“I will very simply put America first.”
-President Donald J. Trump
“Start spending on security for the northern border. Pay your 2% to NATO. Stop sending fentanyl from China over the border into the United States or you’re going to face tariffs.”
-Kevin O’Leary translates Trump’s WEF speech for Canada
“The Fourteenth Amendment provides for equal rights and equal protection of the laws. If you want more than that, then you are no longer talking about rights, but about special privileges.”
-Thomas Sowell
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”
-Ayn Rand
“Many white liberals have adopted blacks as mascots, in order to ‘make a statement’ against American society. But mascots are only symbols, and their well-being is seldom a top priority.”
-Thomas Sowell
Democrats Play Games with the President’s Cabinet: On Jan. 20, 2009, Democrats confirmed SEVEN of Obama’s nominees. On January 20, 2025, the Democrats voted to ONLY confirm ONE of President’s Trump nominees.
The nominees have the votes to be confirmed; however, for petty partisan gamesmanship, the Democrats are obstructing the President’s picks.
Petty… just stalling for the sake of politics. That’s why they LOST the elections.
President Trump on Day One: A compilation from Stephen Moore…
– Federal hiring freeze
– Federal back to work order
– Regulation freeze
– Pause on all foreign aid funding
– End government censorship
– Reverse all of Biden’s anti-energy regulations
– Withdraw from Paris climate treaty
– Withdraw from World Health Organization
– End Green New Deal programs
– End EV mandates and gas appliance bans
– Withdraw from OECD minimum tax agreement
– End federal DEI/equity programs – move to merit-based hiring
Birthright Citizenship: “Beyond the legal arguments there is a pressing moral argument about citizenship and nationhood that lies at the heart of our current debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. The moral argument engages a different and arguably more important set of questions. What is an American? Who is America for? What is the purpose of immigration? What do immigrants or would-be immigrants owe to the native-born population?”
A great read… the last article in today’s newsletter.
Read more below and follow me on X & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
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Saul’s News Weekly Rewind Video
This Week: Senate Leader Thune vows to get President Trump’s cabinet picks over the finish line, Sen Katie Britt wants to finish the wall, and the Secret Service gets a new director!
Trump’s ‘shock and awe’: Forget first 100 days, new president shows off frenetic pace in first 100 hours
Trump teased at his inauguration that things would ‘change very quickly’ with his return to the White House. He wasn’t kidding.
Buckle up.
President Donald Trump is back in the White House and moving at warp speed.
In his inauguration address, the new president vowed that things across the country would “change starting today, and it will change very quickly.”
And moments later, White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich took to social media to tease, “Now, comes SHOCK AND AWE.”
They weren’t kidding.
Trump signed an avalanche of executive orders and actions in his first eight hours in office, which not only fulfilled major campaign trail promises, but also allowed the returning president to flex his executive muscles as well as settle some longstanding grievances.
The president immediately cracked down on immigration, moved towards a trade war with top allies and adversaries, reversed many policies implemented by former President Biden, including scrapping much of the previous administration’s federal diversity actions and energy and climate provisions.
President Trump’s Revolutionary Inaugural
As Callista and I sat in the Rotunda listening to President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address, I realized that it was among the most revolutionary inaugural addresses in American history. If President Trump achieves the great changes he described in those 30 minutes, he will be the most consequential president since Abraham Lincoln.
This morning, I read President Thomas Jefferson’s first and second inaugural addresses (1801, 1805), President Andrew Jackson’s first inaugural (1829), and President Franklin D Roosevelt’s first inaugural (1933). All are well worth reading.
President Jefferson did an astonishing job in his first address explaining the importance of the peaceful transfer of power – and the obligations of citizens to respect each other if the system is going to work. Jefferson helped found the Democratic-Republican party (later to evolve into the Democratic Party) to compete with the Federalist Party. It was a daring and difficult thing to do. The world was being shaken by the brutality and bloodshed of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries had guillotined the king and queen and hundreds of aristocrats. They then began guillotining the people they disliked in their own ranks. That revolution finally burned out when Napoleon Bonaparte used military force and returned France to autocratic government.
Democrats Play For Keeps. It’s Time for Republicans to Do the Same
Above all, my motivation for supporting someone else in the GOP primary was that I didn’t think former President Donald Trump had any chance whatsoever to win the general election. As I’ve written before, I was as sure of this as I’ve ever been sure of any political prediction in my life. I had zero desire to be correct in this prediction though. In fact, as the election results solidified I was elated to be wrong.
