Tag: MAGA

Trouble With Reservations: How the Biden administration created a national labor crises

This was a hectic Holiday season for me, with many more social engagements than usual.  It’s usually pretty busy, but something happened this year that I have never seen before, and that is I had much trouble booking reservations for dinner engagements, which was very strange.   Because I am usually busy with this kind of thing during November and December, I have a base to say that this year differs from other years.  And that the occurrences were higher than usual indicates that statistically, we’re not dealing with an accident here, but statistical certainty.  But out of the 20 dinners I was involved in over the Holiday season, I had trouble with reservations on 18 of them.  This means that, on the first attempt, the restaurant I was trying to book for a holiday party for social engagements would not accept the reservation due to competing holiday celebrations.  I would have to make a few calls, and in all the cases, I could get a hold of somebody to overcome the apprehension.  But with that process, I also received an explanation that ticked me off.  It’s a trend toward the negative that I have been pointing out to everyone over these last few years, coming out of all the dumb COVID protocols.  That globalist poison attacked our American workforce, and now, under four years of Joe Biden, the impact on the average American worker has destroyed them to such a degree that it was showing up in restaurants and how they staff and handle their employees regarding pressure.  In all 18 cases I mentioned, the general managers explained that they were having difficulty staffing their businesses, especially their kitchens, and were very concerned about overloading them because they were afraid they might quit. 

My idea of a great restaurant is Gordan Ramsey’s signature restaurant in Chelsea, England, just to the south of London along the river.  There are a few great places in the world that I also think about regarding top-tier food.  A steakhouse in Kobe, Japan that specializes in Kobe steak, which is fantastic on every bar you measure.  But that 3 Michelin Star Chef Ramsey place in London is, I think, about as good as it gets.  They know how to prepare food and treat a customer.  And it is hard to make a reservation there.  They purposely have a tiny dining room because they are concerned about the high food quality.  It is an excellent experience if you ever get a chance to go, and it’s costly but well worth the money.  When I was there, they toured me through the kitchen, and I could see how things work behind the scenes, and it was all top-notch.  The workforce was clean, engaged, organized, and efficient.  I can say that I’ve seen the best in the world and understand what it takes to be that way.  That was why I could call shenanigans to many of these local managers in the Cincinnati area when they tried to tell me that they were hesitant to book reservations for fear that their staff might be overworked and start delivering poor food quality.  That was the case in one particularly dumb explanation: a very nice restaurant on the Ohio River overlooking downtown Cincinnati was almost empty on the night that I wanted to entertain guests, yet they were concerned about booking my reservation for more than 20 because they had during that same hour a party of 15 and a party of 10.   

After further probing, I got to the heart of the matter: many people who work in restaurant kitchens doing fine food have become very sensitive to pressure under the Biden administration and the COVID protocols that never disappeared.  While high-quality restaurants were able to hire those kinds of people, their ability to handle stress is much lower than they were just a few years ago, and if pressured in an environment where the demands were intense, these employees were prone to walk off the job rather than fight through the pressure.  So managers of nice restaurants were doing their best to keep that pressure off their kitchens in a rock, paper, scissors game of at least keeping the food quality high, even if it meant a loss of sales at the door.  Cincinnati and areas around the city, especially up in West Chester and Liberty Township, have restaurants that are as good as anywhere in the world, so I understand wanting to keep those high food quality standards by taking the pressure off the kitchen staff.  But the kitchen staff shouldn’t be such crybabies, either.  This was a big problem in my eyes because it’s not just restaurants; this is a major domestic service problem that is the direct result of bad government management by introducing minimum wage increases that were not market-driven and creating workforce shortages with government talk of universal wages and work from home policies of virus management introduced by socialist health departments.  It had taken a few years to get there, but the Biden administration policies had shown up in the reservation systems of high-quality restaurants. The artificial constraint of employees had impacted their businesses to the point where they couldn’t plan to maximize their dining room seating to maximum effect because their staff had become soft and unable to manage high amounts of stress. 

