(Daily Signal)—President Donald Trump has ten pieces of advice for 2025 college graduates, who he said “have a chance to be the greatest generation in the history of our country.”
Trump’s speech at the University of Alabama was his first graduation address of his second term.
He addressed a stadium of about 100,000 people. Many donned “MAGA hats” and cheered uproariously throughout the speech, at one point chanting “USA.”
1. You’re not too young to succeed
“First, if you’re here today and think that you’re too young to do something great, let me tell you that you are wrong,” Trump said. “You’re not too young to have great success.”
Trump mentioned making his first big deal developing a hotel at only 28.
“Young people can do anything,” he said.
2. Love what you do
The president encouraged young people to find something they love to dedicate their lives to.
“You have to find something that you love, and you have to follow your own instincts and listen to your parents, they’re very wise, but you have to follow your instincts and your heart, your soul,” Trump said, “and you want to be the very, very best you can be.”
Trump rarely sees somebody that’s successful that doesn’t love what he or she does, he said.
“Treat every day like a home game against Auburn,” he said to cheers, referring to a rival university. “Fight like hell.”
Trump said love for his career is what made him so successful.
“I had a lot of different careers, but I loved real estate so much, and I was very successful in real estate because I loved it.”
3. Think big
Trump told graduates to think big about their futures.
“America doesn’t aim small,” Trump said. “Alabama doesn’t aim small, and neither do you, so think, when possible, think big,” he said.
Trump warned graduates against thinking small.
“You have to do something that you love,” he added. “You will have all the same headaches and challenges, all the same delays and setbacks. You might as well do something that’s just amazing.”
4. Work hard
Hard work is key to success, Trump said, adding that because he loves what he does, it’s not so hard.
“You really have to work hard and you’re going to be successful because you have the talent to get into the school,” he told students. “It’s not easy to get into. It is even more difficult to get through.”
5. Don’t lose your momentum
“You have to know if you are losing, and you have to know when you’re losing,” the president said.
“And so maybe you stop, and maybe it’s time to stop, listen to the feedback, think through your plan very carefully, and keep moving fast.”
6. Be an outsider
Successful people can’t be afraid to take risks and be an outsider, Trump said.
“If you wanted to change the world, you have to have the courage to be an outsider,” he said. “In other words, you have to take certain risks, to do things a little bit differently. Otherwise, if that weren’t the case, everybody would be successful. Doesn’t work that way.”
“Progress never comes from those satisfied with the failures of a broken system,” he said. “It comes from those who want to fix the broken system.”
Those who make it to the top have to break the system, he said.
7. Trust your instincts
Trump told Alabama graduation attendees to “trust their instincts” and use “common sense.”
“You can go very far in life with common sense, and I apply that to politics, because some of these things, like they had open borders that everybody in the whole world will flow into our country,” Trump said. “That’s not common sense. They had transgender for everybody. We ended that.”
Trump said allowing biological males to play women’s sports is not common sense.
“As long as I am president, we will always protect women’s sports. Men will not play in women’s sports,” Trump said to loud cheers from the University of Alabama graduation crowd.
8. Believe in the American dream
“It’s real, and it’s right there before you,” the president said of the American dream.
A banner on the stage read “The American dream is back” with the Alabama logo.
The president then spoke to the power of positive thinking, quoting his former pastor, Norman Vincent Peale.
9. Think of yourself as a winner
Trump warned against the victim mentality plaguing young people.
“Don’t consider yourself a victim,” he said “Consider yourself a winner. In recent years, too many of our young people have really been taught to think of themselves as victims and blame people and be angry. But in America, we reject that idea that anyone is a victim.”
“Our heroes are the ones who take charge of their own destiny, make their own luck and determine their own fate, despite the odds,” the president said.
10. Never give up
Trump said “never give up” is his most important advice, adding that “Victory is right around the corner.”
“Perseverance is everything, so matter where you are in life, be optimistic,” he said.
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.
