President Donald Trump delivered a pointed message to the Republican establishment in South Carolina on Friday evening, endorsing Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette for governor while bypassing a wide range of candidates, including firebrand Rep. Nancy Mace. In doing so, Trump reinforced a principle that has defined his movement: steadfast loyalty to his priorities matters more than on-again, off-again support.
This decision wasn’t merely about picking a candidate. It was about drawing a line in the sand for the future of conservative governance. As South Carolina Republicans head to the polls on June 9, Trump’s endorsement signals that the era of convenient alliances and selective conservatism is under scrutiny.
Evette, a self-made businesswoman who founded Quality Business Solutions, has served as South Carolina’s first female Republican lieutenant governor since 2019. Her background as an accountant and entrepreneur who understands the burdens of taxes and regulations aligns naturally with core conservative principles of limited government and economic freedom. Trump praised her as an “America First Patriot” who stood with him from the beginning, never wavering through tough cycles.
The Contrast in Records
Mace’s record has been marked by mostly conservative and/or populist stances tainted by a few questionable choices. Most notably, she condemned President Trump and the “insurrectionists” of January 6, 2021.
“I believe we need to hold the President accountable,” she said in her first speech on the floor. “I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday. I also believe that we need to hold accountable every single person, even Members of Congress, if they contributed to the violence that transpired here.”
The congresswoman from South Carolina’s 1st District has built a reputation for theatrical moments and policy flexibility, drawing blowback for her staunch support for AIPAC. The Jewish organization has, in return, been one of her top financial supporters, contributing around 10 times more to her than her Congressional peer and fellow gubernatorial candidate Ralph Norman.
More recently, she has threatened to side with Democrats to limit the Commander-in-Chief’s war powers. Meanwhile, she has been among the strongest proponents for full transparency of the Epstein files.
She recently made waves with calls to prevent foreigners from being in Congress:
Evette’s record is more obscure. As Lieutenant Governor since 2019, she hasn’t had to make her perspectives known through legislation or executive action. President Trump’s endorsement highlighted the issues she has publicly supported:
“As your next Governor, Pam will fight hard to Grow the Economy, Cut Taxes and Regulations, Promote MADE IN THE U.S.A., Champion our Amazing Farmers and Ranchers, Keep our Border SECURE, Stop Migrant Crime, Strengthen our Military/Veterans, Safeguard our Elections, and Protect our always under siege Second Amendment.”
Trump’s words highlight some of the difference. Evette represents continuity with proven conservative governance under Governor Henry McMaster, while Mace’s campaign has leaned heavily on personal branding over consistent ideological grounding.
What This Means for South Carolina Conservatives
South Carolina has long been a stronghold for constitutional conservatism, a state where faith, family, and freedom aren’t slogans but lived realities. Voters there understand the stakes. With a crowded Republican primary featuring Attorney General Alan Wilson, Rep. Ralph Norman, and others, Trump’s intervention clarifies the choice.
Evette’s focus on eliminating the state income tax, reducing regulations, and supporting small businesses flows from her real-world experience building a company. This isn’t abstract policy debate—it’s the application of conservative economics by someone who has met a payroll.
Mace’s response to the snub, invoking Margaret Thatcher on not seeking to be liked, demonstrated her trademark rebelliousness:
Margaret Thatcher once said that if you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time and would achieve nothing. I did not come into politics to be liked. I came to deliver.
I also know I put the likelihood of an endorsement on the line when I demanded transparency on the Epstein files. I demanded it because you deserved the truth – ALL OF IT – and as a survivor, I had to get justice for these women.
If this is the price of an endorsement, I will never pay it.
Will South Carolina Republicans follow President Trump’s endorsement or Mace’s popularity? The primary will answer that question, but the signals are clear. Prediction markets shifted dramatically toward Evette following the endorsement, reflecting the weight Trump carries among the base.
Faithfulness in Leadership
In times when political winds shift rapidly, the value of reliable character stands out. Public service demands faithfulness—steadfast commitment rather than convenient pivots.
Trump’s bypass of Mace isn’t personal vendetta; it’s pattern recognition. Evette’s early and ongoing support for the MAGA movement contrasts with Mace’s occasional shifts. Being so vehemently opposed to the “insurrectionists” did her no favors, especially as we’ve learned just how manufactured the J6 events were.
This race transcends one state’s borders. It asks a fundamental question for the Republican Party: Will we learn from past mistakes and elevate those who prove reliable, or continue rewarding those skilled at playing both sides? Trump’s endorsement provides a clear answer.
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.
