You might have noticed a theme with the incoming Trump administration.  It was very obvious at the Daytona 500, where Trump walked around the track with his granddaughter.  Or with Elon Musk bringing his children into the Oval Office to play while doing press conferences.  I told my very good friend, Senator George Lang, how I thought so much about how he and his wife work together so well and enjoy doing many things as a couple.  A lot of people don’t get to see that side of him, but George has a great family. They love their kids and are just good people from the ground up.  And that seems to be a constant theme regarding people I tend to think are doing a good job in government; they do a good job in their homes, starting there.  That was certainly the message with J.D. Vance at the inauguration, where his children were crawling all over the place during the parade ceremonies.  It was very nice to see.  As I was reading Vivek Ramaswamy’s new book Truths recently, ahead of a big event with him where he is going to announce he’s running for governor of Ohio, he spent a whole chapter on the topic of family and how important it is to the constructs of a good society and good government.  In almost every case, you can’t expect to govern other people well if you don’t have a good family life.  So more and more, the way to sell good government to people is to show everyone that you know how to run a good family, because it all starts in the home.  We have been lied to when it has been suggested otherwise.  To be Great Again, America needs to make families great again as the first layer of good government; from there, everything else flows forward. 

I tell my wife every year that it is her birthday, in late February, to which I always hold my breath and which I most look forward to.  I’m not crazy about the weeks between Christmas and her birthday.  I enjoy the holiday season–Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year.  There is a lot of optimism that the human race has created for itself during that time of year, and I do love it.  But once the cold of winter hits and there are several weeks of very short days of daylight, I sort of hold my breath for her birthday, which always comes after it, the optimism of spring.  So we usually do something fun as a family for her birthday as a mile marker through a winter hard won.  This year, we celebrated by going to the Fuji House at Bridgewater Falls, and we had a wonderful evening there as a family with my kids and their kids.  It was her pick; it’s an open hibachi-style Japanese place where they cook in front of you.  I get to do that a lot. I’ve been to Japan a few times recently, and they do a lot of that cooking style there, so I’ve seen it firsthand. I have to say, they do a great job at the Fuji House.  It’s the only place my wife wanted to go for her birthday dinner, and everyone had a great time together.  The little kids loved it.  My kids enjoyed the treat, as they work hard, and life has a way of chipping away at people in their thirties and forties, they needed the break.  So my wife’s instincts were correct on that particular place on that particular night.  One thing you always get with Japanese society, in any form, is that they are very family-friendly, and the Fuji House in Butler County, Ohio, is undoubtedly family-oriented, making it fun for everyone. 

As I was watching our cook doing his warrior-like slicing up of our food with fire dancing all around in front of us, I kept thinking about Vivek’s book, about Trump and his kids and grandkids, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, my friend George and his wife Debbie and there isn’t any way to hide it.  Family is the first foundation for everything; you can’t have a culture of success without it.  Everything starts at home.  You manage your family well.  Only then can you think of managing anything in your community.  I know most of the trustees in the communities I work with, and I can say that in all their cases, family is essential to them.  Most of them have functional relationships with their spouses.  If you control that, you can think about state government.  Then, from there, the federal government.  And if there is anything left after all that, you can think about what’s happening in the world.  But never do any of those things at the expense of your family.  Family is everything, and any experiment from the past that has been said otherwise is a catastrophic failure, and we are paying for it now on many levels.  Sitting there watching our cook put all that well-prepared food on our plate for us to eat with chopsticks, I thought about all the great family moments we have had over the years, and really, those are the only things that ever mattered.  I’ve done many neat things, but time with our family has been the most important.  When I talk about good government and its needs, I always utter it from the perspective of a good family foundation first.

All suggestions otherwise have been wrong and should be viewed as an attack on our basic social structure.  Anything that attacks the pursuit of a happy family attacks the basic premise of values in that culture.  Thinking more about our own experiences, especially over this last decade, as we have traveled a lot as a family, usually with a caravan of RV campers, we have had many great experiences that indeed show up in the little children.  And that is the task of someone like Trump to give his grandkids an idea of what a good life should look like.  Otherwise, how would they know?  If you can’t have a good life at home with your family, how will you do it for community members, state, or nation?  That is what the borderless world people have gotten wrong from the beginning; they are trying to erode this essential Truth, as Vivek Ramaswamy calls it.  The government doesn’t start from the world as a global citizen and then work down to the family.  It’s the complete opposite, which is why Disney as a company has been failing.  They used to understand the family first concept.  But through radicalized politics, they tried to turn that basic structure on its head, attack the premise of family membership, and replace it with being a global citizen.  And that’s just wrong at every level.  So, I again enjoyed my wife’s birthday and dinner with our family to celebrate it.  There was a time not that long ago when we all got on a plane and flew to London to have her birthday dinner at Chef Ramsey’s premier restaurant in Chelsea, which was fantastic.  But in the scheme of things, Fuji House was better.  Not so much in the quality of food, but in the atmosphere.  The family-friendly environment there was just conducive to a good evening; many families there doing the same thing we were, and I saw a lot of evidence of good government in the home and people ready to take those values into their community, which was terrific.  There is hope for the world yet–through the children.  And if the adults let them down, that is a real tragedy.  And the signs of a future lousy government. 

We did it last year; I had just stepped off a plane from Japan.  And I was going to take our whole family to Disney World.  We were planning to spend a whole week at the Fort Wilderness Campground.  It’s a trip I had wanted to do before the grandkids got too old for Disney.  And I wanted them to experience it before the park started to fall off the rails due to their woke politics.  Since I was traveling late from Japan, the rest of my family headed to a little campsite in Georgia with their RV, and the agreement was that my wife and I would meet them there, just south of Atlanta.   I stepped off the 14-hour plane ride from Tokyo and literally got right into our SUV to pull our RV trailer to that Georgia campsite to catch up with my kids, who were already there, to drive 8 hours per day over the next couple of days.  And that evening, when we met up at a table set up between our two RVs, I brought them little treasures from Japan, and we had a great evening together, ahead of a week at Disney World and a Park Hopper pass to all four of their amusement parks for the week.  It was a wonderful day, the best we could ever hope for in a government experience.  Seeing it firsthand, I can say that I know what it looks like and what other people should be doing to get to similar happy places.  And it’s not up for debate. 

Rich Hoffman

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