Are You Tired of Winning Yet?
Trump scores huge wins, with the biggest trade deal in history and a Lebanon-Israeli peace. And it only gets better from there.
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by Rod D. Martin
June 27, 2026
There’s been an awful lot of winning this week.
FIRST: Just 11 months ago, Donald Trump signed the biggest trade deal in history, with the most historically intransigent of our trading partners. No, not China. Europe.
This week (June 25, 2026), the EU ratified that deal. Even conservatives said it would never happen. They also said Trump’s approach to trade would launch a trade war that would isolate and ultimately cripple, if not destroy, America.
Uh, right.
But that’s only one bit of the “winning” that happened this week:
SECOND: at the same time we were finally balancing our trade with the world’s second largest market (again, not China: Europe), Marco Rubio negotiated peace between Israel and Lebanon.
But it’s way better than just that.
The deal is straightforward: Iran gets booted out of Lebanon, and Lebanon will boot out Hezbollah, taking full control of its own territory and preventing that territory’s use to attack a neighboring state (as required by international law) for the first time in 51 years.
If Hezbollah can actually be removed, it will be the first time Lebanon has had internal peace since the Islamists and Palestinians launched their murderous Lebanese Civil War in 1975. Not because of Israel: because of its own internal factions (oh, and because of the Palestinians, who try to overthrow every country that's stupid enough to let them in).
The deal also includes mutual recognition of sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity. Lebanon has NEVER recognized any of that, not since the day it declared war on Israel in 1948. The Woke Right leaves that part out. Who knows why?
If all proceeds as planned, this likely means full diplomatic relations will be established and Lebanon will join the Abraham Accords.
It also means Hezbollah has nowhere to go. The Lebanese government understands this better than anyone. So lest you miss it, they just signed up for a bloodletting.
THIRD: Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s home state GOP is about to censure him over the SAVE America Act. John Solomon reports:
The South Dakota Republican Party’s Resolutions Committee approved a censure resolution against Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who represents the state.
Grassroots conservative activist Scott Presler, who was in attendance for the vote, shared footage of the committee vote. Their decision sends the resolution to the state party.
The resolution condemns Thune’s failure to pass the SAVE America Act, a marquis voter ID bill that has languished in the upper chamber, despite pressure from President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. Thune has resisted changes to Senate rules to pass the bill without the 60 votes needed to clear the filibuster.
Thune faces reelection in 2028. The vote follows Presler claiming to have been barred from a paid dinner organized by the South Dakota Republican Party.
Trump’s win-loss record for primary endorsements in 2026 has been 298-9. There’s literally nothing like it in history, and it’s better than that when you consider that two of those whom Trump defeated were sitting United States Senators: Bill Cassidy (RINO-LA) and the execrable John Cornyn (RINO-TX). That’s in addition to Thom Tillis (RINO-NC) “retiring” to avoid a Trump-endorsed primary challenger.
Maybe Thune should step up before he’s next. Voter integrity is an 80-20 issue. Just sayin’.
FOURTH: Marjorie Taylor Greene (RINO-GA) and Tucker Carlson (Hamas-Qatar) have announced they’re leaving the Republican Party.
A couple months ago, all we heard was that Tucker, MTG (who somehow made $25 million in her four years “serving” in Congress), Candace Owens, et al. were “the real MAGA” and their views had “already won” and blah blah blah.
Now they’re leaving the Republican Party they were supposedly leading. Which suggests rather strongly that they did not, in fact, win the argument.
It’s important to note: it is characteristic of the Woke Left as well as the Woke Right to claim majority status when that is laughably untrue. They do this to appear stronger than they are and thus persuade you to go along with things you otherwise never would. They learned this lesson from the Bolsheviks (Russian for “majority”) who named themselves that when they had just 3,000 members in all of Russia.
They also dubbed their massively more numerous opponents the “Mensheviks”, which is Russian for “minority”. It stuck, as it does so often in our own Enemedia.
Nothing has changed.
FIFTH: As I’m writing this, Trump is conducting strikes on Iran, in retaliation for a largely unsuccessful Iranian attack on a cargo ship transiting the Strait (no casualties, minor damage).
All our lives, all we’ve heard from American governments is “proportional response”. Trump is not a “proportional” kind of guy. According to CENTCOM, U.S. aircraft are striking missile and drone storage locations, as well as coastal radar sites inside Iran, as part of the retaliatory operation.
We can keep this up for a long, long time.
