Why Trump Won and What It Means for Everyone

The Eve of Destruction 

The day before the election, a family member asked me if I was ready for a “landslide.” He was confident Harris would win by historic proportions because “No woman or person of color is going to vote for Trump.”

I just smiled because I wasn’t sure – and I didn’t want to set myself up for an “I told you so!” from him. What I believed was that the election would be very close. And I think I felt that way because I’d been reading predictions from both conservative and liberal media, and they were all reasonably convincing.

As the exit poll counts began shifting towards Trump later the following evening and it looked like he might achieve the unthinkable and win every swing state, I was tempted to send my relative an “I told you so!” text. But I didn’t.

Well… the truth is I did. But as soon as I hit the “send” button, I felt bad about it. It wasn’t fair to gloat.

In fact, my Never Trump friends and family members were so devastated by Trump’s win that I was told several times, in no uncertain terms, that I should not speak to them until they could “process” it.

How Close Was It? 

If you get your views from the NYT and CNN, you probably think Trump won the election by a narrow margin. The fact that he won the popular vote by only 1.5% could be said to support that view.

If you get your news from the NY Post or Fox News, you may believe it was a landslide. The fact that he won every one of the swing states could be said to support that view.

So let’s take a quick look at the numbers…

The Count by State 

As you can see from the map above, Trump won 31 states while Harris won 19 (plus the District of Columbia).

Despite the initial enthusiasm Harris’s candidacy created with the Democratic base when she entered the race in July, she fell far short of collecting the votes expected in every state and every demographic.

The belief among her campaign team, which was uncritically reported in the legacy media, was that her age, her gender, and her race would play strongly in her favor. And that, at the very least, her numbers would be better than Biden’s were in 2020.

It didn’t happen. In Arizona, she received about 90,000 fewer votes than Biden had. She received about 67,000 fewer in Michigan and 39,000 fewer in Pennsylvania. In four other states – Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin – Harris won more votes than Biden. But Trump’s support grew by more. In some states, significantly more.

Harris’s strongest results came in Georgia, where she received almost 73,000 more votes than Biden did when he very narrowly carried the state. But Trump did better than that, adding 200,000 to his 2020 total, and winning Georgia by roughly two percentage points.

The Electoral College Vote 

Trump swept the seven most competitive states to win a convincing electoral college victory, becoming the first Republican nominee in 20 years to win a majority of the popular vote.

The Count by Cities, Counties & Rural Areas 

Of the 27 cities with populations of more than half a million, Harris won 12 (Boston, New York, Washington DC, Richmond, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle). Trump won the other 15.

Though Trump improved across the map, his gains were particularly strong in the urban counties of Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, and in the industrial swing states Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Finally, Trump did better with rural Americans than he had in 2020, from the Southwest to the Acela Corridor. And in doing so, he bulldozed the once invincible Blue Wall.

The Count by Gender 

One of the biggest surprises of the election was the women’s vote.

Biden won 55% of the women’s vote in 2020 and it was expected that Harris would do much better than that. In fact, she did not even equal Biden’s numbers, winning only 53% of the women’s vote. Meanwhile, Trump won 46% of women, 3% higher than he’d garnered in 2020. Trump also increased his share of male voters, from 53% in 2020 to 55% in 2024.

The Count by Race 

The other big surprise of the election was the count by race. Democrats have long enjoyed a significant advantage with racial minority voters, but this lessened considerably in 2024. Compared to 2020, Trump increased his share of Black voters by 10%.

Harris beat Trump with Hispanic voters 52% to 43%. But in 2020, Biden won 69% of the demographic. That’s a 17-point swing in Trump’s favor.

The Count by Age 

The polls predicted that Harris would crush Trump with the youth vote. She won the demographic, but it was not a landslide, On the contrary, the results were mixed.

In 2020, Biden won the women-under-30 vote by 32 points, but Harris did considerably less well in 2024 by only 18 points. Meanwhile, male voters under 30, who had voted for Biden over Trump in 2020 by a margin of 15%, went for Trump by a margin of 13%. A 28-point swing.

The Count by Political Affiliation 

The biggest leaps to the right weren’t taking place exclusively in Republican-leaning counties, but also in the most Democratic-leaning counties. Michigan’s Wayne County swung 9 points toward Trump, tying the more Republican-leaning Antrim County for the largest movement in the state.

The Popular Vote 

The 2024 voter turnout was lower than 2020’s by 4.2 million. Nevertheless, Trump picked up about 6-7 points in the national popular vote, receiving 2.5 million more votes than he had four years before, while Harris lost about 6.9 million votes.

What’s interesting is that Blue state voters drove the shift. Six of the top seven moves to Trump occurred in hard-left states, led by California, the hardest of all. (Florida, the only exception, has gained hundreds of thousands of Blue state refugees since 2020, helping drive its shift.)

Was Trump’s Victory a Landslide?

The short answer is no.

Depending on how you do the count, there were probably two dozen presidential elections in US history that topped Trump’s win.

Just for fun, I did a little research, and the results surprised me.

In first place was the very first presidential election in 1789. George Washington won 100% of the electoral college. All 69 votes. Of course, he had a big advantage. He ran unopposed.

Next was the election of 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon, a very weak candidate, by 97 percentage points. It’s commonly believed that Roosevelt’s landslide victory was due in part to the promise of the New Deal. But it was also a result of his ability to read the shifting winds of voter sentiment and his willingness to change sides to accommodate them.

The third greatest landslide may surprise you. It was the re-election of 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale with a very successful campaign dubbed “Morning in America.” It crushed Mondale’s campaign by 525 to 13 electoral votes. This landslide has been credited to Reagan’s brand of folksy conservatism that gave American voters, after suffering through the turbulent 60s and 70s, hope for a new era of political and economic stability.

Fourth place in the landslide race may be, in retrospect, another surprise if all you remember about the victor was the inglorious way he left office. It was the 1972 victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern, winning the popular vote by an astonishing 18 million. Nixon’s huge victory was in large part due to the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Nixon had already reduced the number of troops in Vietnam and had promised to end the draft.

There were two other landslides in my lifetime: The 1964 race, when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes against Barry Goldwater’s 52. And Barrack Obama’s 2008 win over John McCain by 9 million votes.

Next to those margins, Trump’s win was hardly a landslide.

Nevertheless… 

But it was a good deal better than the election of 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college while losing the popular vote. And it was a slightly stronger electoral college win than Biden enjoyed when he beat Trump in 2020, which left the Republicans with control of the House.

I think the reason Trump’s win may feel like such a big victory to many voters on both sides is because it came as such a shock to virtually all the pollsters and pundits who had predicted Harris would win by a significant margin.

That said, the significance of Trump’s victory should not be discounted. He won all seven of the swing states, and the popular vote to boot. Furthermore, he moves into the White House in January with a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. Which means he has just about all he needs in terms of political power and popular support to get his promised agenda done.

And there is one more thing: The fact that Trump beat Harris, the first Black and female presidential candidate, with both women and Blacks, as well as with Hispanics, Jews, and young voters, gives him a moral advantage that he will surely use to dismantle most if not all of the progressive policies and programs that were enacted during the Biden/Harris administration.
Why Did Trump Win? Let’s Count the Ways 

The Economy 

It’s often said that the ultimate determinant of federal elections is the state of the economy.

And that’s probably why, beginning about a year ago, the Biden administration began promoting the idea that the economy was strong and getting stronger. They had some numbers to support their case. Rising employment, for one. A rising stock market, for another. They went so far as to tout these increases as “Bidenomics.”

It was a cute idea, but it didn’t work. Throughout 2024, Biden’s “trust” ratings on the economy plummeted. The reason for that wasn’t complicated. The increase in employment was not due to an expanding GNP. It was merely the return of millions of working- and middle-class Americans that had lost or quit their jobs during COVID.

And those weren’t better jobs with higher paychecks. They were the same old jobs at the same salaries that workers were getting before the lockdown. But nearly four years later, those paychecks had much less purchasing power due the rising cost of all the most important things that middle- and working-class people spend their money on. Principally fuel and food, but also such things as building supplies, cars (new and used), and home, health, and life insurance.

Most working Americans never bought the “miracle” of Bidenomics. But the progressive politicians and media that were promoting the ruse didn’t notice that because during
that same period, from 2021 to 2024, they saw their stock rise by 50%.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see what a mistake it was to push the Bidenomics lie. Affluent voters knew that Biden had nothing to do with the fattening of their 401(k)s. And the rest of the voters were feeling the pain of stagflation.

Immigration 

Immigration was the second most important issue that affected the outcome of the election, according to most pollsters. And for good reason.

The Biden administration’s open-border policies resulted in something like 11 million immigrants entering the country during his term. Most were not vetted. Instead, they were given notices for court dates when they were expected to appear sometime in the future.

Notwithstanding the miniscule incursions sent by border states northward to upscale Blue communities like Martha’s Vineyard, the impact of this massive influx of largely uneducated, non-English-speaking foreigners had a direct and damaging impact on the lower-income communities around the country where the Biden administration had been sending them in military planes under the cover of night.

Looking back at it now, one might wonder why the Biden administration would have thought that letting so many millions of undocumented immigrants into the US would help them win the 2024 election. I don’t think that was ever their intention. It’s obvious to me that the play was to get by in 2024 and then lock themselves into successful reelections thereafter with a widely expanded base of Hispanic voters, which have traditionally supported Democrats.

But they didn’t quite get away with it. Instead, Biden’s open-border policy pushed a significant number of Black and Hispanic voters (mostly men) to Trump. The demographic remained predominantly Democrat. But there was enough of a shift to make a difference in key voting districts.

However, in my view, those two issues – the economy and immigration – which were touted by Republican analysts to be the critical issues in giving Trump a marginal win, were not what made the difference.

As I see it, more important were the “softer” issues to which the Biden team paid scant attention.

Social Media and the Woke Movement 

For the last 25 years, the way the world generates and consumes information has changed profoundly.

In 1999, for example, people in literate cultures received basically all their news from two media sources: television and newspapers. And each of those sources had fewer than six news channels, for a combined total of about a dozen. But those channels were not all doing primary research and reporting. Most relied heavily on international agencies. (UPI and AP were the largest.)

Which meant there was a limit to the amount of news that was being collected around the world and, therefore, to the diversity of events that could be reported on and facts that could be discovered.

To be sure, there were news channels that were thought to be left- or right-leaning and a few that were in between. But because they were all drawing from the same few wells, the range of opinions about the news was limited, too.

Another way of putting that is that in 1999 both conservative and media outlets were largely agreed on a great number of basic facts. Those facts were seen as indisputable and thus uncontroversial. Which meant that differences of opinion could, with good faith and logic, be discussed reasonably so that common agreement was possible.

This is what made the great 1965 debates between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin so civilized by today’s standards. And it is what allowed such debates to be watched by millions of Americans across the political divide.

Today, we have a very different media landscape. Thousands of independent outlets dispense news gathered from thousands of different sources and provide the potential for millions of different perspectives on a virtually unlimited number of facts.

I remember reading an essay about this about 20 years ago. The writer predicted that one of two things would happen: Either the production of information would fractionalize into hundreds of options feeding hundreds of different individual consumer profiles, which he saw as a “democratizing” event. Or a small handful of media outlets would oversee the production and dissemination of most of the information to most of the world.

As it happened, both predictions were right.

We now have countless primary news sources feeding into countless broadcasting channels. But because of the introduction of algorithms and AI, individual users are being fed information tailored to their individual interests and biases in a manner that has steadily eaten away at a consensus of common belief. Rather than enjoying a significant wellspring of factual truth, we live in a world where truth has become determined by computer programming and belief systems have become tribal.

