OPINION:
Republican voters clearly embrace Make America Great Again principles, including reshoring U.S. factories, securing borders, strategic energy dominance, an end to endless wars, draining the swamp in Washington, and fair elections.
If this MAGA center holds, a Republican supermajority coupled with MAGA-leaning independents and Trump Democrats will deliver a Republican landslide.
Democratic strategists’ best chance of winning is to turn MAGA into a four-letter word associated with domestic terrorism and extremism. President Biden used this messaging with surprising success in the 2022 congressional elections, and Republican strategists must counter it by more clearly articulating “The True Meaning of Trump’s MAGA,” as my new book by that name describes it.
While normally I would shamelessly urge you to buy this book (a 99-cent Amazon Kindle steal), instead, I recommend former Navy SEAL Jack Carr’s new thriller, “Only the Dead,” as a far more entertaining grassroots MAGA primer.
Mr. Carr transcends his genre with razor-sharp prose offering a pitch-perfect MAGA view of America’s domestic fissures and geopolitical threats. Of the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in which Mr. Carr so bravely fought, Mr. Carr’s protagonist offers this pure MAGA poetry: “They failed you and those they sent to fight. For 20 years. They filled the coffers of their defense industry allies, enjoying dinners and drinks with lobbyists, none of whom had the balls to step into the breach.”
From an Afghan peasant’s view, Mr. Carr reveals it was not just venal lobbyists sending America’s “paper tiger” to defeat. It was a “blind” military command making colossal blunders, e.g., opening a “second front” against Afghan poppy growers, which “turned more of the populace against” the U.S.
On the folly of Ukraine, a new endless war strongly opposed by MAGA, “U.S. ‘sanctions’ had the opposite purported effect,” strengthening the ruble and turning a Russian trade deficit into a massive surplus. Ironically, “because of their dependence on Russian energy,” the European Union transfers “more cash to Russia to fund the special operation in Ukraine than they [send] to Ukraine to fight the Russian military.”
Mr. Carr further illuminates treachery I’ve worried about since al Qaeda made billions “speculating” in the oil futures market prior to its 9/11 attack. It’s not speculation if you can manipulate the market by bombing the twin towers.
In advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carr similarly describes this obscenely profitable “managed speculation”: Anticipating an oil price shock following the invasion, Russian “oligarchs, senior politicians, intelligence directors, military leaders, and other friends of the Russian president” loaded up early on “out of the money” futures.
To evade anticipated U.S. sanctions, Russia sold futures contracts to China and India. Russia then made billions more by shorting oil prices at their peak as Mr. Putin flooded the world market and U.S. sanctions collapsed.
In MAGA Nation, we can only wonder why Mr. Biden’s Pentagon, Treasury Department and National Security Council aren’t investigating.
On the need for secure borders and strategic energy dominance, Mr. Carr laments how easy it is for terrorists from around the world to penetrate our borders even as he bemoans American politicians who spend “money they [don’t] have, throwing gasoline on the coals of inflation” while ignoring an increasing “dependence on foreign energy.”
As one Russian villain channeling MAGA’s Steve Bannon notes, America is “a nation in decline” that has “given up on national sovereignty, weaponized their justice system, politicized their military, and lost faith in their elections.”
As for the very real “Deep Swamp,” fictional Congressman Douglas Linden rails on “the lying, the doublespeak, the insider trading” and “family members” of politicians caught red-handed taking millions from foreign governments hostile to the U.S. Yet he cynically trades campaign contributions for legislative support of lawsuit immunity for Big Pharma vaccines.
Mr. Linden even acknowledges this Mike Lindell fair elections wisdom: “If you wanted to make elections more secure, you would get rid of the machines and require identification to vote.” But if you speak such an obvious truth, the “Twitter mobs” call you a “racist” and a “fascist.” So the congressman is “more than happy to take multiple votes from the same person.”
Mr. Carr’s plea for a strong American manufacturing base in the interests of the Trumpian mantra “economic security IS national security” harks back to my Trump White House MAGA days: Most products “come from China, the precursor drugs for the antibiotics also come from China. Total [U.S.] dependence on their enemies only requires one additional step: microchips… [and that means taking] Taiwan.”
To this “take Taiwan” end is a Russian plot to frame Iran for nuking Israel. Russia’s gambit is designed to divert America’s focus away from both the conflict in Ukraine and a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with a new endless Iranian war. Russia’s goal: Spawn a new world order featuring a lethal Chinese-Russian axis with ownership of over 25% of global wheat exports, control of a significant percentage of the world’s energy and food supply, and the ability to starve and freeze out the West.
That it takes a Navy SEAL to illustrate MAGA principles so insightfully speaks as much to Mr. Carr’s blue-collar brilliance as it does to the failure of elitist American politics. We in MAGA want only peace and prosperity for all Americans by following MAGA principles. This must be the winning Republican message in 2024.
• Peter Navarro served as former President Donald Trump’s White House manufacturing czar and chief China hawk. This column first appeared at http://peternavarro.substack.com.
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