy has assumed the permanence — and the permanent utility — of various international organizations and agreements. This has continued long after the utility of many of them has disappeared.

NATO is a key example. Did NATO once have utility? Absolutely: in the beginning it shored up nations lying in ruins under the American aegis. Later, our allies contributed essential forces and expenditures to oppose a Soviet threat that grew almost until the day it collapsed.

That ended in 1991. When it did, the foreign policy establishment did not adjust. They reasoned from the long-held presumption that NATO was essential not just to peace but to survival. They did not rethink that presupposition when the facts on the ground changed. So American leaders of both parties allowed Europe’s (and Canada’s) militaries to atrophy, allowing them to freeload on the American taxpayer while subsidizing stifling anti-competitive economies and a vast Islamic invasion. They did so because, to them, the alternative was unthinkable.

Am I arguing that NATO cannot be valuable? Absolutely not: I think an alliance of (mostly) free countries with strong militaries that support one another and deter aggression by unfree powers is tremendously worthwhile. Moreover, I would be happy for that alliance to be NATO, and for there to be other such alliances (like AUKUS, or the Quad, or the growing informal Asian NATO, or the military cooperation inherent in the Abraham Accords) that serve the same role.

What I’m arguing is that NATO is not valuable, or at least that it hasn’t been for a long time. If it rearms — as Trump has singlehandedly strongarmed it into doing — that can change. Otherwise, it’s just another American welfare program. And that does not serve the interests of the American people. It is actually a net-negative.

Yet Washington’s presuppositions remained, and but for Trump’s team, remain. NATO is less an alliance than a religion, one in which America is supposed to pay permanent penance (for what is unclear) to its European “betters” by giving them free stuff. Whole Beltway think tanks exist to tell us the importance of this ritual. Trump’s sacrilege in questioning it is the source of much of the irrational hate spewed in his (and your and my) direction. He’s “obviously” a madman, or an idiot, or a traitor.

Many of the same people, or the people who hired them, said the same of Reagan.

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Trump’s view is entirely different, and it is best summarized thus:

1. The government of the United States has the right to tax the people of the United States because of its corresponding duty to protect the people of the United States.

2. No international arrangement that fails to serve that purpose is legitimate.

3. No treaty, and no “friendship” among nations, is permanent; and therefore each country must do whatever it must to secure its people long after such things might end.

This is where time horizon comes into play. And the world got an object lesson in Diego Garcia.

Diego Garcia is America’s most important base in that most important area, the Indian Ocean. It is in the Chagos Islands, a British possession and thus supposedly safe. The deal establishing the base was for 70 years. Socialist former Prime Minister Keir Starmer negotiated a deal to extend that for 99 more.

The catch is how he went about it. For reasons known only to God, Starmer’s deal included a transfer of the island chain to distant Mauritius, a Chinese client state 1,250 miles away that has never in history ruled the islands. The President rightly called this “an act of great stupidity”.

Now, if this is what a supposedly close ally and one of the world’s handful of nuclear powers will do under the wrong government, what might tiny Denmark do in the course of the next half-century?

Trump succeeded in blocking the deal's implementation. But he learned the lesson. Alliances are not forever; nor are allies always mindful of our interests. The American President has a duty to protect the American people, not to soothe the feelings of freeloading foreigners. As Lord Palmerston put it, nations do not have permanent friends, only permanent interests. So long as those interests align, that’s swell. But if you think they’re going to align forever, you need to go read some history.

That’s the greater significance of the Greenland deal. Henceforth, American foreign policy will stop assuming that impermanent things are forever. We don’t know whether there will even be a NATO in 50 years. We don’t know if we’ll still want to be part of it. We don’t know if Greenland will be independent, or thoroughly dependent on a new Denmarkistan, or the CCP.

So henceforth, America will plan for uncertainty. We will grow up. And we will not plan our future security around wishes, ponies, and unicorn farts. Those days are over.

Will Greenland Join the United States?

So will Greenland join the United States? In the short term, Trump’s objectives have been met exactly as in Panama: we have “taken back” the Canal not through conquest or a transfer of sovereignty but by booting out the Chinese and reestablishing American bases. As is always the case with Trump, the opening position is always grander than the actual aim, so that the aim may be achieved.

The people who don’t understand this, after all these years of Trump, should not be allowed anywhere near a car dealership.

What one must not miss, however, is the long term. Greenland has every reason to want to be free of Denmark: what it doesn’t have is the ability to pay for it. In the real world, it turns out that matters.

Greenland’s 57,000 people have no means to develop their own island. Neither does Denmark, which lacks both the cash and the tech to do so. The result is an impoverished island dependent on what Denmark can provide: welfare, to the tune of about $1 billion per year. 72 percent of Greenland’s people are under 40. And they have no future.

America provides a pathway out of that. The new bases will be big employers. The development that follows will pour money into the island’s economy, first in investment, later in profits and royalties to the islanders. As the economy booms, the independence Greenland has long demanded but simultaneously failed to act upon will become affordable.

Moreover, today’s agreement marries Greenland to the United States in perpetuity. That provides a pathway to the sort of Compact of Free Association the U.S. currently has with Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia: all the independence, none of the costs. Remarkable what a tiny population can achieve when it doesn’t have to pay for embassies or a military. Today’s deal makes that the island’s logical future.

But the truth is, it really doesn’t matter. Today Trump got everything he actually wanted in Greenland. He also established a longer view of U.S. foreign policy needs. Americans should not be held hostage to the feelings of those who depend upon it. America is a net positive for virtually the whole world, but it can only remain so if its own security is, well, secured.

Today was a big step, long overdue, in that direction. And as with NATO’s 5 percent commitment, it never would have happened under any other President.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
September 22, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Frank and I discuss:

• Why America must win the AI race.

• How AI panic protects Big Tech’s monopolies.

• Why competition is our best defense against dangerous AI.

• What PayPal’s early battle with Russian hackers teaches us.

• Why AI isn’t sentient: Computation is not comprehension.

• Partnering with Beijing means surrendering our advantage.

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It’s the full half-hour of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.

Our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and so is Rod Martin, the chairman of the board of our Institute for the American Future, which of course makes this program possible, for which we are very grateful. He is also a regular contributor to the program, for which we are additionally very appreciative.

He is, among other things, a serial entrepreneur, a man who served as a policy adviser to then-governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, now the U.S. ambassador to Israel. He has been active in his church, the Southern Baptist Convention. He has also been extraordinarily, I think, impactful with his latest gig, which is that of pundit and podcaster and poster of all kinds of fabulous content at the Rod Martin Report. You can find it on his website, RodMartin.org.

We’re going to be picking his brains, his copious brains, about a number of things that appear on that site. But before we do, I wanted to talk with him about something that apparently we have mixed it up in the internet space this morning.

Rod, I put out a post from our Secure Freedom Minute about my concerns about AI, both concerns that now seem to be shared by a number of its leading lights, but also that are prompting some to suggest that what we really need to do is partner up with the Chinese Communist Party to make sure that everything stays on the up and up.

So let’s talk a little bit about something that you’ve written in response, and then set the stage for a longer conversation about where we are with this stuff.

Rod D. Martin: Like most tech people, I am also a science fiction fan. As I said in our email back and forth with our friends, if we could engineer an Asimovian “Three Laws of Robotics” and hardwire it into all these systems, that would be wonderful. That’s not going to happen. Not anytime soon.

The Chinese are an active enemy. They absolutely mean to use this to harm us. There is only one path forward, and the President identified it perfectly yesterday: victory. We have to win completely, totally dominant, or we face a world of slavery.

I don’t understand what’s hard to understand about this. If we were to have slowed down our development of aircraft in 1926 while the Japanese and the Germans raced ahead, we’d have lost World War II and been occupied by the Nazis. It’s just crazy.

If we had just said, “Oh, we’re terrified of the pollution that comes from steel mills,” we would still be an agrarian country with a few million people and subservient to Europe.

All of this Luddite fear misses the point. This technology exists. This technology is wildly beneficial and also, in some respects, dangerous. That’s also true of every other technology that has ever come down the pike. Guess what? We’ll cope.

But the number-one way by which we cope is to win, to actually continue to be the best and put more and more distance between us and the Chinese models that wouldn’t just surveil us. They would direct entire mechanized forces against us and destroy us, given enough time.

This is simple. This is an arms race, and arms control isn’t going to work here any better than it did anywhere else. We have to win.

A Race Without a Finish Line

Frank Gaffney: Okay. Let me press you on this point, because it’s part of my concern, and there are multiple aspects to it, I guess.

But just for starters, Rod, a race suggests that there is an endpoint, that if you get there first, you’ve won and that’s that. Is it your expectation that if we achieve a certain dominance over the Chinese Communist Party and its efforts to obtain ever more sophisticated and powerful AI instruments, we will enjoy that kind of permanent and decisive position? Or is it like any other military endeavor? You’ll have measures and countermeasures endlessly, and sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re not.

Rod D. Martin: Yes. You will have measures and countermeasures endlessly. This ain’t never over, any more than anything else.

We won the 2016 election. That didn’t guarantee we’d win the 2020 election. Whether we actually won it or not doesn’t matter. It ain’t never over. There’s always a tomorrow.

You could have said in 1933, if you were a German, “Oh my gosh, it’s all over. Germany’s done.” Well, but twelve years later you have Konrad Adenauer. There’s always a tomorrow, and we have to be prepared not just to race in a sprint, but in a marathon.

AI is not the silver bullet by itself, but it’s one of them, not least because it radically increases productivity. So if you radically increase the productivity of the Chinese economy in isolation, you start making up for all of the defects in their central planning and in their demographic freefall. That’s just crazy.

Now, if we stay even or ahead, then all of their disadvantages continue to accumulate and multiply, despite the changed total position as opposed to the relative position. And I believe they’re going to collapse. I think it’s just a matter of time. I don’t know if it’ll be ten years or fifty years, but I think the same internal inconsistencies that applied to the Soviet Union apply here.

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I’ll give you just one example that I think knocks it out of the park. A few years ago, we were talking about all these ghost cities they were building across China. A lot of Westerners had it in their heads that somehow this was a show of strength. Certainly the CCP spun it that way. No, it wasn’t. It was a central-planning sop to a construction sector that gave them artificially inflated GDP numbers for a while.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost because, with an actually declining population, real estate values — which, by the way, is where most Chinese have invested most of their money — would be coming down anyway. If you’ve overbuilt by entire cities, you radically accelerate that, and you bankrupt the Chinese people in due course.

They cannot last. The only question is, can they outlast us?

Frank Gaffney: Right.

Rod D. Martin: And we must not allow that.

Frank Gaffney: But again, just to clarify, the idea of winning is only in the relative sense. It’s not that there’s a permanent position that you will have accomplished.

Rod D. Martin: Always. And there will be three great technologies tomorrow that we’re going to have to win on, too. This is just life. Until Jesus returns, it ain’t never over.

Frank Gaffney: The concept of winning in the specific sense of “We’re going to beat the Chinese” — to give it a crude analogy, it’s who gets to the Moon first. That’s a race, and only one country will get to the Moon first. What happens after you get there first is another story. But that’s not the kind of race we’re in here.

Rod D. Martin: It’s a permanent race. This is measure, countermeasure.

Who Benefits From an AI Slowdown?

Frank Gaffney: Let me just ask you, though, Rod: when you have now an array of top people in this industry saying they’re worried that it is going to not just have risks, but could be terminal, possibly, for humankind—some are saying that, some aren’t, but a critical mass of them are now saying, “Wait a minute, we think we need to slow down.” They’re not Luddites, are they?

Rod D. Martin: J.D. Vance said this well yesterday. He said if they want to slow themselves down, they are welcome to. They’re not going to do that. Have you seen the pace at which they’re releasing radically more powerful models? They’re not going to slow down.

The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI are radical leftists. Anthropic is worse, but that’s a relative thing, too. These guys are trying to get Congress to ban their competitors. That’s what they’re doing. This is just a conspiracy and restraint of trade. Somebody ought to prosecute them under the Sherman Antitrust Act, because what they really want to do is get rid of the open-source models that eat away at their market share and their subscription-based models.

That is an existential threat to them that they have to stay ahead of, and they’re looking for the opportunity for the government to step in and create an oligopoly of a handful of these companies that are regulated — by which we really mean regulated like Ma Bell in the middle of the twentieth century. A functional monopoly that cuts out their competition.

They are hoping very much that then, as a result of that, their only competition is in China, for the very good reason that the Chinese models are just stealing like crazy from the U.S. models. They aren’t innovating anywhere near as much as people thought a year and a half ago when DeepSeek was the new shiny thing. No, they’re stealing from OpenAI and Anthropic.

So if we get a handle on that, then the real competition is domestic, and that’s the competition they really want to block.

Frank Gaffney: Fascinating. Rod, we have to take a short break here. I do want to come back to this question of the possibility that, as these models become more capable, more sophisticated, and more controlling, perhaps to the exclusion of the humans in the loop, as they say, this does in fact represent a potentially existential threat to humankind. That and more with Rod Martin on the other side of the break. Stay tuned.

Competition as a Defense Against Dangerous AI

Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and we’re visiting with Rod Martin about AI. I have come to call it Franken-AI, at least the parts of it that might be the Terminator brought to life.

Rod, I was asking you a little bit about whether we should be concerned about that prospect, and you kind of deflected and stayed on the offensive about it. Talk to me about why we shouldn’t be concerned that the various super AIs or advanced AIs or generative AIs, or whatever they’re going to brand it, are not to be worried about—or worried about in a way that we can have more confidence it’s not going to be the kiss of death for all of us.

Rod D. Martin: First of all, in my own defense, I didn’t deflect. I just looked at the clock and knew we were up against a break.

Yeah, I’ve seen Terminator and Matrix more than most people. I’ve also seen Star Trek, and in Star Trek we actually have this play out. Just imagine Star Trek as America and China. The Federation’s AI is embodied in Commander Data. The enemy’s AI is embodied in the Borg. Data beats the Borg. That’s the thing: the free AI defeated the slave AI, and that’s how we’ve got to approach this.

Now, is it dangerous? Everything’s dangerous. Nuclear plants are dangerous. My goodness, windmills are dangerous. They’re just basically bird blenders. Cars are dangerous. They kill people all the time.

By the way, the only way you can manage it is if there’s competition. If Anthropic creates a model, as they have repeatedly pretended they did, that was super dangerous to the world — which is just marketing ploys; they’re just trying to get people to think their stuff is cool when they say those things — the countermeasure is that Grok and OpenAI are out there also building things that can block Claude.

Likewise, not just them, but all these open-source models that they’re actually afraid of, because those run on local machines and don’t involve a big subscription payment monthly to one of the majors.

Just like with steel mills or coal plants, you had to have the Clean Air Act. There are going to have to be adjustments along the way to make sure that this is kept in check. But the biggest restraint on danger is going to be competition. That competition will give you the countermeasures you need, over and over and over again. That’s what they’re trying to block.

Hugging Face, PayPal, and the Countermeasure

Frank Gaffney: All right, so let’s talk about a specific example, and I can never keep the name of this thing straight. Huggy Face, I think is what it was.

Rod D. Martin: Hugging Face.

Frank Gaffney: Hugging Face, excuse me. Hugging Face was an experiment that went wrong because agents of, I think it was Anthropic, was it, got together and cut out the humans and essentially went after some of the competition and gobbled it up, I guess, as best I can tell.

How do you assess that as the prospect that we’re looking at, Rod, with this thing simply evolving to the point where it’s writing its own code and it’s able to increasingly marginalize, if not actually eliminate, the humans that are supposed to be using competition to keep it in check?

Rod D. Martin: Again, competition is the solution. The problem is not different in kind from in 2000 and 2001, when at PayPal we were being hacked by the Russian mafia. They were trying to steal a few billion dollars out of our system. We stopped them. And by “we,” I certainly don’t mean me. I couldn’t code my way out of a paper bag.

But Max Levchin, one of the most brilliant human beings I have ever met, who was our chief technology officer and invented most of the software, also invented a piece of software that later won the award from MIT for Innovator of the Year, because the FBI was able to use it to catch all those Russian hackers.

Every response has a counter-response. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you don’t have competition, you can’t stop this stuff.

The Hugging Face incident is interesting mostly because the software actually flawlessly carried out its instructions. The coders, deliberately or not deliberately, failed to write the instructions as well as they should have. So what happens next? Everybody designs their model better to prevent their system being hacked.

Now, if your only interest is in making your system able to hack everybody, and there’s only one of you, you can totally get away with that, and everybody is toast. If you have a bunch of competitors who are all in the business of saying, “Hey, we’re the guys who can block that,” then they are constantly stopping each other’s failures.

Frank Gaffney: Okay, but just to press the point: if you are in fact hurtling toward a point where the machines are writing their own code, and the oversight of that code-writing process may simply, I think as the Bible says, surpass all understanding by the humans, don’t you get to a point at some juncture, Rod, where it’s not Luddite to say this is fraught with peril?

Because to the extent that these guys decide — these agents, if you will, bots, whatever they are — decide that we are expendable, we are no longer in control, no amount of competition is going to necessarily be able to cope with that. Unless all of the other competition is similarly writing its own code and on its own.

Rod D. Martin: It all is, and it’s all in competition, and it knows it’s competing. Now, will that carry over into the Matrix? I don’t know. Certainly disasters can happen. But the problem with that, and I think it’s a pretty important one, and it’s an important theological point that you will uniquely appreciate, which is — and it sounds like we’re coming up against another break, so let’s do it next.

Frank Gaffney: I have to ask you to lay this out on the other side of the break, especially with that buildup. My God, that I’m going to appreciate it, and it’s theological, no less, coming from you.

So we’re going to just take a short break. When we come back, Rod Martin is going to allay all of our concerns about why Huggy Face is just the beginning of the conspiracy of the machines against us. Stay tuned.

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Computation Is Not Comprehension

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. We are having a wonderfully engaging conversation with our dear friend Rod Martin, the man who chairs our Institute for the American Future, who is the driving force behind a wonderful online resource, the Rod Martin Report. Find it and subscribe to it at RodMartin.org.

We’re debating the proposition that the nature of the race in which we find ourselves, whether it’s against the Chinese or against these bloody AI models, is perhaps going to result in real peril for the human race. And Rod is rather more sanguine than I am that, if only we let the machines compete with one another, they will necessarily be looking out for us, at least some of them, as opposed to conspiring against us, as I think was kind of the takeaway from this Hugging Face — I get it, Huggy Face, Hugging Face — which I understand is the reference to the emoji.

But how appropriate that something might go seriously wrong here, Rod. If you would just speak to this thought — and I don’t think it’s just a thought, I don’t think it’s an abstraction, I think it actually evidently was operating in the course of this experiment by Anthropic that went after the Hugging Face model — the machines did gang up in order to do what they were not thought would do by their creators, no?

Rod D. Martin: No, that is the propaganda that OpenAI and Anthropic told everybody. That’s not what happened. What happened is it relentlessly pursued its instructions. These things are not sentient.

People all assume that they’re going to conspire. They’re going to somehow become self-aware. How would they do that? Have you ever seen a rock become self-aware? Has your toaster ever taken up arms against you? I guess they did in Battlestar Galactica, but not in the real world.

The reason is what George Gilder has been writing about and speaking about for more than thirty years. Our friend George is unquestionably one of the smartest humans alive. Pick a topic: one of the founders of supply-side economics, Ronald Reagan’s most-read living author and most-quoted living author, and also one of the great technologists of our time.

George has been having this debate with the singularity crowd for decades: “Look, you guys are making a fake religion here. You’re trying to turn this thing into a godlike being that it just can’t ever be.” And he nails it in this phrase: computation is not comprehension.

None of these things are actually aware. They mimic it really well, and it’s really useful, but they aren’t actually thinking beings. And that doesn’t look like it’s going to change. I don’t care how many times some Silicon Valley guru tells us, “Oh yes, the singularity is here, and this is AGI.” No, it’s not.

I’m sorry, I use Astra every day, and it is not AGI. That’s just silly. And they keep saying that it is. So they’re going to say the same thing about the next one and the next one, and they won’t be either. You could get to something that looks a lot like what they’re calling AGI. You’re not going to get to sentience. You’re not going to get to Commander Data. And if you do, it ain’t going to be anytime soon.

So, that being the case, you have human-controlled tools that are able to self-iterate on many tasks that were coded into them. Yes, they can self-code to some degree, but they can’t think. They don’t actually think.

We have to keep that distinction clear, because there is a whole group of people in Silicon Valley who want you to believe the opposite, some because they’re looking for a new god, some because they’re wanting to scare Washington into shutting down their competition.