This change from what I would call a belief in truth and rational discourse to tribal beliefs that feel true and rational occurred gradually at first. But then, according perhaps to Moore’s Law, accelerated to the point where a perfectly intelligent person could, based on his instincts and prejudices, believe almost anything, including such ideas as White people are inherently racist, men are inherently toxic, and men can give birth.

The final stage of this transition began, I’d like to say, with the MeToo movement of 2006 – which, when it became a viral hashtag in 2017, had half of the country accepting the “fact” that in the US and other Western countries, the underlying social system was a hierarchy of brutish men and toxic male values that oppressed women in every aspect of their lives and tolerated every sort of injustice towards them, including rape.

The George Floyd incident of 2020 deepened and extended that divide. Enter the Black Lives Matter movement, ANTIFA, and academics pushing the ideologies of intersectionality, systemic racism, White privilege, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). In this view, men were the oppressors and “people of color” were the oppressed. Whites were inherently racist. White privilege was ubiquitous. Racism was universal and systemic, and the only solution to that would be a Socialist (race-based) revolution and reparations to Black Americans.

You would think that would have been the highest possible level of the intersectional, blame-and-shame movement when suddenly, almost out of nowhere, a new entry emerged. What group could be more oppressed than homosexual women of color? It turned out to be a group that most of the world hardly knew existed – people who were even more marginalized and oppressed than women, homosexuals, and people of color, but whose biological gender didn’t comply with their gender identity!

At first, the larger public didn’t quite understand. Eventually, we learned that the term “trans” referred to girls/women who saw themselves as boys/men and boys/men who saw themselves as girls/women.

In prior days, we thought of them as feminine boys/men and masculine girls/women. But now we learned that these were not quirky preferences, but states of individual identity that were as deep and permanent as color and needed to be respected as such. Not only that, but they were not in any way artificial. If a biological boy displayed girlish tendencies, it was not because of some passing fancy. It was because he was a girl. An actual girl. The fact that he had only one X chromosome and male genitalia was irrelevant. Not only that, but if you referred to him as a boy – directly or indirectly – you were guilty of harming him. Violently. And there was a term that could be applied to you. You were “transphobic.” Which was as bad as or worse than being sexist, homophobic, or racist.

During Trump’s first run for office, it was hardly even a topic of discussion. But by 2023, a transwoman had been honored as “Woman of the Year” by a British magazine and another transwoman was Biden’s guest of honor at a celebration of international womanhood at the White House.

This was nuts. But Woke ideology had progressed so far by that time that laws were being enacted to allow biological males to use the bathrooms previously reserved for biological females and compete against them in sports. Worse were the laws passed that allowed such troubled children to be “treated” for their “dysphoria” through “gender affirming care” (i.e., chemical castration and bodily mutilation). In some cases, without parental knowledge or consent.

The Rise of the Silent Dissenters 

I believe it was this extreme development of the “trans” movement that ultimately led to Trump’s victory and the defeat of the Democrats in both houses of Congress.

It was one thing to acknowledge that children with “gender dysphoria” should be treated with kindness and respect. It was an entirely different matter to claim that we should abandon reality in how we thought about and treated them.

But by 2022, progressives had taken identity politics to such an extreme that it was impossible to say the obvious truth about this lunatic set of cultish beliefs without being shamed and ridiculed and, in some parts of the world, face legal action.

What happened then was a massive chilling of common sense. Voicing disapproval or even doubts about these unwritten transgender commandments meant condemnation and/or ostracization from one’s otherwise likeminded community. So, tens of millions of liberal and leftist American voters had to go quiet on the issue.

But in the privacy of their personal thoughts, they knew the progressive movement had gone too far.

There were few if any surveys to indicate how large the group of silent dissenters had grown. But there were plenty of indications in the declining viewership of the progressive media and the declining revenues of many of America’s largest companies that associated themselves with the trend.

From 2020 to 2024, all the major TV networks, as well as the largest liberal newspapers, saw their audiences decline precipitously. In some cases, by as much as 50%. Revenues from Disney-produced Woke movies plummeted, as did sales of Bud Light and Target when they put their chips on Woke advertising campaigns.

Some of the decline came from conservative consumers who were being exposed to the craziness daily by conservative media. But I believe there was also a very sizeable loss from moderate and even liberal consumers who quietly decided they couldn’t take it anymore. They weren’t rushing to Fox News or the New York Post necessarily, but they could no longer watch MSNBC and The Washington Post.

This disaffection from the extremities of the progressive movement happened not only with the news and entertainment, but in all sorts of other industries. In 2024, there were dozens of large businesses that turned their backs on their DEI efforts and returned to hiring and firing people based on merit.

But virtually none of this disaffection was being reported in the legacy press.

Depending on the poll you looked at, Harris was either going to win in a landslide or by a modest margin in the electoral college. But she was certainly going to maintain the popular vote.

My point is: The pollsters were so terribly wrong this time not because they were misreporting the facts, but because a whole lot of the centrist and even liberal voters weren’t being honest with their answers. They didn’t want anyone to know that they were going to vote for Trump.

What Trump’s Election May Have Put an End To 

As I said above, I don’t believe Trump’s victory was a landslide. Trump won a solid majority of the electoral votes, both houses of Congress, and a majority of the popular vote. But he will face resistance in trying to implement many of his promises. Not just from the Democrats in Congress, but also from a portion of the Republican politicians that have no desire to really drain the swamp.

What he can accomplish now that he understands Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy and has appointed outsiders to dismantle it has yet to be seen. But I do think that his victory may put an end to some of the worst excesses of the progressive movement.

For example…

Forbidden and Compelled Speech 

A nation doesn’t need a constitutional amendment to protect speech that the government approves of. The founders of our country understood that. They also understood that forbidden speech was, more than anything else (including political ideology), the primary and most powerful way that government can usurp democracy. That’s why they made freedom of speech the First Amendment.

The Biden administration seemed to have forgotten about that when it bent a knee to forbidden speech by entertaining the concept that certain kinds of speech were not protected by the First Amendment.

As Biden-Harris Climate Czar John Kerry said at a World Economic Forum conclave prior to the election: “If people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick… our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”

If that wasn’t scary enough, Biden and Harris went so far as to conspire to establish a government office to monitor and prosecute speech that might be determined to be hateful. The next step, something the Biden administration also entertained, was to establish laws and regulations to compel “correct” speech – like Canada did by passing its gender identity rights Bill C-16.

The percentage of Americans that believed this made sense was probably equal to the percentage of Americans who suffered from gender dysphoria. Almost none. But by embracing the craziness, Biden and Harris (who proudly announced her pronouns on several occasions) signaled to moderate, undecided voters that they – and the progressive wing of their party – had abandoned common sense. If they were willing to pretend that biological males could transform themselves into “real” females simply by identifying as female, what other insane political ideas would they embrace?

With Harris’s defeat, the madness of criminalizing hate speech and/or compelling “correct” speech has, at least for the foreseeable future, fallen into the cesspools of Woke thinking. I don’t think it will come back in my lifetime.

DEI and Virtue Signaling 

If you spent any time over the last four years watching Congressional hearings of Biden appointees, you witnessed the fruits of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology. One crazy person after another was nominated for important positions, most with no other qualification than fitting into and supporting some favored category of DEI. Harris herself, by Biden’s own testimony, was selected for her race and gender. (Imagine how much better the Democrats would have done in 2024 if Tulsi Gabbard, who demolished Harris in the elections, had been Biden’s nominee.)

DEI was dumb. But it was accompanied by an equally dumb idea: that espousing DEI was morally virtuous – and that denouncing DEI was racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

As John Leake, a politically moderate Substack commentator recently wrote:

Memo from the American People to Democrats: We don’t believe your virtue-signaling is an expression of true moral integrity, so stop virtue-signaling and try to learn something from your humiliating defeat. Analyze your mistakes and try a fresh approach at the next election.

I don’t think we have to worry about this bad idea resurfacing during Trump’s term or for the foreseeable future. DEI was a hot topic among Fortune 500 companies and leading educational institutions in the last four years. But almost all of the companies and even many of the institutions are abandoning those policies after suffering the embarrassment of showing the world how well they work.

Lawfare 

Towards the end of the summer, as the election drew near, never-Trump celebrities and media personalities began talking about their fears that Trump would initiate a campaign of vengeance against his political opponents and even attempt to throw them all in jail. They made these statements with straight faces, oblivious to the fact that Trump had just endured two years of progressive-led lawfare against him. All of which was covered happily by the legacy media, and all of which was obviously political. The strategy failed completely. It couldn’t increase the base of Trump haters. They were already committed.

But it could, and I believe it did, make Trump a sympathetic character in the drama for enough undecided voters to help bring him the victory on Nov. 4.

On Jan. 20, Trump and the Republicans will be in the catbird seat to do exactly what his opponents are worried about him doing. It will be interesting to see if that happens.

Race & Gender Baiting as a Political Tactic 

I cannot think of a political personality in my lifetime that has been called a racist more times than Donald Trump. Or a misogynist, for that matter. Pick any version of these two pejoratives and ask Google how many times it’s been applied to public personalities. Trump will be at the top of every list.

It’s said that if you make a claim, true or false, seven times in a row people will begin to believe it. This did not happen with the vilification of Trump. Like the lawfare strategy, the effort to turn voters away from Trump by slandering him backfired. It may have sated to some extent the hate felt by those who did the name calling. But it had no chance of pitting undecided voters against him.

And that wasn’t the big mistake. The tactic that sealed the deal was the same one that give Trump the victory in 2016, when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables.” Watching the most visible Trump haters proclaim that anyone who would even think about voting for him is racist, sexist, transphobic, galvanized a significant percentage of undecided voters.

In retrospect, that so many prominent Harris supporters would employ this vicious and impulsive ad hominem name calling as a rhetorical strategy can best be explained as a symptom of the less virulent term of ridicule used by the opposition: Trump Derangement Syndrome!

Since the election, some outspoken progressives who called Trump racist and sexist during the campaign have admitted that the name calling was ineffective and questioned the wisdom of having done it. But others have doubled down by expanding the target of their slander to anyone and everyone who voted for Trump – i.e., the majority of the electorate! It seems clear to me that if the Democrats want to win back the White House and Congress, they will have to abandon this foolish exercise in self-indulgence.

Trust in the Legacy Media 

One of the most salient facts about Trump’s win was that he won convincingly without any support from the legacy media, including the NYT, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, and NPR.

This was not a surprise. In the eight years that elapsed since he won the presidency in 2016, most of the major media outlets saw their audiences gradually get smaller.

And since the 2024 election, those numbers fell off a cliff. MSNBC, for example, lost roughly half its viewership, from an average of 1.34 million prior to Nov. 4 to an average of only 660,000. CNN lost about 40% of its prime-time viewership since Nov. 5, from an average of 739,000 to 448,000. Ratings for the broadcast and cable news channels saw a decline of 15 million since 2020, from an average of 57 million to 42 million.

A similar pattern has taken place in the newspaper industry, with daily nationwide circulations falling from more than 30 million in 2019 to less than 20 million. If the trend continues, one-third of newspapers will be lost by 2025, according to a 2022 study published by Northwestern University.

Fox News, on the other hand, has seen its prime-time viewership increase by about 25% since Election Day, from 2.4 million to nearly 3 million.

As for the why of this trend, some of it can surely be attributed to the rise of independent social media news outlets, and particularly conservative ones. But it’s also impossible to deny that an equally big part is attributable to a decline in the public’s trust of mainstream media. Recent polls indicate that only about one in three Americans have confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.”

It will be interesting to see whether the legacy media will try to recapture its audience by more balanced reporting or double down on their positions, as some liberal think tanks have advised.

