Join the discussion of this topic that I posted on my Substack.
Today’s morning newsletter is one that is certain to prompt some people to unsubscribe. There are many patriots on both sides of the Trump/DeSantis aisle who will lambast me for criticizing their favorite or complimenting the other. That’s the nature of our current polarized situation in the United States. For many, it’s either complete loyalty or you’re considered part of the problem.
I received many Twitter DM’s yesterday when I expressed my opinion about not being happy with Donald Trump lately. It was shocking to me how so many people consider any criticism of Trump proof that I must be a Democrat. Then there were those who defended Trump to the point of claiming his continued endorsement of the jabs is all “part of the plan.” One person tried to convince me that technically Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin are considered to be “vaccines” now and that’s what he’s actually touting.
I'm sure many of you will block me for saying this, but I don't care. It must be said.
Not happy with Trump. He's still bragging about the jabs. He's still endorsing McConnell RINOs.
I still support him for 2024 but he's approaching my red line.
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) June 13, 2022
To start the discussion, I’ll state my stance. I still support Donald Trump, but I’m very concerned over two things. First, the aforementioned jabs. He’s still claiming he saved millions of lives by getting the Covid injections out there so quickly and that it may have been his greatest achievement as president.
Second, he is picking the wrong people to endorse. To be more accurate, he’s letting his advisors and mega-donors pick the wrong people for him to endorse. They are trying to pick winners rather than picking the best America First candidates. It’s all about having a winning record to demonstrate his control over the GOP, but it’s disingenuous. Endorsing who he thinks is going to win doesn’t mean his endorsements made them win.
Dr. Mehmet Oz is a globalist and left-leaning moderate. He makes Trump’s endorsement of Mitt Romney seem logical. And to those who try to compare him to Trump and others who have switched from Democrat to Republican, I would remind them that Trump’s transition towards populism was clear long before he ran for president. Dr. Oz was defending Roe v. Wade and pushing for gun control until months before he decided he wanted to be a Senator.
Then, there’s Katie Britt in Alabama. This is a trickier one because Trump believes Mo Brooks betrayed him by saying we need to stop focusing on the 2020 election theft and fix things for the future. I disagree with him, but considering he did exponentially more to try to correct the 2020 stolen election than Britt or any of the other candidates for Senate, it’s hypocritical to endorse her.
But here’s the thing. If Trump wasn’t picking winners, he would never have endorsed Britt even if he didn’t want to endorse Brooks. He should not have made an endorsement in the race because Britt is 100% controlled by Mitch McConnell. This is why McConnell’s people will have sunk well over $10 million dollars into the race for Britt before the runoff. McConnell was investing so heavily in Britt to STOP Trump’s endorsed candidate. Britt is the RINO’s RINO, just another McConnell puppet he’ll use to pass anti-American legislation if the GOP retakes the Senate.
With all that said, the body of work for Donald Trump is why I still support him. He did more for America despite being surrounded by RINOs than any president in recent history. There is work to do and I hope his base can sway him again after the midterm elections if he chooses to run. As I’ve long said, I love his policies and hate his choice of people.
H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, Reince Priebus, Omarosa, Bill Barr, Mike Pence, John Kelly, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, Jeff Sessions, Mark Esper, Anthony Scaramucci — I could make a very long list of very bad choices Trump inserted into his White House.
Nevertheless, he’s a proven entity and if he runs, I’m hopeful that he will learn his lessons from his first term and get America First patriots on his team instead of RINOs, Democrats, and Deep State operatives.
As for Ron DeSantis, I like him a lot. I am definitely ready to support him for a 2028 presidential run and 2024 if Trump doesn’t run. I may be persuaded to support him in 2024 even if Trump runs. It’s too early to tell.
One caveat: There’s a hero-worship surrounding DeSantis right now that is unhealthy. His supporters are very much like Trump supporters in believing he can do no wrong. I’m a big fan of improving candidates and politicians, and that requires criticism. Those who believe they can do no wrong are certain to be incorrect.
It’s unfortunate they both reside in Florida. While that fact does not prohibit them from running on the same ticket, it makes it challenging from a Constitutional perspective because the electors in Florida will only be allowed to vote for one or the other. An archaic rule establishes that if they run together, only one or the other can get Florida’s electoral vote. This was based on the original voting process in which the VP was the runner-up in the presidential race. Here’s the text from Article II of the Constitution:
“The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.”
In 1804, the Twelfth Amendment altered the Electoral College process and created a separate ballot for vice president. But the rule of not being able to use both votes on a person from an elector’s home state remained in effect.
Technically, they could run together but it would be challenging to get them both in office unless they won by more than Florida’s 29 electoral votes. If the GOP controlled the Senate at the time, then it would be fine because they would then install DeSantis if he didn’t get the 270 to win without Florida, but it’s all a headache that pretty much everyone will want to avoid.
In other words, a Trump-DeSantis 2024 ticket is virtually impossible.
So, that’s where I stand. I support Trump. I like DeSantis. If they run against each other, I don’t know which one I’ll support. Whoever wins a primary between them will get my vote in November 2024.
I almost hope one or the other doesn’t run in 2024 so we can avoid the GOP civil war that would ensue. Almost. The side of me that appreciates the merits of discourse and friendly conflict as sharpening tools is actually giddy about the prospects.
Iron sharpens iron. Could a protracted GOP primary be exactly what this nation needs to make both men stronger, or would the conflict drive too large of a wedge within the party, thus aiding the Democrats?
Please post your thoughts in the comments on my Substack.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