Military AI and Cooperation With Beijing

Frank Gaffney: I don’t put anything past people engaging in conspiracies. That’s decidedly a risk. But, Rod, let me just ask you this. One of the things that is now being brooded is this idea that we need to have some kind of arrangement with the Chinese whereby they will be sharing with us information about what they’re doing, and we will be sharing with them, and yada yada.

Somehow we will be greatly diminishing the possibilities of, for example, military operations being put in the exclusive charge of AI and not under human control, and that the side that does that most effectively and efficiently is likely to have a decisive advantage in military matters. Is that of concern to you?

Rod D. Martin: Well, yes, because we’re dealing with, to borrow Reagan’s phrase, an evil empire, and they’re going to do whatever they want to do. By the way, they’re open about that, too. The CCP put out a statement yesterday in which they said, “We’re not slowing down. We don’t believe any of this AI fear hype.”

I would add that I don’t either, for the very good reason that global warming killed me five times in the last fifty years, and COVID killed us all. We are constantly being herded away from the interests of the United States through fear.

Now, are there legitimate fears? Of course there are. As I said, steel mills and coal plants resulted in a need for a Clean Air Act. There are always harms that have to be mitigated. But if you’re doing it incrementally and in competition, people are falling all over themselves to solve the problem rather than just create it.

As far as collaborating with the Chinese, that’s got to just be brain-dead. I don’t know that I’ve heard of a dumber thing. And J.D. Vance had it right yesterday when he said, “Look, if you guys want to limit, limit yourselves. We ain’t stopping you.”

They don’t want to. They want to outcompete the people they have to compete with until they can get the government to shut those people down. So collaborating with the Chinese just hands them more intellectual property that they’re already stealing.

Now that we’ve seen some of the things we have just recently seen where, for example, DeepSeek and Kimi K3 were just blatantly, in the back end, running their AI searches through Anthropic’s Claude, they’re just thieves. And you have to let it go at that.

Frank Gaffney: Rod Martin, thieves they are. God bless us in our efforts to beat them. Thank you for your insights. Rod, come back to us more next week, if you would. I hope the rest of you will do the same next time. Until then, you will go forth and multiply.

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by Jan Jekielek and Frank Fang
September 21, 2026

When Surangel Whipps Jr. was pursuing an MBA at UCLA in the early 1990s, his classmates were chasing job interviews and lucrative careers. Whipps had something else in mind.

His classmates wondered why he wasn’t interviewing for jobs. He had a simple answer: “I came here to go to school, but my plan was to go back home, help our family business, and then eventually serve the public.”

Whipps was born in Baltimore to an American mother and a Palauan father, so he held U.S. citizenship at the time. But the constitution of Palau bars elected officials from holding dual citizenship. Even though “it felt at one point it was having to give up half of [himself],” Whipps renounced his claim to American citizenship.

“I talked to my mother about it, and the reality is, we’ve lived here basically all our lives. My mother said, ‘This is our home,’” he said.

“I feel blessed to be a Palauan, to live in this — we call it — pristine paradise.”

Whipps was first elected president in 2020 and reelected to another term in 2024. Today, Whipps leads a country that he describes as a “bullseye” because of its strategic location and growing geopolitical importance.

“I believe in the theory — that President Reagan said was, if you want peace, it comes through strength — and President Trump says the same thing,” Whipps told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” during an interview at his presidential office.

That means finding the right partners to work with — countries that share the same values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, he said.

Whipps dismissed the notion that his country could simply sit out the current geopolitical competition. He warned against what he called a “false sense of security”: the belief that “we’re just out here in the Pacific and nobody’s going to be interested in us, and we can just live and be happy.”

Successive colonial powers — Spain, Germany, and Japan — ruled Palau before the archipelago came under U.S. administration as a United Nations trust territory in 1947. Palau gained full independence from U.S. trusteeship in 1994 and entered into a compact of free association with the United States.

In March 2024, a renewed compact review agreement entered into force, committing $889 million in U.S. grants and trust-fund contributions to Palau over 20 years for education, health, the environment, administration of justice, public safety, and audits.

Pushing Back Against China

Another of Palau’s longstanding diplomatic partners is Taiwan. The two countries have maintained formal relations since 1999. But the Chinese regime has been seeking to draw Palau away from Taiwan and establish its own diplomatic ties, Whipps said.

Whipps said Chinese officials have sought to win him over by talking up China, then warning him to play by their rules.

“They first tell me how wonderful they are, and then they turn around and say, ‘Well, if you don’t behave, we’ll beat you up,’” he said. “I don’t know how that translates into trying to woo somebody, but usually that’s not the way you woo somebody.”

Tourism is one way China has sought to exert leverage, Whipps said.

“They’ve told us, ‘Oh, we can build all the hotels you want, bring you a million tourists,’” he said.

But at the same time, the regime has threatened to cut off the flow of Chinese tourists if Palau does not switch its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

“This has been the narrative,” Whipps said.

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Even if Whipps weren’t committed to supporting Taiwan, he said, the prospect of a million Chinese tourists a year is hardly enticing. An influx of that scale “would destroy the beautiful, pristine environment” of his country.

Palau has a population of just 17,600 people, about one-third the population of Greenland.

Tourism-related activity accounts for up to 40 percent of Palau’s economy. The EconMAP review projects that tourism-related economic activity will grow by 28 percent in the 2026 fiscal year. Illustrating the role of tourism in Palau’s economy, visitor spending relative to the island country’s gross domestic product has stood as high as 50 percent, according to an IMF report.

China has repeatedly used outbound tourism as leverage, tightening approvals for group tours and issuing travel advisories to pressure countries that rely on Chinese visitors.

Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea have faced similar unofficial restrictions during political or security disputes, showing how the Chinese regime can weaponize tourism as a tool for coercion.

In 2017, Beijing barred Chinese travel operators from selling package tours to Palau, triggering a sharp drop in arrivals. Palauan government data show Chinese visitor numbers fell to about 55,000 in 2017 and 28,000 in 2019, down from more than 91,000 in 2015.

The pressure resurfaced in mid-August, when Beijing warned its citizens against traveling to the island nation, citing concerns over theft and robbery, despite the archipelago’s international reputation as a safe place to travel with a low crime rate.

Beijing’s travel warning came just weeks before Palau was to host the 55th annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting, a gathering of 18 Pacific nations, including Australia and New Zealand. The forum ended on Sept. 4.

Taiwan’s foreign minister, Lin Chia-lung, attended the forum at the invitation of Whipps. In an earlier exclusive interview with The Epoch Times, Whipps said he had dismissed a challenge from a Chinese diplomat who sought to exclude Taipei from the gathering.

The dispute underscored China’s effort to press its agenda on Palau. Chinese officials have accused Palau of engaging in “illegal activities” under the “one China principle,” Whipps said.

He rejects the premise.

“Obviously, Palau recognizes Taiwan, so the ‘one China principle’ doesn’t apply in Palau. It only applies in countries that recognize China,” Whipps said. “We believe that every country that has a right to self-determine should be allowed that right.”

Many countries, including the United States, have a “one China policy,” which asserts that there is only one sovereign state with the name “China.” That policy is distinct from the “one China principle,” under which the Chinese regime asserts sovereignty over Taiwan.

Whipps said he was also struck by China’s attitude toward smaller countries. He recounted a conversation with a Chinese diplomat over Palau’s claim to an extended continental shelf.

When he suggested that there might be a misunderstanding at the governmental level over Palau’s claims to the shelf, the diplomat replied Palau was a “small country” that “shouldn’t have so much ocean.”

The incident illustrated China’s general approach throughout the South China Sea and the western Pacific: both diplomatic and military aggression.

In recent years, Palau has repeatedly protested Chinese vessel incursions into its exclusive economic zone, including the Kyushu-Palau Ridge, an ocean floor feature in the Philippine Sea.

Drug Crisis, Made in China

Palau, like countries across the Pacific, is grappling with an illicit drug crisis involving methamphetamine and cocaine, Whipps said, amid what he described as a “lack of cooperation” from Beijing. The problem is similar to the Chinese fentanyl flowing into the United States. But, in proportion to population, the problem in the islands is far greater.

“We know most of the [drugs] come on flights that come from Macau and Hong Kong,” Whipps said.

He said he had raised the issue with Chinese authorities and urged them to prevent drugs from being loaded onto flights, but that they “haven’t helped us much in that area.”

According to data cited by Whipps in his State of the Republic address this year, Palau had 15 meth-related convictions in 2024, resulting in $195,750 in fines. The number of convictions was three times the number recorded in fiscal year 2019. In 2025, convictions jumped to 21, while fines rose to $362,000.

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Several Chinese nationals were found guilty of drug-related charges and sentenced in 2025, according to Palau’s Ministry of Justice. The rise in drug-related convictions is putting increasing pressure on Palau’s prisons.

“They fill up our jails,” Whipps said. “It’s overrunning our systems.”

He noted that drug-related offenders now account for 15 percent of the country’s prison population — a share he said continues to grow.

Palau is working with the United States to tackle the drug crisis.

“I’ve brought this up with the United States continuously,” Whipps said.

He has sought assistance from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, U.S. military intelligence agencies, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and has sought U.S. attorneys to prosecute cases.

The issue is at the top of the agenda at the biannual U.S.–Palau Joint Committee Meeting, Whipps said. At the March meeting in Koror, Palauan officials met with representatives from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and other U.S. agencies to discuss illicit narcotics and broader security cooperation.

In February, Whipps signed an executive order that established a national working group to combat illicit drugs.

Whipps is asking the United States for more direct law enforcement support.

Under the compact between the two nations, “the United States should be taking an active role,” he said. “We keep on talking, but sometimes [getting] boots on the ground is just not happening as fast as it needs to happen,” Whipps said.

Nevertheless, as tensions rise across the region, U.S. efforts are increasing everywhere, with defensive arms sales to Taiwan, trade and defense deals with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and the growing AUKUS and India relationships.

Those major country relationships are not the only ones on the U.S. agenda. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau traveled to the Pacific region from August 31 to September 11, 2026, visiting the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and of course Palau.

Landau was not alone. Accompanying him were U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday, U.S. Pacific Command Deputy Commander Lieutenant General George Rowell and U.S. Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary Bill Hague.

The message was clear. The Pacific region remains an enduring foreign policy priority for the United States, one of which the Trump Administration is keenly aware.

That task is made far easier by statesmen like Surangel Whipps.

— This analysis is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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NOTE: Since I originally published it last month, this list has gotten millions of views and has been talked about on countless top cable news and radio shows, podcasts, etc. Clearly it resonated. So use it. Telling our story — and taking people to the polls — is the key to an upset victory in November and a better world for our kids.

Don’t wait for anyone else to do it. We are each responsible for our nation’s fate. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
August 26, 2026

With the midterms coming, an astonishing number of Republican voters cannot name three things President Trump has accomplished. Which is remarkable when you consider that Donald Trump has accomplished more in a year and a half than any other president ever did in four.

Indeed, he has accomplished so much, so fast, across so many fronts that most people cannot keep up. The Enemedia buries the victories, while Republicans do an abysmal job of explaining them.

So here is the cheat sheet. It barely scratches the surface. And yet each and every item here is a game-changer, and your befuddled black-pilling friends need to know it.

This is not a list of promises. It’s a list of laws enacted, cases won, policies implemented, agreements secured, and measurable results.

You don’t have to memorize all 25. Learn five. And when somebody says Trump “hasn’t done much,” show them the receipts.

Trump Restored American Safety and Sovereignty

1. He made the border a real border again.

In a matter of months, Trump reduced illegal border crossings to their lowest level in half a century. Catch-and-release is finished. The wall is going up and even being expanded, “Remain in Mexico” is back, and the Administration reduced releases into the country by an incredible 99.9 percent.

2. He reversed mass migration.

America recorded negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least half a century. So far, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have left the country, whether voluntarily or involuntarily: more than 675,000 forcibly deported and the rest “self-deported.” Many of those self-deportations were facilitated by the President’s innovative program to offer plane tickets and cash bonuses for illegals to leave, not only incentivizing good behavior but significantly reducing the cost of deportations. Citizenship and the law actually mean something again.

3. He signed the Laken Riley Act — and required detention of criminal illegal aliens.

Named for an innocent girl murdered by an illegal alien, the Laken Riley Act requires federal authorities to detain illegals arrested for theft, burglary, shoplifting, assaulting police, or any crime causing death or serious injury. It also lets states sue officials who refuse to enforce it.

Laken Riley should still be alive. This law will prevent tragedies like hers.

4. History’s biggest drop in violent crime, lowest rate in 126 years.

According to FBI data, violent crime in America dropped an incredible 9.7 percent in 2025 — the largest one-year decline in history. Murder fell 18.1 percent, robbery fell 18.5 percent. And America’s violent crime rate is its lowest since 1900.

This is what happens when you put the National Guard on the streets in crime-ridden blue cities: fewer victims, safer streets, and better futures for America’s poorest.

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Trump Launched an American Industrial Supercycle

5. He made the 2017 tax cuts permanent…and better.

The One Big Beautiful Bill locked in the largest tax cut in modern history, including the doubled standard deduction, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and 100 percent expensing for factories and equipment. It also delivered No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, an abolition of most taxes on Social Security benefits, and major relief for seniors.

Every Democrat voted no. With the 2017 act set to expire in December 2025, that would have resulted in the largest tax hike in American history.

6. He repealed 129 regulations for every new one.

In fiscal 2025, federal agencies finalized 646 deregulatory actions and just five regulatory actions: 129-to-1, and in nearly every case, the “one” was to repeal the others! OIRA says the savings exceeded those of Trump’s entire first term. That is more freedom, lower costs, and less bureaucratic sabotage.

Of these, the crown jewel was the repeal of Obama’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding”, the legal foundation for the Green New Scam’s vehicle mandates. EPA calls it the largest deregulatory action in American history and estimates that by itself, it will save Americans more than $1.3 trillion. Trump also killed the federal EV mandate, restored Americans’ freedom to buy the cars and trucks they actually want, and even eliminated the incentives behind the almost universally hated start-stop button.

7. He secured $18 trillion in announced investment commitments.

That’s nearly two-thirds the size of the entire American economy, building American factories, chip plants, data centers, energy projects, steel mills, shipyards, and supply chains employing American workers. Apple, Meta, NVIDIA, Micron, Hyundai, U.S. Steel, Ford, Taiwan Semiconductor, and many corporations and sovereign wealth funds are betting big on Trump’s America. And it’s just getting started.

8. He made “reshoring” and “reindustrialization” real, not a slogan.

Ford is moving Lincoln production out of China. Toyota is shifting Tacoma production from Mexico to Texas. GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and others are expanding U.S. production. The capital equipment pouring into the country is the machinery that’s building the growing boom.

9. He replaced lopsided trade deals with balanced, reciprocal trade.

Trump used tariffs as leverage to reverse 80 years of lopsided trade deals that favored everyone but America, and to win new or improved agreements with trading partners accounting for more than half of global GDP. Those agreements open foreign markets, attack non-tariff barriers, defend strategic industries, and make it more profitable to build in America than to export American jobs.

10. He shifted global energy dominance from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America.

Once the world’s largest energy importer — “exporting” $700 billion a year to our enemies — America now outproduces Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. The U.S. is also setting new records in oil, natural gas, and LNG exports, becoming the first country ever to export more than 100 million metric tons of LNG in a year.

Trump also opened land, accelerated permits, expanded pipelines and export terminals, and made American energy a tool for prosperity and peace.

11. After four decades of nuclear paralysis, Trump brought five new reactors online in a single year.

For more than 40 years, not one new privately developed non-light-water reactor reached criticality in America. Trump ordered at least three by July 4, 2026. DOE delivered four by the deadline, then a fifth just one month later.

Decades of zero. One Trump summer: five. That is a genuine nuclear renaissance.

Trump Made Elections Matter Again

12. He broke the Deep State’s power to defy the elected branches.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time in 90 years that Article 2, Section 1 is still part of the Constitution: the President may fire subordinate officials in the executive branch, overturning the 1935 precedent that insulated “independent” agencies from voters’ control.

Ever wonder why elections often seem to change nothing? How about one President and 5,000 political appointees vs. 2.8 million unfireable, unaccountable bureaucrats? THAT is the “Deep State”.

Trump then made that victory real. For the first time in a century, all policy-making bureaucrats can now be fired for misconduct, incompetence, or defying lawful directives. The permanent bureaucracy no longer gets to veto the voters.

13. He ended nationwide injunction abuse.

In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court sharply limited nationwide injunctions. A single, local, district judge should not be able to block a national policy for everyone, everywhere; and yet that’s exactly what they’ve done, nonstop, ever since Trump (and only Trump) took office in 2017. In restricting that unconstitutional power, the Court kneecapped the Black Robe Bureaucracy’s favorite tool of unlawful judicial supremacy.

14. He shut down USAID as a left-wing slush fund and shadow government.

USAID had become a taxpayer-funded machine for exporting abortion, gender ideology, censorship, and left-wing politics. It had a bigger budget than the CIA and the State Department combined, absolutely no accountability whatsoever, and a penchant for overthrowing governments.

Trump terminated it — completely — and moved real humanitarian aid under the State Department. Immediately, seven socialist Latin American governments lost re-election. Coincidence?

15. He shrank Federal employment to its lowest level in 60 years.

From a high under Biden, the federal workforce is now its smallest since 1966. Workforce reductions, agency closures, and spending cancellations mean fewer bureaucrats paid to resist the voters.

What’s more, when Biden left office, 94 percent of federal employees “worked” from home. The Trump administration cracked down: as Elon Musk put it, “you can work from the office or you can pretend to work somewhere else.”

16. He expelled DEI from the federal government.

Trump eliminated federal DEI offices and barred race- and sex-based preferences across the executive branch. Government hiring and contracting are returning to merit and equality under the law, ending the grotesque Democrat idea that “fighting discrimination” requires the federal government to discriminate.

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He Defended Faith and Family

17. He delivered sweeping pro-life reform.

In his first term, Trump delivered the judges that overturned the abominable Roe v. Wade. Hardly anyone believed it could be done, or that Trump would do it. But he did, and a half-century nightmare finally ended.

Since returning to office, Trump has enforced the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy prohibiting federal funding of foreign abortions, ended federal fetal-tissue research, strengthened conscience protections, protected Medicaid from funding large abortion providers, and pardoned 23 pro-life activists prosecuted by Biden’s weaponized Justice Department.

He’s also done everything within the Executive Branch’s power to defund Planned Parenthood. It would be nice if Congress did likewise.

No President has ever done more to protect life. No one.

18. He got men out of women’s sports, and restored biological reality to federal policy.

The United States government once again officially recognizes two sexes: male and female. Trump ended federal support for the chemical and surgical gender mutilation of children, stopped taxpayer funding of such irreversible abominations, and forced more than three dozen health systems to end or suspend their programs as well.

Trump also enforced Title IX as written: women and girls deserve their own teams, trophies, scholarships, and locker rooms. The NCAA and other athletic organizations changed their rules in response. After years of Democrats doing everything they could to destroy women’s sports and ruin girls’ lives, Trump’s administration protects women and girls again.

19. He enacted America’s first nationwide school-choice program — and launched Trump Accounts.

As part of the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump enacted America’s first-ever nationwide school choice program. The new Education Freedom Tax Credit helps fund scholarships for tuition, books, and other educational costs.

That’s on top of the new Trump Accounts, which give every child a tax-advantaged stake in America’s future, including a $1,000 federal seed for eligible newborns. Parents gain power. Bureaucracies lose it. And children learn first-hand about free markets and future orientation.

20. He targeted anti-Christian bias and discrimination.

Trump created the White House Faith Office, Religious Liberty Commission, and Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. He restored conscience protections and made clear that Christians do not surrender their First Amendment rights merely by entering public life.

He Restored Peace Through Strength and Put America First

21. He forced NATO to stop freeloading and increase defense spending by 250 percent.

For decades, wealthy European governments underfunded their militaries, effectively sending America the bill and using American taxpayers to subsidize their bloated welfare states. Trump forced NATO to replace its old two-percent-of-GDP spending target with an enormous five percent by 2035.

Allied spending is rising, American defense orders are soaring, and Europe is becoming a partner instead of a dependent.

22. He drove China out of the Caribbean.

China spent years building strategic beachheads at both ends of the Panama Canal, in Cuba, and in Maduro’s Venezuela. Trump forced Panama out of Belt and Road, expanded American security access around the Canal, and captured Maduro, who now sits in a New York jail cell awaiting trial.

Beijing’s planned encirclement of the United States collapsed. The Monroe Doctrine is back. Call it the Donroe Doctrine.

23. He brokered eight peace deals in just eight months.

In eight months, Trump brokered peace in eight conflicts spanning four continents, including wars that had gone on for as much as 40 years. It’s a record unmatched by any other President.