And to be fair, the huge gap that currently exists between the legacy and the conservative media will probably narrow after Trump takes office in January. Some percentage of those that left CNN and MSNBC will almost certainly come back for news and views that are critical of Trump. But I don’t think there is any chance that the recovery will be much more than half of what was lost.

Recommended Reading 

Different perspectives on lying from The Free Press…

* Matti Friedman: “When We Started to Lie”

* Peter Savodnick: “The Big Scramble”

* Bari Weiss: “The Era of the Noble Lie”

How-to-Succeed-in-Business Books: Which Ones Can You Trust? 

“I’m a sophomore in college, majoring in business, and I want to start my own business after I graduate. I’m taking all the usual courses on accounting, management, and finance, but I want to supplement what I’m learning by reading books. A friend recommended Ready, Fire, Aim, which I really liked. I’ve already got copies of Seven Years to Seven Figures, The Architecture of Persuasion, and Automatic Wealth for Grads. What other books of yours should read? And can you give me some tips on how to choose books by other people on entrepreneurship and business building? (I did a quick search online and found hundreds of them. Literally, hundreds!)” – JP

My Response: 

I’ve never been a big consumer of business books. When I was your age, JP, the only books I read that were not required reading were novels, short story collections, and poetry. These days, my range is much wider. More than half of my reading consists of nonfiction books and essays. It is still only very occasionally that I’ll read the sort of how-to business book that Ready, Fire, Aim is.

Why? I’m not sure. It must be a form of pride or arrogance. It is surely connected to the fact that however lost I find myself in an unfamiliar city or even a large, unfamiliar retail store, I cannot bring myself to ask for directions.

Something must have happened in my early childhood that left me nearly disabled when it comes to asking for help. Doing so feels like a form of weakness or capitulation. I feel the same way about reading self-help business books. It feels like cheating.

In fact, in 2000, when I began writing Early to Rise (ETR), my daily blog about achieving “health, wealth, and wisdom,” you could count on one hand the total number of self-help books I had read.

I didn’t start ETR because I felt I had so many great ideas to write about. I did it because I could see that the world of internet publishing was exploding, and I wanted to get on board.

Having spent, by then, nearly 25 years as an editor and publisher, I knew enough about the publishing game to understand that if I wanted to succeed in this new world of digital newsletters, I had to (a) write about something that could generate income for my readers, and (b) restrict my writing to topics I could write about with authority.

But since I had read so little on “health, wealth, and wisdom” – the subjects I claimed to be an expert about – I had to anchor my theories almost entirely to my personal experience. That turned out to be a good thing, because my ideas and advice were, for the most part, different from the conventional ideas and advice one could find then in popular books and magazines. That gave me a USP (unique selling proposition) that drove ETR’s circulation up beyond 900,000 at its peak.

When I wrote Ready, Fire, Aim in 2007, it was similar in the sense that it was based almost entirely on my experience in starting and developing small businesses. When I referenced other books or magazine articles in its chapters, it was almost always to disagree with them.

Likewise in 2010, when my partners and I launched Creating Wealth, an internet periodical on entrepreneurship and wealth building. The content was 90% based on my personal experience.

You may be wondering, JP, why I’m telling you this. I’m sure you anticipated – and perhaps would prefer – a shorter answer to your questions. But I can’t really answer them without also giving you answers to other questions which, whether you meant to ask or not, still apply.

Point One: One idea that I hope you will take away from this is that my ignorance about such things as personal productivity and career-building gave me an advantage. My ideas and theories and stories that supported them were unique. They came from a different perspective, and gave my readers a way to achieve success that they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Your Takeaway on This Point: While absorbing ideas and insights about how to succeed in business from others, it is always smart to construct a filter between what they are saying and what you decide to do. Every business and wealth-building opportunity is unique. Never treat the ideas and advice you get from them as commandments. Treat them as pencil sketches for the masterpiece that will be yours and yours alone.

Point Two: In telling you about the difficulty I have in taking advice from others, it sounds like I’m suggesting that this is an advantage in business. Not so.

Your Takeaway on This Point: It was, for me, an advantage in developing a unique perspective. But if I could go back in time, I would have asked questions whenever I had them but filtered the answers through what I knew from experience. And that’s what I’m suggesting you do when you read how-to books on achieving success in business.

As I see it, there are basically two kinds of how-to books on business success:

* Outside-In Books – written by academics or professional writers, and

* Inside-Out Books – written by people who have achieved success on their own.

On the one hand, the books written by writer-researchers are often more objective and factual since they are derived from multiple sources over time.

On the other hand, books written by people who have done what they are writing about are often more believable because they are coming from the successful horse’s mouth.

Each kind of book has its advantages and disadvantages.

Outside-In Books: One thing I like about these books is that, if the writer is smart and articulate, the ideas are usually compelling and the reading is fun. But that is also their downside. Because the ideas are both fun and compelling, the reader is tempted to accept them without further investigation and without comparing those ideas with their personal experience.

Inside-Out Books: These books have the advantage of authority. They are coming from someone that has done what he is telling the reader to do. Why would you not follow such advice? I’ll give you one good reason. Because these books are often written by ghostwriters who have little to no prior knowledge of the industry or business they are writing about. They are getting their stories and their theories from the man that did it. And they have no way of knowing whether what they have been told by him is accurate or was invented to gild his lily.

The Bottom Line 

You should read as many how-to books on business and entrepreneurship and building wealth that you feel you have time for. But read them with an understanding of whether the ideas, strategies, and advice they present are outside-in or inside-out.

If it’s an outside-in book, remember that the author is in search of a clever idea that could become a bestselling idea. He may believe in the ideas he presents, but he hasn’t formulated them from experience. And that is a limitation you must keep in mind.

If it is an inside-out book, enjoy the stories. But remember that the person whose career you are reading about already has all the money and fame he could want. What he may not have is admiration and respect for his accomplishments. And if he thought he might generate such admiration and respect by altering his story or his insights, you might be reading bullshit.

66 Books Any Aspiring Entrepreneur or Wealth Builder Should Read
(Aside from My Own Books, of Course) 

These are not all the books one might want to read, nor are they necessarily the best – but they are the best books I’ve read and feel comfortable recommending.

Entrepreneurship

* The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
* Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc
* Zero to One by Peter Thiel
* Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
* The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
* Start with Why by Simon Sinek
* Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

Business & Business Management 

* How to Be Rich by J. Paul Getty
* A Passion for Excellence by Tom Peters
* Good to Great by Jim Collins
* Made In America by Sam Walton
* The Nordstrom Way by Robert Spector
* The World on Time by James C. Wetherbe
* The Disney Touch by Rod Grover
* You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen
* The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

Biographies & Autobiographies

* The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
* Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
* Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace
* Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace
* Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump
* Rupert Murdoch by Jerome Tuccille
* Iacocca: An Autobiography
* Be My Guest by Conrad Hilton
* Goals, Guts, and Greatness by Mark O. Haroldsen
* McDonald’s: Behind the Arches by John Love

Sales & Marketing 

* Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
* Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
* My First 65 Years in Advertising by Maxwell Sackheim
* The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
* Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
* How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor O Schwab
* The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
* Direct Marketing by Edward Nash
* Your Marketing Genius at Work by Jay Abraham
* The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy
* How to Win and Keep Customers by Michael LeBeouf
* Ziglar on Selling by Zig Ziglar
* The Guide to Greatness in Sales by Tom Hopkins
* How to Close Every Sale by Joe Girard
* The Art of the Hard Sell by Robert L. Shook

Investing & Wealth Building

* The Intelligent Investor Benjamin Graham
* The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom
* Gold: The Once and Future Money by Nathan Lewis
* Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
* The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
* The Bond King by Mary Childs
* The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias
* Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip Fisher

Economics

* The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
* Economics in One Lesson by William Hazlitt
* Das Kapital by Karl Marx
* The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
* Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by Ludwig von Mises
* Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
* The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
* The Empire of Debt by William Bonner and Addison Wiggins
* Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter
* Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner & Steven Levitt

Personal Development 

* 7 Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen R. Covey
* The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins
* Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
* The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale
* How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
* The Essence of Success by Earl Nightingale
* Atomic Habits by James Clear

The State of Our Economy: Republicans Are Saying One Thing, Democrats Another… and Both Have “Facts” to Prove Their Claims

Here’s What I Think

On Aug.16 and Aug. 23, I wrote about the key issues I believe we’ll be hearing about from Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz for the next two and a half months.

My argument was that the issues that are most important to core Trump voters and core Harris voters – such as immigration, rising crime, gender ideology, and censorship on one side, and abortion, trans rights, global warming, and the plight of the Palestinians on the other side – won’t be the deciding factors in the upcoming election.

Instead, as it has so many times before, it will come down to the economy. To be more accurate, to the perception of the economy by undecided voters in the swing states.

So, is it healthy – perhaps healthier than it’s been in years – as Harris has recently been claiming? Or is it, as Trump is suggesting, a skyscraper of debt and mismanagement teetering on the verge of collapse, but savable if he is in the Oval Office?

I am not an economist. What I know about economics is the result of heading up a business that has been publishing newsletters, books, and special reports on investing for more than 30 years.

Nevertheless, I’m going to tell you what I’m thinking right now based on the reading I’ve done in the past, the ups and downs I’ve experienced as a businessman, and what I’ve been studying over the past several weeks to write this piece.

Here’s the Good News 

The good news is that, despite countless predictions by some doomsayers to the contrary, the US economy has not fallen into a depression. In fact, we are not even in an official recession.

GDP has been growing a bit faster than expected, inflation growth is, at least temporarily, ebbing, and job opening numbers are officially rising.

Consumers are spending less, which is good, However, these same consumers are borrowing more – which Biden administration economists interpret as stimulating for the economy, though others see it as bad.

That’s all I could find for the good news. If you think I missed anything, please let me know.

And Here’s the Not-Good News 

At the top of the not-good news is that the US is now about $35 trillion in debt, which is about $105,000 for every individual and $270,000 for every US household.

Over the last 12 months, as you can see above, the national debt has surged by nearly $2.3 trillion. That’s about $6.4 billion every single day, roughly $266.7 million an hour, and around $4.44 million a minute.

Click here if you want to watch it tick up live by the second. But be warned – it’s disturbing.

I know these numbers are abstract and difficult to fathom. But stick with me as I try to explain, to the best of my understanding, why they are so scary.

This peak debt of $35 trillion is not only an all-time high for the US, but also more than twice the debt load of China (in second place at about $14 trillion), almost three times Japan’s (in third place at about $13 trillion), and more than 10 times the UK’s (in fourth place at about $3 trillion).

$35 trillion is about 125% of our GDP, the sum of all the goods and services we produce. This is bad. Not as bad as Japan’s and Italy’s debts as a percentage of GDP, at 250% and 140% respectively, nevertheless bad.

As I said, the US economy is not in a recession right now. (A recession is technically defined as a fall in GDP for two successive quarters.) But for the US to avoid a recession in the near future, the Fed must reduce its $7.2 trillion balance sheet and stay on a path to normalize monetary policy. That is going to be a difficult – maybe impossible – job. It’s likely, in fact, that the Fed will restart “quantitative easing” – i.e., printing more dollars – very soon. That will increase, not reduce, our debt.

As for inflation, the Labor Dept.’s CPI (Consumer Price Index) rose 2.9% year-on-year in July, the smallest gain since 2021. That is a fact the Harris camp will be using.

According to official government data, inflation, which is most often calculated by using the CPI, advanced only 0.2% in July, up 3.2% year-on-year. But this is misleading.