Knowing all this and keeping the managers happy with their dilemma, my approach was to let everyone take two or three hours for dinner so that the kitchens didn’t get stressed out too much and to allow the food quality to be reduced.  My logic to the managers is that they’ll make more money letting their guests wait for the food and buying appetizers and drinks than in trying to pace everything to the artificial constraint of the kitchen staff that was trying to figure out if they’d work that night or call off to play Call of Duty.  If employees are getting paid anyway, why would they work harder?  That is what happens when you take away incentives from the American worker to do more and to do it faster.  Most of these restaurants in Cincinnati are built for speed and large crowds.  This is not like Chef Ramsey’s restaurant in England, which had a purposely small dining room.  The places I was going to were meant to fill every seat, and if they could fit in a reservation, they could book it and keep their dining rooms full.  They needed to push their kitchens to perform.  However, “push” became a bad name under the Biden administration.  Employees have become radicalized and are “pushing back” by saying that they need an emotional safety animal to manage stress so they don’t cry when the pressure becomes too great for them.  The way I think, this is a national security issue.  You don’t see this from workforces when I travel around Asia.  They work hard. In the West, workers don’t work hard anymore, a change from just a few years ago.  Like I said, I do this kind of thing every year.  This year was the first time that I had reservations turned down on nights when the dining rooms were mostly empty, but the managers were purposefully trying to keep the pressure off their kitchens because their employees had become emotionally soft after four years of the Biden administration, and globalism employment practices in general.  And it’s certainly something we need to address as a nation.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Mirror, Mirror On the Wall: ‘The Right Stuff’ and H-1B Visas

I knew this would be a challenge; you can’t have a populist movement gain so much support, as it did behind electing President Trump, and expect all those people to get along.  There would always be hard truths that would come back at the mirror as we asked it, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all.”  And that the reply would come back, “foreign labor.”  And like the jealous queen from Snow White, we would have people from the MAGA movement try to poison Snow White with an apple we gave her to eliminate the pain of the reality that we had a rival and thought of them as better than us.  But I’m with Vivek Ramaswamy on this contentious issue regarding the exploded topic of H-1B visas.  The truth is, to bring back all the jobs on an America First agenda, there are not enough good workers to perform the task.  And yes, this system is trying to defend itself ahead of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy implementing D.O.G.E. upon Trump’s inauguration.  The media found a wedge issue to exploit.  There was no way to bring all these labor union types into the Republican Party and Democrats and have everyone holding hands through the complex process of managing mass society.  This is where the formula for success was always going to clash with the concept of populism, which has been the primary drumbeat of the WarRoom posse, specifically Steve Bannon and the gang.  I usually get along great with those guys, but they don’t understand this issue correctly.  The exact mechanisms that aligned everyone through populism behind President Trump won’t solve an inherently cultural problem.  And Vivek Ramaswamy hit the nail on the head in a way that hurt many people’s feelings.  And that will happen a lot over the next few years.  This labor issue is just the first in a long line of hard feelings that will be exposed to the surface.  Ironically, the first people who will have to deal with the challenges of an America First employment approach will have to face facts about the reality of our current labor market.  It’s not that cheap immigrant labor makes them so attractive, they aren’t so cheap these days.  It’s because they still have a work ethic in most cases, whereas several generations of bad culture have destroyed it in America and made it so that not enough people would want to work hard enough to make America great again.  They will have to learn to be great again, personally, before they can help anybody make it that way.  Being the best labor force in the world requires more than waving a Trump flag and electing a President.  It takes a lot of hard work, something most people these days just don’t want to do.  Saying that won’t make anybody popular, or sell books.  But it needs to be said for the harsh reality that is required.

Part of a quote from Vivek Ramaswamy that caused a lot of people some tough reflection.

