President Donald J. Trump is once again calling on Washington to confront its own dysfunction. The problem is, this time he’s calling for something that many in his base don’t want to happen: the removal of the filibuster.
With the federal government now in its fifth week of shutdown and hundreds of thousands of Americans furloughed or working without pay, Trump is calling on Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster—what he calls “the Nuclear Option”—to end the “the Schumer Shutdown.”
Trump’s demand came Thursday in a fiery Truth Social post, where he urged Senate leaders to “play their Trump Card” and stop allowing Democrats to paralyze the government. “It is now time for Republicans to get tough,” he wrote. “End the filibuster. End the shutdown. Get it done now.”
Here’s his post, mildly edited with line breaks:
I just got back from Asia where I met the Leaders of many Countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and others. It was a Great Honor to meet them but, more particularly, to see that America is respected again — RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE!
Great Trade Deals were made, Long Term relationships now exist, and money is pouring into our Country because of Tariffs and, frankly, the Landslide Results of the 2024 Presidential Election. The one question that kept coming up, however, was how did the Democrats SHUT DOWN the United States of America, and why did the powerful Republicans allow them to do it? The fact is, in flying back, I thought a great deal about that question, WHY?
Majority Leader John Thune, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, are doing a GREAT job, but the Democrats are Crazed Lunatics that have lost all sense of WISDOM and REALITY. It is a sick form of the now “legendary” Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) that only comes from losing too much. They want Trillions of Dollars to be taken from our Healthcare System and given to others, who are not deserving — People who have come into our Country illegally, many from prisons and mental institutions. This will hurt American citizens, and Republicans will not let it happen.
It is now time for the Republicans to play their “TRUMP CARD,” and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW! Just a short while ago, the Democrats, while in power, fought for three years to do this, but were unable to pull it off because of Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Never have the Democrats fought so hard to do something because they knew the tremendous strength that terminating the Filibuster would give them. They want to substantially expand (PACK!) the United States Supreme Court, make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico States (Thereby automatically picking up 4 Senate seats, many House seats, and at least 8 Electoral Votes!), and many other highly destructive things. Well, now WE are in power, and if we did what we should be doing, it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying “SHUT DOWN.”
If the Democrats ever came back into power, which would be made easier for them if the Republicans are not using the Great Strength and Policies made available to us by ending the Filibuster, the Democrats will exercise their rights, and it will be done in the first day they take office, regardless of whether or not we do it. In addition to all of the other things we would get, such as the best Judges, the best U.S. Attorneys, the best of everything, this was a concept from years ago of then President Barack Hussein Obama and former Majority Leader Harry Reid in order to take advantage of the Republicans. Now I want to do it in order to take advantage of the Democrats….
….BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT THE DEMOCRATS HAVE GONE STONE COLD “CRAZY,” THE CHOICE IS CLEAR — INITIATE THE “NUCLEAR OPTION,” GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
The shutdown began on October 1, 2025, after Democrats in the Senate refused to advance a Republican funding bill that excluded their latest spending demands. As the impasse drags on, nearly 900,000 federal workers have been impacted, air travel has been strained, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the shutdown could shave up to 2 percent off the fourth-quarter GDP. What began as a budget dispute has now escalated into a constitutional and moral battle over how the Senate governs itself.
For Trump, the issue is straightforward: Washington’s rules are protecting political gamesmanship instead of the American people. The former president argues that the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold has become a tool of obstruction for Democrats like Chuck Schumer, who he says would rather see the country suffer than allow Trump-aligned Republicans to govern effectively. To Trump’s supporters, the demand reflects his signature style—decisive, direct, and unapologetically results-driven.
But even among the MAGA faithful, this latest move has divided opinion. Many conservatives remember 2013, when then–Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the same “nuclear option” to confirm Obama’s judicial nominees. That decision later enabled Republicans to confirm Trump’s own Supreme Court picks, but it also set a precedent that weakened institutional safeguards. The fear now is that if Republicans eliminate the legislative filibuster, it could backfire spectacularly the next time Democrats regain control of Congress.
“This isn’t just about ending a shutdown,” one conservative strategist noted. “It’s about whether we want a Senate that can still restrain the mob when the other side takes power.”
Others argue that the Founders designed the Senate to slow down rash policymaking—not to enable permanent paralysis at the hands of career politicians.
Inside the Senate, Republicans are split. Populist voices like Josh Hawley have expressed openness to Trump’s idea, saying the country needs decisive leadership to end Schumer’s blockade. Meanwhile, constitutional conservatives like Mike Lee and Rand Paul are warning that abolishing the filibuster would permanently damage the balance of power and erase one of the last procedural brakes on tyranny of the majority.
Trump’s call is as much about moral clarity as it is political urgency. The Democrats, led by Schumer, have turned the shutdown into a weapon. They are using the suffering of everyday Americans—families without paychecks, veterans without benefits, small businesses without government contracts—as leverage to force Republicans into submission. Trump, however, appears determined to turn the tables, painting Democrats as the ones prolonging the pain for political gain.
The broader question is what kind of Republican Party will emerge from this test. Trump is betting that voters want action more than preservation of parliamentary niceties. His critics, including some within his movement, warn that “going nuclear” would strip conservatives of their ability to resist the Left when the balance of power shifts. Both sides are right to fear what comes next.
The Senate was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Today, it resembles a barricade—a place where ideas go to die and leadership goes to hide. Trump’s challenge to the filibuster is not just a procedural gambit. It’s a symbolic stand against a system designed to protect itself rather than the people it serves.
Whether Republicans heed that call will determine more than the fate of a shutdown. It will test whether the America First movement still has the courage to confront Washington’s dysfunction head-on—or whether it, too, will be swallowed by the swamp it set out to drain.
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.