That official rate, now called “core inflation,” does not include the cost of energy and food, which, quite obviously, comprise very significant percentages of middle-class and working-class expenses. And while it’s true that prices for some goods have fallen, they have been more than offset by rising prices for a range of items, including auto insurance (18.6%), childcare (5.1%), fast food (4.3%), and internet services (3.9%).

As for job growth, the Harris campaign is claiming that US employers added 114,000 jobs in July and taking credit for that as a sign of a recovering economy. What they won’t tell you is that the US economy must produce at least 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with population growth. So even if we did add 114,000 jobs last month, we would still be losing ground.

And it’s worse than that. These job growth numbers are estimates that have been consistently and grossly inflated. Here’s an explanation of how overblown the government’s numbers have been over the last 12 months.

From the WSJ:

It isn’t difficult to get a positive employment report every month when you are “adjusting” the final number by about a quarter of a million jobs that you just “assume” are being created somehow.

In any event, even if we take the government’s report at face value, the Sahm Rule (which has successfully predicted every recession since 1970) has still been officially triggered…. The rule stipulates that a recession is likely when the three-month moving average of the jobless rate is at least a half-percentage point higher than the 12- month low.

Over the past three months, the unemployment rate has averaged 4.13%, which is 0.63 percentage points higher than the 3.5% rate recorded in July 2023.

But Enough with the Government’s Questionable Data – 
Let’s Look at What Is Happening in Reality

I feel more comfortable interpreting numbers that are easier to understand and harder to fake – i.e., numbers reported by businesses that are required under penalty of law to be correct. And here, the overall outlook is bleak.

Some examples:

Banking 

US banks closed 28 branches across the country in just one week in July. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and US Bank each closed eight locations in the last week. Greenville Fed, Chase, and Schaumberg Bank & Trust closed the other four.

Retail Business 

The retail industry is going through a tough time. Since the COVID shutdown, there has been a massive abandonment of businesses across the country. Thousands of mom-and-pop stores have closed – many in urban areas – and retail chains are in no better shape.

The surveys I’ve looked at say the great majority of the mom-and-pops are shut for good. And those closed chain stores – it’s hard to say, but it is going to take time and some divine intervention to grow the economy to the point where they will be reopened.

If it were just the smaller stores, it would be bad news but not necessarily reflective of the health of the retail industry at large. However, these smaller closures are happening at the same time as the big ones.

Some examples:

* Two months after announcing plans to close about 40 stores nationwide due to financial woes, Big Lots has indicated on its website that it intends to close almost 300.

* Macy’s has plans to close more than 150 of its stores over the next three years.

* Stop & Shop will be closing 32 of its large grocery stores in the US northeast “as part of the company’s efforts to improve its financial performance.”

* CVS, one of the US’s largest drugstore chains, closed nearly 900 stores from 2020 to 2024. Additionally, the company announced plans to close dozens of its pharmacies inside Target stores.

* The furniture retailer Malouf sells beds and bedding in a fraction of the colors it did a few years ago.

* Avon Products, once one of the most iconic brands in the beauty industry, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Aug. 14.

* Blink Fitness, a chain of gyms that has more than 100 locations in seven states announced that it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Aug. 12.

* The Body Shop, a beauty brand originally from the UK, closed down all its US stores last year.

* In March, Dollar Tree announced that it would be shutting down nearly 1,000 stores in the near future.

* Family Dollar announced that it is planning to close at least 600 stores this year.

* Best Buy, the retail giant specializing in electronics, closed about 24 stores last year. While the company saw strong sales in the last quarter (thanks to the holiday season), it plans to close an additional 10-15 stores by 2025.

* And Walgreens, the big daddy of pharmacy retailers, is projected to shutter 2,150 of its roughly 8,600 locations over the next three years.

Restaurants 

Restaurants could be said to be a subdivision of the retail industry, but their financial health is not always in sync. One might hope for some better activity with the restaurant chains – but overall, it’s just more bad news.

For example:

* Applebee’s is closing more than 30 stores this year.

* Red Lobster is closing at least 48 of its stores.

* Bloomin’ Brands began closing some of its Outback Steakhouses in February and plans to continue to close more as needed, as well as other brands it owns, such as Bonefish Grill, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse.

Overall, at least 11 retail brands have said that they’re closing US stores in 2024, totaling up to 1,401 locations.

Energy 

The US has always had the advantage of massive in-ground stores of oil, coal, and natural gas.

Leftists generally and “renewable energy” devotees have been waging a political war against fossil fuels with cultish commitment. The Biden administration, starting on day one, catered to these voters by implementing a series of measures that has made our core energy resources dramatically more expensive in the last three years – which is the argument that Trump and Vance are going to be making.

But I don’t think most Americans from either side of the political spectrum have any idea about the economics of energy or how large the impact of energy prices is on the health of the economy. So, while I do think Biden’s policies have been detrimental to the economy, I don’t think the energy argument will be a winning one for Trump/Vance.

In fact, I’m bullish on oil, gas, and natural gas. I don’t foresee a future where the fossil fuel industry goes bust. Quite the contrary, the harder the government presses to move away from fossil fuels, the more fossil fuels will be consumed between now and whenever a deadline for eliminating them is pursued.

Keep in mind that every technology we have today that is green requires the burning of fossil fuels to produce the hardware and software needed to achieve a green economy.

Utilities 

Because of our government’s energy policies over the last several years, utility customers across the country are increasingly paying more for less-reliable service. And the massive heat wave the US has been experiencing this summer has only made the situation much worse.

Real Estate 

The US real estate industry is a mess. It began with the hysteria-inducing government-imposed COVID shutdown… which led to tens of millions of office workers working from home… which led to a huge spike in office vacancies and a big drop in commercial real estate prices, which has not been recorded and probably never will.

Example: A Washington, DC, office building was sold at a massive 75% discount last week. The 175,000 sq. ft. tower, which sold for $60 million in 2006, sold for $16 million this time.

Meanwhile, the housing market is falling apart because prices have been inflated so severely over the past several years.

One result is that evictions are on the rise. Eviction filings in 10 cities across the country are up more than 15% over the past year compared with the period before the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to the Eviction Lab, a research unit at Princeton University.

Education 

The price to attend a traditional four-year college has surged. Some private colleges and universities recently announced tuition of $90,000+ for the 2024-25 school year.

Families are facing a record amount of student loan debt, with an estimated $100 billion in new loans to be issued in 2024, up from $98 billion in 2023.

That is probably why, according to the WSJ, enrollment at US community colleges focused on vocational skills rose 16% in 2023 to its highest level since 2018, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.

Bankruptcies 

Personal and business bankruptcy filings rose 16.2% in the 12-month period ending June 30, 2024, compared with the previous year.

According to statistics released by the Administrative Office of the US Courts, bankruptcy filings totaled 486,613 in the year ending June 2024, compared with 418,724 the previous year. Business bankruptcy filings rose 40.3%, from 15,724 to 22,060 in the year ending June 30, 2024. Non-business filings rose 15.3% to 464,553, compared with 403,000 the previous year.

The Big Picture 

The rise of US debt and the dismal state of the US economy cannot be assigned solely to Biden and Harris. The Trump administration – and every other administration in the past 20 years – has been equally complicit. Over that period, the landscape of the US economy changed greatly. The rich have gotten richer. The middle class has gotten poorer. And the number of people reliant on government assistance to survive has exploded.

This gets me back to the beginning of this essay. Wealthy East and West Coast voters may very well believe the economic “facts” they are hearing from the Biden administration and the Harris campaign. But according to a research report I cut and pasted from CBS Money Watch:

* Americans have a specific annual income in mind for what it would take to feel financially secure, according to a new survey from the personal finance site Bankrate. The magic number? $186,000 per year.

* Currently, only 6% of US adults make that amount or more. The median family income falls between $51,500 and $86,000, according to the latest federal data.

* For most Americans, financial security means being able to pay your bills while having enough left over to make some discretionary purchases and put money away for the future – and they have an even higher yardstick for feeling rich. The survey found they believe they would need to earn $520,000 a year to qualify as wealthy – up from $483,000 in the same survey last year.

As Sarah Foster, an analyst at Bankrate, pointed out, that gap between what the typical American earns and what they aspire to earn means “Americans think they need to make more money even if they know it’s unrealistic, they’ll never make that amount.”

Conclusion 

Trump is essentially right in pointing out that the US economy is in bad shape – and could be teetering on the brink of collapse. I don’t know if he means it. I don’t even know if he understands macroeconomics. But the same can be said of most American voters.

What matters to voters is the microeconomics of the micro-economies in which they live. And those economies (all the industries listed above) are either floundering or foundering.

I don’t know any company owner or CEO who is optimistic about the future of his business. Nor do I know any consumer that believes prices haven’t risen to frightening heights.

If the November election comes down to how undecided voters feel about the economy today, as opposed to how they felt four years ago, the outcome looks bad for Harris.

My Fourth-Quarter Advice to Kamala and The Donald, Part II 

Last Friday, I wrote about the key issues Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz will be facing over the next two and a half months. A conservative-leaning reader complained, noting that most of the advice I gave was beneficial to Dems.

When I looked over what I had written, I realized that he was right. So today, I’m going to give my helpful counseling to Trump and his team.

Here goes…

Donald – In advising the Harris team, I suggested that it would be wise for them to keep her out of the public eye until November. (“Just read that teleprompter and smile, Kamala. Don’t laugh!”)

As you know, that didn’t happen. Three times she went off script and, obviously without getting clearance from the COPs, announced three policy proposals, one dumber than the other. Why she felt the urge to go solo with these ideas is anyone’s guess. They were so ill-informed – so economically ignorant and politically naïve – that her media supporters had to leap to her rescue almost as soon as the words left her mouth.

The COPs (especially Obama) must be furious with her. Where did she get the idea that she could make complex economic, military, and diplomatic decisions on her own? Was she reading and believing her own hype?

I’m not, as you are not, a huge Kamala fan. She sometimes says and does things that make me wonder if there are any lights on in the attic. But there is a reason she has come so far. It’s not just the boost she got from Willie Brown or now from Joe Biden. We saw that last night in her speech, which was a political triumph. This joy and strength theme is making her core audience giddy. As for undecided voters – it’s difficult to believe it will have much impact.

What will have an impact is her new platform, which is basically a shameless confiscation of many of your strongest policy plans, but lathered with promises that economists said would amount to $5 trillion worth of government giveaways.

I claim partial credit for her great night last night because she stuck to the script that was written for her and never strayed. And she made most of her stated falsehoods sound believable.

So, her three dumb moves last week are all but forgotten and she is now big on closing the border and returning illegal immigrants.

My point, Donald, is that she almost blew it when she ignored my advice, and yet she bounced back strongly when she heeded it. I want you to think about that. And consider the danger of not following my instructions.

I know you pride yourself on saying whatever is on your mind when you say it. I also know that this political personality disorder has won you tens of millions of middle-class and working-class voters that were tired of the ever more ludicrous lies they were being fed.

Nevertheless, I have to remind you: This election won’t be decided by the fan base you have now. It will be decided by undecided voters in the swing states. And to move them to your side, you need a new approach and, in a few cases, a different narrative.

First of all, I know you will attack her for her easy-on-crime policies as California AG. And you should. But if you do it the way you always like to go after your political opponents, you will only cheer up your core at the expense of losing many of the undecideds.

The undecideds are undecided because they (a) have common sense and (b) pride themselves on thinking through the decisions they make. So, we must assume that they are aware that crime has been on the rise since Kamala’s woke ideas on the subject have been effectuated by woke governors and AGs in a dozen states.

Which means that, though the issue of rising crime is a good one for you, the way you bring it to the undecideds is important. If you do it as I’m about to tell you, it should be a slam-dunk in your favor. But if you follow your instincts, you will almost surely lose the advantage that you now have.