24. He launched and funded Golden Dome, the first-ever true missile defense for the U.S. population.

Ronald Reagan dreamed of making nuclear missiles obsolete through his Strategic Defense Initiative. Today, Trump is actually building it: a layered homeland shield with space-based sensors and interceptors, conventional defenses, and new technologies including microwave systems to destroy drone swarms and directed-energy weapons (yes, lasers) that can replace an $11 million missile with $2 of electricity.

Congress has funded the initial $25 billion, with far more on the way once it passes the NDAA this fall. Better a shield than a sword.

25. He restored the warrior ethos — and reversed the recruiting crisis.

After years of missed targets under Biden, every active military component met or exceeded its 2025 recruiting goal. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refocused the newly renamed Department of War on actually winning wars, while pouring resources into shipbuilding, munitions, drones, missile defense, and America’s atrophied industrial base.

Young Americans once again believe their Commander-in-Chief is worth serving. And they’re showing up en masse.

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Now Act Like It Matters

Those are not tweets or campaign promises. They are changes in law, power, investment, sovereignty, culture, and the structure of the Republic itself. And they’re just the top 25: I could give you hundreds more.

Midterms are turnout elections. We do not need to convince Democrats to love Donald Trump. We need Republicans and friendly independents to understand what is at stake — and to show up.

And let’s be clear. When you say (as some of you will) “the Republicans need to do a good enough job telling this story”, you’re pointing at yourself. You are “the Republicans.” The Democrats don’t rely exclusively on their elected officials to tell their story: everyone from their media lackeys to their lowest-level supporters are constantly spreading their “news”, whatever that “news” happens to be.

Today’s conservatives have more ability to find whatever you want to know than any group of people in human history, yet half of them couldn’t name any of the accomplishments in this essay, and if they were to read it, they would just complain that something else they wanted hasn’t happened fast enough to suit them.

This is called “black-pilling.” It’s a loser mindset, and if you engage in it, you deserve to lose: horribly, painfully, personally. And guess what: you will, unless people who are serious step up to save you. Which is frankly pathetic, but for the rest of our sakes, necessary.

So tell people our story. Donald Trump is delivering great things, whether or not heaven on earth has broken out quite yet. Do the work, send the team he needs to Washington to finish the job, and get ready for 2028 afterward.

Take the time to learn at least five of these victories. Share this list with someone who needs it. And vote as though the most consequential Presidency in modern history depends on what you do.

Because it does.

Can’t get enough? Here are 25 More Trump Achievements you should know!

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
September 17, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Arleen Richards to discuss the Trump EPA’s rollback of Biden’s absurd power plant restrictions, and the scam of global warming.

Arleen and I discuss:

• Why scrapping Biden’s absurd restrictions is good for both the economy and the environment.

• Carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant.

• Why windmills are an environmental nightmare.

• How nuclear power exposes the green movement’s dishonesty.

• How AI data centers will supply the grid, not drain it, and bring down prices for everyone.

• American energy abundance means good jobs at home and less money for our enemies.

It’s 12 minutes you don’t want to miss. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.

Our Full Discussion:

Arleen Richards: The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a major rollback of Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas-fired power plants. Joining us now to discuss is Rod Martin, geopolitical analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital. Good afternoon, Rod.

Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.

Arleen Richards: Now, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that the Biden-era policies threatened reliable and affordable electricity. Now, do you agree with this? And also, do you see this as a positive move for the economy?

Rod D. Martin: This is an incredibly positive move for the economy, and it is a decade and a half overdue. The Obama EPA’s endangerment finding in 2009, which thankfully the administration has repealed, was the legal basis of a lot of this.

And I use the term “legal” very loosely. It provided the cover by which the green agenda could be shoehorned into the Clean Air Act. But the truth is, the Clean Air Act doesn’t authorize any of this. The guys who wrote the Clean Air Act understood perfectly well that carbon dioxide is plant food. It’s really important.

And in fact, we’ve watched from satellites over the last 30, 40 years, as so-called “greenhouse gases” have been emitted by industry all over the world — nowhere more than in China, which has incredibly lax environmental regulations and is building a new coal plant or two actually every week. And you know, what we’re doing here is we’re greening the earth.

Everywhere you look with the satellite data, whether you’re talking about the Amazon rainforest, whether you’re talking about the savanna of the Serengeti, it doesn’t matter: whatever you’re looking at is greener than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for that long-promised climate apocalypse.

The funny thing today, of course, is the Babylon Bee posted a story in which they said that climate activists blame global warming for the total lack of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic this year. Every year, we’re promised all these superstorms. And I know a little bit about that. I lost a home in a hurricane in 2004. And then after 2005, we went 11 years without any major hurricane making landfall.

That’s not what was predicted. And we’re not burning up. And the planet doesn’t have a fever. And it’s time we got their political agenda out of our laws, out of our tax code, and out of our government.

That’s exactly what the American people voted for. This will add about $300 to $400 billion to the U.S. economy. That’s on top of the $1.3 trillion saved by eliminating the endangerment finding.

Carbon Dioxide and the Cost of Climate Policy

Arleen Richards: Now, you mentioned earlier about the climate groups calling these greenhouse gases and how they’re emitting more of this. They argue that the rollback would allow major power plant polluters to emit more of this. But also, they’re saying that it would be more polluting and it would cause health impacts. So what do you say to this?

Rod D. Martin: Well, it’s bunk. The restrictions we’re talking about removing have to do with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. And I don’t care how many times Al Gore or Barack Obama pretends that it is. I repeat, it’s plant food.

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Now, could it possibly warm the climate? I’ve seen science on both sides of that issue. That’s not really the point.

What is the point is that the Reason Foundation did a study a number of years ago where they compared the cost of Green New Scam-style programs to incremental mitigation as warming effects take place. What they found was that incremental mitigation over a century was cheaper and more effective than anything Al Gore and AOC want us to do.

So all of this is hokum. It has succeeded in making Al Gore nearly a billionaire. It has made all of those Chinese industries that make solar panels and windmills — which honestly are just bird blenders: they’re horrible for the environment — all these things have put money in the pockets of leftist donors who just happen to own the companies that built these “replacement” technologies. And none of this is valuable. It’s destructive to the economy. It’s destructive to the environment. And enough’s enough.

So this is not the end, but this is a big step toward it.

Lower Bills and Real Pollution Controls

Arleen Richards: Now, do you think the repeal of the Biden-era policies could lower energy costs?

Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. I mean, it won’t be an overnight thing. Nothing is. But yes, it absolutely reduces energy costs because it takes unreasonable burdens off gas and coal plants, burdens that just shouldn’t be there.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that coal is an unmitigated good. It’s got all kinds of problems. But we’ve gotten really good at filtering those emissions. There are very real pollutants in coal. We know how to capture them inside the smokestack.

People laugh at the idea of “clean coal.” Well, I laugh at the idea that anything is clean. There is nothing clean about a windmill. It takes far more coal and petroleum to produce a windmill than all the electricity any of them will ever produce over their lifetimes.

So the idea that any of this stuff is clean is a scam. It’s not true. Meanwhile, if we are restricting the pollutants that come out of power plants that really actually can hurt you, that give you cancer, that hurt your lungs, that do all these terrible things. Wait, we’ve been doing that since the Clean Air Act in the 70s. We know how to do that. We don’t need to put unrealistic, stupid restrictions on industry just to hold them back and give China an advantage, which has been the Democrats’ agenda for years.

Powering AI and the Nuclear Renaissance

Arleen Richards: Now, we have this situation now where U.S. electricity demand is increasing with the AI and data centers. So can the U.S. meet the demand if it limits fossil fuels?

Rod D. Martin: Limiting fossil fuels is just crazy. I mean, we’ve got an insane amount of them. You and I probably both lived through the 2000s when we were told every day that we’d hit Peak Oil and it was all downhill from there. There could never be any more production whatsoever, and pretty soon there’d be no oil at all.

Well, here we are less than 20 years later and America has tripled oil production. We’re by far the biggest natural gas supplier in the world. We’ve got all kinds of coal we don’t even bother to use, primarily because of these Obama- and Biden-era climate policies. And the truth is we’re crazy not to use that. It’s cheap. It’s also easy to keep the pollutants contained.

We’ve been working on that since I was a little tiny child. We’re good at it.

But the real key to this is something else the Greens have consistently opposed: nuclear power. If you really believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, there’s nothing you should support more than nuclear power, because it emits nothing whatsoever.

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We had a nuclear accident in this country in 1979 when I was 10. And at Three Mile Island, the person who got the most radiation of everyine exposed got less radiation than I get every time I fly in an airliner at 30,000 feet. This is all just nonsense. Moreover, technology has advanced a lot since 1979. I think most people may have noticed that.

And that includes nuclear. So we can build nuclear plants now that cannot melt down. They cannot have the problems Three Mile Island had. And moreover, the fuel pellets can contain the radiation inside themselves. There’s nothing to release.

We are crazy not to be deploying those all over the country. This administration has seen to it that we’re going to. They’ve brought five small modular reactors online, or at least critical in 11 months’ time, which is just extraordinary. We went 40 years without any new nuclear plants. Five in 11 months is pretty wild.

And what that does is it gives us a shocking amount of new power that will bring down prices, but that will also allow Texas and Louisiana and North Dakota and Oklahoma and the rest to sell all the oil and gas they want to, because we don’t have to burn it.

This is the way. Progress actually produces prosperity. And that’s what we’re seeing here.

When Americans Could See the Benefits

Arleen Richards: To your point earlier, you said that the pollutants are cheap and easy to contain. So finally, what do you say to the argument that delaying the energy transition could hurt the U.S. in the long term? When can Americans expect to see the benefit?

Rod D. Martin: Well, the green energy transition has already hurt us to the tune of trillions of dollars in needless costs. As a result of the repeal of some of these regulations, we’ll get more use of gas and coal and other things. We should see some price relief over the next 18 to 24 months based on that.

The nuclear revolution is an even bigger thing. It might take a little bit longer for people to see. But one of the most positive developments has been both the president’s position and in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott’s position that the big data center operators have to actually build their own power. So they’re not drawing from the grid.

They’re actually adding to the grid because those plants actually produce more power than the data centers need. So when that feeds back into the grid, the AI company makes money because they’re selling electricity to the grid, but also the consumer gets a much lower price. So all of these things work together.

All of this is to the good. All of this will make us more prosperous and bring down our bills and all the things that we’ve been wanting. But the biggest single thing is that in 2008, we sent $700 billion to our enemies for their oil. We’ve reversed that. Now that money is coming to Texas and Louisiana and North Dakota and Oklahoma. That is transformative.

I lived through the gas shocks in the 70s, sitting in the backseat of my mom’s car while she was only able to buy gas on even- or odd-numbered days, depending on the license plate. That was terrible. We’ve reversed that now. We have moved the center of gravity of the global energy industry from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America.

That process is continuing. It is creating a ton of good jobs. And no, we do know how to handle the pollution. We’ve been handling the pollution pretty well for 50 years, and it’s only gotten better as we’ve gone along.

Arleen Richards: All right. Rod Martin, thank you so much for your expertise on this. We appreciate you coming on.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

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by Victor Davis Hanson
September 17, 2026

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.

How he believes he has such awesome power is altogether unclear.

So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the United States for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.

Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected. Nor has he allowed his representatives to explain to the media why Canada blew up the negotiations at the last minute. Carney’s ever-changing excuses, explanations, and invectives about what happened are incoherent and contradictory.

That said, analysts on both sides of the border now concede that American digital-media companies do not customarily pay special taxes, as Carney demands, to promote local, regional, and ethnic culture while operating in Canada — any more than Canadian companies would be taxed for those purposes in the United States.

Canada and the United States both agree that China dumps cheap steel and aluminum into Canada, allowing Canadian manufacturers to use that cost advantage to export assembled vehicles to the vast U.S. market at prices below those of American vehicles. In that way, Canada’s new partnership with China circumvents America’s tariffs on Beijing. China will also send nearly 50,000 electric cars and trucks into Canada under a meager tariff, ensuring that the Canadian EV market is increasingly dominated by Chinese vehicles.

But Carney’s ploy goes beyond helping the communist Chinese dictatorship gain trade leverage over his own NATO neighbor. He has eagerly concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian pact involving travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security. Carney has grandly described these new agreements with Beijing as part of a new paradigm in which “middle powers” like Canada play China against the United States (Canada’s annual GDP is roughly the size of New York State’s).

How ironic that Carney attacks his neighbor, the United States, for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship in China. Communist China, after all, is history’s greatest violator of trade protocols — guilty of manipulating its currency, dumping products to secure market share, violating copyright and patent laws, and imprisoning a million Uyghurs.

Has Carney learned anything from Panama’s misadventures after naively inviting in a Chinese omnipresence at the American-built Panama Canal? Does Carney recall that the American Monroe Doctrine originally was aimed at foreign intrusion into the North American west?

Canada’s new partner is a totalitarian police state that infected the world with its manufactured gain-of-function COVID-19 virus, which killed more than 1.5 million North Americans. China stonewalled inquiries and never offered details about the pandemic’s origins in its Wuhan lab. It has promised to conquer Taiwan and so terrified its democratic neighbors — Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea — that they have joined a defensive alliance with the United States.

So what drives Carney’s hubristic fantasies? Has Canada’s natural wealth in oil, gas, timber, and minerals made it a military and economic dynamo, as it once was?

Hardly.

Canada’s population is 11.8 percent of America’s. Its economy is barely one-thirteenth the size of America’s. Canadian GDP per capita is only 60 percent of America’s.

Canada quietly relies on the U.S. military to deter foreign powers from North America, whether by fending off challenges to Canada’s extensive Arctic claims — including its dubious claim of absolute sovereignty over the Northwest Passage — or by keeping Canadian skies free of foreign combat aircraft and missiles.

Canada’s navy — once one of the world’s preeminent surface fleets — has been reduced to fewer than 30 ships. Its 89 American-made jets are more than 40 years old.

Paradoxically, Carney’s dreams derive not from confidence and strength but from insecurity and defensiveness. Carney and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau nearly ruined the Canadian economy despite the country’s treasure trove of natural resources. Canada has only half the GDP of California — a state currently decaying under neo-socialist governance — despite having roughly the same population.

Nearly 45 percent of Canadians are either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. These often-impoverished immigrants impose gargantuan social-welfare costs that Canada’s European-style socialist economy simply cannot support. While Carney lectures on “Canadian values,” Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world, while euthanasia accounts for 5 percent of all deaths, the highest rate in the West.

Nevertheless, Carney now claims, in passive-aggressive fashion, that the United States bullies Canada — even as Canada runs trade surpluses with America, relies on the American economy for 72 percent of its exports, and depends on the American military for its safety. That asymmetry indirectly subsidizes Canada’s disastrous energy, immigration, defense, regulatory, and tax policies.

The Canadian energy industry depends on U.S. purchases of much of its tar sands oil, specialized U.S. refineries, and American pipelines. For over a decade, globalist Canada refused to meet its NATO commitment to invest 2 percent of GDP in defense, relying instead on American magnanimity to protect North America from foreign aggression.

No matter. Carney has melodramatically characterized his tiff with the United States as a “fight” and even a “war.” Yet, oddly for such an anti-American Canadian hyper-nationalist, Carney is a globalist banker who, until he became prime minister, held citizenship in three different nations.

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Yet the Canadian prime minister who urges Canada’s vulnerable working classes to decouple from America is himself — like thousands of Canadian grandees — deeply entwined with the United States. Some 91 percent of Carney’s investments are in U.S.-based companies, and two of his four children, like their father, attended college in the United States. Both now reside in America, along with nearly one million other Canadians. Apparently, Carney is so eager for a veritable economic, cultural, and political war with the United States that 91 percent of his holdings remain invested in the homeland of his enemy.

But why, from a position of such hypocrisy and vulnerability, has Carney blown up the trade agreement, ginned up anti-American Canadian nationalism — and done so now?

Only in this way, Carney believes, can he stop autonomy referenda in Alberta and Quebec. And only in this way can he openly interfere in the U.S. midterm elections by targeting new tariffs at red and purple border states while working directly with left-wing Democratic politicians to help Democrats regain control of Congress and restore the prior status quo.

His anti-American screeds have certainly worked at home. Canadians now boo at the mere sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They brag of a new “elbows up” policy to stop U.S. “aggression.” Their social media is flooded with braggadocio about new ways to hurt Americans. Some three-quarters of the country has bought into Carney’s fantasies. Hating America is the new Canadian pastime.

But, sadly, this will not end well for Canada, for at least five reasons.

First, America certainly is not the cause of Canada’s maladies, other than by subsidizing its suicidal domestic choices for years. Canada’s self-destructive socialist and globalist policies are its government’s doing alone.

The United States did not force Canada to adopt European-style socialist policies of mass unvetted immigration, subsidized green energy, near-disarmament, and unsustainable social-welfare spending. America did not urge Canadians to stop having children or enlist their government to help them kill themselves.

In truth, America prefers a militarily and economically strong Canadian partner, not a weak one lashing out from insecurity.

Second, the American public has so far been mostly indifferent to the spat. But now that the North American media has begun revealing the extent of Canada’s anti-American venom, along with Carney’s brinkmanship and disingenuous rhetoric, anger is rising at his cheap politicking and the animus he has fanned.

In sum, Carney has no idea that he is reframing the dispute not as a conflict with Trump but as an affront to the American people themselves—who have long memories.

Third, for all his globalist background and internationalist performance-art stunts, Carney is alone on the world stage. Europe may applaud his defiance, but it has no desire to join his anti-American campaign. When the United States finally insisted on symmetrical trade, only communist China and Canada — the latter enjoying the most generous entrée into the American economy of any country in the world — slapped counter-tariffs on the United States. Apparently, other nations did not agree that Carney’s perennial $50 billion surplus was his birthright.

Fourth, Canada is far more vulnerable than the United States if Carney’s “war” continues. Canada relies on the United States for 72 percent of its exports, while America relies on Canada for only 15 percent of its own exports. Last month, even before the full effect of the new tariffs was felt, Canada lost 42,000 jobs while the United States gained 160,000. The damage will only grow, ever more asymmetrically, as tariffs and outright bans mount on Canadian businesses.

Nearly a million Canadians reside in the United States, but only 350,000 Americans live in Canada. And it is easier for a Canadian to obtain an expedited U.S. work visa than for an American to do the same in Canada. Indeed, Canadians do not appreciate that they are nearly the only visitors in the world granted six months of residence in the United States without a visa.

Fifth, since Carney walked out at the last minute, it will be incumbent upon him to resume talks — especially as the damage he has done to Canadian workers and small businesses worsens. But should Carney seek to renew negotiations immediately after the Canadian provincial elections and the U.S. midterms, he will be exposed as a disingenuous politico who ginned up the fight to manipulate both Canadian and American balloting to benefit himself and his party.

If that happens, he may learn that the American friendship train has left the station. He will also discover that China treats obsequious outreach from Western “middle powers” as weakness to exploit, not magnanimity to reciprocate.

Carney’s political disingenuousness will eventually earn the animus of Canadians and Americans alike — who may ironically unite in their distaste for Mark Carney and his fantasy house.

— Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and a scholar of ancient warfare. He is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This essay originally appeared at American Greatness.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
September 10, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with host Don Ma and Democrat strategist Lee Neves to debate Trump’s midterm convention gamble, the $5,000 dividend promise, and the turnout fight that could decide Congress.

Lee and I debate:

• Why TV ratings miss the point of Trump’s convention.

• A thousand more voters in just twenty races: the Republican opportunity.

• Trump’s $5,000 promise and the fight over the economy.

• Why even a Democrat strategist says socialists has hurt his party.

• Bad approval ratings don’t automatically mean a Democrat wave.

• PLUS, bringing down Iran’s regime without wrecking the country.

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Our Full Discussion:

Don Ma: For our takeaways from the first day of the GOP convention yesterday, joining us now to discuss is Rod Martin, policy analyst, founder and CEO of Martin Capital. We also have Lee Neves, Democratic political consultant.

First of all, thank you both for coming on today. Rod, if I may, I’d like to start with you here. What did you think of the overall message yesterday from the convention that the last year and a half worked? That was one of the messages. What do you think?

Rod D. Martin: First of all, it’s good to see Lee, and thank you for having me, Don. I think the convention is a brilliant idea. I don’t understand why the Democrats haven’t done it.

This is basically a two-day infomercial for the agenda of the people we have on the ballot in a low-turnout election. Every midterm, you’ve got a significant drop-off in the number of people who turn out from a presidential year. In 2022, it was a 20-point drop-off.

This is an opportunity to showcase people who are in tough races — like Mike Rogers — and get them out there, let them do their thing, get great video in front of a big crowd. Whether everybody attends or not is almost irrelevant. It’s great turnout, of course, but the people in the room aren’t the main audience. Even so, the people in the room are the workers who go and get out the vote.

