Trump’s Right in Lowering Diesel Prices
President Trump struck a deal in early October for Russia to supply diesel immediately to the U.S. to lower the sky-high prices that Americans are paying for this essential fuel. Truckers, farmers, and ranchers are being hit the hardest by the sharp increase in diesel prices, and this cost is passed on to all who rely on trucks for the shipment of goods, which is nearly everyone.
The price today of filling a commercial fuel tank is $1,000 or more in many parts of our country. Russia is the #2 supplier of diesel to the world, after the United States, and the sanctions against Russian sales of diesel during its war with Ukraine have driven up the costs of groceries and much else.
“I made the right choice for the American People — ALWAYS, AMERICA FIRST!” Trump responded on Truth Social to his critics. Globalist Republicans, including Senators John Curtis (R-UT) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), have spoken out against Trump about this but they have squawked against MAGA policies before, as did Curtis’s predecessor Mitt Romney.
Trump pointed out that the European Union, which continues to provoke Russia by pushing to bring Ukraine into the EU, has paid Russia $250 billion for energy, and yet the “fake news media doesn’t want to get near that story.”
On October 13, the EU opened new negotiations with Ukraine for it to join as a member, which is why Russia continues to fight. The U.S. has reportedly been providing intelligence to Ukraine about Russian movements and targets, but Trump has threatened to suspend that assistance while also calling for a new presidential election in Ukraine to replace Zelensky.
The last presidential election in Ukraine was held more than 7 years ago, on April 21, 2019, when oligarchs pushed this professional comedian into office. Zelensky failed to give many interviews for that office as presidential candidates normally do, and instead shirked the press and traditional forums that would have at least helped him learn what is necessary for the job.
While Zelensky did not attend campaign events in Ukraine and has refused to allow another presidential election, Zelensky did find time to campaign for Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania in 2024, attending one of her events as she attempted to defeat Trump. Many voters of Ukrainian descent live in Pennsylvania and also Ohio, but Trump won both states, including Ohio by a landslide.
October 12 marked the 1,693rd day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began under the presidency of Joe Biden. Trump campaigned on ending this war as soon as possible, and he has made every attempt to do so but has not received sufficient cooperation from Zelensky and Europe.
In key battleground states like Iowa, affordable diesel fuel is essential for farmers and others to be able to ship their goods for sale throughout the rest of our big country. Diesel peaked at $6.528 per gallon in the United States near the end of September, and has come down a bit since then thanks in part to Trump.
Republicans are struggling to hold onto statewide seats in the heartland of America. A Democrat is ahead in Iowa’s governor’s race, despite how that office has been held by Republicans for 15 years, and its U.S. Senate race is considered a toss-up.
High diesel prices came up in the debate between the telegenic Republican candidate for Senate, Ashley Hinson, and her tenacious Democrat opponent, Josh Turek. Hinson is a former newscaster and congresswoman, while Turek is a state representative and former professional wheelchair basketball player.
Turek is running a social media ad featuring a farmer hit hard by fuel prices. Meanwhile, Hinson said in the debate that the war in the Middle East must end soon, which the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Mike Rogers has also called for in Michigan.
Trump is right that Americans should not be burdened with higher energy costs due to the perpetual war between Russia and Ukraine. Diesel prices are roughly 65% to 71% higher than a year ago, which is more than twice the increase in the price of gasoline during the same time period.
Ukrainian officials ask what they are getting in return for Trump relaxing the diesel sanctions on Russia, but the U.S. has already sent hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and military supplies to Ukraine, along with crucial military intelligence. Americans have received nothing in exchange for all this.
Americans should not be forced to fund, through inflation, the globalist scheme to make Ukraine part of the EU, which Russia is fighting to stop. If European leaders at the EU insist on continuing to antagonize Russia, they should bear the costs of that rather than burdening Americans.
Thunder on the Right in Europe and Brazil
Establishment politicians in Europe are being routed in elections by an uprising of the right, with some leftist candidates also winning upsets. The collapse of the political middle there is similar to what is happening in the United States, where more incumbent members of Congress were defeated in primaries than in any non-redistricting year during the last half-century.
Centrist politicians have been failures worldwide on nearly every issue, ranging from halting unwanted migration to addressing social issues like abortion. In some countries the judiciary has contributed to the problem with liberal, activist rulings strongly disliked by a large percentage of voters.
On September 20, the pro-life, conservative party named the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, won a spectacular victory that humiliated the unpopular centrist chancellor, Friedrich Merz. AfD predicted that Merz would be forced to resign from his office before the end of this year.
Newspapers dub the AfD “far-right” but its anti-immigration and socially conservative stances are similar to MAGA in the United States. This was the second election that it won in September in small but significant regions of the country.
The German economy has stagnated under its media-pandering leadership, which foolishly embraced the Green New Deal to shut down traditional energy sources including clean nuclear power. The real GDP per capita of Germans has actually declined since 2019, while it has increased by 11% in the U.S. and has grown in other countries in Europe including Germany’s neighbor Poland.