You must – I repeat, must – desist from the ad-hominem attacks. Undecided voters are looking for reasons to make their decisions. They are looking for facts. It will turn them off if you try to humiliate Kamala on this issue. Remember, even though the undecideds want to make rational decisions, they don’t know enough about crime or criminal justice to have already formed an opinion on her ideas and history. It will turn most of them off if you treat her like you treated Hillary.

So, how should you act when this topic comes up in a debate (as it most surely will)?

Remember when, after Biden blew himself up at the debate with you, you were asked to respond? You miraculously restrained yourself by simply explaining that you couldn’t understand what he had just said.

That’s the way you need to deal with the crime issue. Resist your impulses and speak as if you believe Kamala is a worthy, or at least sympathetic, opponent.

The undecided voters are looking for facts, not rhetorical combat. If you verbally abuse Kamala, they will see you as mean. But if you treat her the way you did Joe – like a nice person with some mental shortcomings – they will see you as kind.

I give you the same advice when it comes to discussing the economy. Don’t try to shred Kamala when she claims that she and Joe improved the economy with such failed policies as their Orwellian named anti-inflation bill. Undecided voters know how much more they are paying for food and rent and utilities. So treat her gently but correct her on facts.

My specific directions are thus: When she makes a statement that is clearly wrong, look at her for a few seconds as if you are thinking, “Are you serious?” (And smile when you do that.) Then, and this is important, turn away from her and face the camera.

Explain to the camera – i.e., to the undecideds – why the “official government data” on inflation is rigged and wrong. And how even though the rise of inflation has slowed, the current level is still badly hurting middle- and working-class people. Then give three or four specific facts to back up that statement. Three or four is all you need. Watch some Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson videos to learn how to mete out your facts in an emotionally compelling way.

(And, by the way, I offer this same advice to you, too, Mr. Vance.)

Do the same thing whenever Kamala says something naïvely woke about geopolitics or foreign policy. Don’t respond to her directly. Make your point as a concerned and edifying message to the public, letting the facts speak for themselves.

It’s highly unlikely Kamala will bring up the fact that we are on the threshold of WWIII. It’s just too obvious to anyone who thinks about it that both the Israel/Hamas and the Russian/Ukraine wars started on her watch. If she does bring it up, say this:

“You know, at the beginning of my term in office, many of my critics were predicting  that I was going to get us into trouble militarily because they believed I was too tough and too inflexible. They thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with our allies and enemies diplomatically. But they were wrong.”

Then point out that you are the only president in modern times that was in office for four years without starting a war.

Let’s see. What else?

As for Walz’s exaggerated claims about his military record, don’t even mention it. Leave that to JD.

If she follows her script, Kamala will harp on abortion-related issues, including the current composition of the Supreme Court and its recent decision re Roe v. Wade. In my advice for her last week, I said that she should deal with these issues strategically – be careful about making exaggerated claims and statements.

Keep in mind, Donald, that many of the undecideds are uncomfortable with the Supreme Court’s decision and also worried a bit about what a conservative Supreme Court might do in the future.

So when abortion comes up, it’s critical for you to come off as compassionate.

Say:

“We are talking about a very difficult decision, one that weighs most heavily on the pregnant mother, but also affects the rights of the father. Ultimately, it must include such considerations as the mental and physical health of the mother, the circumstances of the pregnancy, as well as a realistic conversation about what rights the unborn child might have.”

Then say:

“I would not presume to have the ultimate ethical answer. But I think that for a pregnant   woman to make such a decision without exploring all the issues and complications is not good for all involved, especially for herself.”

Then say:

“As I see it, the Supreme Court’s decision was not about taking a side for or against the right to life or the right to choose but recognizing that the Constitution makes it clear that in nuanced and complicated matters such as these, it serves the Republic as a whole to  have such policies made on a state-by-state basis.”

Then say:

“If voters disagree with the laws and regulations made by their state, they are free to oppose them and overturn them legally if they can. That goes equally for those that are pro-life and those that are pro-choice.”

If pro-choice interlocutors continue to challenge you after you have said all that, say this:

 “Our founders were divided in their opinions about all sorts of important issues. They also were very sensitive to the danger to freedom and democracy that comes from treating important issues as binary questions. It was precisely because of that wisdom, which came from their combined social and political experience as immigrants from countries that had teetered on and experienced tyranny and revolutions, that they invented the concept of separation of powers: the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the Supreme Court. That court was established precisely because they knew that issues would arise about laws and policies that could tear the country apart. It doesn’t mean that their judgements will always be perfect, but it held out the hope that when the future populous became dangerously divided on an issue, there would be one branch of   government whose job would be to make decisions based on their commitment to making such decisions based on the founding principles of the country, which are inscribed in the Constitution.”

You’ll have to stick closely to this script. My guess is that in the swing states, a third of undecided voters are pro-life, another third are pro-choice. That means you and Kamala will be competing for the last third – the undecideds that are truly independent thinkers. Because they like to think for themselves, they will have mixed thoughts and feelings about abortion. My script is designed to win them over. So stick to it. Don’t think you can improvise your way through this minefield.

Okay, Donald, I think I’ve covered the big issues.

The bottom line is this: If you listen to what I’m telling you, you will beat or tie Kamala on all the wedge issues. But to be safe, you should assume that you will come out even on them.

And if that happens, your target audience – the undecided voters in the swing states – will make their final decision based on how they feel about the economy. Which is what has happened with so many elections in the past 20 years.

Remember that the facts are on your side. So, use them. Calmly. And with exactness. Be the rational authority, the man with the truth.

Don’t underestimate Kamala in this regard. She will come to the podium with facts of her own – facts that will sound true, however nonsensical they really are. Her facts will seem believable if she presents them with conviction. And so will yours. Your advantage will be that your facts will be actual facts.

Nobody really understands economics, and that includes the undecideds. If they are upset with the economy, and most of them are, they have no choice but to side with the person that seems most knowledgeable but also the most rational – the person who breaks down the problem into understandable pieces and offers advice that sounds like common sense. You have the edge here… if you can restrain yourself.

I’m going to be watching you next week, Donald, just as I watched Kamala this past week. I’m hoping to see that you will have understood – and paid attention to – my advice.

The Election Is Getting Close: My Fourth-Quarter Advice to Kamala and The Donald 

After my May 17 essay on the coming election, I received a few complaints from Trump supporters saying that it was nothing short of a battle plan for how the Dems could win. So this time, I’m going to even things out by giving advice to the Trump campaign as well.

Where We’re at Right Now 

The Dems are feeling optimistic about November since they took Joe Biden off the ballot and his replacement, Kamala Harris, jumped ahead of Trump in the polls.

As I’ll explain in a moment, I don’t think the folks orchestrating the Democratic agenda had Kamala in mind. In fact, I believe she was never even a consideration. Her poll numbers were always low, and by mid 2023 they were even lower than Biden’s. But here she was, Biden’s unelected replacement, and the public response was very positive. Much better than they could have imagined.

More than a year ago – in January 2023 – I predicted that Biden would not be the Democratic candidate for president come November 2024. I made that prediction for several reasons, but especially because it was becoming increasingly evident to me and anyone else who was paying attention to the visible signs of his physical and cognitive decline that he could not beat Trump.

Though Biden’s many embarrassing lapses, pratfalls, and bizarre behaviors were downplayed by the mainstream media, his rapidly evolving dementia was certainly obvious to those close to him, including those few that had been running the Democrat agenda and planning his reelection. I can’t say I knew exactly who “they” were, but, mostly because I liked using the COPs acronym, I chose to focus on the influence of Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi.

Biden’s replacement had to be someone strong and skillful and likeable. I thought their obvious choice would be Gavin Newsom, who has the charisma, political intelligence, and rhetorical skills to stand up against and even defeat Trump in an extended campaign. And I wrote that if Barack could convince Michelle to be Newsom’s running mate, victory would be all but guaranteed.

I was right about Biden being ousted, but I was wrong about his replacement.

Sleepy Joe surprised the COPs and suddenly stopped taking orders. He resisted when they told him he had to step down and kept resisting. If they did nothing, it was going to be another Biden/Harris ticket with the genuine possibility of an Orange Menace Redux.

They had to act fast, so they pulled out Plan B. They called for an early debate with Trump, the earliest such “presidential debate” ever held. And I believe they knew what was going to happen. When it did, Biden knew he had to go. They had exposed what they and the establishment press had been hiding for more than a year: Biden was not capable of running for president, let alone being president.

So, Biden was gone. But did they have enough time to bring in Newsom? And would Newsom even agree to do it, since he is smart enough to know that there might not have been enough time to build the campaign he needed to win?

Someone decided: We must go with Kamala. Even if only as a temporary measure.

When the announcement was made, her likeability scores shot up. And now, the positive energy is so strong it’s palpable. Despite my best efforts, I’ve found myself irrationally swept up in it. At least she’s attractive to look at, some primitive part of my brain whispers. And she has a pulse, which is a big improvement over her boss.

Or is it? What if she wins and she and her VP begin knocking out executive orders based on their historical preferences? What if they are truly committed to doing to the nation what they did to California and Minnesota?

Don’t worry, my liberal and left-leaning readers, I won’t paint a picture of what I think will happen to America if Kamala wins. Because, despite the current frenzy of giddiness about her, there is still a possibility that the COPs have a switcheroo planned.

But if they don’t, they have a challenging job on their hands.

The Challenge Facing the Dems 

Even if she is locked in a basement for much of the time between now and November, Kamala will be forced to face the public and answer questions that Trump and his team are eager to ask her.

She will be indicted for every failure and damaging decision made by the Biden administration in the last three years. Some of the charges will sting. She needs to have answers for them.

At the top of my list is what is politely referred to as their “Southern Border Policy” – the deliberate (and ruthlessly brilliant) idea of opening the Mexican border to 18 million (or was it 12 million?) illegal immigrants who would be reliant on government handouts to survive in the States, and then flying and/or busing them to various cities and suburbs across the nation.

That was step one. And it was successful beyond any reasonable expectation.

Step two was to give the immigrants driver’s licenses to make them “sort of legal” (currently allowed in 19 states and the District of Columbia). And step three will be to give them the right to vote. This would ensure Democrat dominance in the Oval Office and both houses of Congress for decades to come, and may well be Kamala’s first executive order if she is elected.

When I made my prediction about Biden’s exit, I would have said that the border issue would be lethal for Kamala. After all, she has been, in theory, the border tsar since 2020. (Amazingly, despite the mainstream press exalting her as “border tsar” ad nauseam in 2021 and 2022, they are now claiming – and she will be too – that she never had such a job. Her job was to research the “root causes” of immigration. As if that was a genuine question. Gee, why would someone who lives in, say, Nicaragua, which is safer than the US, want to emigrate to the States.  Could it be that the average landscaper in Nicaragua makes less than $2,000 a year?

But once again, the COPs have done something clever. You may not have noticed, but the Dems have completely abandoned the Biden policies that let in all those millions and reinstalled Trump’s strict border policies. So now, when confronted, Kamala can say, “Joe and I solved that problem.” And the establishment press will agree.

That will help. But the election will be decided by the undecided voters, and I don’t know if they will buy the claim that the problem was solved.

The effect of an influx of millions of largely unskilled and uneducated immigrants continues to be felt across the US, including Democrat-run cities faced with the costs of giving them the “sanctuary” they had been guaranteed by the Biden administration.

Kamala also has some personal “issues” to deal with. She is not good at public speaking. And she is not particularly likeable. Even the people that work for her don’t seem to like her. But let’s put that aside.

My Latest Advice for Kamala and the Dems 

The Abortion Issue 

For obvious reasons, Kamala is going to be urged to spend a good part of her time and the best of her speechwriters’ rhetoric on the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to “overturn” Roe vs. Wade by relegating abortion rights to the States.

