Tag: Bernie Moreno

Foreign Money in Ohio, The Rest of the Story: Why Governor DeWine wants Joe Biden on the Ohio ballot

Why would Governor DeWine push to get Joe Biden on the ballot in Ohio?  Why would Republicans again work to help out their political rivals while the other side is willing to cheat, steal, manipulate, and put in jail any of us?  When I first heard about DeWine calling a special session of the House in Ohio to resolve this matter, my first thought was, “No wonder we lose all the time as Republicans.”  And this isn’t the first time DeWine would let me down, acting more like a Democrat than a Republican.  I’m not a fan of Mike DeWine or any of the DeWines, for that matter, even in the Supreme Court in Ohio.  They are way too liberal for me.  But as the media was going crazy with the irony, I was getting more to the story from many people coming straight out of Columbus.  As I learned more, the smoke started to clear, and I found that this is a position in which I support DeWine.  We want Joe Biden to appear on the Ohio ballot for several reasons.  One big one is that Bernie Moreno and J.D. Vance want it because they don’t want to frustrate any Democrat turnout that will turn in their direction.  Bernie has a tough race with Sharrod Brown for the Senate, and Brown is a deeply entrenched political target.  But in hindsight of this upcoming election, none of us want Democrats to claim they lost to some technicality.  So we don’t want to be desperate and hope to win because not enough Democrats showed up. Instead, we want to win over Democrats and tip support in Republican favor because they think, J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno, need all the turnout they can get to win over Brown. 

Yet, it’s more than that; it’s the essence of this endeavor.  There is still the problem that is quite extensive regarding the Issue 1 loss in August of 2023, where too late, lawmakers noticed that powerful foreign money was coming into Ohio to pass pot legalization with loose abortion laws in the wake of recent Supreme Court rulings, specifically regarding Roe v. Wade.  Once the Supreme Court finally did the obvious, and that is rule that only the states can regulate abortion, then Ohio became one of the prime targets because Constitutional amendments only required a 50+1 vote.  So, Issue 1 in August of 2023 was supposed to pass in a low-turnout election to protect Ohio’s Constitution with a 60-vote threshold.  But it failed, and that led to abortion and pot passing in November of 2023, which has fed the progressive anti-American destruction efforts of globalists and domestic cut-throats infinitely.  Meanwhile, still mending from a House coup that took out a Speaker of the House who would be much more supportive of an America First agenda. Instead, Speaker Jason Stephens was put in place with Democrats and RINOs to soften the Republican agenda in Columbus and essentially erode any leverage the GOP had with their majority.  It was a matter of some filthy politics, and locally, in Southern Ohio, Sara Carruthers got caught up in the mess as a part of the coup to put in place a more “Democrat” friendly Speaker.  And it cost her in the primary for 2024.  She will lose her seat this year because of her affiliation with Democrats.  Instead, it’s going to be Diane Mullins who will face off against the Democrat Vanessa Cummings in the November election for that Representative seat.  In Butler County, the GOP censured Sara because of her role in putting in place Speaker Stephens, a known RINO.  It cost her the party endorsement, which then went to Diane.  Are you following along, dear reader? This is not the kind of stuff you get from the newspapers anymore, if ever, or the radio.  But this comes straight from the halls of the Statehouse, a building I often say is much loftier and nobler than the people in it, but the effort is worth the consideration.

Republicans this time around are looking at their options, and they can make Biden getting on the ballot much easier for him, but they want something in return.  A few bills in the Senate, S.B. 215, have sought to deal with the foreign money problem that defeated Issue 1 with the amendment threshold and allowed so much foreign money to backdoor our political process for destructive purposes and make a deal with Democrats.  The House has a similar bill that is much more active at the moment, H.B. 114, which has been through the House, went to the Senate, and is now back in the House for a concurrence vote.  And that is where the impasse is, which Governor DeWine is well aware of and wants to break loose.  But, people like Sara Carruthers and her RINO-supported Speaker, Stephens, want to keep that foreign money flowing because there are a lot of corrupt politicians who feed off it for their sustenance.  And they don’t want to take it out of Ohio.  DeWine can afford moral clarity on this as he is in the final years of his second term.  So it’s no skin off his back, and the direction of politics is headed more in this kind of MAGA direction anyway.  Democrats have something they want from Republicans: they want Joe Biden on the ballot.  So, Republicans are looking to get foreign money out of the state for future elections.  And that’s where the impasse is. 