Too many on both sides of the aisle ran to a microphone to say “Trump lost!” or “Trump surrendered!” But here’s Trump, showing up to a knife fight with a gun as always, enforcing a deal which would be good if it were kept. He’s enforcing that deal, with disproportionate force. As he will continue to do.
And the Iranians will continue to violate it. Which he also knew they would do.
Do you see where this is headed? Try to be smarter than a podcaster.
Trump is buying time for…something. The midterms? Arming and training Reza Pahlavi’s “Immortal Guards”? Allowing Iran to dig a hole so deep that the whole world begs him to finish them? All of the above? You decide.
In the process, he’s providing relief for U.S. consumers going into the summer.
Trump is not moving U.S. forces. They’re still right there, ready.
The Iran gambit is far from over. Nor was it over in 2025 after Fordow. Betting against Trump, or calling the game early, is a big mistake.
Still, by sheer magnitude, the EU Trade Deal is the news of the week. And so, I have decided to republish below my recap of that deal and what it means. Trust me, you’ll be glad you re-read it. You won’t get this stuff anywhere else. — RDM
The EU Trade Deal: Are You Tired of Winning Yet?
by Rod D. Martin
July 28, 2025
Are you tired of winning yet? Clearly President Trump isn’t.
Yesterday, the President clinched a supposedly impossible trade deal with the European Union. And the terms are pretty extraordinary.
Previously, Europe has charged America four times the tariff on autos that we charged them. They have long blocked most sales of farm goods. And since the start of the war, they have sent twice as much money to Moscow for energy as to Kiev for military aid, effectively subsidizing the Russian war machine while failing to purchase that energy from Texas and Louisiana, an obviously more secure and more mutually supportive option.
These are allies?
Trump just changed all of that. There will now be a flat 15% tariff in both directions on most goods. Europe’s markets will now be almost as open to the U.S. as ours are to theirs. And since I said “almost”, Europe will also “buy down” its gargantuan trade surplus with the U.S., in two ways:
$600 billion in new direct investment in U.S. manufacturing, and
$750 billion in energy purchases from the U.S. over the next three years alone.
In Dallas, there was much rejoicing.
Now you have to understand, this is all on top of NATO’s vastly increased commitments last month. For decades, the 31 non-U.S. “allies” paid just 29.5% of the cost of defending the alliance; the United States picked up 70.5% of the bill.
This might make sense if our European “partners” weren’t on the front line of any likely conflict. But they are. It also might be more reasonable if they weren’t all wealthy countries in their own right, or had recently been flattened as they were in the immediate aftermath of World War II when the U.S. agreed to such things.
Today, especially given Europe’s massive subsidy to Russia and equally annoying moralizing toward a U.S. that’s sent three times as much aid to Ukraine as all of them combined, none of this is in the same realm as “reasonable”. And Trump said so. Loudly. In his first term, he pushed them to spend 2% of GDP on defense, still a paltry sum compared to the U.S. but vastly more than they had been spending. Last month, with the Russia war in its third year, he got them to agree to 5%, which is in effect a 250% increase in NATO defense spending, not to mention battlefield effectiveness.
Were our “allies” effective before? Well let’s put it this way. The United Kingdom has twice as many admirals as warships. And until recently, Germany was training infantrymen with broomsticks because they didn’t have enough rifles.
Trump forced the issue. He made NATO into partners, not dependents. And now he’s done the same thing with trade.
The Disgraced Opposition
In both cases, Democrats, RINOs, and NeverTrumpers (but I repeat myself) told us — in the most hysterical possible terms — that not only was all this impossible, but that the exactly opposite would happen:
Trump was unalterably opposed to NATO
His purpose in pushing our “partners” to spend more on the collective defense was to shatter the alliance
His trade policy would bring recession, if not outright depression, to the U.S.
His tariffs would provoke the whole world to unite in a trade bloc against us
We would be isolated militarily and economically
And all of this (at least some thought) was because Trump was “Putin’s puppet”
Oddly, none of these people seemed that worked up over Joe Biden actually being Xi Jinping’s puppet. But that’s a different essay.
The real problem with all these people — the many who actually meant it, not the lying liars like Obama, Brennan, and Comey who knew at least the last bit was false — is that they, the Beltway Establishment, the Uniparty as it were, are the cowards on the playground. If there’s a weaker kid, yeah, they’ll rough him up and impose their will. But if there’s a bigger bully, or anyone who looks threatening for whatever improbable reason, they cower before that kid and give him their lunch money. “The fear of the thing is often worse than the thing itself.”