I thought it was ironic that to make their point, WarRoom used one of my favorite scenes from any movie to frame their problem with the H-1B visa program, which essentially gives a way to bring in immigrant labor to fill skilled positions in the American labor market.  It was the scene from The Right Stuff where Chuck Yeager was offered to fly the X1 and break the sound barrier for essentially the pay the military gave him.  It’s a great scene, and there is a lot of truth in it, as Steve Bannon and others intended.  And I can say this from personal experience.  I met Chuck Yeager while he was alive on a few occasions.  And I knew people like Scott Crossfield.  And Neil Armstrong lived right down the road from me.  I understand these people, and they were not quite as heroic as portrayed in that Paul Kaufman version of The Right Stuff.  The real people were not as lofty as that movie made them.  But that’s not a bad thing.  The Right Stuff was an inspiring movie adapted from a great book by Tom Wolfe, and it was meant to do as Steve Bannon does in his WarRoom podcast, and that was to inspire people to greatness.  And when I was a little kid in that dark theater watching that movie, it spoke to me.  I became that version of Chuck Yeager.  My work ethic is very much how Chuck Yeager was shown to be in that movie, and there are lots of stories that people still tell about their antics with me that could fill many movies with the same level of inspiration.  Needless to say, I loved that movie and that specific scene for all the same reasons that Steve Bannon did. 

But I have found that reality was not shown in The Right Stuff.  Even within that movie, Kaufman puts his finger on it at the end of the film when all the Mercury astronauts were being celebrated with essentially unearned valor while the real hero of the movie, overlooked by everyone, was still pushing all the limits to drive aviation forward, with Chuck Yeager stealing the new hot plane, the Lockheed NF-104A to break a high altitude record.  Because that was the closest he was ever going to get to space.  He didn’t have a college education that fit the profile that the space program wanted.  Which was very much a populist message that the fake best and brightest were put on a pedestal when the real best and brightest were crashing from a failed attempt to climb that slick plane into space anonymously and heroically, where only his wife and a few friends knew what was going on. 

Most of the people I have found who are the hardest workers are people from other places in the world, and I interact with more people of foreign origin than just about anybody for that reason.  I have tried to help domestic people with their problems, and I have climbed out on a limb with them time and time again, even with them using a saw to cut everything down in an obsession with self-destruction.  And I will always try to help them.  But for several generations now, our American workforce has been destroyed through drugs, bad living, education, and an entitlement mentality that was dealt with in that movie using the pure character of Chuck Yeager and asking the question, what made the space program great, was it the Germans we brought in to build the rockets?  Was it the heroics of the test pilots who couldn’t keep their pants on and cheated on their wives all the time with their celebrity status?  Or was it people like Chuck Yeager who were flying for the joy of it and weren’t afraid to risk it all through obsessive competition and a desire to be the best and boldest pilot of them all?  The answer is obvious now that America is going through that very problem.  We must find The Right Stuff, and our education system makes The Wrong Stuff.  And it will take decades to fix that problem.  And while we are bringing all these jobs back under America First control, we need the people in the world who aren’t abusing themselves with high divorce rates, drug use, and a bad work ethic to sign up to do the work.  We need more Chuck Yeager’s in America as portrayed by that movie, not the kind that lived in real life and had all kinds of problems.  The movie showed us what we wanted to be.  But reality told us who we were.  And that is what is going to happen in politics.   We have to be honest and expect lofty results.  But we have to be willing to hire the people who want to do all the hard work of making America Great Again, even if their reason for doing it is chasing an American Dream that most people who were born and raised in America took for granted all their lives. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Elon Musk the Reporter: Free speech will destroy tryanny every time