After all, according to the latest Pew Research poll I saw, a majority, 62%, of Americans disagree with that decision. Perhaps more importantly, 43% strongly disagree.

But I think it would be a mistake for Kamala to make this a key part of her election strategy.

Here’s why.

First, a sizeable portion of Americans, 41%, believe the court’s decision was a good one, and 25% strongly agree with it. Those are minority percentages, but not overwhelmingly small. Furthermore, according to the Pew survey, adults living in the states where abortion is newly largely prohibited (or where prohibitions are set to take effect soon) are much more evenly divided: 46% approve of the court’s decision, while slightly more, 52%, disapprove.

This means to me that in the 40+ states where abortion is still legal, the anger and energy among those opposed to the court’s decision will have diminished considerably by November. For them, it won’t feel like such a threat. And that will matter greatly to the undecided voters – the voters who will make the final decision about the outcome of the election.

So, I am hereby advising the COPs and whoever they’ve appointed to run Kamala’s campaign to advise her to bring up the abortion issue strategically – only when she can attach it to some charge against Trump where it might resonate among undecided voters.

The Supreme Court Issue 

Most of the liberal and left-wing pundits I’ve watched and read seem to believe that promising to “fix” the Supreme Court could be a very strong arrow in Kamala’s quiver.

I do think the pundits are right that the currently conservative composition of the Supreme Court is a very strong issue to talk about. It appeals to a genuine fear – not just of liberal and leftist voters, but probably significant numbers of undecided voters as well.

So, like the abortion issue, Kamala should make this part of her campaign platform. But again, she needs to be careful with how she handles it.

She is going to feel a great deal of pressure to promise to pack the court, and there is a way for her to do it. The Constitution does not stipulate the number of Supreme Court justices. The number is set by Congress. So she could use her position as president to pressure Congress to enact a law to increase the number from nine to 11 or even 13, and then work to get two or four additional seats filled by candidates with strong liberal views (as Biden did so successfully with appointments to the lower courts in the last three years).

But I would advise her to leave this one alone. Though packing the court is something that most voters know nothing about, I think it would feel like a very anti-Democratic, dirty-trick approach to politics to anyone but confirmed leftists. Most voters, especially undecided voters, would be turned off by the promise, if she makes it.

She can avoid the risk and still get the benefit of fanning the flames of liberal and leftist fears by simply pointing out that the Supreme Court is largely composed of septa- and octogenarians, some of whom she will be able to replace in the four to eight years she will be president of the USA.

The Economy 

Next on the attack agenda for the Republicans will be the economy. They will argue that Biden and Harris spent three years making one bad economic decision after another, which has set the US economy tumbling towards something akin to Venezuela’s, with an oversized government bureaucracy, skyrocketing taxes, and continued inflation that will make each dollar made, saved, and spent less valuable.

Kamala will counter with data (increasing job opportunities and decreasing unemployment) that, at least on a superficial level, seems positive, which she will attribute to actions and policies instituted during the past three years. And if the stock market is doing well during her campaign, she will take credit for that.

The fact is that important political actions and decisions that can and do affect the economy (such as major spending bills, significant tax adjustments, international trade tariffs, hikes or cuts, or adjusting corporate and individual income taxes) almost never effect the larger economy during the administration in which they are enacted. Big fiscal, monetary, regulatory, and tax decisions made at the federal level take years – usually five to seven years – before their impact is fully registered.

Nevertheless, the economy has always been a major, if not the major, deciding factor in elections when other important issues aren’t clear winners.

Kamala has some arguments on her side. But most of them, like most of the arguments Trump will make, will be both misleading and irrelevant and will be perceived by undecided voters as false. They are living in the economy every day. And it doesn’t feel good to them.

Trump has the advantage of having been president during a time when the economy was stronger than it is now. And there is nothing that Kamala can say that will convince undecided voters otherwise. So I think Trump has the edge here. It’s not a huge advantage, but his claims will ring truer than hers because people are naturally inclined to view the past more positively than it was and their current situation a bit more negatively than it is.

And like I said, the current enthusiasm for Kamala is certain to ebb as the election approaches. Right now, I’m giving the nod to Trump. But only by a hair.

My Advice for Trump and His Campaign 

I dread to say it, but I suspect that Trump and the Republican leadership will ignore my advice, just as the Democrats have so far.

I’ll say it anyway…

Maintain your confidence, Donald. Keep on with your boasting. Bang relentlessly on how strong the economy was during your tenure and remind voters constantly that you know how to build things and make money and that Kamala has never worked an honest day in her life.

But don’t make that your main theme. You may very well lose if you do.

Instead, use your recent ear thing to tell the nation… not that you’ve found God (that won’t expand your base) but that you have found a space in your heart that is telling you that now is the time to unite Americans… that we are facing serious threats and we cannot defeat them and prosper as a divided country. Make the same pledge Joe made, and try to sound like you mean it.

Some will tell you that tactic won’t fly. They will say that no one will believe you. But they are only half right. The tens of millions of Trump haters won’t believe you. But the tens of millions of Trump lovers will. More importantly – more critical strategically – is that many undecided voters will believe you because it’s something they want and need to believe can happen.

And here’s the most important thing: You can mean it. You can mean it because, as you said to an interviewer just before the 2016 election, what you would most like to accomplish as president would be to become the “most loved” president of all time.

Yes, you said that. Do you remember?

You said it and you meant it because… well, because you are a narcissist.

I’m not dissing you for that. Being a narcissist is not always a bad thing. One of the positives is that you have the ability to change not only your opinions quickly (which all politicians can do), but also your beliefs, even your deepest beliefs, if it will mean that more people will love you. Used in situations like this, narcissism is a rare and powerful strength. Accept it. Embrace it. Become the unifier you are going to say you will be.

There’s More Than One Way to Claim Victory 

JG, a new friend I’m giving some advice to on how to grow his already successful business, wrote to me late last week. He mentioned, among other news, that he’d just returned to training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu after an absence of four weeks and, perhaps because he’d lost 16 pounds, had a great comeback training session. “There are some specific things I have done to drop weight and increase lung capacity that I will share with you when we talk,” he said.

I lost weight during my nearly four weeks in Japan, but I lost only five pounds – and I can’t say that I felt the additional energy and endurance that JG experienced. But I’d like to. Losing weight – especially if it’s fat – puts less stress on the heart and lungs and, thus, helps with endurance. And as I said on Monday, endurance is one of the most important factors for success in BJJ (and every other fighting sport I can think of). Losing weight can also make for more agility.

So I’m eager to see what JG has to show me. I’m equally eager to get below 200 pounds again. I doubt that will happen unless I get on the semaglutide train, which I’m considering. Meanwhile, I have to take my BJJ victories as they come. In very small doses.

I’ve mentioned before that the four guys I train with regularly are all national and world champions.

ES, the youngest of them (in his late-20s), is a multiple national title holder. I’ve been training with him since he was a blue belt at 16. I used to beat him then. I continued to have the upper hand until about halfway through his 17th year. Never since. ES is a nationally ranked black belt now, with a body fat count of about minus-5. Since he’s still a kid, I can sometimes get him laughing during training. This tactic has allowed me to score a point or two on him, but since he’s a kid, he feels like he has to give me some painful payback immediately thereafter. To avoid the drubbing, the moment I get my points, I jump up and run around the perimeter of the mat, hands raised in celebration. (I suppose he’s not the only child in those fights.)

VS, his older brother (34), is on a hot streak in national and global competition, having taken gold (sometimes twice in a single tournament) in all of his last seven fights. He walks around at my weight, about 220, and fights at 208. But even at 220, he is built like Hercules. He is, however, the gentlest of the four in wrestling with me. (Jiu Jitsu is sometimes described as the “gentle” martial art.) Once, before one of his big fights, he was going especially easy on me and let me outscore him for three or four minutes. I got worried that he might be thinking he was losing his touch. So I bet him that he couldn’t pass my guard and submit me in five minutes. I knew he could, but I figured I could at least hold him off for a few minutes and a hard-fought victory over me would give him the confidence boost I imagined he needed. He asked me how much I was willing to bet. I was feeling cocky, so I said $100. He passed my guard and submitted me in 17 seconds.

Then there is SM, another national and world champion who walks around – or so he says – at 245. Since he fights in the ultra-heavy division, he doesn’t have to weigh in. So, I – and some of the other guys that train with him – suspect he’s even heavier. In any case, SM has a slow, controlling game, which means that once he gets hold of a wrist or ankle, it’s pretty much game over. Inch by inch he puts me down, passes my guard, mounts me, and then, instead of submitting me by a choke or joint lock, as he easily could, prefers to lay his huge chest on top of my face and make me submit for fear of suffocation. He also has an annoying habit of speaking gently to his opponents as he dominates them. (“Nice try, Mark, but you know

Finally, there is RT. At 50, RT is the oldest of the four. He walks around at 165 but competes at 10 to 20 pounds lighter. He’s been ranked #1 in the world for seven years running. It’s immensely stupid of me, but every time I train with RT, my brain says, “This guy has gray hair and weighs 50 pounds less than you. You are a black belt. You have won four regional titles. Surely, you can defeat him today.” I told RT about my bet with VS. He passed my guard and submitted me in 14 seconds!

You might be thinking: “Why would a 73-year-old man who has suffered two Achilles tendon ruptures, two rotary cuff surgeries, one ACL replacement, and another full knee replacement continue to train at BJJ and get his ass kicked for a solid hour four or five times a week?”

For me, the answer is simple.

BJJ is a great physical workout in every way – strength training, endurance training, flexibility training, and motor-response conditioning.

It is also a brain game that it is highly technical (much more so than, say, boxing or conventional wrestling). Each movement by your opponent sets up three or four responses you must make in less than a second or you will fall quickly behind. And each response of yours creates an equal number of possible movements on his part. In other words, Jiu Jitsu is a sport where you have to make hundreds of decisions every minute, each one in anticipation of hundreds of possible decisions your opponent makes. This is why it is often referred to as physical speed chess. (It’s also why it’s quite possible for a small and even a weak practitioner to dominate and defeat someone that is considerably bigger and stronger. And younger.)

It is rare to spend an hour or 90 minutes training without learning something new – something that might improve my “game” in some small way, or something that is cool because it’s technically interesting.

And there is a unique kind of comradery that can come with training BJJ. It is the trust that develops from constantly putting yourself in positions where your training partner could seriously hurt or kill you – except for the mutual agreement that when you “tap” on his body or the mat he will immediately desist. I think of it as a lighter version of how police or soldiers that are paired up over time begin to feel about one another. It’s hard to think of any other sport that would allow me to have this level of trust and appreciation for my teammates. It’s a casual but deep bond that runs through every type of social, physical, or psychological barrier.

Since the likelihood of my winning gold again is diminishing as I get older, I’ve concocted a way to enjoy winning vicariously. It works like this: I’ve pointed out to my training partners that every time they’ve won gold in recent years, they had trained with me – and beaten me handily – a week or two beforehand. “It might be a coincidence,” I’ve told them. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t take the chance of not doing that training with me.”

So it’s become something of a ritual. And since we began this ritual a couple years ago, my record is something like 40 and 4. And July 26, at the Orlando Open, three of my guys competed and came back with four gold medals!

I’m not saying that training with me beforehand was a deciding factor. But I’m not saying it didn’t help either.

Yeah, BJJ makes me happy. Happy from the exercise. Happy from the learning. Happy from the comradery. But also happy in a way that I thought I’d never again experience – the childhood joy of going out to play and playing and not wanting to stop at dinnertime.