No matter what happens, Joe Biden will be on the ballot.  Republicans don’t want to win like Democrats are trying to do with Trump, and that is win in the courts and in a game of keep away.  When you beat someone, you should beat them fairly and squarely, leaving little doubt in the aftermath.  So, Republicans are playing this issue with H.B. 114 very well.  And on May 28th, 2024, DeWine is looking to push the issue toward resolution.  Likely, people like Sara Carruthers will vote to keep foreign money flowing into Ohio because, without it, all the progressive invasions will lose their funding and stall out.  But progressives know what they want to do, and Sara has proven she is one of them, which is how we ended up with Speaker Stephens, a Republican in Name Only—a (RINO).  Many of them would never get elected any other way, and once they are in office, they love access to all that foreign money, so they will fight to preserve it, which is why the issue has stalled out among the Representatives.  They’d rather play dirty tricks to keep the money flowing than make a deal to get their guy, Biden, on the ballot in Ohio.  But yes, DeWine is on the right side of this one, and so are many other Republicans looking to do the right thing in 2024 to beat Democrats fairly and squarely.  In the case of Bernie Moreno, to win Democrats over to Republican votes on the back of a strong Trump ticket that will help all the down ballots, the priority is voter turnout.  This happens best when you get voter representation that is fully engaged and pushes out the foreign influence and soft-shelled RINOs who work with the Democrats to undermine our system of government.  And that is, as Paul Harvey used to say……………..” the rest of the story.”

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

How Bernie Moreno Wins Ohio as the Next Senator: The three key factors

The results of the Republican primary for the Ohio Senate, where Bernie Moreno won over Frank LaRose and Matt Dolan, will be similar to how Moreno will beat the entrenched Sherrod Brown.  It wasn’t that long ago when Jim Renacci ran against Brown, and I thought Jim had a great chance to win.  I knew Jim a bit and understood his personality.  And I’ve had a chance to get to know Bernie, and I think the lessons learned will undoubtedly fall in Bernie’s favor.  With Moreno getting just over 50% of the vote in that primary election against two other good Republican candidates, it is very telling how this will play out, which is something that many outlets have been considering now that the strength of the Trump pick had performed.  Can Bernie Moreno beat the dreaded Sherrod Brown?  The answer is yes.  Matt Dolan was a good sample of the anti-Trump vote, whether they be RINOs or Democrats, and statistically spreading them out from what we saw in the primary over into a general election should be pretty similar.  Looking at the voting results precinct by precinct, Bernie Moreno performed very well in the north, better than might usually be thought.  And, of course, in the south, Bernie Moreno dominated, which is somewhat expected.  Anything south of Columbus in a matchup with Sherrod Brown could be considered Bernie territory, while in the north, he is vulnerable because he’s not the Trump-endorsed candidate.  The Rust Belt unions want Bernie and Trump.  They will vote for the person Trump wants, which makes Trump the kingmaker in the Senate race if the anti-Trump forces couldn’t generate more than they did against Bernie Moreno, especially with all the negative ads that tell you everything you need to know about the matchup between Brown and Moreno. 

Additionally, this is something I discussed with the Moreno team during a private sit-down a few months ago.  Sherrod Brown may have been in the Ohio Senate for many decades and is a bastion for progressive politics on the radical left side, but he is vulnerable in ways that Jim Renacci didn’t exploit.  Jim got caught up in the classic high-ground strategy of not exploiting the problems with Sherrod Brown’s domestic violence issue.  The previous election results showed that Brown was vulnerable, but Renacci didn’t go there. In several debates, Brown turned the whole issue on its head and told Renacci he should be ashamed of himself for even bringing it up.  Since that election, Sherrod Brown has been much less ostentatious publicly, showing cryptic vulnerability.  Instead, being a crafty politician, he has pivoted towards Trump support as he was the president then and hasn’t run away from him.  Brown acts like Trump is his best friend to confuse voters into voting for a union ticket for further support.  However, a swing of 7-8 points could be eroded from Brown on the morality and ethics front, which could quickly put Moreno over the top in November.  So I don’t think it is as close of a race as the national pundits think using conventional wisdom.  I believe convention will be thrown out in 2024 because a new set of rules that nobody has ever seen before will be applied.  And Sherrod Brown doesn’t match up against that wisdom at all.  He is built for classic unionized politics where Democrats controlled the narrative.  But they have lost that narrative, which can’t be ignored when looking at any election results from around the country.