For all these different reasons, I think this is going to become a feature of American politics. I think both parties are going to do it from now on, and I think that’s a positive thing.

Don Ma: Lee, do you think a midterm convention itself is a good idea? Do you think Democrats should follow suit?

Lee Neves: I think Democrats haven’t done it because they have a scheduler who actually knows what’s going on in the United States.

Day one of the convention happened to also be on the same day as the opening game of the National Football League. You know, that sports league that everyone in the United States follows. Game two of the convention will be on the night of the Netflix special, where my San Francisco 49ers will hand it to the L.A. Rams down under in Australia.

The people the Republicans want this convention to reach are going to be too busy with pizza watching football, not paying attention to a political convention. This political convention is literally the political version of, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Don Ma: Rod, a lot there to respond to. Do you think people watched the convention?

Rod D. Martin: I think it’s completely irrelevant. That’s what I was just saying. This is two days of great video of great Republican candidates in front of a great crowd. That’s going to fill our advertisements for the rest of the year. It’s also a room filled with activists who are going to go home and redouble their efforts to turn people out.

Nobody honestly cares if anybody watches this on TV. That’s a broadcast-TV-era kind of statement. In 1986, that would have mattered. In 2026, it’s completely irrelevant. I don’t watch anything live. I stream it all, unless it’s on NTD.

Don Ma: Thank you for that, Rod. Lee, do you think that even if people didn’t watch it on day one or day two, they’ll still hear about it after the fact on news?

The $5,000 Promise and the Economy

Lee Neves: A couple of things. If the Republican activists need a convention to get them fired up for the November election, then the Republican base and activists have an enthusiasm problem, and that’s really going to be a problem come the first Tuesday in November.

Are people going to hear about it? Yes. They’re obviously going to hear about the $5,000 check that Trump is promising. And then the next question will be, “Well, gee, is that going to come before or after the $5,000 DOGE check and the $2,000 tariff check we were all promised?”

If anything, that $5,000 promise is a great way for Republican congressmen to fundraise. I should know. I got a fundraising text from Congressman Jake Ellzey there in Texas saying, “Will you accept the $5,000 from Trump? To do so, please just donate $25 to my campaign.” And if I’m getting that fundraising text, they probably need to clean up their fundraising lists.

Don Ma: Rod, will $5,000 get you to vote?

Rod D. Martin: It won’t, but it’s a great, great dividend to the American people. The economy is kicking into gear. It’s taken a little while to clean up the mess that Lee’s friends in the White House did for the last four years.

But the truth of the matter is, we have the Atlanta Fed telling us we’re looking at 4.7 percent GDP growth for the quarter. That’s on an annualized basis. That’s an incredible achievement.

As that ramps up, as we bring factories home, as we create great jobs, as we get rid of now three million illegal aliens who were depressing the job market for the union workers that the Democrats used to represent, what we’re seeing today is the beginning of a boom. As a result of that, yeah, the American people deserve a $5,000 dividend.

But I’d go you one further. I’m still waiting for that cheap health care Barack Obama promised me. I’m still waiting for being able to keep my doctor. I’m still waiting for the free health care Bernie Sanders promised. All of this stuff was bunk.

Guarantee you, we’ll follow through on this if we win. And if we don’t, the Democrats are going to do their best to put taxes back on tips, back on overtime, back on Social Security, and back on the backs of the American worker.

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Don Ma: I appreciate your honesty, Rod. But if it were me, if I weren’t going to vote and they promised me $5,000, I would change that decision so quick.

Capitalism, Socialism, and Iran

Don Ma: Lee, Republicans are framing this election as a choice between capitalism and socialism. Do you agree with that framing?

Lee Neves: No. It’s simply name-calling because they’ve got nothing else. Trump came into office on day one saying he was going to lower prices. He was going to make things more affordable. He was going to make the economy better. Instead, what have we got? We’ve got the highest gas prices on Labor Day since 2012, is what we have. We have a president getting us into a war there’s no end to.

Look, I have been on this network. I’ve been on other networks. I’m the one Democrat who said, if we’re going to go into war with Iran, just take them out. Just take them out. They’re the biggest funder of terror. They’re going to do nothing but cause trouble. Just take them out. Don’t diddle the waddle like we’re currently doing now, with one foot in, one foot out. Either do it or don’t.

At the end of the day, American voters want to see someone who’s taking their woes seriously. We currently have a president who is more preoccupied with sending out Truth Social posts about renaming New Mexico “New America” and renaming Lake Ontario than actually getting down to solving the problems that a lot of families are facing today.

Don Ma: Rod, you’re smiling there. What are you thinking?

Rod D. Martin: I’m thinking Democrats used to have a sense of humor. It used to be fun to watch late-night television. It hasn’t been since Obama took office because nobody on that side can laugh.

But the truth of the matter is, we are moving into an historic economic boom. It is just amazing what’s gathering when you look at the manufacturing numbers, when you look at the trade numbers, when you look at the energy numbers. It’s incredible.

I’ve got to say, I completely agree with Lee’s enthusiasm about taking out the center of terrorism in the entire Middle East. Totally agree with that. I do think the president’s approach is better, and strangely enough for Donald Trump, a little more nuanced, in that using the blockade to choke the snake and not merely chop its head off is avoiding a lot of collateral damage that would otherwise happen in a war.

We want to leave an intact country as much as possible to the Iranian people when they throw off their tormentors. But the point is, I don’t think that’s going to move much at the margin.

This is a low-turnout election. Every midterm election is. Lee’s team probably wins because the president’s party almost always loses the midterms. But the truth is, if we can turn out a thousand more people in just 20 key races across this country, we win the House and the Senate. Those numbers are plain, and this convention is helping.

Socialism and the Michigan Senate Race

Don Ma: Lee, let me ask you the question in this way. Do you think Democratic Socialist candidates are an advantage or disadvantage for the Democratic Party?

Lee Neves: Look, I’m going to say they’re a disadvantage ten times out of ten because I’m not a DSA candidate. I am very, very well known for being pretty in the center as far as a Democrat is.

Do DSA candidates do well in New York and West Hollywood and Berkeley? Yeah, they do. They fit those districts. They want to run there, fine. They’re one of 435 when they get to the United States Congress.

Now, in states like Michigan and Florida and whatnot, no, they’re not exactly the best candidates to have. I’ve said that before, and I’ll say it again. They’re not going to attract your centrist voters that we need to get to win those types of elections.

The funny thing with Michigan is that the Republicans were in the catbird seat after that primary. El-Sayed won the nomination. Mike Rogers was looking great. There were going to be a lot of disaffected Democrats who weren’t going to vote for Rogers and probably wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed.

Then Trump goes ahead and starts to pick a fight with Michigan’s biggest trading partner, Canada. If there’s one state that’s going to feel the effect of those tariffs and feel it deeply, it’s going to be Michigan. Come Election Day, they may very well take that out on Mike Rogers.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: El-Sayed, not my kind of Democrat. But he, I think, is going to benefit, fortunately or unfortunately, take your pick, from what’s going on between the United States and Canada right now.

Don Ma: Rod, you can respond to that, but I want to ask you a follow-up to what you said earlier: that if more voters turn out for this midterm, then Republicans have a chance for the House and the Senate. Do you believe that Republicans still think Trump is the turnout machine for the GOP?

Rod D. Martin: I think he clearly is. He certainly was in the primaries. Nearly every single contested primary in which Trump made an endorsement, his guy won. That’s unprecedented in two ways. First of all, nobody has that kind of batting average. But second, presidents historically haven’t actually endorsed a lot of people in contested primaries. That’s kind of a new thing. Trump was able to move the dial again and again and again. So in a low-turnout election, yeah, absolutely.

I think Lee’s hitting exactly the right note for Michigan, although I think we can overcome it, because they nominated a Muslim Marxist to run as the standard-bearer of the Democrat Party. And I very much hope that Lee’s team wins that fight internally.

I think Bill Maher’s doing great work here, too. He’s certainly no Republican. But the truth is, we used to have a consensus in this country about the values that shape America, about our Constitution, about the basic values that we all shared. We were just arguing about how to achieve those ends. Democrats had a different view. We had a different view.

Now we’re talking about people who are completely outside of that circle. They hate America. They hate the Constitution. And they’ll tell you so.

I’m grateful for Lee, and I’m grateful that there are guys like him fighting for the soul of the Democrat Party. But for this year, I just want to beat the Democrat Party, and I think we’ve got a shot.

Trump’s Approval Ratings Versus Turnout

Don Ma: Lee, do you think it’s a good strategy to put Trump front and center for the convention?

Lee Neves: No. His popularity is so far underwater, the DMV may be more popular than Trump is these days.

Not only that, here’s the problem with the convention. Literally, there were Republicans calling it “Trumpapalooza.” No. If you’re going to have a convention, talk about actual solutions, because Rod was talking about how the economy is booming, is doing great. If I give Rod that, that the underlying factors of the economy are all fantastic, that doesn’t matter. What voters feel is what matters. That’s what’s going to drive how they vote.

Right now, your average voter doesn’t feel like the economy is great. They don’t feel like they’re doing well. They feel like they’re paying too much for gas, and they shouldn’t. They feel like they’re paying too much for groceries. And the guy they’re all pointing at and blaming is President Donald J. Trump, because when he ran on solving those issues in 2024, he did an excellent job. I’ll give credit where credit is due.

When he ran in 2024, he was laser-focused on the economy, on showing that Kamala Harris was out of touch and not worrying about everyday Americans’ issues. He said he was going to change that on day one. Whether it changed or not, voters feel like it hasn’t changed. And that is what is going to drive them come the first Tuesday in November.

Don Ma: Rod, do you agree that this convention is not trying to convince all voters nationwide? The approval rating for Trump is not the end-all, be-all, because for the base, the GOP approval for Trump is still high.

You were talking about turnout. If the turnout machine is not dead, midterms, as you mentioned earlier, are often based on turnout. The fact that the Republican Party is doing this convention and is trying to have turnout rather than persuade, do you think his approval rating, perhaps in this context, may not be the final factor?

Rod D. Martin: Look, it’s a turnout election. If you don’t fire up the base, you’re going to lose. It’s just that simple. The Democrats have to solve the same problem. History’s on their side, but you still have the mechanical part of politics that you have to actually execute on.

Donald Trump can fire up our people. There’s no question about that. Now, should he go campaign in New Hampshire? No. Sununu needs to carry that on his own. He needs to say, “This is all about New Hampshire.” That will be a winning message there. But there are a lot of other parts of the country, such as Texas, where Trump’s presence makes an enormous positive difference.

I’m not concerned about his approval rating as far as that goes, because I know it’s a turnout election. He needs to fire up his own team. That likely produces the numbers he needs.

But the bigger point here is, as this rolls along, as the economy improves, you’ll see better numbers. It may take a minute. That’s fair. But the bigger point we must not lose track of is that Abdul El-Sayed will put taxes back on tips. He’ll put taxes back on overtime. He’ll put taxes back on Social Security. And Donald Trump already did away with all of them.

While it is true that Donald Trump frequently engages in hyperbole, “Oh, I’m going to do such and such on day one,” most of us know that it is hyperbole. Most of us know that’s just how he talks. And nearly everybody by now has figured out that Donald Trump delivers results, that tax law being one of the bigger ones we’ve ever had for poorer and working Americans.

Redistricting and the Possibility of a Democrat Wave

Don Ma: Lee, you bring up Trump’s approval ratings. I want to contrast for you: In 2018, voters who disliked Trump translated that into votes for Democratic House candidates, so Democrats ultimately took the chamber. But I think there’s a difference. It’s a little bit different in 2016. And that is, polling for Democrats on the generic congressional ballot shows they have a smaller lead compared to what they had at the end of 2018.

Maybe approval rating doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to produce a 2018-sized Democratic wave. Also, we have to consider the redistricting factor, because according to certain estimates, redistricting has created approximately a nine-seat Republican advantage. What is your reaction to this?

Lee Neves: The nine-seat advantage is being generous, because you’ve got to look at a lot of, first of all, Missouri. Their map just got halted by the Supreme Court this morning. They’ve got to revert back to the old map.

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Places like Florida, where they had to cut into safe Republican seats to make other seats slightly Republican, and they were wanting to get four or five new seats out of that. But when you weaken some seats, you put more seats in play, especially in a Democratic wave year.

At the end of the day, look, I have run enough campaigns my entire adult life to know that negative works. People are compelled to go vote, especially in a midterm election like this. They’re compelled to go vote when they don’t like something or they don’t like someone. That’s why I’m not worried about Democrat turnout.

Democrats, by and large, be it DSA or centrist, don’t like President Trump. That’s when they go and cast those ballots. They’re not casting a ballot against Republican Congressman X or Republican Candidate B. They’re casting a ballot against Donald Trump.

Rod is correct. It is a turnout game. Democrats, by and far, are so far a lot more enthused to come out and vote this midterm.

Don Ma: We’ve got to wrap this up, but Rod, if you have any final thoughts, quickly.

Rod D. Martin: Lee’s right about that. Look, if the Democrats get a wave year — and I don’t see that happening — but if they do, there’s no question that none of this redistricting stuff is going to amount to a hill of beans.

I think what we ought to be looking at, though, is the fact that it is historically close. Historically, if the Democrats have had a three- or four-point lead on the generic ballot, our side has won. And you’ve got that Harvard-Harris poll where we’re actually up two on the generic ballot, which is kind of out of the blue. Harvard-Harris is certainly not a Republican-leaning poll.

I think we’re in it. I think we’re going to try to win it. I think we might have a shot at it. And if Lee’s team wins, he’ll be absolutely in line with history.

Don Ma: All right, let’s end it here today. Great speaking to you both, gentlemen. Thank you very much.

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NOTE: There has been much talk in recent days of slowing U.S. artificial intelligence research. China immediately announced that it would have no part of the “fearmongering” and would not slow down at all. But they are far from the only active enemy employing AI against us. — RDM

by W.T. Hale
September 16, 2026

In 1999, two psychologists conducted a study in which test subjects counted how many times a basketball was passed among individuals wearing white shirts. The passing was not tricky to see. The action was not particularly fast. On its surface, it was a simple task.

Yet half of the participants missed the gorilla.

Midway through the video, a student in a full gorilla costume walked into the center of the court, turned to face the camera, thumped its chest, and strolled off-screen. The viewers’ eyes swept over the primate. Still, their brains, entirely consumed by the mental arithmetic of pass-counting, filtered out the visual data. They missed the obvious because they were preprogrammed to a particular task.

A decade later, researchers ran a similar experiment with board-certified radiologists. These were not novices, but bona fide experts, examining chest CT scans. These doctors were asked to look for suspicious lung lesions, called nodules, often indicative of cancer. Special software tracked their eye movements so researchers would know exactly where they were looking.

But then, just as in 1999, there was a gorilla.

Embedded in the lung tissue of the final scan was a graphic of a gorilla, 48 times the size of the average cancerous nodule. Of the 24 radiologists in the study, 20, or 83 percent if you are so inclined, failed to see it, despite the eye-tracking software proving they had stared right at it for half a second.

How could they have missed a gorilla in a chest CT scan? When they stared directly at it?

This cognitive glitch, inattentional blindness, is not merely an academic curiosity. It is the ultimate cloak for asymmetric warfare. When sophisticated transnational networks build advanced technical capabilities, they do not rely solely on physical camouflage. They construct operational decoys tailored to the predictable diagnostic schemas of state bureaucracies.

Flood the field with common crimes, and the big one gets through. Send a flurry of small drug shipments to distract from the large one. Give the state a low-level, familiar crime to count, and it will count it. A bureaucracy will never look up, never see the oddity.

The Cartels Up Their Game

Many civilians hold preconceived notions about criminals and their activities. Some are surprised to learn that criminals are not all bumbling, uneducated brutes, and that their ranks include highly intelligent businesspeople, scientists, and engineers. Professionals carry this same burden. Preconceived notions abound.

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For years, many experts felt confident that fentanyl would not be abused, simply because it was so potent and dangerous. More than 500,000 Americans have died from fentanyl-driven synthetic opioid overdoses since 2005.

Strange submarines were once dismissed as Bigfoot sightings, urban legend, and nothing more. Then, in 1996, the United States Coast Guard captured an intact semisubmersible narcosub 100 miles off the coast of Costa Rica. It had a carbon-fiber hull, diesel-electric power, thermal-blocking, water-cooled exhausts, and satellite navigation. A clandestine shipbuilding program was operating in the jungles of South America. The myth of the narcosub was shattered.

El Chapo’s communications network told a similar story. What looked like disposable SIM cards and burner phones turned out, once an FBI-turned IT specialist gave up the details, to be a private VoIP network running on servers scattered across Canada and the Netherlands. The network was complete with automated wiretap software, spyware for real-time GPS tracking, and counter-surveillance tools aimed at cartel rivals and Mexican state officials.

The Zetas were thought to rely on off-the-shelf walkie-talkies and pirate frequencies. They were actually running an air-gapped, military-grade multistate radio command network.

Even the small stuff got underestimated. Los Viagras ran what looked like a low-grade Wi-Fi extortion racket in rural Michoacán, charging residents $25–$30 a month, a simple municipal shakedown worth $150,000 a month on paper. Then cyber-forensics specialists opened the seized routers and found firmware built for deep packet inspection, MAC address logging, and traffic redirection. In other words, a signals intelligence network for monitoring police radios and triggering an internet kill-switch during military operations.

The submarine, the burner phones, the walkie-talkies, the Wi-Fi shakedown, all these “myths” were far more than anyone expected. The preconceived notion dictated the charge, and the charge dictated the scope of the investigation. If an anomaly fell outside the standard legal form, it simply did not exist. Figments of the imagination, until they could not be ignored.

A Server Farm in Cartel Country

All of this brings us to a secluded mountain compound in Tlaola, Puebla: 100 miles northeast of Mexico City, 175 miles inland from the Gulf ports of Veracruz and Tampico, less than 500 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Brownsville, Texas.

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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
September 15, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Frank and I discuss:

• Why Mutual Assured Destruction was always a moral evil.

• The history of missile defense, from Nike Hercules to Safeguard to SDI and Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.

• Multimillion-dollar interceptors versus $2 laser shots: how technology could reverse the cost equation and usher in a defensive age.

• Could we make nuclear weapons nearly impossible to deliver?

• Why tomorrow’s warships need nuclear power, not just more missiles.

It’s 16 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

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Our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. We are visiting with Rod Martin for this full hour, which is an extraordinary thing. The time that he has available for even our relatively short visits each week is deeply appreciated. And when he can give us an even more extended opportunity to pick his copious brain, it’s a banner day here at Securing America.

Rod, I’m so grateful to you for all you do for the cause and for the country. Let’s just pick up on something that you were emphasizing in the earlier segment. I know President Trump has, shall we say, deprecated George W. Bush recently.

One of the things that I think he deserves great credit for, and I believe we had a small hand in engineering him committing to do it, is to get us out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which essentially left us absolutely naked before missile attacks from the Soviet Union or from Russia or from China or from assorted others who’ve now gotten in the game: North Korea, Iran, Pakistan.

He not only promised to do that, but he did do it in his presidency, and he set the stage for us being able at last to restart in earnest the deployment of missile defenses. I know we’ve touched on this in the past with you a little bit about the Golden Dome, which is what President Trump has in mind.

And you have a piece prominently featured at your Rod Martin Reports website, rodmartin.org, about what the Navy is doing at the moment to turn electricity into ammunition, as you put it, and change tremendously the whole cost-effectiveness-at-the-margin argument about not building missile defenses because it was always going to be cheaper to have the means of attacking us than it would be to defend against them.

So bring us up to speed on all of this, if you would: the legacy of George W. Bush in this regard, and what we best be doing now, sir.

Rod D. Martin: Well, it’s that exact cost differential that got us locked into the absolute immorality of mutual assured destruction, which was totally needless in the first place. Because honestly, when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, we had a 10-to-1 advantage over the Soviets in nuclear weapons. If they had launched a nuclear war, it would have been checkmate for them, and that’s exactly why they didn’t.

Then McNamara and LBJ allowed the Soviets to build up to near parity. And at that same time, anti-ballistic missile technology was evolving really fast, whether you’re talking about upgrading certain anti-aircraft missile systems or actually rolling out Sentinel and Safeguard, as was the plan.

The Democrats come against that. They convinced major cities that they were in more danger if they had a missile defense than not. And when you go back and you look at those debates, first of all, it is staggeringly similar to the debates we had over the next several decades. The Democrats never changed their tune from about 1966 on, on this point.

So Reagan comes out with the Strategic Defense Initiative after Nixon kind of surrenders to reality and signs the ABM Treaty. Reagan comes back and says, “No, that’s hooey. Let’s actually build something robust. Better a shield than a sword. Let’s defend each other’s populations. We’ll even share the technology with the Russians so that everybody can feel safe together.”