I figured it out long ago, and Elon Musk can now do it at a much larger level.  Free speech and citizen journalism are tremendously powerful tools and are the key ingredients to a prosperous society.  If left alone, in most cases, people in collective masses become corrupt and dangerous.  So all this anger toward Elon Musk is understandable, for the way he expressed himself during the budget battle in Congress over the continuing resolution that started at over 1500 pages and ended up being just a few hundred by the time it was all said and done.  I explained to everyone that this was how D.O.G.E. would be effective.  They didn’t need to have an office somewhere where they stamped approval in some bureaucratic way, like everything else in government.  No, D.O.G.E. initiated by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would be more like reporters, doing the job the media should have been doing all along.  And because Musk bought Twitter and turned it from a three-lettered mind control device into a platform of free speech where he has over 200 million direct followers, a lot of this has caught the radical left and deep state establishment figures off guard.  No, they will not be able to control any of this.  They lost their power long ago and were only propped up by legacy media looking to do their dirty work.  But free speech was always the key to our personal Constitution in the United States, and it has been the killer of globalism for many decades now.  All people needed to do was figure out how powerful their opinions were.  This is why I put so much work into my own efforts; it has worked for many years and made things better where they otherwise would languish in obscurity. 

I used to participate in a lot of media, write for newspapers, and appear on television.  I did a lot of radio.  I was even in a few movies.  So, I understand the entertainment culture and news broadcasting that most people use to interact with information very well.  I am that guy who used to show up and give speeches at public gatherings, especially at school boards.  And there was just something wrong with speaking to people who gave you only 3 minutes to speak.  Newspapers would only give me 250 words to make my point.  Radio would only put you on for around a 15-minute segment.  Millions of people heard it, but the information was often lost to people before the next segment started.  I learned a long time ago because I saw how things were cooking in the kitchen, and letting the bad guys determine how long you speak in public and how much you could write regarding news and opinion was wrong.  And it kept people from speaking freely to other people.  So, I gradually started my own blog site and launched this news and opinion effort that has been very effective for over fifteen years.  I learned what worked and didn’t, and I gradually stopped appearing on other people’s radio and television shows and just started doing my own where I could write as much as I wanted and say as much as I desired about anything and everything under the sun.  If you didn’t care about making money that other people would pay you for the work, then freedom would become the primary currency, and people would get different perspectives from what they previously didn’t have. 

When Elon Musk bought Twitter and converted himself out of political necessity away from a left-of-center globalist to a MAGA Republican who has been accused of either being one of Trump’s kids because they have become so close after the election of 2024 or the president himself, Musk bought a free speech platform that had been used to shape public opinion and turned it into something that reflected what people actually thought.  And what tyranny cannot live up to is public scrutiny.  So, in many ways, Elon Musk became much more potent than any figure on planet Earth, including the President of the United States, because he could evoke what people thought about something instead of limiting what they could see and hear in a way to push them into a thought process that reflected the values of institutionalism.  It was never going to work.  The crazy authority figures of the world should have known better and learned their hard lessons from the Berlin Wall and the many control mechanisms they have in China.  Free expression is a powerful weapon, which is why it’s the first of the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution.  And if you are Elon Musk thinking about how to have governments functioning properly on faraway planets so human civilization can thrive, we must solve this problem once and for all here on Earth, here and now.   We can’t allow tyrants to rule through limited knowledge and control over opinion.  And that’s how these crazy, debt-ridden CRs have been passed by our government for years.  They are full of garbage that nobody knows about and sold to the public with a gun to the head, saying essentially, “Pass this bill to get funding for cancer research by ignoring the funding of bio labs in Ukraine and all kinds of other dangerous stuff that the lobbyists have stuffed in there with goodies and corruption galore.” 

The power Elon Musk used in December of 2024 was not the power of a president or a government insider.  It was the power of opinion, and he was using free speech in the way it was designed to educate the public and let them make decisions about things themselves.  And for all that, the Beltway culture withered in pain over the CR debate.  And people haven’t seen anything yet for all the pain it caused.  This is precisely how D.O.G.E. is going to work.  It won’t be from policymakers and long meetings with peer review that government reform will be done.  It will report what is happening and build public pressure to reform through free speech.  I can report on this matter from my personal experience.  There is nothing that any of the bad guys can do about it.  They won’t be able to stand up to it, and they won’t be able to stop it.  Short of turning to violence themselves, which I have had to deal with myself on many occasions.  Once they realize that violence won’t get them what they want, it will make it much worse for them, and they will become very frustrated with the results, much like the way many reacted to Elon Musk during the CR negotiations in 2024.  Musk doesn’t need to be president.  All he needs to do is allow people to have an opinion on something and give them things to think about through his X social media platform.  So what happens next will be bewildering to many people.  But there is nothing they can do to stop it.  Free speech is the check on power that it was designed to be.  Unfortunately, in years past, too much free speech was controlled through various corporate controls directly connected to the political structure.  And that allowed bad guys to do bad things.  Well, not any longer.  That is why 2025 will differ significantly from any other historical period.  The debate over the 2024 continued resolution for congressional spending hasn’t seen anything yet.  And it’s about time!