But more than that, I also felt a sense of profound relief. Relief as a columnist and online pundit that I would be able to continue to express my opinions relatively free and uncensored. Relief as a father that at least some of the woke nonsense trying to brainwash my kids may be dialed back a notch or two. Relief as a business owner that the economy will get better and the regulatory environment will ease. Relief as a homeowner that interest rates might go down. Relief as a citizen that my right to defend myself and my family won’t be impeded. Relief as a Christian that my religious liberty will be protected. Relief as an American that our country is in good hands and we are much less likely to get into a pointless foreign war…
…So, while we should enjoy this victory, the last thing we should allow ourselves to feel is complacent. We all know Democrats play for keeps. We need to find a way to do the same. We have one chance, a Providential chance at that given the tremendous odds Trump faced, to turn this country around. Blow it, and we likely won’t get another.
The 21 people in Trump world you need to know
They include longtime Trump loyalists, newcomers and an array of friends and donors.
Donald Trump is back. And he’s brought a cadre of familiar, and not so familiar, faces with him.
The Trump 2.0 brain trust isn’t wholly dissimilar from Trump 1.0, including the longtime loyalists who stood beside the president through his Florida exile and his Manhattan courtroom days as well as an array of friends and donors who have long traveled the Mar-a-Lago circuit.
But it also features an array of newcomers who proved their mettle, and loyalty, on the 2024 trail by using their platform, or their dollars, to support the MAGA cause — and reflect the broad coalition the president now helms.
These are the people Trump dials up at all hours of the day both to gab and get their counsel, or are in close physical proximity to him. They’re the people who will have his ear as he enters his second four-year term as president with a robust policy agenda that includes mass deportations, expansive tariffs — and maybe trying to buy Greenland.
American Power
Donald Trump’s guests said a lot about American power.
What makes America great and unique? Obviously, the baseline is the founding documents and associated freedoms that we as Americans enjoy. One only has to look to England where freedom of speech is no longer guaranteed online or outdoors. In Australia, they took away the citizens’ guns. Maybe American greatness relates to its beauty and wealth of natural resources. That plays a part as do the people, but other countries also enjoy natural beauty and resources. When one thinks of American greatness, he thinks about American power. And that power was reflected in the group of people sitting immediately behind Donald Trump’s family.
If the inauguration had taken place in say the 1950s, then the titans of industry who might have attended would have been the makers of steel and automobiles. The heads of Boeing and “Ma Bell” might also have been in the crowd. But today, those companies are on life support. US Steel is trying to get itself bought by a Japanese rival. The “Big Three” automakers are worth less together than Tesla. AT&T was broken up decades ago, while Boeing’s stock has as much of a problem flying as do some of their planes. The people sitting in the second row behind the president are the face of American power, and I am glad that they were at the formal inauguration. I saw them schmoozing while the heads of Argentina and Italy stood in the back of the room.
Birthright Citizenship: Game On!
The 14th Amendment does not confer automatic citizenship.
Claremont Institute scholars, including me, Ed Erler, Tom West, John Marini, and Michael Anton, President Trump’s incoming Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, have been contending for years—decades, really—that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause does not provide automatic citizenship for everyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances. Other prominent scholars, such as the late University of Texas law Professor Lino Graglia, University of Pennsylvania Professor Rogers Smith, and Yale Law Professor Emeritus Peter Schuck, have come to the same conclusion based on their own extensive scholarly research.
Claremont scholars have made the argument in books, law review articles, congressional testimony, and legal briefs. President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese, even joined one of those briefs, in which we argued against treating enemy combatant Yaser Esam Hamdi as a citizen merely because he had been born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while his father was working in the U.S. on a temporary work visa. Perhaps as a result of our brief in that case, the late Justice Antonin Scalia referred to Hamdi as a “presumed citizen” in his dissenting opinion.
Our argument is straightforward. The text of the 14th Amendment contains two requirements for acquiring automatic citizenship by birth: one must be born in the United States and be subject to its jurisdiction. The proper understanding of the Citizenship Clause therefore turns on what the drafters of the amendment, and those who ratified it, meant by “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Was it merely a partial, temporary jurisdiction, such as applies to anyone (except for diplomats) who are subject to our laws while they are within our borders? Or does it instead apply only to those who are subject to a more complete jurisdiction, one which manifests itself as owing allegiance to the United States and not to any foreign power?