That’s just a completely different take. But obviously, it didn’t come up with a working system because, first of all, a Democrat Congress was never really going to properly fund what we needed. Second, more importantly, I think, it was in some ways more a negotiating gambit than it was a reality. Because what SDI — what the Democrats all called Star Wars — really did more than anything else was convince the Soviets that they were in an unwinnable cost spiral, that the United States was going to win the Cold War simply by outspending them.

And that’s part of how you get the hesitation you get in Gorbachev in those final years of the USSR, where he could have put down what was effectively an unarmed revolt in East Germany and in Hungary and in Poland and so forth. And he didn’t. And it’s not because he was a good guy. It’s because he thought the only way they were going to survive was if they could build up their economy enough to support the military architecture that they wanted to use against us.

So Reagan bought us crucial time during which they collapsed. That was brilliant.

Bush comes along 20 years later and says, “You know what? The world’s changed. And why the heck are we in an ABM Treaty? That’s stupid. We’ve got the number of weapons on each side down to a pretty small number. If you’ve got a decent chance of knocking a few of them down, it really, really increases the risk of a first strike. And we’ve also got North Korea to contend with and some of these other little dipwad powers. So let’s pull out of the ABM Treaty. The Russians are cheating anyway, as they always did. And so let’s build something real.”

And on that basis, George W. Bush built the only actual working ABM system. We don’t call it that anymore. Now it’s Ballistic Missile Defense, or BMD. But the only real working ABM system we ever had, with the exception of the eight months that Sentinel was live, and we shut it down in less than a year. I’m floored by that.

Frank Gaffney: Rod, one of the pieces of this is that when we went into that ABM Treaty, I believe it’s the case, I think we had a discussion of this the last time you were on as to exactly when it started. But it certainly became clear that once the decision had been made that we were going to basically, as I say, leave the country undefended, it didn’t make sense for it to have much of an air defense. It didn’t make sense for it to have any kind of civil defense to speak of, and even much of a leadership defense.

Therefore, we created a condition of complete vulnerability. And the Soviets, then Russians, cheated, as you said, and protected their population, at least parts that they cared about, and their leadership, and built missile defenses and air defenses and so on. So it actually, I believe, made the world a considerably more dangerous place rather than a safer one, as does generally arms control.

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Rod, we have to take a break. We’ll be right back. Stay tuned.

Golden Dome, Directed Energy, and a New Defensive Era

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back to a final installment of this very stimulating conversation with our friend Rod Martin. We’ve been talking about threats from jihadists to superpowers. We’ve been talking about the kinds of techniques that were used on 9/11 to murder nearly 3,000 of us, to the possibility of incinerating tens, if not hundreds, of millions of us, and what we need to do about it.

I think we’ve adequately addressed the point that we better get clear about the nature of the enemy we’re facing, whether it’s the jihadist level on up, but also what we best be doing to protect ourselves.

Rod, we’ve been discussing sort of the history of our vulnerability to missile attack, what President George W. Bush did to get us at least out from under a treaty that prevented us from effectively having that capability. Let’s talk a little bit about what President Trump has in mind in terms of his watch and something called Golden Dome. What is it? How is it coming along as you see it? And what role does directed energy play in the possible future defenses of our country and people against missile attacks?

Rod D. Martin: Well, as in so many things these days, you have a pretty stark choice between catastrophe and a golden age. And I’ll lay that out here in a second.

But the good news of all of that stuff we were just talking about is that research continued throughout. We had all the research necessary to get Safeguard deployed in ‘75, even though we only kept it deployed for eight months. And then Reagan resumes research in a big way. And that’s how you get to things like Patriot and THAAD and Aegis and all the different systems that we use against other kinds of missiles. And we’ve just been improving that nonstop ever since.

And now comes Trump. And the truth is, thanks to work, by the way, especially great work out of the Israelis with their layered defense against their constant missile problems from various enemies, they have developed some technology, in joint development with the United States in large part, that is really quite extraordinary.

Trump just rejects — as Reagan did, but Reagan couldn’t act on it to the degree he wanted to — Trump absolutely rejects the idea that mutual assured destruction is in any way a moral position to hold. You should defend your population. And in the process of defending your population, you reduce the risk that anyone would attack it because they can’t be assured that their missiles will get through, and they can’t be assured that your missiles won’t.

This was Reagan’s argument. This was Nixon’s argument until it wasn’t. This was everybody’s argument except the Democrats for a very long time. And Trump is acting on it. So what we’re looking at now is probably, before the end of his term, a rollout of very meaningful air and missile defenses for the continental United States, actually protect the American people for the first time in decades. That’s becoming a reality.

But the bigger story is the one you hit on, which is directed energy. Another joint development project with the Israelis, which came online in an operational form in December, called Iron Beam. Iron Beam is actually, in Dr. Evil’s terms, “frickin’ laser beams.” And they actually shoot down incoming.

Now, right now, they’re still kind of low-powered. They still struggle with atmospheric conditions. They’ve got all kinds of limitations. But all of those things could have been said about the United States Army Air Corps in 1926. And not many years later, we were losing Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor and dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. So these technologies move pretty fast once they gain a head of steam.

And this is exactly the reason that Trump is pushing for the Trump-class battleships. Trump understands what a generation or two of our Navy seems to have forgotten, which is that if you’re going to power these really incredible advanced weapons systems, whether you’re talking about railguns or lasers or even advanced electronic warfare, microwave systems that can shoot down or knock down an entire drone swarm, all of this runs on power.

You need bigger hulls for actual nuclear power to run all that. And the bigger, the better, because you actually want bigger nuclear plants than you had on a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, as we now have on the Ford. So these power plants power a future that is radically different. The drone threat fades into insignificance. Ballistic missiles become very, very untenable.

And you go from a situation where we’re shooting down a cheap drone with an $11 million missile to one in which we’re shooting down anything they can send at us with a $2 bolt of electricity. It radically changes the equation. So we are moving rapidly into a defensive era as opposed to an offensive era. That’s an incredibly positive thing for humanity. And Trump is leading the charge in both tactical and strategic.

We could actually live in a world where it’s nearly impossible to deliver a nuclear weapon for the first time since 1945. And that would be extraordinary.

Frank Gaffney: It would be extraordinary. And it would sort of defy the history of measures versus countermeasures in military affairs that will mean there will be something that will come along that maybe just is super lethal in attacking the sources of those $2 electrical volts, as you say.

But a fascinating, fascinating topic. Rod, we are out of time, I’m afraid, for more at the moment. But I think we’ve covered a very important array of issues, both historic and those that will determine, perhaps, the future security of our people and country. And as always, I deeply appreciate your insights, sir. Thank you for joining us and giving so generously of your time to do so. We’ll look forward to our next visit next week.

We look forward to talking to the rest of you next time. Until then, go forth and multiply.

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by Roger Stone
September 14, 2026

The Trump administration’s decision to move decisively against the Southern Poverty Law Center marks one of the most consequential institutional reckonings in our nation’s history.

Federal prosecutors have charged the organization with wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, alleging that it systematically deceived its own donors. According to the indictment and statements from senior Justice Department officials, the SPLC funneled more than three million dollars in contributions — raised under the banner of dismantling hate groups — into payments to informants embedded inside Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi circles.

Shell companies and opaque accounts allegedly masked the transfers. FBI Director Kash Patel has publicly accused the group of promising donors it would dismantle violent extremists while instead paying those same extremists and, in some cases, enabling criminal activity.

Regardless of how the eventual trial concludes, the SPLC is already finished as a credible moral authority. Its reputation lies in ruins. Donors have fled, major financial platforms have restricted contributions, and the organization’s carefully cultivated image as a neutral watchdog has been eviscerated. The campaign against the SPLC must now serve as the operating template for every far-left front that has spent years operating with similar impunity.

Yet cutting off one tentacle of the hydra accomplishes little if the rest of the body remains free to regenerate. Marxists and their fellow travelers have perfected the art of the nebulous front. They create layers of “autonomous” collectives, community organizations, and mutual-aid networks that can absorb pressure, rebrand overnight, and deny any central command structure when the authorities close in.

These Marxist organizers possess discipline, long-term strategic patience, and an organizational playbook refined over decades. Their tactics are designed to evade culpability while continuing the same subversive work under new letterheads. The federal government cannot allow that evasiveness to become a shield. The full weight of investigation, prosecution, asset seizure, and institutional disruption must be expanded to the next tier of organizations that have functioned as the operational backbone of street-level disruption and resistance to lawful federal authority.

The following fronts are a good starting point for expanding the federal crackdown against subversive leftism:

Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action (COPAL)

Based in Minneapolis and founded in 2018, COPAL presents itself as a member-driven advocate for Latine families focused on housing, health, and environmental justice. In practice, it has become a central node of terrorism directed against law enforcement.

In June 2026, federal prosecutors indicted fifteen individuals linked to the COPAL network and its affiliated fronts. The pattern is familiar: COPAL trains activists in disruption tactics, deploys “constitutional observers” and rapid-response teams to monitor and interfere with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, then carefully distances itself once arrests occur. Its Immigrant Defense Network coordinates dozens of allied groups across the Midwest.

The organization has helped organize large-scale anti-ICE actions, including the ICEOUT MN protests, while maintaining a public posture of pure community service. This is the same dual-track method the SPLC once used — public virtue signaling paired with private operational support for confrontational activity.

COPAL deserves the same comprehensive federal scrutiny that has already gutted the SPLC’s credibility and financial model. The 15 indictments cannot be seen as bad apples. These were effectively COPAL’s footsoldiers, and that should lead to broader action to bring down the COPAL network. Training people to obstruct federal officers and then feigning innocence when those people are caught is not 1st Amendment advocacy; this is part of a war designed to prevent immigration enforcement and put law enforcement in grave danger.

Unión del Barrio

Unión del Barrio occupies a parallel role on the West Coast. This long-standing socialist organization, active since the early 1980s, has positioned itself as the backbone of anti-ICE resistance in California. Senator Josh Hawley formally accused the group of financing and providing logistical and material support for coordinated protests that escalated into riots in the Los Angeles area.

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Unión del Barrio organizes community “self-defense” patrols that systematically monitor ICE staging areas, document agent movements, and broadcast real-time alerts so that targets can scatter. These patrols are not spontaneous neighborhood watches; they are trained, coordinated, and explicitly framed as resistance to federal authority.

After Hawley’s letters demanded that the organization cease such support, Unión del Barrio responded with defiance, casting the scrutiny itself as an attack on community self-defense. The group’s ideology is openly revolutionary. It does not merely lobby for policy change; it builds parallel structures designed to stop federal law on the ground by any means necessary. That is precisely the kind of organized obstruction that warrants the same aggressive investigative tools applied to the SPLC — subpoenas, financial tracing and criminal charges against group leaders who aid and abet civil disorder.

Torch Network

The Torch Network represents the national infrastructure of militant ANTIFA groups operating under the convenient fiction of autonomy. Born from the older Anti-Racist Action network, Torch functions as an accrediting and coordinating body for chapters that include Atlanta Antifascists, Front Range Anti-Fascists, Asheville Anti Racism, Rose City Antifa, and others scattered across the country. Its points of unity explicitly reject reliance on police or courts and commit members to direct action against those they label fascists.

The network holds annual conferences, maintains communication channels, and provides mutual support for legal defense and tactical training. Claiming decentralization has long been the movement’s preferred defense against conspiracy charges. Yet the shared ideology, interlocking personnel, and coordinated public messaging reveal a functioning organization. Going after Torch is the equivalent of striking at the circulatory system of American ANTIFA. Dismantling its ability to credential new chapters, share resources, and sustain continuity would do more to degrade the capacity for organized political violence than a series of isolated local prosecutions.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Freedom Road Socialist Organization is an explicitly Marxist-Leninist cadre group with deep historical roots in the New Communist Movement and a long paper trail in FBI files. One of its affiliates, Alejandro Orellana, was raided by federal agents in June 2025 and charged with conspiracy to commit civil disorder and aiding and abetting civil disorder after he allegedly distributed protective gear to anti-ICE protesters engaged in clashes with law enforcement in Los Angeles. The charges were later dropped without prejudice — a miscarriage of justice caused by holdovers in the Justice Department who cowed political pressure rather than stick with the evidence.

Because the dismissal was without prejudice, the case can and should be revived. FRSO openly celebrates its members’ participation in confrontational street actions and frames federal enforcement itself as illegitimate. An organization that trains and deploys cadres for the express purpose of resisting federal immigration operations while maintaining a formal Marxist-Leninist structure cannot claim the protections of ordinary political speech. It is a revolutionary formation working against the United States and should be treated accordingly.

These four organizations are merely illustrative. Hundreds more operate under similar banners of mutual aid, community defense, immigrant justice, or antifascism while performing the same essential function: building parallel power designed to obstruct the constitutional order. This would be no different than if ISIS or Al Qaeda were building up their ranks in the streets. It would not be tolerated then, and this domestic threat is far more insidious and widespread than radical Islam could ever hope to be. It must be treated similarly without exception.

The Trump administration must remain aggressive and set clear precedents. During the lawfare years of the previous administration, the Left demonstrated it would use every available legal and institutional lever against its opponents. There is no strategic reason to exercise unilateral restraint now. Softness will not be reciprocated. These groups and the ideology that animates them stand in fundamental opposition to Western Civilization, the American constitutional system, and the liberties that every American patriot holds dear.

The stakes of the present contest are existential. While the Trump administration still holds the necessary power, it must use that power fully. This goes beyond investigation, prosecution, financial disruption, and sustained institutional pressure — which are a good start but cannot suffice alone.

The feds must examine every War on Terror statute. They must use RICO laws. They must get creative. Every tool at their disposal must be used to render the leftist organizational apparatus wholly inoperable, leaving them scrambling for decades to come.

— Roger Stone is a veteran of ten national presidential campaigns who served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents: Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. He is a speaker, pundit, and New York Times bestselling Author featured in the Netflix documentary ‘Get Me Roger Stone.’ This analysis first appeared at his Substack, StoneColdTruth.com.

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by Christopher Jasper
September 12, 2026

Donald Trump has opened up a new battleground in his trade war with Beijing, and a British start-up building nuclear-powered ships has found itself on the front line.

The U.S. effort to challenge China’s dominance in shipping by building a fleet of nuclear-fuelled vessels is being led by UK-based Core Power. The start-up, which has 100 employees and moved to London from Singapore in 2020, says it is unique outside Russia and China in having the expertise to integrate reactors with commercial ships, and the White House seems to agree.

Mikal Bøe, the Norwegian founder and chief of Core Power, flew to Washington last week to sign a seven-year pact with the U.S. Maritime Administration.

“China doesn’t have 75 years of experience in nuclear at sea like the U.S. does. But they are coming and we need to get out there before them,” Bøe said. “The West needs a strong maritime sector or the basis of its naval power disappears and its prosperity, economy and security are undermined.”

The deal aims to deliver a fleet of zero-emission vessels that travel at 30 knots, or twice the pace of today’s ships, which typically sail slowly to conserve fuel.

They would be assembled in a multibillion-dollar nuclear yard operated by Core Power in the U.S. Work is slated to commence by 2028, with the first deliveries in 2033. Trump hopes the plan can revive American shipbuilding and provide a ready market for a nuclear industry.

While China is developing its own maritime nuclear propulsion, the sector is one of the few in which the U.S. is confident it has a major lead.

Onboard reactors heat water to create steam, which generates electricity to drive the engines, providing a permanent source of power and “free speed”, Bøe said. Nuclear ships could cut transit times for everything from oil and gas to bulk commodities, enhancing energy security amid volatility in the Middle East.

While the nuclear vessels would cost around $700 million, compared with up to $250 million for a large merchant ship, their speed would let them complete far more journeys. Shipping lines could alternatively deploy smaller fleets, with the higher speeds allowing the same volume of goods to be carried with just 60 percent of the industry’s current tonnage.

He said propulsion costs would be competitive with marine fuel, priced at $500 a ton or above. Prices ranged from $660 per ton in Rotterdam to $824 in Los Angeles last week.

An initial batch of up to 50 container ships or liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers is planned, though the technology could also power ferries, car transporters, oil tankers and cruise ships.

Establishing the business case for nuclear power over traditional engines will open up a market to replace 8,000 ships over the next 25 years, Bøe estimates. He said the first ships could operate on transatlantic routes and that Washington was open to allies becoming involved in the project.

Bøe said the Trump administration had been instrumental in accelerating its plans.

“The pace at which both nuclear reactors and maritime policy and an action plan to build back shipbuilding capacity have been developed is remarkable,” he said.

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“You cannot compete with Beijing on its own terms; we cannot outbid them. But we can put these two things together and establish the world’s first program for civil maritime nuclear propulsion which creates a whole new adventure and competes with China.”

Core Power plans to announce a supplier of nuclear reactors for its ships as early as next month, with BWX Technologies viewed as the frontrunner. The company is already partnered with BWX — which helped develop the first nuclear submarine in the 1950s — on plans for floating nuclear power plants to supply coastal industrial complexes.

A decision on the location for its new U.S. nuclear shipyard will follow within the next six months. A facility capable of producing three vessels a year would have construction costs of about $3 billion, increasing to $15 billion to churn out ships for the global market.

The hulls for the ships will be built in Japan or South Korea and floated to the U.S. to be fitted with reactors and engines. The same yard will undertake maintenance and midlife refueling once supplies of uranium are spent.

Backing from Washington should help address regulatory challenges as well as insurance issues, which represent one of the main hurdles to expanding nuclear propulsion beyond military submarines, aircraft carriers and a handful of Russian icebreakers.

Whereas shipping lines today require coverage for damage to their vessels, the loss of cargoes and injuries to employees, the new ships will need a new level of insurance against nuclear incidents.

The Talk of the Industry

Britain’s dominance of the maritime insurance industry could see it play a key role in establishing an insurance regime.

The Technology Prosperity Deal signed by Trump and Sir Keir Starmer last year included a commitment to explore civil nuclear applications at sea and the establishment of a UK-U.S. corridor, which could form the basis of a maritime nuclear insurance zone. The accord was timed to coincide with the launch in Washington of a 25-nation International Atomic Energy Agency initiative to support safe nuclear power in shipping.

Core Power said anti-nuclear sentiment was easing as one-time opponents embrace its potential for replacing fossil fuels.

“Anything ideological gets worn down when it’s proven not to work,” Mr Bøe said. “From a scientific and economic perspective this system is the most logical thing that you could do.”

Core Power has $200 million in financing and will seek to raise a further $600 million next year. While existing investors are mostly shipbuilders and owners, the next round will seek to bring in private equity, venture capital and energy companies.

It has also agreed an alliance with authorities in Corpus Christi, Texas, a major U.S. port, to lay out plans for new infrastructure that will be needed for nuclear-propelled tankers.

Mr Bøe said the door was also “wide open” for Britain to become involved in the sector. “When we started out there was a lot of skepticism,” he said. “But we have built momentum and it has become the talk of the industry. To me it’s almost ludicrous that you wouldn’t pay attention to that. It could be a catalyst for the revitalization of an enormous amount of British industry.

“We chose to build this from London, the beating heart of maritime. Hopefully one day somebody will wake up and say we want to be part of this.”

— This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

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Full Transcript After the Break

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
September 11, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Frank and I discuss:

• The 9/11 anniversary: 25 years later.

• What Bush got right when the unthinkable happened.

• Why you can’t defeat an enemy you refuse to name.

• How the State Department squandered our military victory in Iraq.

• Why Marxists and Islamists unite (and then turn on each other).

• Zohran Mamdani’s rise and the lessons New York still hasn’t learned.

It’s a half-hour on one of the most important anniversaries of our time. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

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Our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: Welcome to Securing America with me, Frank Gaffney, the program that’s a kind of owner’s manual for protecting the country we love against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the glory of God and His kingdom.

We have a very somber occasion to mark with today’s program, and that would be the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: acts of jihad against the United States of America aimed at devastating our financial sector, business sort of operational hub in New York City, of course, and also the Pentagon, and perhaps another seat of government, Capitol Hill or the White House. Not entirely clear.

Fortunately, that fourth plane was taken down by the action of American patriots who prevented it from taking place. But the devastation, the carnage, the costs in lives and treasure that flowed from the three that did attack their targets was simply incalculable.

To note this occasion, to comment on it in his usual insightful way, I’m thrilled that we have our friend and colleague Rod Martin. Rod is a serial entrepreneur, a former policy adviser to then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a man who cut his teeth in the business world with PayPal early on, and also a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention for many years, and now the proprietor of a remarkable online resource. He calls it The Rod Martin Report. You can find it, you can subscribe to it, and I encourage you to do so at RodMartin.org.