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Air Taxis in West Chester, Ohio: The future is now, and its very exciting

The future is now

It’s going to happen at this point anyway.  My bringing it up now is more of a formality of connecting the dots and explaining to anybody who will listen how the future economy under President Trump will look.  I have conversations about making Ohio the number one state for business-friendly conditions all the time.  I attend many seminars on economic development and Chamber of Commerce incentives for depressed areas looking to rebound.  And when I say the only thing holding back this technology is the FAA, politics has changed.  Deregulation under Trump will get stuffy bureaucrats out of the way, and a second wave of aviation and aerospace development will be unleashed.  The other day, I talked a lot about Hyperloop and how and why a terminal should be built in Monroe, Ohio. But today, I’m talking about an old idea that is about to be unleashed and create an all-new transportation mode: skycars, or more technically speaking, VTOL air taxis.  I can say from personal experience that Joby Aviation, up the road from West Chester and Liberty Township, is at the front of the market.  They have air taxis ready to go, built, tested, flushed out, and prepared for delivery to market in 2025/2026; essentially, all that is standing in the way is the FAA approval process.  Joby Aviation is making a piloted version, but they will quickly become fully automatic and will work by calling one on your phone and having them pick you up and perform just like an Uber.  The future is here, now.  All that needed to happen was that politics would have to get behind it.  We don’t already have these air taxis in use because the Biden administration was a slow and Marxist micromanager that stalled all these efforts.  If Trump had stayed in the White House in 2020, these Joby air taxis would have been out for a few years by now.  So once we get a Trump administration back in the White House and install a pro-business mindset back into America, Joby and a few other companies are going to move quickly, and technical innovation on this front will happen at a blistering pace. 

Knowing all that, I would propose that we get all the minds together in West Chester and Liberty Township and become the first areas in the world to develop official Sky Ports.  Abu Dhabi and China are already deep in development.  And Europe is already all over it.  But they don’t have Joby Aviation right down the road and a stable environment to perform the early day development of the technology, which could make Ohio the first to fly again.  Here’s how and why it would work.  For instance, there is a nice little piece of property across from Ikea in West Chester that is just big enough for a sky port, a mini runway kind of helipad where these air taxis would land and take off like a helicopter, but much quieter and with much more stable flight.  This always happens to me; people come and see me from out of town.  They stay at the many hotels and have to get back and forth between CVG and West Chester, and their biggest problem is the traffic down I-75, which gets back to the airport to catch their flight when doing business in West Chester.  This air taxi system would take all that worry away and improve life for many people. 

For instance, when business guests were ready to leave their hotel, they would walk or catch a little transport from their hotel to Sky Port by Ikea. Theoretically, a sky taxi would be waiting for them.  In this case, a piloted version of the Joby VTOL vehicle would be waiting for them just like an Uber, dialed up by their phone with the ticket, and everything would be paid.  The guests would arrive and get into the craft like a car.  The sky taxi would fly them down to the airport at CVG and land at the front of the terminal, likely on top of the parking garage there, and fly over all the traffic, making the trip in about 15 minutes, which usually takes over 50 minutes.  Another problem I have is bringing people from West Chester who are in town without a car to sporting events.  I typically pick them up and drive to the Great American Ballpark to attend a game for the evening.  Getting downtown with all the rush hour traffic is a pain in the neck.  It would be much better to get into an air taxi and fly straight to the stadium, land in a nice, safe place along the river, and get to the game in about 10 minutes instead of an hour during those peak hours of 5 to 6 PM.  When the game was over, the passengers would just let the air taxi service know you were about to leave, and they would come and pick you up just like an Uber driver now.  Only it would be a VTOL instead of a car.  The same air taxi service could be set up to get to Kings Island from all over Cincinnati.  It could also be set up to serve politicians from their districts directly to the Ohio Statehouse.  There are a vast number of immediate applications that would benefit immediately from the low price of freshly poured concrete. 

