If you’ve ever played speed chess, then you can appreciate what President Trump is about to do to “official” Washington. This won’t be like 2017, when the president did everything he could to work amicably with House and Senate Republicans. This time, you either get on the “Trump Train” or kindly throw yourself from the back car. There’s no time to waste, and the president won’t be slowing down for stragglers.
After his first election, President Trump arrived in D.C. with Republican majorities in Congress, too. He expected that the people who had promised to repeal Obamacare for seven years would have a legislative package ready for him to sign into law. He expected that Republicans who had campaigned on securing the border for four decades would be prepared to do what it takes to achieve that goal for the American people. His expectations were met with the disappointing reality of squishy Republican backbones and Uniparty backstabbing.
While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell informed President Trump which of his potential nominees would get Republican support (McConnell’s wife, for instance, would have no problem winning confirmation), House Speaker Paul Ryan told him that there was just no money to build a border wall (because Ryan had already spent trillions supporting Barack Obama’s policy agenda). Both Republicans took turns publicly laughing at Trump for arriving in D.C. with the misguided belief that the work of government could be anything other than slow. McConnell and Ryan wasted most of President Trump’s first year in office bickering about how best to dismantle Obamacare before finally throwing up their hands in feigned exasperation after Senator John McCain saved the Democrats’ costly expansion of government-directed medicine with his final “screw you” vote.
On the other hand, McConnell and Ryan took the Russia collusion hoax very seriously. Although Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Brennan, Jim Comey, and numerous other coup-plotters inside the Intelligence Community had created that fantasy as a mechanism for illegally spying on candidate Trump before his election and as a mechanism for overthrowing President Trump after his inauguration, congressional Republicans treated the matter as if it deserved their utmost attention. McConnell and Ryan both knew that the allegations against Trump were ridiculous, but they eagerly assisted Democrats in their efforts to paint the president as a Russian spy. Why? Because holding Trump’s fate in their hands gave them power over his presidency.
President Trump entered office in 2017 beholden to no one. No secret billionaires had funded his campaign. No foreign governments had secretly supported his run for office. Unlike other politicians who are easily controlled once the Intelligence Community digs up enough dirt from their pasts, President Trump has never had a problem showing the public exactly who he is. How do you manipulate a man who has few secrets and whose peccadilloes are already widely known? You make him “Putin’s puppet” and enlist Republican leaders to legitimize the farcical intelligence operation. With “friends” like McConnell and Ryan, President Trump was surrounded by enemies.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can play that phony card only once. There will not be another round of Uniparty and Intelligence Community hijinks engineered to divide the American people and stifle the MAGA agenda. The “news” organizations that ran Russia collusion stories for years have exposed themselves as mere propagandists for the State. The credibility of the media, Intelligence Community, FBI, DOJ, and Uniparty lies in tatters. The “Trump Train” has left the station, and it’s picking up speed.
Heads must roll. People who fabricated the Russia collusion hoax must pay a price. Because nobody ever suffered for inflicting this fraud upon the American people, the worst offenders just continued offending. We got the fake quid-pro-quo Ukraine impeachment (which was designed to cover up real quid-pro-quo crimes of the Biden Crime Family and other powerful political-crime families in D.C. that rake in a great deal of money from foreign regimes). We got the J6 psy-op in which demonstrators protesting for free and fair elections were condemned as “insurrectionists.” We got the unending lawfare from Democrat prosecutors and Merrick Garland’s Department of (in)Justice designed to imprison Trump, his friends, and his voters. These crimes against the American people will not stop until the perpetrators are brought to justice. Conspirators, fraudsters, and government employees who used their offices to persecute innocent Americans for their political beliefs must be held accountable.
While President Trump and his new administration sort through the nest of vipers in D.C., they will keep the guilty preoccupied. It is difficult to respond to the president’s constant moves when you’re spending fifteen hundred dollars an hour on legal representation. Expect President Trump to show Establishment Republicans just how much can be accomplished in Washington when the overarching command is simple: Let’s get s— done.
Illegal immigration, inflation, crime, economic malaise, bureaucratic regulation, “woke” indoctrination, censorship, and the growing likelihood of WWIII are the consequential issues that broadened and strengthened President Trump’s MAGA coalition in 2024. Americans feel that their country is vulnerable and in decline. They overwhelmingly believe that their country is on the wrong track. They are desperate for the federal government to take their worries seriously. With their votes, they have spoken loudly. President Trump has been given a mandate to execute on his policy initiatives and to prove to the American people that their voices have been heard.
President Trump will give the Deep State a magic show. As is his wont, he will move fast, change directions, and keep his opponents off guard. He will juggle numerous balls in the air and still surprise his adversaries with a rabbit from under his hat. Pay attention.
President Trump is serious about mass deportations. The American people cannot be made to feel unsafe in their own communities. Expect to see the Obama-Biden handouts for illegal aliens come to an end. Expect to see violent criminals rounded up. Expect to see border security reactivated. Expect to see the completion of a border wall. And expect international cartels currently in control of the U.S. border to be designated as terrorist organizations. The old way of doing things is over. Those who have been destroying America with fentanyl, human-trafficking, and organized crime have no place to hide. Their days are numbered.
Bureaucratic regulations operate like hidden taxes that increase the cost of necessary purchases, such as food and fuel. When agencies issue new rules, they steal liberty from the American people and empower themselves with additional authorities. Expect President Trump to send in the equivalent of several Special Operations Forces to wage war on the administrative state. Their mission is to slash red tape, battle the bureaucratic Leviathan, liberate markets from undue restraints, and return freedom to the American people.
Expect President Trump to return to tariffs as his preferred tool for battling international foes while increasing economic opportunities for America’s middle class. Wall Street hates tariffs because multinational companies do not benefit from “America First” policies. Main Street, however, benefits greatly. When the cost of doing business overseas is greater than the cost of producing goods in America, domestic manufacturing rises. When foreign regimes respond with their own tariffs, it becomes more expensive for American-produced food and energy to be exported. Those supplies stay home, and domestic prices decrease. Expect President Trump to accomplish through deregulation and tariffs something that the “experts” say is impossible: deflation in the United States.
President Trump sees America’s natural resources and the American people’s unmatched ingenuity as the country’s greatest weapons. He will unleash domestic productivity and, by doing so, use the nation’s economic strengths as both sword and shield against foreign enemies. The rabbit under his hat is the prospect of global peace.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
I eagerly await for the curtain to go up and the hammers to fall.