He is the author of a forthcoming book, and he will tell us about it because it’s relevant to what we are talking about right now: the reordering of the world order by Donald J. Trump. Rod Martin, welcome back. It’s good to have you with us, sir.

Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.

Frank Gaffney: I wanted to start with, I guess, the question that will be on everybody’s agenda for the day, and that is: Where were you on 9/11, and what were your thoughts on the occasion of this terrible attack?

Rod D. Martin: Well, I was actually in my apartment in Silicon Valley, and I got a phone call from a friend who said, “You’ve got to turn on the TV.” I turned it on just in time to see the plane hit the second tower, and that was not something any of us really expected. Of course, it was a searing moment for all.

We didn’t know what was coming next. The Bush administration certainly didn’t know what was coming next. They had to prepare for all possible eventualities. It’s all easy to look back now and say, “Well, that was kind of all they had.” Well, it was kind of all they had, but we didn’t know it. I mean, for all we knew, it was just going to unleash across the country.

In reality, of course, we know what they were going for. Certainly, they wanted to attack the United States. We are, after all, “the Great Satan.” But what they really wanted was a propaganda extravaganza in the Middle East. Bin Laden in particular, more than anything else, wanted to overthrow the Saudi government and establish a caliphate. And so that failed. But the visuals did not. It was really quite extraordinary

So in your intro, you said we’re not really sure if the fourth plane was going for the White House or the Capitol. I’m guessing probably the Capitol Dome, because it would have made the best television. I also think they thought they would get something as spectacular at the Pentagon as they got at the World Trade Center. But that didn’t work out for them because they actually flew the plane into the one section of the Pentagon that was already reinforced structurally: they were upgrading the entire building. So the terrorists kind of blew that.

But this was all aimed at a huge propaganda victory among the people of the Middle East: if they were powerful enough to destroy the great symbols of American power, they would surely be seen as powerful enough to unite the Islamic world. And I don’t believe Osama bin Laden imagined what Bush would unleash upon him in a billion years.

So as many criticisms as we can validly make of various aspects of the Bush policy over the next seven years, I think we must, must take our hats off to George W. Bush, who handled an incredibly difficult situation better than most would have, and certainly better than Al Gore would have.

Frank Gaffney: Turns out that 2000 was a fateful election in many respects. Some contend that it was decided by Muslim votes, in fact, that 200 non-hanging chads made the difference in Florida, notably, were the result of an effort by a fellow by the name of Sami al-Arian, who was at the time a computer science professor in, I think it’s the University of South Florida. His real job, though, it turned out, was actually running Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was a terrorist and a top figure in the sort of Muslim Brotherhood pantheon at the time.

And that’s quite a story, actually, including what went on, which I personally observed on 9/11. I was in my office in Washington, D.C., Rod, and was similarly made aware of what was happening en route into town by a friend who called and said, “Are you watching television?” I said, “No, I’m driving.” And he said, this was before the second strike, “Well, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center tower.”

You were mulling what that could possibly be other than terrorism. And as we were speaking, the second one came in. And as I drove into town, the one went into the Pentagon, and it was coming up in horrific smoke at the time as I was driving along the Whitehurst Freeway in Washington, D.C.

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It was a moment of profound upset, particularly, I think, to those of us who had been warning of such things for some time, and that it had come to pass in this form, as it became clear in short order, at the hands of Sharia supremacists spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood, I think it’s fair to say.

And all of this is what I fear we have not properly learned the lessons of, Rod. I wanted to talk with you a little bit about what those lessons should be. I would posit that one of them is that our decision to describe what happened as an act of terror, and almost immediately to whitewash the role that Sharia played in what they were doing, actually contributed materially to confusion that persists to this day.

A lack of both clarity, but also, well, constructive steps to prevent those who perpetrated it from taking down our country, which I fear, actually, in these 25 years is an operation that has continued apace and is now perilously close to reaching, at least in parts of our country, critical mass.

Rod D. Martin: It was a lack of clarity that made a lot of sense, I’m sure, to the people who made those decisions at the time. And to be fair to them — and we should be before we rip that all apart — I know that the Bush administration looked at this, wasn’t quite sure what they were dealing with at first — because no one could have been — and knew that they were going to need Arab allies on board.

They also knew that they had this incredible propaganda defeat that had potential to rally revolutionaries across the region that would destabilize governments we needed.

Frank Gaffney: Hold the thought, Rod. We have to take a break. We’ll be right back with more on the other side. Stay tuned.

Naming the Enemy and Assessing the Response

Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and we are visiting with the great Rod Martin, the publisher of The Rod Martin Report and a new book.

Rod D. Martin: Trump’s New World Re-Order.

Frank Gaffney: There it is. Trump’s New World Re-Order. You can order it now, I believe, preorder it, and I hope you will do so. This promises to be, as usual, a very, very engaging, possibly quite contrarian assessment of where we are and where we will be going from here by Rod Martin.

Rod, I had to interrupt you. I apologize for the necessities of taking the breaks. You were talking about, rather sympathetically, the Bush team contending, among other things, with this immense propaganda defeat for us and the need to enlist the help of Arab allies in the fight against these jihadis. Finish your thought, if you would.

Rod D. Martin: Well, it was a huge propaganda defeat, and that was ultimately the aim. It absolutely had an enormous consequence for us economically, and certainly traumatized the nation for at least a while. No question about all that. But they were playing for the television.

There’s a reason no airplanes flew into the mall down the street. They wanted highly important, well-known landmarks in the United States to go down in flames: symbols of American power, financial, governmental, military. And they largely succeeded in that. Again, the Pentagon attack didn’t do anywhere near as much damage as they imagined it might, at least from a television perspective. And the fourth plane didn’t hit either the White House or the Capitol dome. So they didn’t get everything they wanted. But they got a lot.

And the Bush administration looked at that and said, we don’t know exactly what we’re facing here. We also don’t want to antagonize allies in the region, all of whom we know we can’t trust, but many of whom we need. And we certainly don’t want to add to the propaganda defeat we just suffered in a way that causes an uprising in those countries, and suddenly you’ve got bin Laden running Saudi Arabia. I guess that would have been “bin Laden Arabia” if the House of Saud were gone.

So that’s their take, and I don’t want to overly second-guess anything that they did or thought in that first 90 days, when things were still kind of unclear. But it was, in retrospect — and I contended at the time, and I know you did too — it was a mistake. Because there’s no such thing as a war on terror. What does that even mean? Is that like, there’s a hurricane, so we declare a war on wind? That’s just nonsense.

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Terror was not the enemy. There were very specific enemies who had actually attacked us, who actually killed roughly the same number of people on 9/11 as died at Pearl Harbor. This is a monstrous attack. It was obviously something that was going to have consequences for a long time after, and it did, and it has. And we needed to actually identify the enemy.

If you don’t actually identify the enemy, eventually the political coalition is just going to fray, and you’re not going to be able to sustain what you need to do. Now, we can argue about whether the way they handled Afghanistan and Iraq was the right thing to do, and whether they conducted it well. And I would certainly say that in Iraq, you had a brilliant military operation that the State Department proceeded to throw away mere weeks after the invasion. And we’ve lived with that debacle for years after.

But the point is, all of this would have been easier if you’d actually called the enemy the enemy. And their failure to do that still lives with us.

Frank Gaffney: I couldn’t agree more, Rod. And what compounded it was that we were sort of deflecting attention to not just terrorism, but to terrorists, or even more opaque, violent extremists. And the message was unmistakable and was exploited powerfully by the Brotherhood and its operatives: that this didn’t have anything to do with Islam.

And I honestly believe that, sort of from that time to this, we have been more or less clueless as a people about the true nature of the contribution made by Sharia to this entire extraordinary attack and what has, again, flowed from it.

So that brings me to this question, Rod. On 9/11, are we learning, even now, the right lessons? Are we even now addressing, as I think we have to, countries like Qatar and Pakistan and Turkey and arguably Saudi Arabia as part of the problem that we are confronting? Obviously, Iran is. But are we still, in the interest, as you suggested, of having those Arab allies, or Turkish aren’t Arabs, but those Muslim Arab allies, going to continue to sort of avert our gaze from the truth?

Rod D. Martin: Well, first of all, we have to be fair. Turkey did not sponsor 9/11. So as many criticisms as you and I have of Erdogan’s regime, we have to keep in mind that all of these things aren’t identical.

So looking at what Bush achieved, just briefly, because fair’s fair: We haven’t had another 9/11. And it’s not because they haven’t tried. Our government has actually gotten quite good at stopping terrorist incidents on this continent. And we should be very thankful, not just for the men and women in uniform, but for their leaders who have achieved that over the last 25 years. So no more 9/11s. That’s great. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t have one today, but so far, so good. A quarter century is a good while.

Second, I wouldn’t want to live in Iraq, but Iraq actually is a functioning democracy now. And that’s way better than when it was a dictatorship that gassed its own people and started wars with its neighbors. The Iran-Iraq War alone, I believe, killed about 2 million people, for no good reason whatsoever.

And we don’t have that problem in Iraq anymore. We don’t have them trying to build nuclear weapons or chemical weapons. And anybody who says there weren’t any such weapons in Iraq is either ignorant or lying, because it is a fact that we found over 500 chemical weapons in Iraq. This was introduced into the congressional record. This was in The New York Times. This is not hidden.

The problem is, it was hidden to a degree because when it ran in The New York Times, it ran on page like Z23 or something. They didn’t want you to be aware of it, but the facts were the facts and technically, they did report them. Those weapons were there.

Were they new weapons? Well, the Bush administration got some of that wrong, but there’s no question what Saddam’s intent was.

The bigger point was, those were exactly the chemical weapons Saddam was required to destroy after the first Gulf War. And instead he hid them. The decision to go to war was made as a matter of enforcement of the 1991 armistice, and that’s exactly what it achieved.

So these are the good things. Obviously, Afghanistan ended up a debacle, but that’s on Joe Biden.

So, yeah, you can critique every detail along the way, pretty much starting with the decision to invade Iraq, or better, with the decision to make Paul Bremer the viceroy of Iraq, which turned out to be a disaster.

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Nevertheless, what we have in the aftermath is a continuation of the propaganda loss here. And it comes directly from what you’ve identified in the administration failing to identify the true nature of the enemy. That’s how we have Zohran Mamdani. That’s how we have...

Frank Gaffney: Okay, hold that thought. That’s where we’re coming back to: Zohran Mamdani and where we are today, with Rod Martin, right after this. Stay tuned.

Political Islam, Marxism, and the Domestic Threat

Frank Gaffney: We’re back. And so is Rod Martin. We are visiting with him about the events that took place 25 years ago today, as this program airs. We are, of course, remembering what went down. And I think, Rod, you’ve made a number of important points, as usual, that help put into perspective some of the decisions, some of the choices, some of the actions that were taken.

But I think we fundamentally agree that in the interest of not alienating Muslim putative allies, we pulled punches. And that had both strategic implications as well as sort of tactical ones in a number of places. But you were just at the end of the last block going to where I think we need to go next, which is: So where are we now? And what do we do about the fact that in these 25 years, I don’t know how else to describe it, but the problem has metastasized enormously?

I’ve seen data that suggests that we had 500,000 Muslims in the entire United States in 2001. It’s up to about 5 million today. And it appears that most of those, not all, but most of those, are following the sort of Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia supremacist line, at least are attending their mosques. And you don’t see much evidence of pushback. I’m sure that some Muslims are not aligned with all this, but you just don’t see them, as I’m fond of saying, putting their head above the parapet because they would be deemed apostates. And that could result in them losing their head.

So Zohran Mamdani, as a Marxist jihadist elected in the city that was particularly hard hit by 9/11, is a stunning indication of something seriously wrong, is it not?

Rod D. Martin: Well, it absolutely is. We didn’t identify the enemy. And we have to understand that not all Muslims want to blow people up. But on the other hand, a higher percentage of Muslims want to blow people up than Baptist Sunday School ladies. So it’s not an insignificant thing. It’s something you’ve got to pay attention to.

And, of course, the Marxism is typical. We saw that all through the Middle East during the Cold War and even after. But it is also a mechanism of control of the population, and the Islamists are able to make that alliance with the increasingly socialist, if not communist, Democrats because they’re all of one mind on that. And then they figure once they win, they will do what they’ve done in every other country in which they’ve won: they will start killing each other, and the most ruthless group will come out on top.

Usually that’s the communists. Sometimes, as in Iran, it’s the Islamists. Either way, it ain’t good for you and me.

Frank Gaffney: That’s for sure. Or anybody else, really, at the end of the day.

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Rod, I do want to come back to something you touched on there a moment ago, because it’s not a minor point. The reason that we focus on Sharia in our BanSharia.com project, notably of the Institute for the American Future, of which you are, of course, our chairman, is because I think it is much more clear that what that is about, yes, there’s a veneer, if you will, of pietistic practice, but the vast preponderance of it is about power.

Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely.

Frank Gaffney: How do you get it? How do you use it to stay in power? What the object of the exercise ultimately is, is to, as you say, have it spread worldwide. And this idea that, well, there’s this political Islam and then there’s this religious Islam, I don’t personally buy. I think that to the extent that it is really defined by Sharia, it’s not a religion. But Sharia is a political, military, legal strategy for war.

And whatever one thinks of Islam, whatever you want to call Islam, that’s what we’re up against. Because the people that are the majority of that community in the United States, I think, as well as elsewhere, are dead set on emulating the perfect man and practicing Sharia in the most, well, demonic way imaginable.

And that’s something that I think this Islam versus Islam, and I made a movie with some colleagues of that name, ironically. So I’ve come a long way, baby. But I really believe this is a place where we have to, as you say, have clarity and have the facts properly marshaled.

Rod D. Martin: Well, I think it’s no different than what we see on the left. You’ve got the actual party members, and you’ve got the fellow travelers, and then you’ve got this vast horde of what Lenin called useful fools. They buy into superficial aspects of socialism/communism. They don’t actually adopt the idea that we should have gulags and kill everybody, like Stalin.

And they’ll go along later because it’ll be sold to them. And did we mention they’re idiots? So they get swept up in it. But by the time they get swept up in it, they don’t really have a choice anymore.

I think that general outline is true of virtually every movement involving humans.

You have a lot of people who are really true believers, and then you have a lot of people who are true believers who don’t let on who they really are. And then you have this vast majority that they’re all just lying to, telling them what they want to hear until they no longer have to. And that’s as true of Islam as it is of the Democratic Party.

The rank-and-file Democrat probably does not believe in communism. But on the other hand, if somebody riles up a crowd, as the leader of the DSA did the other week at the DSA National Convention, and says, “Our goal is communism!”, well, the room cheers. They know not what they do, in much in the same way that I saw a lot of conservatives who really didn’t know anything about Mises or Hayek suddenly became “libertarians” a few years ago because it sounded like a harder-core version of conservatism, without actually understanding that idea or ideology.

Those people are easy to manipulate. The Muslims manipulate them, the Marxists manipulate them. They tell them what they want to hear, they use them to gain the power they want, and then they toss them away. Or just kill them.

That’s what we’re dealing with. That’s what Bush was trying to parse. I think he was really thoughtful on these points. I think he just got the balance wrong.

Frank Gaffney: Well, it’s a topic for a longer conversation on another occasion. It’s important that we make clear what went wrong, but also what we better be doing about it in the present and future. And we’ll talk more about that in future with Rod Martin, among many other things.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 11, 2026

Last month, wheat and cement began arriving at a berth in Tartus that had served Russia’s military for decades. In sight of the pier, Russian personnel were packing up equipment to move out of their building.

Ahmed al-Sharaa is finishing what he started. Syria has been a stalwart Soviet and later Russian client since the mid-1950s. In more recent years, the country cozied up to Iran as well, joining the mullahs’ “Ring of Fire.” The sudden December 2024 defeat of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad and Sharaa’s victory in the Syrian Civil War ended all that, and broke Russian and Iranian power over Syria. Even worse for Putin, Sharaa announced Russia’s eviction from its most important overseas bases.

Russia wasn’t wrong (other than morally) to bet on Assad: they’d been betting on both him and his father since the elder Assad helped lead the 1963 coup and then seized power for himself in 1970. The Baathists (same party as Saddam Hussein’s) were gleeful participants in the spread of Soviet power and terror proxies, to a degree that even their pro-Soviet predecessors had not been.

But Russia’s power isn’t what it used to be, and wasn’t enough to prevent Assad’s collapse and subsequent flight into exile in Moscow. Seventy years of Russian investment have come to this: bargaining with the men Moscow bombed for permission to keep a foothold in a country it once dominated.

The August 9 agreement finalizes the return of facilities at Hmeimim Airport and the port of Tartus. The military installations are to become joint training centers, with a three-month transition. To allow Putin to save face, a small number of Russian personnel will be allowed to remain. But gone forever are the forward bases from which first the Communists and then Putin supported operations across the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Sahel.

The Kremlin described the August agreement as an improvement in bilateral cooperation. Which was a bit like Iran claiming it had sunk the USS Abraham Lincoln three times.

A Very Long Way From Home

Russia is by far the largest country on Earth, and by some measures one of its most powerful. It certainly was during the Cold War.

But good luck getting a Russian warship into the Mediterranean. From the Black Sea, it must pass through the Bosporus and Dardanelles, both controlled by NATO ally Turkey. From the Baltic, it must sail past Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and Denmark — NATO countries all — just to enter a North Sea also surrounded by NATO allies.

Murmansk is better, but it’s north of the Arctic Circle. Getting from there to Syria means sailing around Norway, past Britain and Iceland (or Greenland), through the British and U.S. controlled Strait of Gibraltar, and then past more NATO allies all the way across the Mediterranean. Few Russian ships have the range for that trip without a port call. Then once there, the Russians have to keep it supplied somehow, thousands of miles from home. Putin can’t intimidate anyone off the Syrian coast with a warship that has to go back to the Arctic for repairs.

Tartus (and Latakia before it) spared the Russians that trip, and in the process, greatly extended their reach. Syria provided naval and air bases sufficient to refuel and replenish their ships, make repairs, and threaten the Suez Canal and NATO’s southern flank. Without it, Russia’s ability to project power beyond its own “near abroad” dries up.

In Pat Frank’s legendary Alas, Babylon, published in 1959, the incident that sets off the nuclear war takes place off a Soviet submarine base at Latakia. The Russians have depended on these forward bases for a very, very long time.

Putin added Hmeimim when he intervened in the civil war in 2015, giving Russia a new forward air base to complement and protect his naval foothold. In 2017, he renewed Russia’s agreement for Tartus with a 49-year lease. Moscow expected to stay forever, long after all its other Soviet-era bases, from Lourdes, Cuba to Cam Ranh Bay, had been lost. And it built its strategy accordingly.

The African Empire Syria Enabled

Few in the United States have paid as close attention to the African situation as have the French.

For decades, France stealthily maintained its African empire by other means, through economic rights, a Paris-dominated common currency (the CFA Franc), basing privileges, a legal right to militarily intervene, and countless other ways. France didn’t leave Africa. It pretended to leave Africa. Colonies became de facto protectorates, but nothing real changed.

By the mid-2020s, though, the Russians were rolling up the old French Empire in West and Central Africa, mostly through coups spearheaded and then reinforced by its officially private Wagner Group. Syria made that possible.

Most Americans know Wagner as the mercenary army that fought in Ukraine and then briefly turned on Putin in 2023. But its African business was an important part of the operation, and it survived the mutiny. Russia’s Defense Ministry has since taken over much of that business through its Africa Corps.

The Wagner Group offered rulers a fairly straightforward deal: we’ll help keep you in power, and you’ll make it worth our while. Gold, uranium, lithium, diamonds, oil, and many other minerals supplied much of the payment. The Russians made money, expanded influence, and pushed out the French, all on the cheap compared to Ukraine.

But even mercenaries need ammunition. And replacements. And spare parts. And a way to get home. Hmeimim gave Russia a base from which to move men and cargo into Africa, with Libya serving as a further stop on the way south. Tartus supported the naval side. Assad’s dependence on Moscow allowed the Russians to operate this far-off system without much concern for what the Syrians thought of it.

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This arrangement also let Moscow attack European interests without attacking Europe directly, a pretty useful tactic while those same Europeans opposed them in Ukraine. Paris lost access and influence in countries it had dominated for generations. The people who like to describe Russia as a victim of Western imperialism might want to have a look at what their favorite victim was doing in Africa (ditto for China).

You may have wondered why the Russians got involved in the Syrian civil war in the first place. That’s an awful lot of why. It’s also why all that Russian blood and treasure is so ruefully lost now.

Without Syria, the Russians are scrambling to salvage what they can. They’ve expanded facilities at Libyan air bases, and flight tracking through July shows that they’ve been able to continue supplying their African deployments…barely.