Naturally, people like that loathe the guy who stands up to the bully: they fear the consequences of resistance, yes, but they also fear the humiliation of being shown to be the cowards they are.
In Washington, add two additional elements: groupthink and inertia. You don’t get invited to many nice parties if you disagree with the monoculture. And you don’t like being questioned when you’ve spent your entire career writing papers no one read on the same tired thesis, especially if it becomes obsolete. Or worse, if it was always wrong.
So of course they hated Donald Trump, who openly said they were all idiots, who they all promised was a joke who could never get elected, and then started proving them wrong. He disagreed with the consensus, so he was not only a moron and a fool, he was a threat, to everything they believed in and to their own self-worth.
And now that’s all undone. The unmasking, as it were, is complete.
Trump was not, in fact, unalterably opposed to NATO: quite the opposite, he demanded it go to the gym and bulk up so it could fight alongside us as true partners, a capability highly likely to deter whatever war might come.
This should have been obvious, just as it should have been obvious that anyone who cared about NATO should desire this course and this outcome. But groupthink and inertia are powerful indeed.
Trump’s trade policy has not, in fact, brought recession, much less depression, and not even Jay Powell’s grossly politicized Fed can change that. Instead, it has opened countries across the world to U.S. products, countries that had hindered or outright banned our goods, well, always (and make no mistake: a 280% tariff on U.S. dairy doesn’t mean Ottawa collects more tax revenue, but rather that American dairy farmers can’t sell in Canada).
Why should countries have access to the biggest consumer market on Earth if they won’t give us that same access? I’m a free trader, but how is that not obvious?
No, Trump’s tough stance did not unite the world against us, on either front. Japan and China were never going to form a military alliance. Europe was never going to “go it alone”, no matter what they said. And likewise, Europe could never absorb all the Chinese goods shut out of the U.S. market if Trump’s 145% tariff effectively embargoed China, and neither could anyone else, nor any collection of anyone else.
One wonders if denizens of the Beltway ever took math.
And since this was always obvious, all of them needed a “reason” for their absurdities — which really came down to needing a justification for not resetting both trade and defense for the 35 years, their entire careers, since the end of the Cold War. Obama’s Russiagate fabrication served quite well: “Trump is destroying America because Putin has something on him!” Once that bit of hyperventilation took hold, no policy debate was required.
The Most Dramatic Six Months Since the End of World War II
If I were to attempt to address all of the incredible events of the last six months, I would end up writing a book. I’ve already done that: it’s called Essays on the Counterrevolution. You can get that here:
[June 2026 Update: And look for my forthcoming Trump’s New World Re-Order, soon to be on sale in bookstores everywhere. — RDM]
Nevertheless, a quick look at the world remade is in order.
Trump’s EU deal is the biggest trade deal in world history.
Trump played chicken with China…and won: China agreed not only to open its markets to U.S. goods, but also to a total 55% tariff on Chinese imports while charging the U.S. just 10% (it can bring those down if it enforces U.S. intellectual property rights and stops the flow of fentanyl). That’s called a “surrender”.
Far from isolating America, Trump made deals with China’s neighbors isolating it, by placing enormous tariffs on goods transshipped through them from China, and by making it far more desirable to trade with the U.S.
Trump negotiated an enormous, nearly-free trade deal with the UK that gives the U.S. veto power over Chinese investment in Britain.
Trump renewed Middle Eastern alliances and came home with trillions in new investment.
Trump (with Netanyahu) wiped out Iran’s nuclear program, thus securing the entire region and showing who’s boss, all without deploying a single soldier.
Oh, and in his spare time, he negotiated a ceasefire between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, brought peace to a 30-year conflict between Rwanda and the Congo (and got an enormous rare earths deal in the process), and put ever-escalating pressure on Russia to resolve its conflict with Ukraine.
As Rush Limbaugh would have said, see I told you so.
We are on the brink of a world in which American manufacturing and energy exports are dominant, NATO and its Asian allies (including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and even India) are two-to-three times stronger than ever before, Iran is no longer a threat (and might be a friendly constitutional monarchy under Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi), Israel is secure in its borders and allied with half the Middle East (including Saudi Arabia and even Syria), and China is sufficiently contained that we avoid any meaningful likelihood of war.
It’s happening, right before our eyes. Turns out, defanging the Deep State mattered to more than just America. A lot more.
And that’s just the foreign policy landscape.
Donald Trump isn’t just courageous, and unflappable, and insightful. He’s a force of nature. No one except Elon Musk gets half as much done.
And this is just the end of the first six months.
Very encouraging on every front.