Then there is the Trump factor, which Sherrod Brown has not seen much of.  The first time around, Jim Renacci was the Trump pick.  I met them at the airport in Lunken, just outside Cincinnati, and Jim was very excited.  At that time, Trump was a popular president doing well, but the political left was in the middle of their Russia, Russia, Russia nonsense, looking for a hook to attempt to derail Trump.  Covid hadn’t hit yet, so nobody knew what to do about Trump’s popularity.  But Jim Renacci, as nice as he was perhaps, was too well-mannered for Sherrod Brown.  So even though Trump endorsed Renacci, the power of that endorsement was not fully realized, not in the way that Bernie Moreno will experience.  After seeing Bernie with Don Jr., J.D. Vance, and Vivek Ramaswamy over the last several months, I realized there is a much different atmosphere to this 2024 election that the Trump endorsement machine understands.  And Bernie has a personality that won’t waste it, whereas Jim just didn’t put the teeth into the effort to knock off Brown.  So Brown was more than a little lucky in that last election, that he didn’t have to face the Trump endorsement now that it has matured into a well-oiled machine.  And that endorsement means voter engagement, actual votes in a booth on election day and before.  I would say that the personality difference between Moreno and Renacci is worth about 8 points in a race like this.  Both were successful business people who were in the car dealership business.  But Moreno is much more like Don Jr regarding a likeability factor than Jim.  Nothing against Renacci, but personality means a lot and Bernie has a lot of it.  If people get to interact with him, they will learn it quickly.

So, three things identify Bernie Moreno as the best option for the Sherrod Brown senate seat: to join J.D. Vance as a Republican and MAGA member of the Senate.  First, Bernie is very likeable and people will want to vote for him, especially where Trump is also on the ticket.  Getting the Trump vote by itself will likely be enough to win this race.  Then there is the juice of the race, the ability to attack Brown and exploit his natural weaknesses due to poor family maintenance.  The media downplayed the domestic abuse conditions of Brown’s ex-wife, and even she gave him a pass publicly.  But there was plenty there to exploit and Moreno will be able to bring those weaknesses to the surface in much the way he stepped up and over Frank LaRose and Matt Dolan in this primary.  Then there is the geography of the situation.  Bernie needs to perform well in the north, north of Columbus.  He doesn’t even have to beat Sherrod Brown in the Cleveland area.  He needs to just do well.  Because in the South, it’s Trump country, and Bernie is the man.  It’s an easy math problem, one that Renacci wasn’t able to tap into.  There is just more pop for Bernie, and he has more endorsements from people who will hit the ground running for him.  Right before the primary election, Trump flew in, and Kristi Noem was in Dayton.  Then, the next day in Milford, Ohio, Kari Lake campaigned for Bernie with J.D. Vance.  Just a few weeks prior, Don Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and others hit the trail, especially in the south, and put their arms around Bernie to secure a victory.  And when that is done for the general election, the results will be very healthy for Republicans up and down the ticket.  So I don’t think it will be close.  Bernie cracks over 50% while Sherrod Brown will be lucky to get into the 40s.  And there is undoubtedly a clear path for Bernie Moreno to become the next senator in Ohio. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Bernie Moreno, Don Jr, and Vivek Ramaswamy at Lori’s Roadhouse: Good people doing good things for all the right reasons