After the FAA permit process, the next barrier would be to win over the public.  So, the sooner people see these vehicles working and overcome their fear of flying, the more the concept will expand rapidly.  At first, it would be similar to a helicopter ride experience that you see in very safe tourist areas.  Only this air taxi concept is even safer and much quieter.  It would be at a small volume, maybe a few flights every hour throughout the peak hours of a business day.  But enough people are interested now to make that happen with the Joby Aviation vehicles right out of the box.  However, the flight frequency would quickly increase to a flight every couple of minutes, and even several flights from several pads at the Skyport would come and go all the time.  It will also greatly enhance the business climate wherever sports reside.  So, I think Ohio has a unique opportunity to be the first.  West Chester, precisely because of its hotels and business traffic, could be the first in the world to demonstrate this technology and benefit economically from the visionary approach.  I’m just connecting the dots here for the many people I know in this business who need to know about each other.  And to explain that this isn’t some far off Jetson’s fantasy concept.  I’ve been involved in these Skycars for over three decades now, so when I say that they are here, I can say it with confidence.  Air taxis are here; they will happen and will be the hottest ticket in town for the next half of a decade.  People will find them very convenient, safe, and pleasant.  And they will become nearly as common as a personal car in a very short time.  The VTOL market needed a president like Trump in the White House.  The rest was waiting for the permit approval, which is about to happen as you read this.  If not sooner. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Mitch McConnell is Out in the Senate: Making a point, and making a difference

I thought it was a pathetic speech, Mitch McConnell’s last one as a senator in any leadership position.  He gave it right before Christmas in 2024, and it came across as petty but very revealing.  As I say all this, I get high-level politics and understand all too well how tough it can be working with people who disagree with you.  I am used to spending most of my time overcoming the objections of people who disagree with me and working hard to turn them into my way of thinking.  Not through force, but by showing them how much they would benefit from doing so.  Some of my best friends are powerful politicians who have to do that every day.  They work with everybody and anybody.  And for that matter, I understand Trump because he has all these traits naturally.  And since he first ran for office, or talked about it, back in the late 1990s with the Reform Party, I thought Trump would be great in a political role because he knows how to get things done and overcome people’s objections while showing them the benefit of agreeing with him.  That’s more of an Art of the Deal than a political thing.  However, that is what Mitch McConnell talked about in his last speech.  Instead, he referred insultingly to what he thinks people in politics are or should be doing.  And he narrowed it all down to two key ingredients that everyone who gets into political office seeks to do, based on all his vast years of experience in the Senate.  He says there are two kinds of people who go to the Senate: people who want to make a point, and those who want to make a difference. 

Mitch came across as an old man trying to learn to play video games.  What I heard from him was a frustrated person who realized that the game had changed from underneath him, and he had no idea how to adapt to it.  He was at the end of his career and wouldn’t be a part of anything under these new rules, and he was frustrated.  The world was going to move on without him, and he was not being revered as a great Senator who had been a leader for many decades.  He was being viewed as an Anti-Trump loser who sold our country out and was the kind of person who put his name on that CR at the end of 2024 that had been 1500 pages and lost the battle to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on the X platform in getting the bill crushed before a vote could be made.  What replaced that bill was a much more narrowly focused CR with many bells and whistles removed, which bothered Mitch McConnell.  And that frustration came out in his speech when he referred to those against his way of doing politics as just getting involved to make a point.  I think what he said revealed why so many members of the Senate and the House have problems because they never did understand what getting into politics was supposed to be.  I find Mitch McConnell revolting, not because he was anti-Trump but because he had so much power, but he never used that power to build a replacement bridge on I-75 going over from Cincinnati into Northern Kentucky.  At one point in 2012, he shared the powers of government with John Boehner, who was Speaker of the House and lived right across the Ohio River and was just as motivated.  But both men dropped the ball and got caught up in the Washington game of Beltway politics where the lobbyists rule the day, and they became part of the problem.  Certainly not a solution. We still don’t have a bridge after decades of trying.  And they had all the levers of power to make it happen.

