I am reminded of an important lesson I received as a kid, when a friend of my father spent weeks trying to help my dad figure out what was wrong with our family car.  For weeks on Saturdays, I would watch these two inexperienced men attempt to fix a jammed motor.  My dad would pay his friend for the help, but it wasn’t until later that a real mechanic informed my dad someone had poured syrup into the gas tank, which caused sugar to expand within the pistons of the engine, thereby disabling our already old VW station wagon.  The culprit was my dad’s friend.  Imagine that!  A guy shows up and helps fix something he caused, and takes money for doing so, even though he’d known all along what he’d done.

I never saw the friend after that, and his wife, who would often stop in and visit on occasion, was also never to be seen again.

The lesson I learned was that even your friends can screw you.  I also learned that people like to create failure for their opposition when they know they are going to lose.  Joe Biden is doing this right now, and what he is doing will most assuredly ail Trump if/when he wins the 2024 election.  Biden knows that Trump has a good shot at winning, so the president is using his time left and deliberately pouring syrup into the engine of the White House.

Within less than eleven months, and if nothing else goes wrong, Trump, as the newly (re-)elected president, will inherit no less than three wars, a flailing economy, a 34-trillion-dollar federal deficit, high crime rates across the country, a broken Southern border that has spilled at least nine million new people into the country without being vetted, and a Deep State that doesn’t want him to succeed.  If that isn’t pancake syrup gutting up an engine, then I don’t know what is.

I might even question Trump’s sanity — or his courage — to want to get anywhere near this calamitous effort of trying to fix what Biden has broken.

Biden is a disgrace.  No other president in history has done more to cripple a country than the former senator from Delaware: devaluing the dollar, raising energy prices, forcing people to stay home, firing workers who showed up because they wouldn’t take a government-mandated experimental vaccine, causing massive instability in Ukraine through failed diplomacy, leaving thousands of men, women, and children behind in Afghanistan, who, because of his failed policy, now live under tyranny and death.  Biden’s failure to protect Israel by doing business with Iran cannot be forgotten.  His encouragement of sanctions of immoral health practices — even encouraging and supporting genital mutilation among “trans” youth — is criminal.  Pandering to every progressive pipe dream, no matter the cost, including the inefficient desire to be carbon-neutral without any credible science or benefit to support his goals, is psychotic.  All of this adds up to a country that has been mortally wounded, with blow after blow of egregious and sociopathic leadership.  This is the legacy of the Biden presidency.

Can the Damage Be Repaired?

We call in the expert surgeon, Donald Trump, and expect him to work the miracle of reviving the patient.  We hope his surgical team is equally supportive of his desire to save the patient, but one cannot be too sure.  Sometimes you can be handed the wrong scalpel, the patient might lose oxygen, or perhaps your assistant despises you and will deliberately sabotage you just to make you look bad, just like the guy who poured syrup down my dad’s gas tank.

This is Trump’s reality.  He must not only prepare for the worst, but also be mindful that he is likely surrounded by people who want him to fail.

Trump’s team — his inner circle, if you will — must comprise competent members who truly share his vision of remedial care.  They must be consumed with but one desire: to get the machine running and to root out the impurities.  Javier Milei, the newly elected president of Argentina, has made headlines showing that it is possible to reduce the waste of big government, something Trump did not do in his first term.  He needs to make it a top priority this time around.

First Priorities

The Deep State are the people who have permanent government jobs, and who would never allow an elected executive to come in and dictate their careers.  And it is the largesse of the Deep State that has made our government inefficient; it is why the taxpayers are 33 trillion dollars in debt, a debt that will eventually destroy the U.S. economy.  Trump needs to bring a machete.

Next are reforms in the judicial and intelligence departments.  This is the slimy liquid that slowly creeps into the crevices of human life and rips away our constitutionally protected right to be left alone.  Biden and Obama have weaponized our justice and intelligence agencies to go after political opponents — even the American people who protest.  They may not be the original devisers of weaponized government, but this cancerous abuse of power has only metastasized over the last two decades with them in charge. 

What Hillary Clinton caused by her Steele dossier is exactly why Trump must gut these agencies and bring people to justice who abused the citizens of our county, many of whom remain in jail today because they showed up to a protest.  Americans will never again trust our justice and law-enforcement agencies unless they are reformed.  Trump was too nice the last time, and I believe most Americans would support him righting the wrongs of sociopathic leaders (and their henchmen) who turned our country into a banana republic.

I also have no doubt that Trump will reverse those energy policies Biden crippled in 2021 during his first days in office.  Once America regains its energy footing again, this will draw lifeblood from Putin, weakening his position in tearing Ukraine apart, and Trump will use our energy superiority to leverage peace in the region.  Trump will save Ukrainian men so they can go back home to their wives — men who do not share Biden’s zeal for destroying Russian leadership at any cost.

I also believe that American energy independence and production will weaken Iran.  By reinstating sanctions on countries who do business with Iran, Trump will rein in the ayatollahs’ ability to sponsor terrorism in the region.

We will see wars ending under a Trump presidency, and this will reduce European tensions.  In short, even those who disdain Trump today will benefit from his presidency, just as they experienced in his first term.  We must give no quarter to the ideologies (and idealogues) that work against the American people.  We must deny and defend against those who want to wokify this country into a socialist hellhole, run by demagogues and Marxists who use ESG and DIE to extort American resources and make us weaker as a nation in a world filled with tyrants.

Regarding fixing the immigration problem Biden created by putting Kamala in charge, it will be Trump bringing the hammer down on employers who hire people who are not U.S. citizens.  Nothing will send people packing more effectively than a lack of job opportunities.  And it will only take the strike of a pen to ensure that ten million asylum-seekers Joe let in don’t become permanent welfare recipients.  There are many ways to remove illegal aliens besides “rounding them up.”  Once communities become sick and tired of the crime and lack of affordable housing, Trump will have no trouble getting Congress to enact stringent immigration policy that will restore order to our borders. 

On reducing crime, once Trump is back in office and local law enforcement officers feel they have a system that has their back, recruitment will go up.  Police will be back on the streets fighting crime and putting criminals back in jail, something the Democrats hate but the people will love because they feel safe again.

The only question is how much the engine has been damaged by President Biden.  America is a resilient country.  I’d like to believe that no one person can do so much damage to a country as great as ours, but gosh darn it if Biden didn’t try like hell.  We don’t yet see the damage under the hood.

History will not be kind to Biden’s legacy, and that is why he becomes more dangerous with each passing day.  Don’t forget that Biden still has his hands on the levers.  Pray he takes more vacations in the coming months and not fewer, and that Trump doesn’t change his mind between now and November.

Jim Watkins is the host of the podcast and nationally syndicated radio program Jim Watkins Is Speaking Out.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.