“An Appetite for Destruction” by Bill Bonner 

One of the qualities I most admire about Bill Bonner, with whom I’ve worked for nearly 30 years now, is his courage as a writer. When you have a large fan base, hundreds of thousands of readers that pay you hundreds of millions of dollars a year to bring them news and views on macro-economics and investing, you get to know which of your opinions they like, and which they don’t.

Given the economics of the situation, and the natural tendency to want to have your essays praised and your thoughts affirmed, the temptation is to double down on the topics and perspectives that you know will be cherished and go easy on those that might be despised.

But if you want to think of yourself as an independent thinker and a writer with integrity, you must write about what your readers may be thinking about – even worrying about – and you must tell them exactly what you think.

Most of Bill’s vast audience of readers range from conservative to libertarian in their political, social, and economic viewpoints. Which means that there is always going to be a reasonably large percentage of his conservative readers that are going to be pro-military and pro-war.

I know from my own experience writing and speaking about the US’s long history of spending trillions of dollars and sacrificing thousands of lives to carry out proxy wars with the Russians, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan and now in the Ukraine, that wars are always complicated, with all sorts of questionable motivations on either side. But they are also always destructive. Even the most justifiable wars – where one side is invading and the other side is defending – quickly dissolve into chaos and hell that takes decades to recover from socially, politically, diplomatically, economically, and psychologically for all those who are caught in or march into the madness.

I remember when Bill wrote his first essay in response to the war that George W. Bush declared against Iraq after 9/11. The destruction of the World Trade Center and the thousands of lives lost felt, for most Americans, like a just cause. But I have always been skeptical of US involvement in wars since the Cold War began, and I was skeptical of that one too. Still, because everyone around me was so ardently bullish on the war, I felt a great pressure to mitigate what I said and wrote about it. Not Bill. He condemned it in the strongest terms from day one – and lost thousands of subscribers and millions of dollars in revenue because he had the temerity to do it so soon after the attack.

On July 23, in Bonner Private Research, Bill posted an essay titled “An Appetite for Destruction.” The first half of the essay was a complaint about the greed of the big manufacturers of war machines, the immorality of the politicians that promote war for political gain, and the American voters that keep supporting these never-ending wars with their tax dollars and their votes.

I’ll pick up in the middle of that essay here:

“The general level of dumbness is breathtaking. Americans think they can improve their economy by banning imports… cutting taxes and interest rates… and spending money they don’t have on things they don’t really need. Their national debt approaches the critical ‘meltdown’ level… and they just spend more. And neither Republicans nor Democrats even mention it.

“But it is on foreign affairs – and the relentless drive for confrontation – that the stupidity is most obvious… and most dangerous.

“It was surely no coincidence that the day Donald Trump was in the sights of a loopy 20-year-old from Butler, PA, the press delivered a bombshell report:

Secret Service ramped up security after intel of Iran plot to assassinate Trump 

Secret Service learned of the increased threat from this threat stream,” [an] official told CNN. 

“No evidence was presented. No motive proposed. Instead, the ‘news’ item merely reinforced the idea of a ‘threat stream’… that foreigners are behind it… and that the Iranians (whose annual military spending represents just 4 days of the Pentagon budget) are ‘bad guys’ who need to be kept under control.

“Secretary of State Blinken continues to beat the war drum: ‘Iran is one or two weeks away from reaching capacity of producing fissile material for Nuclear Weapons’ he claims.

“Blinken seems to have taken Colin Powell for his model. Twenty-one years ago, Powell had this to say:

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he’s determined to make more.

“In the years since Colin Powell lied to the world about Iraq, the US dug such a deep hole of debt it can no longer get out. The increase – $29 trillion – is almost exactly equal to the amount spent on the empire adventure.

“Between the two of them – war and debt – the US is stuck. It desperately needs to cut spending to avoid going bust… but you don’t count the pennies when you’re up against an ‘axis of evil!’

“Colonel Douglas Macgregor, talking to Tucker Carlson:

Over and over, we’ve been told that the Russians are evil… that their army is incompetent… that we’re winning the war. None of it was true. 

“Among the most obvious untruths was that Vladimir Putin was a modern-day Hitler intent on conquering Europe. Putin explained the situation many times, urging a negotiated settlement that would guarantee Ukrainian independence and neutrality. American warmongers – notably Victoria Nuland, wife of arch neo-con Robert Kaplan – preferred war, betting on the superior power of NATO forces to defeat Putin.

“It didn’t work out that way. As many as 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died playing Ms. Nuland’s war game… and it now appears that Putin has won anyway.

“But nobody in US power circles seems much interested in the history of the Ukraine, its complex ethnic make-up, or the legitimate national interests of the Russians. No learning, no understanding, no historical perspective necessary. They just need fuel for their war machine.

“And now, China provides a useful enemy. Foreign policy hack Mary Kissel explained that China aims to ‘upend our way of life and to dominate and change our way of life.’ They are ‘committed to destroy[ing] us.’

“Really? Is it the Chinese… the Russians… or the Iranians who will destroy us? Or, can we do the job ourselves?”

Lessons Learned on This Sojourn to Japan

I have learned so much on this trip. So much about Japan, Japanese culture and history, and the Japanese people that makes me feel a whole lot smarter than I was before. (Which is doubly impressive because this is probably my sixth time here.)

I want to tell you so many things I’ve learned on this trip that surprised, impressed, and/or delighted me. It would fill a small book. So, to save us both the time and effort, I’ll reduce my discoveries to one or two at a time.

Today, I will cover two topics:

1. This whole cleanliness thing I’ve been commenting on.
2. Something unrelated to Japan that I am excited to have learned.

The Cleanliness Thing

One reason this whole damn country is so freaking clean is that the Japanese believe there is such a thing as “correct” behavior, which includes a lengthy list of manners and disciplines that most Americans would consider quaint if not downright antiquated.

* Shoes: I was aware, as I’m sure you were, that in a Japanese home or in a traditional Japanese hotel, one removes one’s shoes before stepping beyond the foyer and into the interior rooms. But I did not know that there are rules about removing your street shoes and where you place them. For example, you would never put them on a desk or a ledge, but always on the floor or on a shelf reserved for them.

* And Socks: I also did not know that if there are not slippers or thong sandals available to slip into, one can walk in one’s socks – but it is considered vulgar to walk barefoot in common areas such as living rooms and dining rooms.

* Chopsticks: One important reason that the Japanese prefer chopsticks to Western cutlery is that they believe one is much less likely to get food on one’s clothing or on the table when using chopsticks. There are, apparently, exceptions for Western foods – but the “clean” way to eat most foods, and especially Asian foods, is to bring the bowl close to your mouth and use the chopsticks to adroitly maneuver the food in.

* Wet Wipes: The first thing a server will bring you at any sort of eatery, from an ice cream parlor to a gourmet restaurant, is what I can only describe as a wet wipe enclosed in a plastic sheath. It took K and I a few meals before we figured out that they are meant to be used immediately after sitting down to get the hands clean and germ-free before touching anything, including the table settings. Even the cloth napkins provided by fancy restaurants are not meant to be touched until you have cleaned your fingers with the wet wipes.

* Coughing/Sneezing: I have lately developed some sort of allergic reaction to who knows what that has me sneezing now and then. Not once, but seven or eight times in a row. These attacks come unexpectedly and quickly, so I am sometimes forced to sneeze into my napkin. This is, in Japan, a disgusting display of crudeness. (K says it is also considered disgusting in America.) In any case, one is supposed to carry a handkerchief for this purpose.

* Public Restrooms: Even at airports, bus stops, and train stations, the restrooms are spotlessly clean. This is true in every city we visited, including Tokyo, which, if you remember from an earlier post, is a city of 14 million people. It’s not unusual to see someone, after washing their hands in a public restroom, clean the sink before leaving. Likewise with toilets. I’ve yet to see a toilet that was left dirty. In fairness, the Japanese have an advantage in this regard, as every toilet I encountered during my entire month-long visit was a Toto toilet, a type of toilet that is… how would I describe it? If American toilets are prop planes, Totos are supersonic jets. I won’t even try to detail their many amazing features. Let me just say that it would be difficult to leave a Toto toilet bowl sullied, even if you wanted to.

I could go on…

I’ve mentioned how clean the streets and sidewalks are. In four weeks, I have not seen a single piece of litter anywhere. And as I said, this is a country that hasn’t provided public trash containers for more than 20 years!

One can’t help but ask how it’s possible for a country the size of California with a population a third of the US to be so damn clean. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. And there are explanations. As I said, cleanliness is considered a virtue in Japan – almost a moral virtue – to which there are no opposing views. (I’ve read somewhere that when Caucasians – I think it was the Portuguese – first arrived in Japan centuries ago, the Japanese could not believe they were human because of how dirty and smelly they were.)

I was talking to one of our tour guides about this cleanliness issue. She was sixty-something, and obviously well-educated. She was also fluent in English and full of insights that made our time with her worth twice her fee. For example, she told us that in grammar schools and high schools, Japanese students are expected not only to keep their own desks and lockers spotless, but to clean the bathrooms, hallways, and classrooms, too. In the US, that would seem preposterous. But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense if you want the next generation to grow up with “correct” behavior and understanding that everyone has a responsibility to take care of not just their personal environment, but the social environments they inhabit.

Next time, I’m going to cover another amazing aspect of Japan that is so very different from every other Western country I can think of. I’m talking about how calm and orderly everything is here. I mean… really…

But today, I want to finish up by telling you about something I learned in an airport on the way to Japan that had nothing to do with Japan.

The Other Thing 

I learned… are you ready for this? I learned how to tie my shoelaces!

Noticing how often my shoelaces were unlacing themselves as we marched up and down airport ramps and corridors, K said, “Why are you always running around with your shoelaces untied? You are going to trip and break something, and then what?”

“I have no idea why this keeps happening,” I said. “Maybe I should double-knot them.”

“You don’t need to double-knot them if you tie them correctly in the first place,” she replied.

I’ve been tying my shoelaces for about 70 years now. And this was the first time I had ever been accused of tying them improperly. But it turns out that there is a way to tie one’s shoes that is substantially better than the method I’ve been using all my life.

It has to do with the looping – which loop goes over the other loop. The way I’ve always done it achieves a seemingly tight and handsome knot. However, if put to the test of, say, several hours of walking, it will come undone. Looping the laces in the opposite way results in a knot that stays tight until you decide to undo it. (Here’s a video I found online that demonstrates the procedure better than I can explain it.)

In the few weeks that have passed since K taught me how to do this, I’ve followed her up and down hills and stairways, along highways and byways, and over hills and rubble and through sand and mud. And not once have my shoelaces come undone.

I realize I’m writing this with the energy one might properly feel after discovering a million dollars stashed under a floorboard. This may not be the most important thing I’ve ever learned, but, in terms of usefulness, I’d have to put it on my top ten list.

A final word on something I’m sure did not deserve more than a sentence or two. If I discover, after publishing this confession, that I am the only adult on earth that did NOT know it, I will be deeply humiliated. So if you, like me, did not know how you tie your shoes properly before reading this, please give me a shout.

Meryl Nass: Why I’m a Fan 

Dr. Meryl Nass is a board-certified internist and a biological epidemiologist with more than 40 years of experience in the medical field. Click here to see her very impressive CV.

As a reader of this blog, you probably recognize her name. I’ve linked to her many times in the past, because when it comes to writing with authority about vaccines – and the COVID vaccine in particular – she is one of the best. And by that, I mean one of three or four epidemiological experts in the world writing about COVID and the COVID vaccines whose opinions make sense to me.

When I began reading her daily posts (there are sometimes two or three) about two years ago, I thought she might be some sort of kook. Who but a megalomaniac could devote so much time to one subject?