Earlier in September the conservative prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, broke the modern record for a single government to remain in power there. She continues with a conservative agenda, including her recent proposal to ban the wearing of burqas in schools.
Meanwhile ten thousand homeless migrants, mostly men, continue to generate garbage on the beach and city streets in Ceuta, a territory of Spain on the northern coast of Africa. Residents of the town became so fed up with the immense nuisance that they attacked the migrants to try to get rid of them.
This was due to a senseless Spanish supreme court ruling that gave special protection against immediate deportation to migrants who arrived by sea rather than by land. Immediately, thousands jumped into the sea and swam to Ceuta, and since then the liberal Spanish government has been unwilling or unable to remove them.
In France the conservative nationalist party known as the National Rally leads in the polls for its election next year. Its long-time leader, Marine Le Pen, would be on the verge of being elected the next president of France, but her enemies have attempted to block her path to power by manipulating frivolous criminal charges against her, similar to how liberals tried to block Trump from reelection in 2024 with multiple unjustified prosecutions.
Le Pen has announced that she will run for president of France, and the election is in April of next year. There is also a youthful new leader of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, who likewise stands against unlimited immigration similar to the position of MAGA in the United States.
Conservative strength has also grown in Spain and the U.K., both of which are currently governed by leftist parties. Polling shows a substantial lead by the conservative parties in Spain for its national election in late November, which would be a first such win since Franco died in 1975.
The Conservative and Reform Parties’ right-of-center polling support in the U.K. has also recently improved. In June, the prime minister from the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, was forced to resign amid a net disapproval rating between 30 and 45%, and local elections repudiated the Establishment.
In the largest country in South America, Brazil, there has been a rise in popularity for the son of the conservative Jair Bolsonaro, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, as he won the first round for president against its socialist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The defeat of Lula, as he is known, in October’s presidential election runoff would be a crushing setback for socialism.
This thunder on the right in Europe and Brazil is a reaction both to the failure of the pro-immigration Establishment and to a rise in Leftism that is similar to the success in Democrat primaries here by socialists. On September 20, the far-Left party won the election in Berlin, after campaigning against the skyrocketing cost of housing there.
Housing costs that have soared out of reach of young adults are a major political issue here in the United States, too. This is a reason why Zohran Mamdani came out of nowhere to become the first socialist mayor of New York City, and why other socialist candidates have also done surprisingly well.
One-tenth of the U.S. Senate, nearly all of whom are moderates, is stepping down from office at the end of this year, which ties a quarter-century record. Six of them are Republicans, which is a record for the GOP.
Trump Wins Again Against Illegal Migration
The Supreme Court delivered another victory for President Trump on the issue of illegal migration on October 5. The High Court reversed a decision by an Obama-appointed judge that had blocked the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for illegal aliens from Venezuela.
Enacted in 1990, the TPS program grants temporary protection for illegal aliens from being deported to countries harmed by wars, earthquakes, or other life-threatening disruptions. But “temporary” is the key word here; beneficiaries of the TPS program are allowed to remain only for a while before returning home, yet Justice Alito observed that “TPS designations in practice have often lasted for decades.”
President Biden extended TPS to more than 600,000 illegal aliens from Venezuela by misusing this program. All told, migrants from 17 different countries totaling more than 1 million illegal aliens were being harbored by the Biden Administration under the TPS program before Trump took office.
Trump has successfully terminated 13 of the 17 designations, and on June 25 the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s authority to shut these programs down in Mullin v. Doe. This set a clear precedent for Trump to terminate the remaining TPS programs, too.
TPS does not bring the migrants here. The South American migrants mostly crossed our southern border illegally and then the TPS program has been used by Democrats to shelter them from being deported.
Venezuela and Haiti were two of the remaining countries with TPS, of which Venezuela poses the greater risk. The terrible Tren de Aragua gang is in Venezuela, and young men associated with that gang snuck into our country illegally and yet were not deported by the Biden administration.
On October 5, three alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were sentenced to 20 years in prison for kidnapping and torturing a Denver man in 2024, and a fourth defendant will be sentenced later this year. They had demanded a ransom from his wife and, when she did not pay it, they cut off the victim’s pinky finger.
President Biden granted special TPS protection to Venezuelans in 2021 and 2023. But there was no war in Venezuela, or a devastating earthquake, to justify keeping so many Venezuelans in our country.
Instead, there was a socialist regime, as is common in some South American nations, like Brazil today. The response to that is for the citizenry to defeat the socialist in power, as Brazilians took a step toward that on October 4 by voting against its incumbent President Lula.
When a gang of Venezuelan migrants besieged an apartment building in Colorado while brandishing guns, this became a campaign issue in 2024. The management company asserted that the migrants were also members of the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Time to go home, Trump indicated, by terminating the TPS program for Venezuela, as Trump has done for more than a dozen countries. But an Obama-appointed judge has blocked this.