Don Jr Endorsing Bernie Moreno at Lori’s Roadhouse

A reporter for the Cleveland Plains Dealer wanted to talk to me after the Bernie Moreno rally at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio, on February 28th, 2024.  It was an unusual rally in that Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle came with Bernie to support a President Trump endorsement ahead of the March primaries; these were all national figures campaigning for the second senate seat and had the full backing of J.D. Vance.  The reporter wanted to know when I knew I wanted to support Bernie Moreno instead of the two other guys, Frank LaRose and Matt Dolan, and I told him it was late August into September.  I said that Frank had screwed up the election in August for Issue 1, and that was going to hang around his neck for a long time because of what it cost us in Ohio, incredibly loose abortion laws from radical progressive outsiders, and the legalization of pot.  And with Matt Dolan, who owns the Cleveland Indians baseball team and allowed himself to be arm-twisted into changing the name to the Guardians, he was simply too soft.  If that’s all he could do to resist the woke mob of lefties who have taken over our government, then he would be no good as a senator.  As Don Jr pointed out during the Moreno rally, a sports team is a little thing that doesn’t matter much to people in the grand scheme.  If Dolan fell short of courage for that little issue, what would he do in the SWAMP, where things mattered quite a lot and the pressure was much more intense?  As I told the reporter, I know both Frank LaRose and Matt Dolan, and they would be nice, typical politicians under normal circumstances.  But they aren’t the kind of fighters needed these days, where we need MAGA Republicans to fit the Trump agenda once President Trump is back in office, and out of them all, only Bernie Moreno fits the need.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Bernie Moreno several times now, including the private lunch we had back in September, and for me, it’s not even a question.  He is the right guy to go up against Sherrod Brown, which continued my reasoning to the reporter.  It’s not enough to win the Republican primary; once Trump endorses someone in the Republican Party, it seals it for whoever that is.  But to get elected into the Senate will be a brutal campaign against Brown, who is deeply entrenched, and it will take someone as likable as Moreno to pull it off.  Even with the Trump endorsement, it will be a steep haul, and the other guys have too much baggage.  They have brand damage that Brown will easily exploit in a general election, so it comes down to who can beat Sherrod Brown.  And Bernie is that person.  I knew it when I first met him, and now, in West Chester, Ohio, with the coveted Trump endorsement behind him and compelling personalities campaigning with him, it is pretty clear what the path forward is.  Ohio deserves some of the best possible senators we could get, and J.D. Vance has picked his partner in the act. Our task is to give him the tools he needs to succeed.  So, the picture was becoming quite clear at the Lori’s Roadhouse rally.  It was a packed venue for an afternoon event in the middle of the work week.  After the rally, everyone went up to a fundraiser at Wetherington, and the Republican Party was unifying behind a clear strategy, and it was great to see. 

Don Jr knows how to engage with a crowd

Seeing so many culminating aspects come together that I have watched uniquely over the last few years was very satisfying.  I enjoyed watching Vivek speak, Don Jr, Kimberly, and, of course, Bernie.  Don Jr. is such a good guy, especially in person.  I had some people with me, and Don signed the wallet of one of them, to have such a down-to-earth guy, the firstborn son of an ostentatious billionaire, is a real treasure.  Don Jr. balances celebrity with practicality amazingly well, and he’s funny.  I’ve seen him in person many times now, and he is always a fine line between comedy and serious political commentary.  And, of course, with Vivek Ramaswamy, I remember being invited to an event with him in Middletown where he essentially launched his political career.  The fabulous Nancy Nix was in front of me during the rally, proudly watching the events on stage at Lori’s, almost like a proud mother.  Many people don’t know it, but she has her hand in most of these things in Butler County.   She put Vivek and I together in a meeting ahead of the release of his book Woke, Inc., which I think will be the economic platform for American policy over the next ten years.  I felt it when I first read it, and I am very sure of it now, and Nancy knows it, too.  She was also very important to the launching of J.D. Vance, which I wasn’t convinced of initially.  But Nancy understood these personalities very well and worked hard behind the curtain to ensure everything worked and the right people got into the right jobs and met the right people along the way.

Lori Fisher and her husband Greg own Lori’s Roadhouse, and they certainly go above and beyond. A great place to save America!

