Townhall Review | Commentaries

For years now—long preceding the emergence of candidate Trump or now President Trump—I have been making repeated and urgent calls for the rebuilding of our Naval fleet.

The president sees that need as well—He’s made his own call for a 355-ship navy.

But there’s been little to no progress from the Navy in delivering even a bare-bones plan to realize the president’s objective.

That failure could jeopardize the president’s chances for reelection next year.

Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were the most surprising states that turned from supporting President Barack Obama in 2012 to voting for Donald Trump in 2016. Those three states were critical to putting President Trump in the White House. Each one of those states has infrastructure that would have benefited from an active shipbuilding program today.

President Trump may well come face to face with the consequences of his Pentagon leadership’s failure to implement his oft-promised 355-ship Navy.

The Pentagon should be presenting a shipbuilding plan now.

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Liberals have used the courts for decades to carry out their agenda of social change. From Roe vs. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion to the more recent protection of same-sex marriage, courts have become an engine of social change.

The death penalty seems to be the next target for social change, either through the courts or by governors. When the U.S. Department of Justice recently announced it would resume carrying out the federal death penalty, presidential candidate Kamala Harris attacked it as “immoral and deeply flawed” while Joe Biden reversed yet one more long-held position and said it was wrong.

Meanwhile in California, even though voters twice upheld the death penalty, Governor Gavin Newsom has suspended it.

Questions like the death penalty should be decided by the people and their elected representatives, not by elite courts and lone ranger governors who think they know better.

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In 1774, the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, delivered a speech to the electors of Bristol-the people he would represent in the British Parliament. He said: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

In other words, a legislator is not supposed to be a human weather vane—simply following the majority opinion at all times.

The same is true for a chief executive.

Whether you think it is out of hubris or philosophical grounding, President Trump is the most Burkean President since Reagan.

Most of our recent presidents have governed from the back of the parade of public opinion rather than choosing to form it at the front.

If President Trump's example of leading with the judgment he was elected to exercise brings about a renewed understanding of proper governance then Trump will have done our representative republic a great turn.

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This is Albert Mohler for Townhall.com.

Planned Parenthood has announced that the organization is pulling out of the federally-funded Title X programs.

It’s a move that will cost the nation’s largest abortion provider over $280 million a year. It comes after months of speculation that they would withdraw from Title X in response to a change in policy from the Trump administration—an effort on the part of the administration to reduce or eliminate federal funding for abortion and abortion providers.

What that means is that Planned Parenthood is so ardently, adamantly, obsessively committed to abortion that the organization is actively going to forego millions and millions of dollars of taxpayer funding for contraception and other family planning services provided under Title X, in order to prove its deadly commitment to abortion, above all.

Planned Parenthood has finally, honestly, made very clear what its real priorities are, as if we had any doubt. Its first priority is abortion.

And now we know.

I’m Albert Mohler.

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After the testimony of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller effectively imploded its key takeaway that there was no collusion between the president, his campaign or family and Russia during Russia’s 2016 attack on the election, then the mainstream media faced a quandary. What to do next?—to both vent Trump hatred and boost ratings.

In the aftermath of the terrible carnage in El Paso and Dayton, Democrats and their supporters in media hit on a solution: pivot from Trump and Russia and instead talk endlessly about Trump and racism.

Indeed, some of the kookier Democratic candidates for president took to calling the president a white supremacist. 

This pivot fools no one and enrages many, for in fact it has the consequence of branding not just the president but all of his supporters as racists and white supremacists.  

There’s not a hint of truth to that accusation. Playing the race card will be bad for ratings and there’s no doubt the effort from Democrats is bad for the nation.

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Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib previously embarrassed herself by falsifying the history of the Middle East—suggesting Palestinians provided a “welcoming haven” for Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

But every historian acknowledges that local Arab leaders responded to Jewish refugees with murderous attacks, ferocious hatred and unwavering opposition. Now, Tlaib is at it again—with distorted portrayals of her own family history as well the general history of her people.

Israel had nothing to do with her father and grandfather leaving the Middle East: her grandfather fled for Brazil in the 1930s, before Israel was even established. Her late father immigrated to Nicaragua in the early ’60s, when the West Bank and East Jerusalem were still ruled by Arab Jordan, not Israel.

While Tlaib emphasizes the suffering of her family under the so-called “occupation,” it’s worth noting that two generations had already found homes in America before that alleged occupation even began.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat candidate for president, recently warned that the U.S. economy might collapse in the near term.

I’ve recently completed extensive research identifying the conditions that tend to lead to financial collapses—what I call catastrophic losses. It turns out the kinds of environments which tend to lead to them are sudden shifts of policy in an anti-business direction and a weakening of property rights. Excessive taxation and excessive spending are also part of a toxic mix. In other words: Exactly the kind of hard-left turns which are associated with much of the Democratic field.

High taxes, big spending, expansion of government all severely raise the risk of collapse. The U.S. economy is resilient, but it’s not immune to collapse.

We should get serious about spending control and growth promotion because it can happen to us.

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With much fanfare, the New York Times launched “The 1619 Project,” commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first 20 enslaved Africans in Jamestown colony.

The Times misleadingly announced: “Though America did not even exist yet, their arrival marked its foundation, the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.”

This sentence constitutes a dangerous lie, because the new colony in Virginia hardly marked the beginning of the system of slavery but rather the continuation of an ancient, universal system that flourished in some form, everywhere, in 1619.

What made America unique wasn’t slavery, but the freedom and opportunity offered to most of the New World arrivals, resulting—within 150 years—in higher living standards, and more widespread liberty, than anywhere on earth.

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We’ve seen warning signs over the past few months that economic growth is slowing down. Now it’s official: The latest GDP report shows growth in the last quarter at about 2 percent—well below historic averages.

President Trump’s tax cuts kicked in at the beginning of last year. By last summer the economy was booming.

But now the boom’s worn off. The president blames Fed tightening; most economists blame the trade war.

And, it’s hard to ignore the volatility in our policy environment which gives business what it dreads most: huge levels of uncertainty.

There’s a real danger now that the president could enter reelection with a sluggish economy. He should make a hard pivot back to pro-growth policies, leaning on advisors like Larry Kudlow who helped him deliver the boom of 2018.

A growing economy could be the key to delivering a reelection boom for 2020.

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The aftermath of the recent mass murders was a revealing one for today's Democratic Party.

Indeed, almost all the leading Democratic candidates for president chose in the week following the horrors in El Paso and Dayton to pivot their main message from "Trump and Russia" to "Trump and racism." At least five candidates went so far as to brand President Trump as a, believe it or not, white supremacist.

It's repulsive rhetoric. It's the "basket of deplorables" talk on steroids, and it says to every Trump supporter: "You, too, are a white supremacist."

I don't believe Trump is a racist, much less a white supremacist. This sort of rhetoric is incendiary and dangerous. It's also politically self-destructive and so absurd as to be laughable but for its repetition.

But the Democratic candidates do not wish to argue, debate and persuade. They wish to smear and exclude. They have exploited the nation's shock and fear to do so.

They should turn back.

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