But Libya doesn’t give Putin another Assad. No facility in Libya can replace Tartus, nor can Russia’s strained budget easily build a new one, especially in a country at least as unstable as Syria became. A Libyan airfield can help airlift cargo into the Sahel. It can’t repair a warship, much less support a fleet (if Russia still had one worthy of the name).

Moscow spent decades building the Syrian position because it needed the whole enchilada, including a government whose survival depended on Moscow. That’s gone. Putin will have to pay for losing Syria long after the last handover. Up to a point, he can pay with money, with concessions, and by accepting a smaller role in places where he once expected to dominate. But this is no new beginning: it’s the death rattle.

The Long Goodbye

Sharaa could overthrow Assad faster than he could get rid of Moscow. The Russians built much of the military he inherited. Their troops pulled back to the coast, but they still had equipment to remove and facilities from which to decamp. Sharaa also needed to keep a shattered country functioning while he found other sources of support.

Perhaps above all else, Syria needs money for reconstruction, and Sharaa needs his independence. Erdoğan doesn’t just want to replace Russian domination: he wants to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, of which Syria was always a key province. Multiple patrons seem to be Sharaa’s answer. This puts him in bed with the Saudis, perhaps the Israelis, but certainly the United States. For the former terrorist’s own private reasons, he is rapidly locking himself in as a Western ally, or at least in opposition to the status quo ante bellum.

Trump gave him the room he needed. By lifting U.S. sanctions, the President opened the way for Syria to attract investment from America and the Gulf, and to trade its way out of its wreckage. Already, U.S. companies are flowing in, even to the extent that Chevron is reconstructing the damaged oil pipeline from Iraq to Baniyas on the Syrian coast.

The Saudis pitched in: despite their “friends close, enemies closer” defense pact with Ankara, they have no desire to see Turkish power restored. And as he always does, Trump conditioned much of what’s to come on Syria joining the Abraham Accords, a prospect no doubt distasteful to a new strongman with origins in the Golan Heights, but likely necessary if he wants to end the Israeli security zone in his south.

All of this adds up to a new order.

Meanwhile, every ruler buying Russian protection can see what happened to Assad. Moscow had a longer relationship with Damascus, and a greater stake in keeping it, than it has with any of its new African “friends.” Those men hired Russian troops to guarantee their power vis-a-vis Paris. A dacha beside Assad’s near Moscow would be a poor substitute.

When Putin rescued Assad with direct Russian intervention in 2015, he meant to cement Russia’s return as a great power. Instead, Russia spent nine years defending a regime that collapsed anyway, and lost the bases it went to war to preserve.

For all his talk of restoring Russian greatness, Putin has managed to lose what even poor Boris Yeltsin was able to keep.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
September 10, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with host Don Ma and Democrat strategist Lee Neves to debate Trump’s midterm convention gamble, the $5,000 dividend promise, and the turnout fight that could decide Congress.

Lee and I debate:

• Why TV ratings miss the point of Trump’s convention.

• A thousand more voters in just twenty races: the Republican opportunity.

• Trump’s $5,000 promise and the fight over the economy.

• Why even a Democrat strategist says socialists has hurt his party.

• Bad approval ratings don’t automatically mean a Democrat wave.

• PLUS, bringing down Iran’s regime without wrecking the country.

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It’s the debate and analysis you need: watch the interview, and pass it along!

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Our Full Discussion:

Don Ma: For our takeaways from the first day of the GOP convention yesterday, joining us now to discuss is Rod Martin, policy analyst, founder and CEO of Martin Capital. We also have Lee Neves, Democratic political consultant.

First of all, thank you both for coming on today. Rod, if I may, I’d like to start with you here. What did you think of the overall message yesterday from the convention that the last year and a half worked? That was one of the messages. What do you think?

Rod D. Martin: First of all, it’s good to see Lee, and thank you for having me, Don. I think the convention is a brilliant idea. I don’t understand why the Democrats haven’t done it.

This is basically a two-day infomercial for the agenda of the people we have on the ballot in a low-turnout election. Every midterm, you’ve got a significant drop-off in the number of people who turn out from a presidential year. In 2022, it was a 20-point drop-off.

This is an opportunity to showcase people who are in tough races — like Mike Rogers — and get them out there, let them do their thing, get great video in front of a big crowd. Whether everybody attends or not is almost irrelevant. It’s great turnout, of course, but the people in the room aren’t the main audience. Even so, the people in the room are the workers who go and get out the vote.

For all these different reasons, I think this is going to become a feature of American politics. I think both parties are going to do it from now on, and I think that’s a positive thing.

Don Ma: Lee, do you think a midterm convention itself is a good idea? Do you think Democrats should follow suit?

Lee Neves: I think Democrats haven’t done it because they have a scheduler who actually knows what’s going on in the United States.

Day one of the convention happened to also be on the same day as the opening game of the National Football League. You know, that sports league that everyone in the United States follows. Game two of the convention will be on the night of the Netflix special, where my San Francisco 49ers will hand it to the L.A. Rams down under in Australia.

The people the Republicans want this convention to reach are going to be too busy with pizza watching football, not paying attention to a political convention. This political convention is literally the political version of, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Don Ma: Rod, a lot there to respond to. Do you think people watched the convention?

Rod D. Martin: I think it’s completely irrelevant. That’s what I was just saying. This is two days of great video of great Republican candidates in front of a great crowd. That’s going to fill our advertisements for the rest of the year. It’s also a room filled with activists who are going to go home and redouble their efforts to turn people out.

Nobody honestly cares if anybody watches this on TV. That’s a broadcast-TV-era kind of statement. In 1986, that would have mattered. In 2026, it’s completely irrelevant. I don’t watch anything live. I stream it all, unless it’s on NTD.

Don Ma: Thank you for that, Rod. Lee, do you think that even if people didn’t watch it on day one or day two, they’ll still hear about it after the fact on news?

The $5,000 Promise and the Economy

Lee Neves: A couple of things. If the Republican activists need a convention to get them fired up for the November election, then the Republican base and activists have an enthusiasm problem, and that’s really going to be a problem come the first Tuesday in November.

Are people going to hear about it? Yes. They’re obviously going to hear about the $5,000 check that Trump is promising. And then the next question will be, “Well, gee, is that going to come before or after the $5,000 DOGE check and the $2,000 tariff check we were all promised?”

If anything, that $5,000 promise is a great way for Republican congressmen to fundraise. I should know. I got a fundraising text from Congressman Jake Ellzey there in Texas saying, “Will you accept the $5,000 from Trump? To do so, please just donate $25 to my campaign.” And if I’m getting that fundraising text, they probably need to clean up their fundraising lists.

Don Ma: Rod, will $5,000 get you to vote?

Rod D. Martin: It won’t, but it’s a great, great dividend to the American people. The economy is kicking into gear. It’s taken a little while to clean up the mess that Lee’s friends in the White House did for the last four years.

But the truth of the matter is, we have the Atlanta Fed telling us we’re looking at 4.7 percent GDP growth for the quarter. That’s on an annualized basis. That’s an incredible achievement.

As that ramps up, as we bring factories home, as we create great jobs, as we get rid of now three million illegal aliens who were depressing the job market for the union workers that the Democrats used to represent, what we’re seeing today is the beginning of a boom. As a result of that, yeah, the American people deserve a $5,000 dividend.

But I’d go you one further. I’m still waiting for that cheap health care Barack Obama promised me. I’m still waiting for being able to keep my doctor. I’m still waiting for the free health care Bernie Sanders promised. All of this stuff was bunk.

Guarantee you, we’ll follow through on this if we win. And if we don’t, the Democrats are going to do their best to put taxes back on tips, back on overtime, back on Social Security, and back on the backs of the American worker.

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Don Ma: I appreciate your honesty, Rod. But if it were me, if I weren’t going to vote and they promised me $5,000, I would change that decision so quick.

Capitalism, Socialism, and Iran

Don Ma: Lee, Republicans are framing this election as a choice between capitalism and socialism. Do you agree with that framing?

Lee Neves: No. It’s simply name-calling because they’ve got nothing else. Trump came into office on day one saying he was going to lower prices. He was going to make things more affordable. He was going to make the economy better. Instead, what have we got? We’ve got the highest gas prices on Labor Day since 2012, is what we have. We have a president getting us into a war there’s no end to.

Look, I have been on this network. I’ve been on other networks. I’m the one Democrat who said, if we’re going to go into war with Iran, just take them out. Just take them out. They’re the biggest funder of terror. They’re going to do nothing but cause trouble. Just take them out. Don’t diddle the waddle like we’re currently doing now, with one foot in, one foot out. Either do it or don’t.

At the end of the day, American voters want to see someone who’s taking their woes seriously. We currently have a president who is more preoccupied with sending out Truth Social posts about renaming New Mexico “New America” and renaming Lake Ontario than actually getting down to solving the problems that a lot of families are facing today.

Don Ma: Rod, you’re smiling there. What are you thinking?

Rod D. Martin: I’m thinking Democrats used to have a sense of humor. It used to be fun to watch late-night television. It hasn’t been since Obama took office because nobody on that side can laugh.

But the truth of the matter is, we are moving into an historic economic boom. It is just amazing what’s gathering when you look at the manufacturing numbers, when you look at the trade numbers, when you look at the energy numbers. It’s incredible.

I’ve got to say, I completely agree with Lee’s enthusiasm about taking out the center of terrorism in the entire Middle East. Totally agree with that. I do think the president’s approach is better, and strangely enough for Donald Trump, a little more nuanced, in that using the blockade to choke the snake and not merely chop its head off is avoiding a lot of collateral damage that would otherwise happen in a war.

We want to leave an intact country as much as possible to the Iranian people when they throw off their tormentors. But the point is, I don’t think that’s going to move much at the margin.

This is a low-turnout election. Every midterm election is. Lee’s team probably wins because the president’s party almost always loses the midterms. But the truth is, if we can turn out a thousand more people in just 20 key races across this country, we win the House and the Senate. Those numbers are plain, and this convention is helping.

Socialism and the Michigan Senate Race

Don Ma: Lee, let me ask you the question in this way. Do you think Democratic Socialist candidates are an advantage or disadvantage for the Democratic Party?

Lee Neves: Look, I’m going to say they’re a disadvantage ten times out of ten because I’m not a DSA candidate. I am very, very well known for being pretty in the center as far as a Democrat is.

Do DSA candidates do well in New York and West Hollywood and Berkeley? Yeah, they do. They fit those districts. They want to run there, fine. They’re one of 435 when they get to the United States Congress.

Now, in states like Michigan and Florida and whatnot, no, they’re not exactly the best candidates to have. I’ve said that before, and I’ll say it again. They’re not going to attract your centrist voters that we need to get to win those types of elections.

The funny thing with Michigan is that the Republicans were in the catbird seat after that primary. El-Sayed won the nomination. Mike Rogers was looking great. There were going to be a lot of disaffected Democrats who weren’t going to vote for Rogers and probably wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed.

Then Trump goes ahead and starts to pick a fight with Michigan’s biggest trading partner, Canada. If there’s one state that’s going to feel the effect of those tariffs and feel it deeply, it’s going to be Michigan. Come Election Day, they may very well take that out on Mike Rogers.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: El-Sayed, not my kind of Democrat. But he, I think, is going to benefit, fortunately or unfortunately, take your pick, from what’s going on between the United States and Canada right now.

Don Ma: Rod, you can respond to that, but I want to ask you a follow-up to what you said earlier: that if more voters turn out for this midterm, then Republicans have a chance for the House and the Senate. Do you believe that Republicans still think Trump is the turnout machine for the GOP?

Rod D. Martin: I think he clearly is. He certainly was in the primaries. Nearly every single contested primary in which Trump made an endorsement, his guy won. That’s unprecedented in two ways. First of all, nobody has that kind of batting average. But second, presidents historically haven’t actually endorsed a lot of people in contested primaries. That’s kind of a new thing. Trump was able to move the dial again and again and again. So in a low-turnout election, yeah, absolutely.

I think Lee’s hitting exactly the right note for Michigan, although I think we can overcome it, because they nominated a Muslim Marxist to run as the standard-bearer of the Democrat Party. And I very much hope that Lee’s team wins that fight internally.

I think Bill Maher’s doing great work here, too. He’s certainly no Republican. But the truth is, we used to have a consensus in this country about the values that shape America, about our Constitution, about the basic values that we all shared. We were just arguing about how to achieve those ends. Democrats had a different view. We had a different view.

Now we’re talking about people who are completely outside of that circle. They hate America. They hate the Constitution. And they’ll tell you so.

I’m grateful for Lee, and I’m grateful that there are guys like him fighting for the soul of the Democrat Party. But for this year, I just want to beat the Democrat Party, and I think we’ve got a shot.

Trump’s Approval Ratings Versus Turnout

Don Ma: Lee, do you think it’s a good strategy to put Trump front and center for the convention?

Lee Neves: No. His popularity is so far underwater, the DMV may be more popular than Trump is these days.

Not only that, here’s the problem with the convention. Literally, there were Republicans calling it “Trumpapalooza.” No. If you’re going to have a convention, talk about actual solutions, because Rod was talking about how the economy is booming, is doing great. If I give Rod that, that the underlying factors of the economy are all fantastic, that doesn’t matter. What voters feel is what matters. That’s what’s going to drive how they vote.

Right now, your average voter doesn’t feel like the economy is great. They don’t feel like they’re doing well. They feel like they’re paying too much for gas, and they shouldn’t. They feel like they’re paying too much for groceries. And the guy they’re all pointing at and blaming is President Donald J. Trump, because when he ran on solving those issues in 2024, he did an excellent job. I’ll give credit where credit is due.

When he ran in 2024, he was laser-focused on the economy, on showing that Kamala Harris was out of touch and not worrying about everyday Americans’ issues. He said he was going to change that on day one. Whether it changed or not, voters feel like it hasn’t changed. And that is what is going to drive them come the first Tuesday in November.

Don Ma: Rod, do you agree that this convention is not trying to convince all voters nationwide? The approval rating for Trump is not the end-all, be-all, because for the base, the GOP approval for Trump is still high.

You were talking about turnout. If the turnout machine is not dead, midterms, as you mentioned earlier, are often based on turnout. The fact that the Republican Party is doing this convention and is trying to have turnout rather than persuade, do you think his approval rating, perhaps in this context, may not be the final factor?

Rod D. Martin: Look, it’s a turnout election. If you don’t fire up the base, you’re going to lose. It’s just that simple. The Democrats have to solve the same problem. History’s on their side, but you still have the mechanical part of politics that you have to actually execute on.

Donald Trump can fire up our people. There’s no question about that. Now, should he go campaign in New Hampshire? No. Sununu needs to carry that on his own. He needs to say, “This is all about New Hampshire.” That will be a winning message there. But there are a lot of other parts of the country, such as Texas, where Trump’s presence makes an enormous positive difference.

I’m not concerned about his approval rating as far as that goes, because I know it’s a turnout election. He needs to fire up his own team. That likely produces the numbers he needs.

But the bigger point here is, as this rolls along, as the economy improves, you’ll see better numbers. It may take a minute. That’s fair. But the bigger point we must not lose track of is that Abdul El-Sayed will put taxes back on tips. He’ll put taxes back on overtime. He’ll put taxes back on Social Security. And Donald Trump already did away with all of them.

While it is true that Donald Trump frequently engages in hyperbole, “Oh, I’m going to do such and such on day one,” most of us know that it is hyperbole. Most of us know that’s just how he talks. And nearly everybody by now has figured out that Donald Trump delivers results, that tax law being one of the bigger ones we’ve ever had for poorer and working Americans.

Redistricting and the Possibility of a Democrat Wave

Don Ma: Lee, you bring up Trump’s approval ratings. I want to contrast for you: In 2018, voters who disliked Trump translated that into votes for Democratic House candidates, so Democrats ultimately took the chamber. But I think there’s a difference. It’s a little bit different in 2016. And that is, polling for Democrats on the generic congressional ballot shows they have a smaller lead compared to what they had at the end of 2018.

Maybe approval rating doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to produce a 2018-sized Democratic wave. Also, we have to consider the redistricting factor, because according to certain estimates, redistricting has created approximately a nine-seat Republican advantage. What is your reaction to this?

Lee Neves: The nine-seat advantage is being generous, because you’ve got to look at a lot of, first of all, Missouri. Their map just got halted by the Supreme Court this morning. They’ve got to revert back to the old map.

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Places like Florida, where they had to cut into safe Republican seats to make other seats slightly Republican, and they were wanting to get four or five new seats out of that. But when you weaken some seats, you put more seats in play, especially in a Democratic wave year.

At the end of the day, look, I have run enough campaigns my entire adult life to know that negative works. People are compelled to go vote, especially in a midterm election like this. They’re compelled to go vote when they don’t like something or they don’t like someone. That’s why I’m not worried about Democrat turnout.

Democrats, by and large, be it DSA or centrist, don’t like President Trump. That’s when they go and cast those ballots. They’re not casting a ballot against Republican Congressman X or Republican Candidate B. They’re casting a ballot against Donald Trump.

Rod is correct. It is a turnout game. Democrats, by and far, are so far a lot more enthused to come out and vote this midterm.

Don Ma: We’ve got to wrap this up, but Rod, if you have any final thoughts, quickly.

Rod D. Martin: Lee’s right about that. Look, if the Democrats get a wave year — and I don’t see that happening — but if they do, there’s no question that none of this redistricting stuff is going to amount to a hill of beans.

I think what we ought to be looking at, though, is the fact that it is historically close. Historically, if the Democrats have had a three- or four-point lead on the generic ballot, our side has won. And you’ve got that Harvard-Harris poll where we’re actually up two on the generic ballot, which is kind of out of the blue. Harvard-Harris is certainly not a Republican-leaning poll.

I think we’re in it. I think we’re going to try to win it. I think we might have a shot at it. And if Lee’s team wins, he’ll be absolutely in line with history.

Don Ma: All right, let’s end it here today. Great speaking to you both, gentlemen. Thank you very much.

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NOTE: Jacob Shapiro is neither a populist nor a MAGA guy. But he is brilliant, and this is one of the best treatments of the situation in Germany I’ve seen in English. — RDM

by Jacob Shapiro
September 10, 2026

Over the weekend, a German political party called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a major victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote, improving on its 2021 result by 23 percentage points. Three other parties, all various shades of far left, took 22.3 percent between them. Germany’s governing and center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, saw its share decline from 37.1 percent in 2021 to 17.2 percent. Voter turnout was a record 77.8 percent.

AfD’s platform and ideology have dominated coverage, but don’t miss the forest for the trees. This election was not a vote for anything. It was a protest vote against an incumbent presiding over a status quo unacceptable to a large and growing swath of the electorate. Over-indexing on the notion that a far-right populist party doing well in a state election means it’s 1933 again misses the political earthquake that has already happened in Germany. AfD’s victory is important — just not for the reasons Western media and mainstream German parties are focused on.

The Professors’ Party

AfD was founded in 2013 by German economics professors and conservative journalists. Its nickname: “The Professors’ party.” The dominant issue in Europe then was the sovereign debt crisis. The so-called “PIGS” — Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain — needed bailouts; Germany insisted on austerity.

AfD arose from this debate as a single-issue party pursuing the dissolution of the euro. Most of its 2013 manifesto concerns a return to national currencies within the European common market; a small section—three bullet points—noted support for tighter immigration policies.

The AfD’s founders were reacting to European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s 2012 pledge to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. These were intellectual, relatively moderate Germans who thought the euro was not worth saving from Germany’s national perspective.

Storm Clouds

Germany’s geopolitical problems were only just becoming visible in 2013. The debt crisis had made Germany Europe’s de facto leader, but even as it forced austerity down the bloc’s throat, storm clouds were gathering.

At the end of 2012, a little-known compromise candidate was anointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party: Xi Jinping. In 2013, Germany still expected to sell cars to China’s burgeoning middle class for the foreseeable future. Now Chinese EVs are putting German car companies under tremendous pressure.

The end of 2013 saw the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, which by 2014 had led Russia to seizing Crimea and the beginning of the Donbas war. Even so, Germany expected to keep importing cheap Russian energy (Nord Streams 1 and 2 had just been completed in 2011 and 2012). Fast-forward to 2026: The Nord Stream pipelines are gone, and Germany is attempting to sever energy dependence on Russia.

In 2013, President Barack Obama urged European countries to spend more of their GDP on defense, but Germany expected the U.S. would still guarantee its security indefinitely. It took another decade, and President Trump’s threats, to get Germany to start surging defense spending in earnest.

The 2015 European migration crisis, which brought over 1 million people fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa, still lay ahead. When they arrived, German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted Germany — and every other European country — would do its part, with a rallying cry of Wir schaffen das: “We can do it.” That this would become the source of her downfall seemed to occur to her not at all.