I only mention Nancy because as I have come to know some of these people, and this is what I was thinking about while talking to the reporter for the Cleveland newspaper, there is some real magic going on with these events that defy conventional political thinking, and my articulation of the point struck the reporter.  These were not typical political considerations but a fight between the life and death of a country and the world’s economy.  And none of these people, including me, needed to do any of this stuff.  All the people traveling with Bernie are rich and powerful.  They don’t need to be in politics.  And I’ve been involved in Butler County politics in Ohio most of my life, and there aren’t that many good people like Nancy Nix who are not in love with name-dropping and power playing, who just do good things because they want to do good things.  There aren’t enough good people in the world doing good things for good reasons.  That includes Greg and Lori, who run Lori’s Roadhouse, they didn’t need to do what they were doing to support these kinds of events.  As I looked around the room at all the people present, Jim and Lee Redkey were standing next to me, T. C Rogers too, and Michael Ryan, along with many others who could have been doing a million other things with their time.  But they were there to support people who were going to great measure to do the right things for our country.  And it was wonderful to witness.  When you start to see the hidden hand of righteousness working over time toward a grand fortissimo of justice and history playing out before our eyes, it’s a magnificent spectacle that doesn’t quite fit the description in a typical newspaper commentary on politics.  It’s simple yet infinitely complex, as so many moving pieces starting many years ago have moved toward this moment as a destiny seeking to be fulfilled.  And so many people played their part, least not the people on the stage supporting Bernie Moreno.  A promise of great things yet to come because people who define greatness purely, not for the recognition they might get or the financial resources that follow, but because it was the right thing to do is a hope for a future that nobody has yet witnessed in the history of the world.  And it was at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio, on an unusually warm day and a political onslaught yet to come that greatness peaked its head out for all to see.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Bernie Moreno and J.D. Vance in West Chester, Ohio: Making Hard Work Great Again

I always enjoy the optimism of an early campaign effort, and Bernie Moreno’s is undoubtedly one of those good ones, early on. He’s running for the Ohio Senate seat against Sharrod Brown, but first, he has to win a primary, so he and J.D. Vance were at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio to make a pitch, and it was full of optimism and an approach to politics that is full of more than empty promises. I like seeing people like Bernie getting into politics, people who have been personally successful and know what it looks like, and who want to do good things for all the right reasons. So, I was enthusiastic about seeing the two of them together, a current senator, and the one who would be his partner representing Ohio in the Swamp we want to drain. We are looking for MAGA Republicans who can work with a Trump administration, unlike the last time. If there has been anything good about losing Trump to exile for a while, it has been that it gave us a chance to knock out the firewall that the Congress and Senate had in preserving the Swamp. If you want to drain it, there must be cooperation from the other branches of government. Otherwise, it just won’t happen. And things are shaping up in a very positive way. I am pretty excited about the future, for a lot of reasons, and one of them was a book I had been reading that very day when I was going to see J.D. Vance again. It was Johan Norberg’s Capitalist Manifesto and it was strange to read a quote in it about J.D. Vance, from a Swedish perspective. Norberg’s book is not an American outlook on capitalism. Instead, it’s a European globalist view and a fascinating process to watch. But he was using J.D. Vance and an example about Middletown, Ohio to make a point that I thought was well made. So, it was weird to have all those elements come together in one Friday morning spectacle.

The point made was haunting me a bit because I am a bit older than J.D. Vance, and I watched Middletown, Ohio, go through its transition from a wonderful blue-collar town that ran off of an Armco economy, a steel mill that told a similar story to those in Pittsburg up the road.  They were the centerpieces of the town, and it’s where everyone worked.  But through lots of influences, particularly communist globalism, the steel mill lost its power, and the economy of Middletown tanked, and never recovered.  It went from a thriving town to something that looked like a third-world hell hole within a few decades.  By the time J.D. Vance came along and was a young person, his experience was captured nicely in the book The Hillbilly Elegy and the movie of the same name by Ron Howard.  That popularity and the association that J.D. Vance now has in the Trump MAGA movement, which Bernie Moreno was now a part of, got Johan’s attention to make a point about globalism in general.  J.D. Vance had said, which Norberg quoted, that neither he nor his friends wanted to have a blue-collar job.  They were all told to grow up and move away to some white-collar job, and that America was going to move to a kind of service-oriented economy.  I remember hearing my dad’s speech, “Do you want to grow up and dig ditches?”  Blue-collar work was frowned upon, even discouraged.  So, no wonder so many of those good jobs picked up and moved to places like China.  It wasn’t so much bad policy that moved them, but the education system, the entertainment culture, and political priorities that had it all wrong, or right if you consider that they were all in on a scheme to destroy America, that caused so many young people to grow up and not want to work.

