(Real Clear Wire)—With all the devastating news about urban crime, drug overdoses, illegal immigration, rampant homelessness, out-of-control budgets, and educational failures, it is encouraging that President Donald Trump has committed his next administration to a saving America’s cities.
As Just the News reported, “With the nation’s first primary state as a backdrop, former President Donald Trump took aim Saturday at Democrats’ urban strongholds, vowing to both secure and revitalize blue cities weary from years of violence and economic decay.”
As the outlet reported, President Trump told a crowd in Durham, New Hampshire, “We’re going to rebuild our cities into beacons of hope, safety, and beauty. It will be the greatest investment ever made.”
This is encouraging. All too often, Republicans have neglected our great cities – or been openly hostile toward them because of their Democratic leadership.
Perhaps the most famous example of this was an Oct. 29, 1975 speech in which then-President Gerald Ford explained why he would not help New York City with its fiscal crisis.
The following day, the New York Daily News had a huge page-one headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
President Ford was philosophically right as a fiscal conservative and federalist, but the political message was devastating for Republicans.
I served with Buffalo Congressman Jack Kemp, who was the most innovative pro-city Republican with whom I have ever worked. Kemp developed a program for enterprise zones to help encourage business development in the poorest parts of cities. Working with civil rights activist Bob Woodson, the two developed a program to allow people in public housing to put in sweat equity and eventually gain ownership of their units. Kemp and Woodson followed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in trying to create an ownership society.
One of the most striking moments in U.S. House debate history was when an outraged Democrat Congressman Barney Frank, who opposed Kemp’s proposal, argued that under the plan, a poor family in New York City might be able to acquire a property worth $1 million in the New York market. It did not seem to occur to Frank that helping poor people become wealthy was a good idea.
President Trump, a product of Queens and Manhattan, understands that we cannot be a great nation if our great cities decay and die. Consider his own words from a speech about saving America’s cities in Reno, Nevada:
“[W]e’re going to indemnify police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the United States from being destroyed by the radical left for taking strong actions on crime. They’re going to be indemnified… Policemen are forced not to do anything when they want to, and under the threat of losing their pension, their house, their family, they lose everything, and they’re afraid to move. … We’re not going to let that happen anymore.
“In addition, we will take over our horribly-run Washington, DC – and clean up, renovate, and rebuild, our Capitol, so that it is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime. You see what’s happening. But rather, will become the most beautiful Capitol anywhere in the world. It’s a mess. It’s a filthy, disgusting, mess. Our parks will be cleaned, the tents and graffiti, all of these tents and graffiti, right in the middle of the most beautiful parks in the world. Those tents and graffiti will be removed. Slum areas will be demolished and rebuilt to the highest level of architectural elegance. Washington, DC will become a symbol of beauty, security, freedom, and strength…
“In addition to our Capitol, we are going to rebuild our cities into beacons of hope, safety, and beauty. Better than they have ever been before. We are going to focus on our cities… It will be the greatest investment ever made in these cities. And we will work closely with Democrat leaders. They are all run by Democrats, if you can believe it. But we’ll work closely with the Democrat leaders of all these failing places to make sure that this rebuilding will be a lasting and compassionate one. It’ll be a great rebuilding. Safety will again be restored, so that our children can go out with their parents, mother, and father, and play in the park without being beat up, molested, or shot. Students will be able to walk to school in peace, criminal rates will plummet, and people will long just long to move back to the city again.”
The fact that President Trump explicitly included working closely with Democrat leaders is a good step toward making the second Trump administration more bipartisan – but still deeply committed to reform.
This was an encouraging speech for our future and a real commitment to save America’s citizens. It is a good step toward bringing Americans together and healing some of the partisan divisions.
Those who are committed to union incompetence, leftwing extremism, and keeping power will fight against a program to save America’s cities. Most Americans, however, will be excited by the vision of a safe, prosperous, and forward-looking urban future.
I expect the American people will win.
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.
Live, from Political Theater, it’s Newt Gingrich!!!!!
So Newt still doesn’t know how to read legislation?!
Here’s a short and sweet one, Newt, called the . . .
CISA Act of 2018 — signed into law by President Trump!
Before he signed it, he won the 2016 election!
After he signed it, massive centralized election fraud in 2020, 2022, 2023 . . .
Weekly, 70,000 to 80,000 unknowns stream across the US borders, for several years now reports have surfaced of many of them being hardcore criminals shipped here by South American countries, and African nations and from the Middle East — in some instances America is flying them in directly from the Middle East and Africa – and the RUBES choose to ignore this or REMAIN OBLIVIOUS to it?!?!
Better get a new plan, fast, bubbas . . .