It’s not like I don’t know the type of people I think should be in the Senate.  I would say I know J.D. Vance pretty well.  He’s from my area, and I’ve met him often.  He’s nothing like Mitch McConnell.  I also know the newly elected Bernie Moreno.  I was one of his very first supporters and was invited to have lunch personally with him in the early stages of his campaign, and I was able to talk to him about why he was running.  He did not run for the Senate to make a difference or a point.  He wanted to be a good manager in the Senate, representing Ohio along the way.  When we voted for him, we were not voting for a MAGA disrupter who just wanted to make a point.  We wanted President Trump’s management support in the Senate so he could be a better president.  I also asked J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno the same question privately.  I said, “If you get in, are you just going to be another louse hanging out on K-Street making deals with scum bags who want to destroy this country in trade for the benefits of some whore standing on the street corner?”  In both cases, they said to me “no Mr. Hoffman.  Absolutely not.”  J.D. Vance kept his promise so far and was an excellent Senator until Trump picked him to be V.P.  So we know the difference between a J.D. Vance, who was new, and an old corrupt politician like Mitch McConnell. 

And yes, when I spoke to both of those guys and many others in the House and Senate, that was my typical question to break the ice.  I am always interested in how they answer, and I can tell a lot by nonverbal communication, whether they are lying to me or sincere.  That’s my way of doing things, and it’s always why I tend to be in a position to ask those questions in the first place.  People respect my opinion and like it when I’m part of the process, especially on the front end.  In doing this kind of thing for several decades, I have known Mitch McConnell, and many have liked him over the years.  And they take the easy way out and listen to all the lobbyists when they shouldn’t.  And they played their role in jacking up our debt to over 35 trillion dollars and adding another trillion in wasteful spending every 100 days.  And they do all that calling the effort compromise.  When what they are doing is packing vast amounts of evil in these bills, passing them so everyone can get what they want, and selling that corruption as a good government that compromises with the bad guys.  Then, they say to their critics that compromising is more virtuous than standing your ground on anything.  And those who do are the kind of people who want to make a point.  They don’t understand how government works, and they certainly don’t understand the Senate.  But to my eyes, all that McConnell said on his way out the door sounded like a 90-year-old grandpa with one foot in the grave trying to learn to play Fortnite with a 7-year-old, slow, crusty and complaining about how fast the world was moving because he didn’t have the skills to play the game.  And that is why Mitch McConnell is out of the Senate, and we are all happy that he is.   

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Importance of Kari Lake Running Voice of America: What the world needs the most of

People will increasingly realize just how important communication is to a culture.  Out of all Trump’s picks for offices that need to work with a new government, I think Kari Lake’s being assigned Director of Voice of America is one of the best and most important.  After all, we just saw what radical leftists wanted for the world.  We saw their Brave New World authority concepts, and they tried to implement them and destroy our American Constitution along the way.  We saw them cancel the fireworks at Mt. Rushmore and any references to patriotism and memory of great American moments.  We saw flash mobs attack our heroic statues and attempt to overthrow our nation in every way.  So we can never forget how terrified our enemies are of the American message, and trying to keep it out of the mind of the world.  To perform what they wanted, the enemies of America, both foreign and domestic, needed to erase the idea of America and personal freedom from the minds of the many.  Luckily, one of Trump’s excellent skills as a builder of brands is an appreciation for the ability to communicate.  And he understands why selling the idea of America to the world is essential.  So he has appointed Kari Lake to do just that, which I think is a much more important job than a Senator or Governor, which she clearly would have been suitable for, but had both of those opportunities robbed from her through gross election fraud by criminals who wanted to hijack America and turn it into something else.  And how do we know they cheated? They kept counting individual ballot drops for weeks after these elections and contaminating the batches with percentages of mail-in ballots not verified by photo ID, and they kept counting fake ballots until they defeated her in the election.  Through election fraud, they kept Kari Lake from winning her last two races, because they know how good she is as a communicator.  So bad people conspired to keep her out of politics.