Scott Jennings: Americans are sick of Democrats telling them they’re ‘too stupid to understand’ — but the party just can’t stop
Democratic Senators who stand ready to sink their teeth into Trump’s cabinet picks are totally missing the political message the American people are sending them, one CNN analyst believes.
“They’re fighting the old battle while missing the point of the election — which is that people want change,” Scott Jennings told The Post.
“They’re the party of the status quo establishment, and it’s out of vogue right now. I don’t know what stage of grief this is that the Democrats are in, but it’s ugly.”
Jennings suggested this week’s confirmation hearings of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks — particularly the “theatrical” grilling of Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth — is proof that party leaders are spiraling.
“I was stunned honestly at how unprofessional and hysterical they were,” he said. “The Democratic Party is at such a low point.”
The Bureaucracy Will Fight Trump’s Counterrevolution
The interests of Washington’s permanent bureaucracy are served by the state. It will resist any effort to better serve the public.
One hopes that the incoming Trump administration is prepared to wage bureaucratic wars against the permanent managerial class that runs Washington as presidents come and go. The old saying that personnel is policy is only too true in the swamps of D.C. Presumably, Trump learned that from his first term. He must staff his second term with men and women who have a counterrevolutionary mindset, or else his second term will only accomplish change on the fringes of policy in Washington.
When presidents challenge the bureaucracies, they strike back — as when … holdovers from the Obama administration promoted the Russia collusion hoax.
Counterrevolution is what is necessary to initially reverse the dangerous and damaging policies that extend back to the Obama administration’s efforts to “fundamentally transform America.” But the bureaucratic rot goes back much farther — to FDR’s New Deal. There will be dogged resistance among the managerial class that has infested our government since then.
Normal bureaucratic inertia will compound the difficulties of changing the direction of the ship of state. Richard Nixon tried to tame it with bureaucratic tactics but failed, and paid the price for that failure. Ronald Reagan had some success in the 1980s, but not nearly enough. Trump during his first term and continuing afterward up to this day has been targeted for oblivion by the managerial class (Trump calls it the “deep state”). Unlike Nixon, Trump had both personal wealth and, more important, alternative media that enabled him to survive the wrath of the managerial class.
Trump’s populist movement is a direct threat to the managerial class that has run Washington for nine decades. The great James Burnham in two still very relevant books from the early 1940s — The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943) — and another book written in the late 1950s — Congress and the American Condition (1959) — showed us how the managerial or “ruling” class operates often to stifle the will of elected leaders.
In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham wrote that politics, hence government, “is the struggle for social power among organized groups” of people, and in every society — no matter what the form of government — there is a “socially dominant or ruling class.” In the 1930s and early 1940s, Burnham perceived that the enormous growth of the state with its ever-expanding bureaucracies that exercised more and more control over individuals and private businesses meant that a “new class” was replacing the old capitalist class as the dominant social group in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Democratic infighting is rising as Trump takes center stage
Democrats are finding themselves mired in infighting and schoolyard sniping just as President Trump begins his new term.
Former first lady Jill Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) daughter have taken shots at each other amid sore feelings over the pressure campaign that led former President Biden to drop his White House reelection bid.
At the same time, there are hurt feelings in former Vice President Kamala Harris’s orbit after Biden said he could have defeated Trump. Harris felt slighted, an ally to the former vice president said, and her aides took it personally.
“Who the hell does he think he is?” one Harris aide told The Hill, recalling the sentiment around the Harris bubble about Biden’s comments. “We’re in this mess because of him.”
Biden’s last-minute pardons of his family members have sparked intraparty criticism.
And in Congress, Democrats are battling in the House and Senate over their strategies after their campaign messaging fell flat with the public. Centrists and liberals are pointing fingers on issues such as immigration and transgender rights.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm Spends Final Days in Office Sending Billions to Home State, Defying Inspector General
Energy Department’s inspector general warned that agency officials are not complying with conflict-of-interest rules
The Department of Energy, in one of its final actions under President Joe Biden, earmarked billions of dollars in green energy loans to utility companies based in Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s home state of Michigan—defying the agency’s inspector general, who called on the Biden administration to suspend the loan program amid conflict-of-interest concerns.