And I wasn’t alone. She has been continuously accused by “fact-checking” organizations (whose funding is never disclosed) of making misleading statements and causing the public to be wrongly fearful of the vaccines she warns against.

The accusations were concerning. Still, I couldn’t help but be astounded by the amount of detailed research she does. And despite my earliest reservations, I found myself being won over by the quality and quantity of evidence she provides for her claims.

I was also impressed by her emotional strength in enduring and resisting the criticism against her, including professional censures and lawsuits, and how she’s been able to keep her readers updated on her struggles in an even-handed, almost objective way. She has learned how to make very direct and sometimes very serious statements about the vaccines, the manufacturers of the vaccines, and the political and media behemoths that are promoting the vaccines without going beyond the boundaries of what she can prove with voluminous scientific data.

I began as a skeptic. But now I’m a fan.

Which is why I am very interested in and hopeful about the approach she has been using to defend herself against media and regulatory attacks. Rather than dealing with them privately through lawyers, she has been taking them public by publishing the charges against her almost as soon as they are made (often on the same day) in one of her daily posts. She prints the accusation and responds to it in detail so that her tens of thousands of readers can get the facts from the source.

This seems to me to be a bit risky because it must embarrass and infuriate those that are trying to shut her up and shut her practice down. But I’m hoping that because she has so many followers, she will be able to wage her battle both within the jurisdictions that govern the complaints and in a public forum where those of us that are interested in COVID and the COVID vaccines can see exactly how the massive pro-vaccine forces work.

Here’s a recent example. Some guy named “John Gregory,” who calls himself a “health editor” for a group called NewsGuard, which, he says, “reports on and tracks online misinformation,” sends her an email accusing her of making misleading statements… and tells her that his deadline for publishing her response is virtually the next day. (This is a common unethical journalistic practice. And, by the way, I checked into NewsGuard. They are hardly objective. Just another left-wing partisan group claiming to be interested in facts.)

Here’s what he wrote:

Dr. Nass,

I’m emailing in regards to your April 20, 2024, CHD video in which you cited the FDA package insert for the H5N1 vaccine Audenz, and said, “One in 200 people who got this vaccine in a clinical trial died,” and later added, “This is a dangerous vaccine for a nothing disease.”

Video of your remarks has begun circulating widely on social media platforms in the past two weeks, used as evidence for claims like “Dr. Meryl Nass: One of the approved Bird Flu quackccines, Audenz… had a death rate of 1 in 200 during clinical trials.”

I noticed the screenshot included in your original video highlighted the sentence, “Fatal SAEs [Serious Adverse Events] included 11 (0.5%) Audenz recipients and 1 (0.1%) placebo recipients,” even though the very next sentence said, “No SAEs were assessed as being related to Audenz,” meaning that none of the reported serious adverse events – including deaths – that occurred among trial participants were caused by the vaccine.

You also did not mention that the FDA’s own statistical review of Audenz stated that, “No deaths occurred that were considered related to the vaccine,” and concluded, “No major statistical or safety issues have been identified” with the vaccine, or that the published results of the Audenz trial said: “None of the serious AEs or AEs of special interest reported by subjects who received aH5N1c were considered vaccine related. Two subjects in the placebo group reported a related AE of special interest (immune thrombocytopenic purpura and polymyalgia rheumatic); these events were also considered serious AEs. During the study, 12 (0.4%) subjects had serious AEs with a fatal outcome, none of which were attributed to the study treatment, and most (n = 11) occurred after Day 43 during the follow-up period in subjects ≥65 years with underlying severe comorbidities and multiple concomitant medications.”

Is there any reason why you did not mention any of this countervailing information?

My deadline is 5pm eastern today, July 3. Thank you.

Best regards,
John Gregory

Gregory’s goal, of course, was to discredit her by saying something like, “We contacted Ms. Nass to give her a chance to refute these charges but she did not respond.”

But Nass, being a veteran of these sorts of sleazy tactics, responds immediately with a massive amount of proof to back up what she had said – then thanks him for “the opportunity to clarify the information so that your readers will be fully informed.”

To wit:

Dear Mr. Gregory,

Since I provided a screenshot of the package insert of the Audenz licensed vaccine and repeated what it said, this can hardly be characterized as misinformation, which you claim to be investigating. Since I included the next sentence in the presentation, it cannot even be construed as incomplete.

Had you been working on issues of vaccines for over 25 years as I have, you would have been aware that the sponsor (mfr) and FDA, who together craft the vaccine labels aka package inserts, ALWAYS assert that most or all of the deaths and serious adverse events occurring during a clinical trial were adjudged to be not due to the vaccine. Had they judged otherwise, a license would probably not have been issued. A license was issued for Audenz.

Later, when a vaccine is given to millions of people, not just a few hundred as in this case, one learns which side effects are IN FACT attributable to the vaccine.

For example, at least a hundred million Americans had received an mRNA COVID vaccine before it was determined to cause myocarditis, in late May of 2021 by FDA.

That is the reason why the raw data, which I presented, are important. So that people have the information to judge for themselves what risks they may face when choosing vaccination. In fact, clinical trials often exclude sick subjects, and drugs and vaccines almost invariably appear more safe and effective in clinical trial data than they do later, in the real world – a fact known to all medical researchers.

Why did I not mention material from an article? Because I was referring to the Audenz label, which is the legal document that FDA attests is true, unlike published articles which are generally written by the vaccine sponsor and have a lesser degree of reliability. In fact, the numbers in the article versus those in the label are not exactly the same.

Furthermore, if the US government was comfortable with the H5N1 Audenz vaccine, why did DHHS’ BARDA just place an order with Moderna for H5N8 mRNA vaccines, even though the avian flu circulating in the US is H5N1? Even though it makes much more sense to match the neuraminidase portion of the vaccine to the circulating strain… which is done every year when seasonal influenza vaccines are produced?

Finally, I invite you to take a look at the WHO data on deaths in humans worldwide from the H5N1 bird flu, which confirms it is a nothing disease in humans, having mutated to a different form than it once had. The federal health agencies have monitored 9,000 farm workers and all they found were 4 mild cases of disease, no hospitalizations and no deaths in the US over the past several years.

I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to clarify the information so that your readers will be fully informed.

Meryl Nass

End result: Not only did she make it impossible for him to claim that she was unable to answer his (invalid) charges, she exposed his chicanery before his supposed publishing deadline.

I hate the expression, “You go, girl!” But I’ll say it for Meryl Nass.

Japan: A Culture of Hierarchy and Egalitarianism 

I’ve always wanted to be one of those people – those self-improvement influencers – who go to bed very early, wake up very early, and accomplish a full day’s worth of work by the time their colleagues and competitors are sipping their first cup of coffee.

That was one of my motivations when, in 2000, I started an email advisory newsletter called Early to Rise.

I believed then that early rising was key to success in every aspect of life, business and personal, and I believe it now. But my ability to follow my own advice is, as it has always been, less than perfect.

Still, I keep trying. And I’m happy to report that, thanks to 13 hours of jet lag between the US east coast and Japan, I’ve finally been practicing what I preach. For all but one of the days since we’ve been here, I’ve been going to bed at about 7:30 pm and waking up at about 3:30.

K is keeping a later schedule by about three hours, which works out well for me. I’m on my laptop by 4:00 or 4:30 am, which gives me about four hours of work time before we have breakfast together.

You can do a surprising amount of work in four hours. Especially when you are working so early that there is no threat of being interrupted by anyone.

On Day One of this current trip to Japan, I wrote about some of the many things I admire about the Japanese way of life. “Clean, quiet, orderly, and civilized,” I said. “Those are my impressions each time I visit.”

A few days later, K and I were able to be not just observers but participants in that culture.

Taking a break from my business-related commitments, we took a one-hour train ride southwest from Tokyo to Hakone, a quaint little town set amidst lush green hills that reminded me of Hawaii, where we spent two days in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese spa. This one was particularly luxurious, providing an exceptional level of serenity, beauty, and comfort.

If you ever have the opportunity to visit a ryokan, I hope you take advantage of it. It will be a cross-cultural experience that you’ll never forget.

This is what you can expect…

When you enter a ryokan, you temporarily leave your native practices at the door and immerse yourself, as completely as possible, in authentic Japanese traditions. (Cultural appropriation is not frowned upon by the Japanese. On the contrary, it is considered a requirement for their guests from other cultures – an indication of courtesy and good breeding.)

There are three traditional clothing options at the ryokan, all of them provided for you to wear during your stay. A yukata (cotton kimono), which can be worn most of the time while enjoying the spa’s amenities. A more formal kimono, which is preferable for dinners – and, I have to say, made me feel like Japanese royalty. And for sleeping, what seemed to be white silk pajamas that made me feel much more important than I do sleeping in my underwear.

Wearing street shoes indoors – anywhere indoors – is strictly forbidden, as is walking barefoot outside of a shower or spa. This is in line with the general Japanese culture of cleanliness, but is just as much a matter of doing everything, and especially the small things, properly.

Dressing in traditional Japanese garments while at the ryokan is a matter of respecting tradition to the max, which you will understand if you’ve ever practiced Japanese martial arts taught by a Japanese sensei. But it is not something to fret over. If you make a mistake, none of the staff will correct you. You are, after all, an honored guest. It would be an insult.

Another custom that courteous guests adhere to is bowing – what the Japanese do not just in place of shaking hands, but every time they come upon someone, on purpose or accidentally.

There is an etiquette to this, too – in particular, the depth of the bow.

How deeply you bow is a function of several things, including whether the situation is casual or formal, or whether one party has erred in some way or even inadvertently inconvenienced or embarrassed the other. But it is also a matter of hierarchy.

Traditional Japanese culture is founded on the principle of hierarchy. There is also a very strong egalitarian aspect to it, which, I would argue, is in some ways stronger than the American idea of equal rights under the law.

A quick example (that I might have written about before): About 20 years ago, I was in Tokyo to meet with the president of the first- or second-largest publishing company in Japan at his headquarters. The entire process of having such a meeting is very involved, as it requires a formula for when and how you meet, an exchange of gifts, and then all sorts of conduct and courtesies on the part of the foreigner if he has any hope of doing business there.

I spent several days meeting with various executives of the company prior to the day I was to meet the president. I was very much aware that we were both CEOs, which means something in business hierarchy. But I was equally aware that his business was ten times larger than mine. Nevertheless, I felt he treated me with the same respect that I conveyed to him.

After the meeting, we had a lunch planned at some nearby restaurant. It was to be him and me, plus two other senior executives. As we exited the elevator, we could see a man sweeping the floor in front of us. A moment later, he noticed us, stood up at attention, and bowed deeply in our direction.

If you were a graduate of Harvard or Brown today, you would say his response was a deplorable vestige of colonialism and hierarchical discrimination.

But something else happened immediately after this simple working man bowed to his company’s president. The president bowed back to him. The president’s bow was not nearly as deep. It was nevertheless an acknowledgement of the floor sweeper’s existence and an appreciation of the role he was playing in the business and, really, in the hierarchy of the world.

Now imagine a similar scenario taking place in America. As the president and his entourage exited the elevator, the floor sweeper would have stopped his work while they passed, but without looking at any of them. And they would not even have noticed him.

So, you tell me: Which of these two scenarios is more egalitarian and respectful?

This curious blend of egalitarianism and hierarchy that I see here in Japan interests me and I’m going to keep looking into it. But it is already clear that respect for hierarchy is a very essential attitude that binds other attitudes, such as human equality and dignity, tightly together in a rational way. (And from what I already know of Japanese history, the Japanese political system, with a parliament and a king, is reflective of that.)

More of my thoughts about Japanese culture next time…