If you want to destroy America, convince their young people to grow up and be lazy.  This wasn’t the point of Johan Norberg, and indeed not where J.D. Vance was politically.  But it was the underlying reason all the steel mills picked up and moved to other places through globalism.  It was getting harder and harder to find good employees to do these jobs; the labor unions certainly didn’t make it any easier, so those corporations moved to places with better workers and more of them.  And the natural poison pill to cultures like Middletown, Ohio, was that nobody wanted to grow up and work as hard as they had to watch their parents’ work.  Those kinds of blue-collar jobs were looked down upon as if they were part of a lower class.  It wasn’t enough to own a home, a few cars, and a bass boat.  Kids watched their parents be put down by culture in general for working in a steel mill, so they grew up wanting nothing to do with any of it.  And now that America doesn’t make much anymore, people are seeing firsthand how valuable manufacturing is to a culture and rethinking how they value those jobs.  That is the primary driver of the MAGA political movement.  People were told many things over the years; now that they see where it has all been going, they don’t like it.  And they want to improve the situation dramatically. 

I would offer that for those who profess that they want to make America Great Again, the best place to start would be to make Hard Work a Priority Again.  It is not so much a throwback to how things used to be, but to look at the grandparents and their parents who made up towns like Middletown, Ohio, promising to begin with and value what they did and to emulate that hard work in the future.  Americans were suckered by globalism into being lazy; they were told that they could grow up and make lots of money in a useless white-collar job where they ordered pizza at 9 am for lunch three hours later, doing very little in between.  And that everything would be great.  And it hasn’t been.  Americans need to get back to working hard and working often.  We need to stop listening to the rest of the world that wants more socialism, which consists of more breaks, more government handouts, and much less freedom.  The globalism we have experienced was a disaster and has been terrible for places like Middletown, Ohio.  Not because globalism was evil in itself, where capitalism would have an opportunity to lift everyone to a higher living level.  However, what globalism turned out to be was an attack on the American way of life toward conversion to global communism; that attack came in the form of convincing an entire nation that hard work was beneath them and that whole generations would grow up to be lazy, entitled, and dependent on globalism for their necessities.  The kind of MAGA movement politics that J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno were pitching and the type of globalism Johan Norberg was trying to sell to the world involved an appreciation for hard work at its core.  Something that would undoubtedly make Middletown, Ohio, Great Again.  We want the future J.D. Vance kids and their friends not to grow up and sleep on the couch but to go to work and do great things with a lot of ambition through their actions.  And through that embrace of values, America and the world can be great again because it all starts with hard work and people willing to do it for the betterment of humanity.

Rich Hoffman

The Removal of Politicians like Kevin McCarthy Will Be Normal: Good people like Bernie Moreno are the future

It should have happened already in history, the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House.  The problem most people have is that they have fallen in love with this notion of acquired power, preserved through bureaucracy and mindless red tape, which is the theme of Washington politics and the media culture that supports it.  Hey, we are dealing with unprecedented evil from the Administrative State; where are the investigations for the Wuhan lab leak, and what does the government know about it and when?  Where are the impeachments of the Biden crime family, and what about the election fraud that put him in office?  And the failure to secure the borders, you don’t play friendly with Democrats.  You do the job of the American people, or you should be removed from office.  Nothing is so sacred as a job if you are not doing the required work.  And Kevin got caught playing with Democrats, trying to destroy America with reckless debt.  I have news for everyone; this is nothing.  The goal isn’t to play nice with other Republicans to preserve Republicans holding more seats than Democrats for power and control of the House floor, as defined by the people trying to destroy our country.  No, we are in a period where actual achievement is required to do these jobs, and if people aren’t doing the job, they will be fired.  For too long, the focus has been on sitting in seats while politicians did the work of lobbyists, and people have grown tired of this nonsense, so this removal of people from office is only going to occur more often, and who is to blame?  The people who didn’t do the job, not the people who called out bad behavior for what it is.  By the nature of things, people should expect many more terminations of government positions if the expectation of actual performance drives the value of those positions.