Some of Granholm’s largest campaign benefactors during her Michigan gubernatorial campaign were among the companies receiving the hefty last-minute loans.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office announced Thursday that it awarded a staggering $22.9 billion in loan guarantees for utility companies to develop green energy projects across 12 states. More than $14 billion of that total was awarded to DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, the two companies with ties to Granholm, solely for projects in Michigan.
In addition, on Friday afternoon, the office announced a $1.3 billion loan for Michigan Potash Company to help fund a sustainable fertilizer plant in Osceola County, Michigan.
Sorry, Biden’s Pardons Are Much Worse Than Trump’s
On inauguration day, President Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of the approximately 1,550 defendants convicted for their involvement with the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. He also ordered DOJ to dismiss all other pending indictments. Most of them, about 900, were for non-violent misdemeanors such as trespass and disorderly conduct. He granted the clemency all at once, and did not begin with pardoning the non-violent misdemeanor defendants first and then examining the remaining defendants on a case-by-case basis as he and others previously had suggested.
Meanwhile, on the very same day, just 15 minutes before he left office, President Biden issued the last set of his own pardons. He granted them to members of his family, most notably his brothers, sister, and in-laws, as well as to members of his administration such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley, and even to political supporters like the congressional January 6 committee members. Biden’s pardons followed thousands of pardons he issued this month to what he claimed were non-violent federal offenders and commutations of virtually all federal death penalties.
Many Democrats and media outlets have criticized Trump’s mass clemency for the January 6 defendants, even as they casually ignored President Biden’s. But let’s put aside the hypocrisy for a moment to examine the real differences between the two sets of pardons, regardless of one’s views of their merits.
First, Biden granted pardons and commutations to more than 8,000 individuals, which is more than any other modern president. Thousands of Biden’s clemency grants were to serious criminals, including murderers, child killers, child abusers, and the biggest municipal embezzler in history, Rita Crundwell. Several of the grants benefitted well-connected Democrats. In both 2022 and 2024, Biden abused his pardon power to achieve mass sentencing reductions that Congress refused to pass by law. President Obama did the same thing when he issued mass commutations of drug sentences.
BIDEN-HARRIS ACCOUNTABILITY TRACKER
Since January of 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has dramatically reversed the successes of the Trump-Pence administration. Americans have been forced to watch helplessly as prices everywhere have skyrocketed, an energy crisis has exploded, taxes have increased, our country has capitulated to international bureaucrats, traditional values have been trampled upon…the list goes on and on. Though Americans have felt the unavoidable effects of the Biden-Harris policies, there has never been a comprehensive catalogue of the specific acts that have led to these disastrous results – until now.
Advancing American Freedom’s Biden Accountability Tracker will serve a critical role in holding the Biden-Harris administration accountable for their disturbing and harmful actions by publishing each significant policy decision made, executive action taken, or regulation promulgated by the administration that hurts the American people. Advancing American Freedom is grateful to the many organizations and individuals throughout the conservative movement who are contributors to this tracker.
Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America
Beyond the legal arguments about the 14th Amendment is the moral argument: who is America for, and what makes someone an American?
On his first day in office, President Trump did the country a great service by issuing an executive order rejecting birthright citizenship as a requirement of the 14th Amendment.
Whether Trump’s order will withstand the legal challenges remains to be seen (a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the order on Thursday). But the challenges themselves will force a reckoning on this issue, perhaps even at the Supreme Court.
Such a reckoning is overdue. For far too long we have accepted without question the outlandish idea that every single person born on U.S. soil automatically becomes an American citizen, and that the 14th Amendment somehow mandates this suicidal policy.
I’m not going to do a deep dive into the legal arguments for why the 14the Amendment’s Citizenship Clause doesn’t grant automatic citizenship to everyone born on U.S. soil (for that, see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Suffice to say, it wasn’t until about the middle of the 20th century, amid massive upheavals in American life, that the notion of “birthright citizenship” was adopted — over and against how we had understood the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause since it was adopted in 1868.
Briefly, the legal argument is this: to acquire citizenship, the 14th Amendment requires a person to be born in the United States and be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which means you owe your total allegiance to the United States alone and not some foreign power. In other words, the children of illegal immigrants, or those here on a temporary basis, were not American citizens. That’s what the drafters of the 14th Amendment said at the time and that’s how the Supreme Court understood it when ruling on 14th Amendment-related cases in the decades following ratification.
