The second Trump presidency is better than the first because he has more supporters—77 million voted for him instead of 62 million—and he took over from another failed president who squandered American military might and opened the border to drugs and thugs.
President Trump has the illegal aliens on the run, Democrats in disarray as DOGE shuts down their federal ATMs, and Republicans united because no one wants to be the next Liz Cheney.
But Trump also brought cultural change to the nation’s capital. He took over the Kennedy Center. Gay Pride nights are out. Patriotic music and fireworks are in.
Before the election, the Washingtonian reported, “Most restaurant and bar owners try to keep their businesses out of one-sided politics for fear of alienating customers. Those in super blue DC who do wade into partisan territory pretty much always lean left. But H Street sports bar Dirty Water—which is hosting an election night party with the Washington, D.C. Young Republicans—is the rare exception.”
The story quoted a post from the bar on Instagram, “We’re rooting for Trump and we plan on spraying champagne when we win. If that’s not your vibe, we kindly suggest you take in election night somewhere less fun.”
The story also said, “Owner Luke Casey argues that the move is a good business decision, because he’ll pretty much have a monopoly on the right-wing bar crowd.”
After the election, that monopoly is gone. Jonathan Capehart, a WaPo regular on MSNBC, noticed things are different today.
Town & Country reported, “Many Trump officials felt like the city and its surrounding area were unwelcoming to them during the first Trump administration. In 2018, then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that she was kicked out of a restaurant in Virginia because of her politics. Trump officials Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen were also heckled in D.C. restaurants. But things are likely to change during the next four years of Trump, according to D.C. insiders.”
Fact-check: Now-Governor Sanders did not claim she was kicked out; the owner of the restaurant admitted she asked Sanders and her family to leave and they did.
Capehart said, “There’s no Trump hotel, but at the same time, you’ve got a Trump White House, a Republican House, a Republican Senate. So, in essence, they own this town. My hunch is folks in the Trump administration and Republicans from the Hill will feel much freer and more open going to all the restaurants in Washington.”
Democrats spent four years DEMANDING people not normalize Trump and then argued he’s not normal. This time it is different. Even Politico said so in a story titled, “How Donald Trump Revealed Jeff Bezos’ True Self.”
Its premise was Bezos was a typical liberal billionaire before Trump’s return to power.
“You see these new rules on display all over the place nowadays. Not far from Bezos’ mansion, a new cohort of moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel have bought their own houses. As I reported earlier this month, Zuckerberg matched Bezos by buying his own $23 million home, which high-end realtors said is part of a trend of oligarchs buying in D.C. to cultivate Trump’s favor. There’s little Washington-fantasy speculation about the mansions becoming new epicenters of bipartisan comity; their owners aren’t here to win over the book-party crowd. Likewise, in the media, prime interviews with administration figures, and potentially prime seats in the briefing room, are going to sharply partisan outlets. There’s little evidence that old-school rectitude is a way to boost influence.
“Is it any wonder that a practical sort like Bezos, someone who has a multitude of diverse interests, would adjust his moves to this new set of conventions?”
It’s Trump’s DC now.
The media hates it like Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather hated Little Women.
Cameron Barr, who left the Bezos Post because Bezos started acting like he owned the place, told Politico, “Trump 2.0 is different from the first term. The power balance is different. The mechanics of how to ‘work with Washington’ have changed.”
High-tech billionaires have bought mansions in DC and made pilgrimages to Mar-A-Lago. Trump very much is the president this time because as Henry Kissinger observed, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Some in the media may grok this, but they don’t work at Politico.
After lavishing praise on Bezos for genuflecting to the liberal establishment for a decade, Politico said, “The more recent Bezos, on the other hand, overruled his editors to kill a long-planned endorsement of Harris and ditch the Post’s tradition of bipartisan opinions—the latter of which he personally announced rather than letting it happen through ordinary Post channels. He joined the parade of tech moguls at Trump’s inauguration. Amazon is paying Melania Trump for a $40 million documentary about her life, a project that was discussed over dinner during a December visit to Mar-a-Lago. It was quite a turn for the same man who once beamed as he took in the gala premiere of The Post, the film about Katharine Graham standing up to Nixon.”
Fact-check: Bipartisan opinions? Where? Well, if you count the Trump Resistance as the complete opposite of Never Trumpers, I suppose you can pretend you are bipartisan.
Trump has experience as president this time.
But he also has experience at being impeached, indicted, convicted and shot. This is not a game. He survived and became Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.