Federal District Judge Edward M. Chen accused Trump of having “animus” toward the Venezuelans, and of terminating TPS based on an improper discriminatory purpose. He held last year that this issue of animus could go before a jury to decide whether Trump and the Secretary of Homeland Security were improperly motivated by “animus,” which is silly because there is nothing unconstitutional about having animus toward aliens who enter our country illegally.
Trump’s Solicitor General John Sauer filed a petition to overturn this ruling with the Supreme Court on July 9, while the Court was on summer break. It reopened on October 5, and one of its first actions was to rule in favor of Trump by overruling the lower court decision against him.
The Court also held in favor of Trump on his partial termination of the TPS program for Haiti. Recall that the presence of tens of thousands of Haitians in Ohio, particularly in the town of Springfield, was a winning campaign issue that Trump forcefully spoke about at his debate with Kamala Harris.
Grassroots opposition to migration into Europe has led to success by conservative parties in elections there. The European Union tightened its rules against migration in response to the public opposition to it.
The current riots in the suburbs of Paris are concentrated where there are large immigrant populations, leading some to suspect that migrants are fomenting the unrest. The stated cause of poor school conditions seems unlikely to be the real source of the enormous violence.
Trump has kept that from occurring here by deporting foreign criminals and ending the sheltering of illegal aliens. This has prevented riots by disgruntled mobs that have blighted European countries, and which could happen in the U.S. if the pro-migration policies of Democrats return.
Transgender Inmates and Title IX
On September 28, the Trump Administration took two major actions against the persistent demand by Democrats for privileges for transgender persons. While some conservatives hoped that the transgender issue was decided by the last presidential election, which Trump won in part by campaigning against “transgender lunacy,” liberals continue to make gains for their agenda with the help of activist judges.
Moments after his inauguration on January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to straighten out the transgender mess embraced by the Biden Administration. Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” established that the two sexes, male and female, “are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
Yet here we are, more than a year and a half later, and the transgender movement has grown in political power and influence in the courts. Activist judges continue to defy President Trump and the will of the people by granting new rights and privileges to transgender persons, such as the ruling in June partially blocking enforcement of Idaho’s new good law safeguarding restrooms against access by opposite-gendered persons.
The federal district court in D.C., presiding in a local culture that is heavily pro-LGBTQ, recently blocked the sensible policy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to decline requests for transgender surgeries by inmates. This ruling flies in the face of President Trump’s executive order on Inauguration Day requiring that the term “sex” in federal law shall mean “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
In faithful implementation of President Trump’s executive order, the BOP adopted a policy of addressing gender dysphoria through mental-health treatment, and not surgeries, hormone interventions, or social accommodations. Scientific assertions that surgeries and hormonal treatments are beneficial have largely been discredited, and many in Europe have been outspokenly critical of these approaches in children.
But D.C. federal district judge Royce Lamberth, who imposed particularly harsh prison sentences against J6 protesters, issued a broad injunction against the BOP. On September 28, Trump’s Solicitor General John Sauer filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court to stay this activist ruling.
“In nullifying BOP’s exercise of its statutorily conferred authority to adopt a policy that prison administrators have determined is necessary to maintain institutional security, the court’s order causes irreparable harm to the government and to the public,” Trump’s top attorney told the Supreme Court in his application.
“Indeed, this Court has emphasized the importance of allowing politically accountable officials to make decisions about the permissible forms of treatment for gender dysphoria, and the need for such policymaking flexibility is even greater in the context of prison administration,” he added.
The second action taken on September 28 by the Trump Administration against preferences for transgender people came from the Education Department. It issued a rule rescinding the pro-transgender mandates by Biden in higher education under Title IX, which is the landmark provision enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972 to protect women, not transgender, college students.
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance,” states the 54-year-old Title IX. Over 20 years later, it was reinterpreted by feminists in the Clinton Administration to pressure colleges to provide athletic opportunities for women in proportion to their share of undergraduate enrollment, despite the fact that women are generally far less interested in competitive sports than men.
Then came the transgender movement, and the Biden Administration twisted Title IX further to require preferential treatment for transgender students. Biden redefined “sex” in Title IX to include gender identity and gender attraction, thereby granting new rights to transgender persons and homosexuals.
Lawsuits seeking many millions of dollars are filed against colleges for alleged violations of Title IX, and most colleges cannot afford this lawfare against them. By removing preferential rights for transgender students under Title IX, Trump’s Education Department frees colleges to focus on improving their academic and sports programs without pandering to demands for inclusion by transgender activists and their attorneys.
Title IX was enacted when women were a minority on college campuses, to expand their educational and sports opportunities rather than to arm disgruntled students for alleging discrimination or harassment by others. But women today have a commanding 60-40% majority at college, including holding most positions of authority, so Title IX has little continuing value.
In light of the vast demographic changes in colleges, men are the ones who should be encouraged to attend and be comfortable at college, and it is obviously harmful to women that the matriculation by men has dwindled. Repealing Title IX would be a bold step that Republicans could propose at a time when they need to attract more young men to the Republican Party.