I had an excellent opportunity to have lunch with Bernie Moreno, who I will be endorsing for the Ohio Senate, and I took away some exciting switches in sentiment for these types of races.  J.D. Vance has already come out and endorsed Moreno for what they are presenting as Team Ohio in the Senate, and from him was a clear understanding that life in Washington, D.C., had to change dramatically.  Moreno is a performance-based guy, a successful person before he ever became involved in politics; he represents an entirely different kind of politician that fits in well with MAGA Republicans as opposed to entrenched SWAMP creatures who grab power by telling everyone what they want to hear, then doing nothing once they get in office.  I asked Bernie why he wanted to run for such an office; he could be doing many other things now.  He responded that he wanted to give something back, which was almost precisely what J.D. Vance had told me a few years ago in the backyard of Nancy Nix.  I’ve been doing these kinds of political lunches with people for thirty years and only lately have I noticed this trend toward merit-based politics since Trump changed things so dramatically in 2015.  Because of Trump, there are now people like Bernie Moreno entering politics, people who have been successful before who are entering politics to bring success from their lives over into public enterprise.  They expect to do a good job; they aren’t going to these offices because they can’t hack it in the real world.  These are completely new types of politicians and that trend is increasing.  Kari Lake just announced that she is running for Senate so we are seeing a dramatic change in expectation as to what a politician should be, and people like Mitch McConnel and Kevin McCarthy are not it.

I also learned at that same lunch from Bernie that Rob Portman, a person I used to know pretty well until he turned to the dark side of Democrat politics, was having a fundraiser in Cincinnati for Kyrsten Sinema.  Of course, the disgust that comes from those kinds of meetings is politicians’ lack of respect for actually doing the job.  The belief is that it’s more important to reach across the aisle to play nice in the sandbox with rivals than actually to get the job done.  That kind of ridiculousness has given politics a bad name, and people are tired of it.  We don’t want bipartisan support with outright Marxists.  We don’t want our Republican politicians to hold hands with domestic enemies.  We want the job of representation done and done well.  And if things get a little rough in debate, fine.  The Republican Party is still the party of Trump, not the country club Republicans of the establishment who represent lobby power more than the boots-on-the-ground people they have always supposed to have represented.  Even though my lunch with Bernie was at a country club, it’s a shift in focus that has occurred over the last decade that he clearly understands.  There is nothing wrong with a good day of golf and talking about important things in politics.  But acquiring power so that a politician can be in such a club environment to make deals with people who do not have the best intentions of America in mind are days that have been over for a while. 

Bernie gets it, and so does J.D. Vance and many others entering the Senate and the House in the coming decade.  Washington, D.C., will have to be a very different place if we get spending levels down to where they should be and get our economy moving in the right direction once again.  That could mean cutting 75% of all employment in the Beltway culture, from the media to lobbyists to actual government employees.  Even after Trump comes and goes, I’m telling everyone now, people like Vivek Ramaswamy are going to be setting economic policy in America.  Things are never going back to what they were. People do not like the kind of government that has produced Joe Biden and his corrupt, sex-addicted family.  In the wake of another Trump term, the political trend will be to clean house, especially after everything the establishment politics has put him through.  They deserve what’s coming for all they did, and Kevin McCarthy is just the tip of the iceberg.  Kevin wasn’t doing the job people expected of him, and for all the House members who thought that the value of Republicans holding enough seats to maintain a majority was the game, they have turned out to be wrong.  When people make promises, as Kevin McCarthy did to obtain the Speaker role, they must live up to them.  Making deals with the Biden White House, who shouldn’t even be there, is not doing the job he promised.  Having the third most powerful position in the world isn’t worth anything if that power isn’t used to do what’s suitable for the people Kevin McCarthy represents.  We don’t need more hand-holding with Democrats to provide the illusion that everyone is getting along.  When we have the problems we currently do, we want results, not cosmetic media drivel, a stiff upper lip while the Titanic sinks to the bottom of the cold ocean.  We need passion in these political offices by people who will never sell out to domestic enemies who intend poorly for our country.  And those values will only become more prevalent in the months and years to come.

Rich Hoffman