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The Trump administration has quietly transformed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, forcing out a majority of career managers and implementing new priorities that current and former officials say abandon a decades-long mission of enforcing laws that prohibit discrimination in hiring, housing and voting rights.
More than a dozen senior lawyers—many with decades of experience working under presidents of both parties—have been reassigned, the current and former officials say. Some have resigned in frustration after they were moved to less desirable roles unrelated to their expertise, according to the sources.
“It’s been a complete bloodbath,” said a senior Justice Department lawyer in the division who is not authorized to speak publicly.
Last week, President Donald Trump’s hand-picked head of the division issued a series of memos outlining priorities that are dramatically at odds with the way both Republican and Democratic administrations have enforced civil rights law — including the first Trump administration.
Good. DOJ needs a good scrubbing. DOJ also needs someone in charge who is not going to put above the law the son and bagman of the Democrat presidential candidate. Pam Bondi is to Bill Barr as JD Vance is to Mike Pence, although I do miss those Pence/Race Bannon memes of yore.
President Trump brings testosterone to the table and the nation responded. There would be no UFC if he had not showcased the sport at his casinos when no one else would. He fronted Mike Tyson the money to become heavyweight champion of the world. While everyone else was doing March Madness, Trump became the first president to attend the NCAA wrestling finals.
The Brookings Institute’s reaction to Trump’s State of the Union address (the media doesn’t call it that but then again, they don’t call Congressman McBride a man either) focused on culture:
President Trump began his first address to Congress by stirring up the culture wars. Early on and in quick succession, he bragged about making English the official language of the United States, renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali, getting rid of critical race theory in schools, and declaring that there were only two genders in America—male and female. But he spent the most time on the cultural issue of the 2024 election—transgender rights, touting his ban on biological men playing in women’s sports and introducing a young woman who had been injured by a man playing on a women’s team. Again, toward the end of a very long speech, he returned to transgender issues, by introducing a woman whose child had been allowed to use a male name and “they/them” pronouns in school by teachers and the principal. And then he went one step further, vowing to criminalize sex changes on children and adding that he would tell American children, “You are perfect exactly the way God made you.”
He did not stir up culture wars. Democrats did by denying basic biology. There are two sexes: woman and man. To say otherwise is brainwashing. Trump is winning on this one.
The Washingtonian reported that Richard Reeves, founder of the DC think tank the American Institute for Boys and Men, recently wrote that, “Ironically, an election that was supposed to be about women because of the issue of abortion rights may in the end be decided by the votes of young men.”
Dang straight. Race was not the issue. Sex was. Let us talk about abortion. Women can abort their parental obligations while men must pay child support for 18 years for a one night stand. As an opponent of abortion, I say write those checks, baby daddy, and try to be in the kid’s life.
The culture has been changing for a few years now. The Bud Light boycott—unorganized as people just switched brands—two years ago lashed the back of LGBTers and their insufferable and never-ending demands.
We are the grownups. We should not allow ourselves to be cowed by crazy rabid liberals who demand we accept the unacceptable.
And we are not accepting it.
We saw the movie Tootsie. We know exactly what failed male actor Dylan Mulvaney is doing—and what William Thomas did competing on the women’s swimming team for Penn, a school that should be banned from all NCAA sports for allowing him on its women’s team.
The grownups in America finally are standing tall against the tranny tyranny. The hormones are poison to prepubescent children and the surgery is mutilation. States are banning this quack medicine and the media sobs. We drink their tears.
But not their beers.
Andrew Breitbart said politics is downstream from culture. Maybe it is the other way around. All I know is the two are intertwined and a president must lead in both worlds. This is why Obama was so insistent that celebrities not hang out with Trump. That worked in his first presidency, but not this time, Barry.
The NFL’s player of the year on offense, Saquon Barkley, tweeted, “LOL. Some people are really upset cause I played golfed and flew to the White House with the PRESIDENT. Maybe I just respect the office, not a hard concept to understand. Just golfed with Obama not too long ago and look forward to finishing my round with Trump! Now ya get out my mentions with all this politics and have an amazing day.”
The scene has changed in DC. Thunder from the right has the left sheltering in place. We have gone from this:
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To this:
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CNN blurred the mugshots citing due process. CNN did not blur Trump’s mugshot. This is why CNN is irrelevant.
The story of Trump’s second presidency so far is simple: He learned and he returned.
This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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