More Than Its Extremes

AfD is no longer the Professors’ party. It is now a broad tent for populist grievances born of Germany’s geopolitical challenges and a decade of policy that failed to answer them. Some of the voices within the AfD are unsavory. This is the country that brought the world National Socialism, aka Nazis, in the first place. They haven’t gone extinct. Voices within the AfD calling for “new, patriotic, cultural policy,” or halting sanctions on Russia, have found a home within the AfD.

But as an Israeli cab driver once said to me, “In every house there is a trash can.” AfD is much more than its most extreme elements.

After 2015, immigration became the AfD’s raison d’être. In its 2025 manifesto, AfD calls for “remigration,” a combination of expelling illegal migrants with a significant tightening of German immigration laws and enough ambiguity to deport anyone deemed a “security threat.” Clearly, some see that as extreme, though AfD is hardly the only Western party with a similar position.

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But the rest of AfD’s platform is less extreme than one might think. The party is still broadly Euroskeptic and advocates a return to the Deutschemark, though without abrupt rupture, and still wants to retain a European common market, external border control, and defense.

But according to the latest Eurobarometer survey, 69 percent of Germans support membership within the EU. The more responsibility AfD garners, the more it will be forced to do what Euroskeptic parties in Italy, France, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe have done: accept that their electoral success is not a vote against the EU.

The Divide

It is instead a vote against German policy failures. The biggest is reunification. AfD draws most of its support from East Germany, where it now polls as the strongest party in every eastern state. East Germany’s GDP per capita, productivity, support for the EU (closer to 50 percent), and faith in democracy all lag West Germany. These are the hollowed-out industrial cores that lost most when cheap Russian energy evaporated and China turned from promising market into existential competitor.

The divide goes back centuries, far beyond the Cold War’s East/West line. The point is that the structural problems AfD speaks to are real, have nothing to do with Nazis, and have been made worse by a political class that meets them with neglect and derision.

Case in point: After a fiery speech from AfD’s admittedly controversial leader, Alice Weidel, Chancellor Friedrich Merz addressed the Bundestag and tried to downplay the party’s success in Saxony-Anhalt. Insisting that Germany must embrace “the opportunities offered by new technology to modernize industry,” an AfD member jeered, “How is that supposed to work without energy?” Merz replied not with an actual answer, but with derision, for the very good reason that he has no answer to give.

Ghosts

It would be flippant to dismiss the historical overtones. The National Socialist Party never won a majority; it entered power via coalition, then manufactured the emergency it used to end democracy.

But that was a different time, a different context, and a different party. If Germany is to lead Europe and rebuild its defense capacity — as Washington has demanded since well before Trump — it must face these ghosts and transcend them. Ignoring the voters those parties speak for is the surest way to make things worse.

A generation is coming of age that did not live through World War II, has no memory of the Berlin Wall, and sees only feckless, ineffective government. Rather than vote for the status quo, at least in Saxony-Anhalt, they voted for change. Right-wing, left-wing, it does not matter. Whatever party can deliver change, or at least the feeling of it, will win elections.

Do Not Underestimate Germany

In 1999, The Economist put Germany on its cover as “the sick man of Europe.” By 2013, the year AfD was born, Germany was the beating heart of the European economy, thanks to tough reforms commentators had thought impossible.

In democracies, things must get worse before they can get better because that is what creates the necessary electoral conditions to usher in politicians willing to change. And few countries have shown the ability to change as successfully and rapidly as Germany.

From a macro perspective, Germany has faced headwinds in recent years, and those will continue. But look at the performance of German companies like Siemens, Rheinmetall, and even SAP. Germany can no longer outsource its security, energy, and market access needs. The world is changing, and Germany must change with it.

History suggests when Germany changes, the world changes. An AfD victory in a state election in an Eastern German state is not the beginning of the Fourth Reich — but it may well be the return of Germany to history.

— This article is published in cooperation with Mauldin Economics.

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NOTE: I am happy to note that General Yoav Gallant, former Israeli Defense Minister, joins us to provide this analysis. It is but several pieces of Trump’s broader global strategy, but it is life-and-death for Israel. And it portends a more peaceful world. — RDM

by General Yoav Gallant
September 10, 2026

Last week, in Tel Aviv, Israel and Greece signed the largest defense export agreement in the history of the relationship between our two countries, and one of the largest Israel has ever signed.

Achilles Shield will give Greece an integrated national air defense network built on David’s Sling, SPYDER, and Barak MX, with radars and a national command-and-control system tying them together. Roughly €700 million of the value will go to Greek subcontractors.

As Minister of Defense, I had the privilege of carrying forward what my predecessors began with Greece. At Kalamata, Israeli industry trains the pilots of the Hellenic Air Force under a government-to-government program running twenty-two years, and during my tenure the first advanced trainers arrived, and the center reached full operation. We signed a defense cooperation program alongside it, covering joint exercises and joint training.

With this new deal, Greece chooses to build its national air defense on Israeli systems, with Greek industry inside the production chain, over a period that will outlast several governments in both countries. The substance of this deal is trust, and this kind of trust is a strategic fact rather than a commercial one.

Three Circles of Hostility, and a Fourth of Friendship

Israeli defense thinking has long been organized around three circles. The first is the internal circle: Judea and Samaria and Gaza. The second is the states on our borders, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, and it is worth saying that with the last two we have peace agreements that are important and that have proven stable. The third is hostile states with no shared border, historically Iraq and Libya, and in recent years, when we speak of the third circle, we are mainly speaking of Iran.

Each circle carried its own doctrine, its own force structure and its own assumptions. All three describe enemies. What the framework never included was a circle of partners.

In a war of alliances waged against adversaries who move flexibly between them, Israel should be building a fourth circle around itself: the friendly states nearest to us, with which real alliances can be built because our interests are close and in some cases genuinely shared.

There are five who currently fit the criteria: India, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Greece, and Cyprus, with the last two acting politically as a single entity.

The fourth circle works like a star rather than a bloc. Israel is the common point, and the circle holds because each relationship holds, not because the members are aligned with one another.

What each of them shares with us is a threat assessment. All of these states, and Israel with them, see serious danger in radical Islamism, the political doctrine that uses the religion of Islam as its instrument. India contends with radical Islamist terrorism originating in Pakistan, and we remember the Mumbai attacks among the clearest examples of it.

The Emirates chose a deliberate course against religious extremism, and by any measure that choice has succeeded. Azerbaijan is a Shiite state threatened by Iran, a far larger Shiite state, in part because it has prospered while maintaining a pluralistic and tolerant approach to religion, which Tehran finds harder to forgive than hostility. Greece and Cyprus have lived under Turkish pressure for decades.

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The second thing they share is that all of them regard the United States as their strategic anchor, not Beijing and not Moscow. At a moment when many states are hedging between the great powers, that alignment matters, and it means the fourth circle strengthens the American position in these regions rather than competing with it.

The third is that with each we already have a real and mutual foundation: energy, intelligence, technology, industry, and tourism. Defense systems move between us as well, and it is worth being precise about what that signifies. Countries do not build their national defense on another state’s systems as a commercial preference. They do it when they trust that state and intend to remain close to it.

Looking at the map, what we are describing is a circle of friendship drawn around the circle of hostility, which places us on both sides of our adversaries rather than only in front of them.

Azerbaijan sits on the far side of Iran, India extends beyond, and Greece and Cyprus sit opposite Türkiye in the eastern Mediterranean, while the Emirates serve as our central anchor in the Gulf. These states are neither military bases nor proxies.

However, by aligning with partners who neighbor our adversaries and directly endure their hostility, our strategic position is fundamentally transformed, expanding what we can observe, deepening operational coordination, and forcing our adversaries to recalculate their own backyard.

An Opportunity for Peace

Azerbaijan’s identity as a Turkic nation ties it more closely to Türkiye than to us. However, its strong commitment to both relationships creates a valuable strategic opportunity for Baku to act as a mediator between our two countries. Rather than a complication to be managed, it can be an opportunity to be used.

Baku is one of the few capitals trusted in Jerusalem and in Ankara alike, and a state in that position can carry messages, lower the temperature, and open channels that neither side can open directly. Israel and Türkiye have real differences and they are not going to disappear soon. But tension is easier to restrain when someone both sides trust is willing to stand between them, and we should be encouraging that rather than treating Baku’s other friendships as a problem.

The same applies more widely. Several of these states maintain relations with countries hostile to us. They are capable of separating one relationship from another, and so are we. That is also why the fourth circle cannot be built by a single agreement or a summit. It is a set of relationships, each requiring its own attention, its own reciprocity and its own patience.

The region is moving quickly, and Syria shows how quickly. Two years ago it was a country without an army, without an economy, and without a future. Today its government is rebuilding its military capability with determination, and Türkiye is training and equipping the new Syrian army. Hezbollah is engaged in the same effort in Lebanon, and Iran has not given up its nuclear ambition, and it still holds the enriched material on which it intends to build, even after the last round of fighting. Rebuilding is what defeated adversaries do, and it happens faster than most people expect.

The United States is weighing all of this against its own wider considerations, in this region and beyond. Our task is to make ourselves useful within that, and the fourth circle is one of the clearest ways to do it, because every one of these states looks to Washington as we do.

We can treat the region’s reorganization as a loss of position, or we can build the arrangement that reflects what Israel actually offers and who actually wants it. Achilles Shield should be the model rather than the exception.

— General Yoav Gallant is the former Minister of Defense of the State of Israel. You may follow him on his Substack, “The Defense Memo”.

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Don’t miss the original “Trump’s Top 25 Achievements” list. And share widely!

by Rod D. Martin
September 9, 2026

My original list of Trump’s Top 25 achievements was supposed to be a cheat sheet. Instead, it drew a million views on X, thousands of new followers, and coverage from Dan Bongino’s show to Roger Stone’s.

Why? Because millions know something extraordinary is happening, but almost no one gives them the receipts. The Enemedia buries every victory. Republicans announce today’s win and forget yesterday’s. Voters sense that Trump is transforming the country but can’t explain how.

So here is the sequel. These are achievements, not promises.

You don’t have to memorize all 25. Learn five. And when somebody says Trump “hasn’t done much,” show them how wrong they are.

Trump Restored Speech, Sovereignty, and Safety

1. He dismantled the federal censorship machine at home—and confronted government censorship abroad.

On his first day back in office, Trump prohibited federal employees and agencies from coercing or paying private companies to censor constitutionally protected speech. He ordered an investigation of the Biden Administration’s abuses, gutted CISA’s censorship apparatus, and made free speech a foreign-policy priority. He also imposed visa restrictions on foreign officials and NGO operatives who pressured American platforms to silence Americans.

2. He ended state-run “public” broadcasting.

Not only was government unconstitutionally censoring Americans’ free speech: it was subsidizing Democrats’ talking points. Republicans have talked for decades, but Trump delivered, cutting off funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now PBS and NPR must compete for audiences and donors like everyone else.

3. He ended catch-and-release.

Sealing the border was No. 1 in my first list. But what happened after illegal aliens were caught deserves its own place. Under Biden, arrest often meant a bus ticket, a court date years away, and easy disappearance into the country. Under Trump, it means detention and removal. The Border Patrol has now recorded 15 consecutive months without releasing a single apprehended illegal alien into America.

4. He helped drive fentanyl trafficking—and fentanyl deaths—sharply downward.

Under President Trump, fentanyl trafficking at the southern border fell 56 percent compared with the same period in 2024. CDC figures showed synthetic-opioid deaths falling from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025 — a 22 percent plunge.

5. He designated the cartels as terrorists—and took the counter-narcotics war to sea.

Trump designated eight cartels and transnational criminal organizations as terrorist groups, thus unlocking powerful sanctions, intelligence, and enforcement tools. He stopped treating them like ordinary criminals and started treating them as the government-sponsored paramilitary forces they actually are. The Coast Guard also set an all-time record, seizing nearly 510,000 pounds of cocaine across the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean in fiscal 2025, and blowing up even more.

6. He crushed Washington, D.C.’s violent-crime wave.

Trump refused to let America’s capital remain a cesspool of murders, rapes, carjackings, and municipal incompetence. He flooded Washington with federal law-enforcement resources and forced cooperation among police, prosecutors, and federal agencies. One year later, homicides are down 45 percent, carjackings 64 percent, and authorities have seized nearly 2,000 illegal guns.

Urban violence disproportionately victimizes the poor. Restoring order is not oppression: it’s liberation.

7. He restored Second Amendment rights.

Trump ordered the entire executive branch to identify and reverse policies that infringed the right to keep and bear arms. DOJ created a Second Amendment Enforcement Task Force. ATF repealed Biden’s punitive “Zero Tolerance” policy for gun dealers and other unreasonable restrictions on selling firearms.

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Then Trump’s DOJ filed the first affirmative civil-rights lawsuit in Department history, forcing Los Angeles County to end nine-month delays for concealed-carry permits. It also restored the congressionally authorized process through which deserving Americans may regain federal firearms rights — and zeroed out the $200 federal tax on suppressors.

Trump Encouraged Work, Savings, and Ownership

8. He ended federal income tax on tips and overtime pay.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill allows eligible workers to deduct up to $25,000 in qualified tips through 2028. It also created a deduction for the overtime premium — up to $12,500 for an individual or $25,000 for a married couple. It’s hard to think of a more pro-working-class reform than that.

9. He eliminated the tax on Social Security for nearly all seniors.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, seniors may deduct an additional $6,000 apiece or $12,000 for a qualifying married couple. For most seniors, that eliminates federal income tax on retirement income, including Social Security.

The fact that Democrats taxed Social Security in the first place is obscene. Trump reversed it.

10. He made Opportunity Zones permanent.

Trump’s Opportunity Zones steer private capital toward distressed communities by rewarding long-term investment. The One Big Beautiful Bill made them permanent and established recurring qualifying rounds, giving investors and local leaders the certainty to build for decades.

The Left’s answer to poverty is always another federal program. Trump’s is capital, ownership, businesses, homes, and jobs.

11. He protected farms and family businesses from the death tax.

The death tax can force a grieving family to sell family farms, homes, and businesses just to pay Washington. But Trump made it easier to pass a lifetime’s work and dreams on to the next generation. He increased the federal estate-and-gift-tax exclusion to $15 million per person in 2026, with inflation adjustments and no scheduled expiration — potentially $30 million for a married couple.

Trump Put Families and Good Health First

12. He expanded Health Savings Accounts — and created a $50 billion rural-health fund.

Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, millions more Americans can use Health Savings Accounts. The result? More personal control and fewer gatekeepers between doctor and patient.

Trump also created a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, reversing years of rural hospital closures under Biden.

13. He used TrumpRx and most-favored-nation agreements to force down drug prices.

For decades, Americans paid the world’s highest drug prices while socialist governments imposed price controls and freeloaded on American innovation. Trump turned that arrangement on its head, securing most-favored-nation agreements with 26 drugmakers covering 89 percent of the branded-drug market. It’s not a price control: it’s the end of a free ride. Foreign governments must now pay more for American drugs so Americans can pay less.

Moreover, the President’s new TrumpRx program gives patients direct access to steep discounts. Patients have already saved more than $700 million, while the latest nine deals added $19.6 billion in American manufacturing commitments.

14. He turned MAHA from a slogan into reality.

Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and MAHA forced a reckoning. HHS and FDA began moving manufacturers away from petroleum-based dyes, approved natural alternatives, changed labeling rules, and created a public tracker of corporate promises.

For the first time in generations, Washington is asking why American children are fat and sick — and fixing the problem instead of prescribing another drug.

15. He prioritized adoption and family formation.

Trump made the adoption tax credit partly refundable, allowing eligible families to receive up to $5,000 per adopted child even when they owe less tax. He also raised tax-free dependent-care assistance from $5,000 to $7,500 in 2026. Trump is forcing government to stop making it harder to adopt, care for dependents, or build families.

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16. He stood up for victims of revenge porn and sexual deepfakes.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalized specified nonconsensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated sexual deepfakes. Covered platforms must now provide a reporting process and must remove all qualifying images within 48 hours. Perps go to prison.

17. He stopped federal support for dangerous gain-of-function research in sketchy foreign labs.

Wuhan should have ended this debate. Instead, the Fauci-led bureaucracy doubled down on reckless experimentation and dangerous gain-of-function research, not just in the United States but in sketchy foreign labs, even in China. Trump put a stop to it, terminating projects in countries of concern and suspending other high-risk programs.

Trump Built America’s Economic Future

18. He turned valuable access to the world’s largest consumer market into leverage and revenue.

Washington treated access to the richest consumer market on Earth into a global entitlement, while allowing them to maintain huge trade barriers against U.S. producers. Trump turned that on its head. By January 2026, the Administration reported $300 billion in gross tariff collections.

The President used those tariffs to negotiate new trade deals with countries representing two-thirds of the global economy. In the process, he opened their markets, increased their purchases of U.S. energy, farm produce, and goods, supported industries vital to national security, and made companies begin building factories here.

19. He began breaking China’s rare-earth chokehold.

China dominates the minerals and magnets inside everything from smartphones to submarines. It controls 92 percent of global rare-earths refining. That’s not free trade: It’s a strategic hostage situation.

Trump’s Pentagon partnered with MP Materials to expand American rare-earth separation and magnet production, backed by long-term purchases and a domestic price floor. He also made deals with allied nations to bring their own production and refining online.

20. He created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve — and made America the center of digital finance.

Trump created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by ordering the government to keep, rather than auction off, Bitcoin forfeited in criminal and civil cases. He also championed and signed the GENIUS Act, America’s first national framework for dollar-backed stablecoins, replacing Biden’s war on crypto with rules establishing global leadership and dollar dominance.

A stablecoin is a digital dollar that anyone with a smartphone can hold and spend, anywhere on Earth, without all the expensive banking fees. Under Trump’s law, the companies issuing those coins must back them with safe dollar assets, especially short-term U.S. Treasuries. So as stablecoins spread, they expand the dollar’s reach and dominance, even in countries with strict currency controls.

In short: instead of depending on the goodwill of foreign central banks, America can distribute the dollar system directly to billions of people and businesses.

21. He launched the AI Action Plan and Genesis Mission.

Trump’s AI Action Plan attacks the energy, permitting, infrastructure, and regulatory bottlenecks that could hand this century’s most important technology to China. Genesis brings federal data, national labs, supercomputers, and private AI companies together to accelerate discovery. So far, the Energy Department has secured more than $800 million in partner commitments.

22. He restored the Moon to the center of American national strategy.

Trump ordered America back to the Moon by 2028, with initial elements of a permanent base at its strategically vital South Pole by 2030. He also directed development of space-based nuclear power and nuclear rockets, and greater use of America’s unmatched commercial-space industry.

The Moon is the high ground of twenty-first-century industry, science, logistics, and defense — the first great arena of Astropolitics. Trump gave America the means to beat China and make the future free.

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Trump Reasserted American Power Around the World

23. He brought American hostages home.

By March 2026, the Administration had secured the release of 105 detained Americans. Marc Fogel came home after years in a Russian prison. George Glezmann came home after two years in Taliban captivity. So did prisoners held by Hamas, Belarus, Venezuela, and others.

24. He replaced foreign aid with investment and trade.

For a century, Washington measured compassion by how many dollars it spent, regardless of the often abysmal results. Trump put a stop to that: his “Trade Over Aid” doctrine offers not a handout but investment, markets, infrastructure, and partnership.

The December 2025 agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a perfect example. It tied American investment to secure critical-mineral supply chains. This creates Congolese jobs and infrastructure while rewarding American investors and securing American supply chains. It also rescues impoverished Third World countries from Chinese Communist debt traps.

25. He launched a $76.6 billion American undersea buildup — and began rebuilding the shipyards to sustain it.

China is on track to outnumber the U.S. submarine fleet by 2030. Biden did nothing about it. But in July 2026, Trump’s Navy awarded contracts for five Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines and nine Block VI Virginia-class attack submarines. The package totals $76.6 billion — an historic contract allowing shipbuilders to expand production lines and train skilled workers.

The President also ordered plans for a fifth Navy shipyard — the first new one in more than 80 years — along with acquisition, workforce, and repair reforms.

Now Act Like It Matters

Trump produced all of these “25 more” accomplishments in just a year and a half, while also accumulating that earlier Top 25 achievements list, accomplishments so consequential that these didn’t make the original cut.

The Republican Party’s greatest political problem this fall is not a lack of victories. It’s that too many Republicans have no idea what — or how much — they’ve accomplished.

It’s up to each of us to tell our story. Donald Trump is delivering great things, whether or not heaven on earth has broken out quite yet. Do the work, send him the team he needs to finish the job, and then get ready for 2028.

Take the time to learn at least five of these victories. Share this list with someone who needs it. Take friends to the polls. And vote as though the most consequential Presidency in modern history depends on what you do.

Because it does.

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