The Voice of America has a special place in my mind.  From my perspective in Liberty Township, I grew up looking at the three towers off on the horizon toward Mason and would listen to bits of it on AM radio.  I was an oddly patriotic kid growing up.  I listened to a lot of AM radio, especially WMOH, which was just down the road in Hamilton, on a CB unit I had that stayed on all the time.  Also near the Voice of America towers was WLW radio, which broadcasts 24 hours of freedom all over America, and I loved it.  My bedroom my mother painted in red, white, and blue stars by hand, which looked like a monstrosity about to perform at a 4th of July parade.  And she did all that because even at ages one and two years old, I had very patriotic inclinations.  I was one of the official Ronald Regan campaigners in grade school in the 7th grade.  I worked hard for Reagan, and I despised Jimmy Carter even though most of the kids in my school had no idea who those people were during that pivotal election of 1980.  I was a weird kid, and many people think I’m a strange adult.  But with my background, I understand all too well how important it is to sell the idea of America to the privacy of people’s lives, whether it’s while they are growing up or looking for entertainment at their homes.  There are many competing ideas out there for entertainment value, but I always thought America should do more to promote itself to the world, so they could learn to be more like us.  Because I have always loved the idea of “us”.  And I have spent much time trying to spread that love as much as possible.

Oddly enough, I grew into an adult who frequently appeared on WLW radio.  I loved the power of talk radio and have watched it evolve.  Because of my friendship with Darryl Parks, the old program manager at WLW radio, I moved away from corporate radio, as there was no future in it, and grabbed on to the independent media formats, which are now turning out to be the last refuge of such a vile conspiracy.  The bad guys believed that by taking over the corporate media controls, they would control America’s message, which turned out to be excessively wrong.  But the attempt at it shows the obvious danger. And Voice of America, like the Truckin’ Bozo Show on WLW, became captured assets to control the message of what America was.  During a particularly tough period in my life, one that probably would have killed most people, I was working 16-hour days five days a week and 8-hour days on the weekends.  My wife and I had only one car, so I rode a bicycle 12 miles each way to work for five years.  I was being sued by multiple people for multiple things, grotesquely unfairly.  But I was a hot-shot young person who was into lots of things, and there were a lot of bad people who wanted to pound me out of existence.  I learned to carry a chip on my shoulder that turned into a mountain after I survived all these things, always thinking in the back of my mind about that patriotic room my mom had painted for me and the goodness of fighting for the right to be happy, and free in the world. 

My only bit of happiness during that rough period was that Paul Harvey would come on WLW at 3:30  AM and do news and commentary, complete with his daily “rest of the story” broadcasts on the Truckin’ Bozo Show.  So that kept me going, believe it or not, when I had nothing else to look forward to.  I couldn’t afford legal representation for all those lawsuits, so I had to do the work myself.  Which I was successful at after more than three years of court cases.  So, I understand hardship, and I greatly sympathize with the pain that the entire world goes through for similar reasons.  Looking back on it, I think God pushed me to become very strong so I could help many people by understanding their perspective.  I loved Voice of America so much that even now, I visit the VOA Park several times a week to record my VLOG broadcasts, which I have found is much more potent than all the radio I listened to as a kid because there were no corporate controls to the effort.  So I get it with Kari Lake; she was very successful in traditional media.  Trump, who was very successful in media also, understands this importance.  Voice of America has become a captured asset of the enemy over the years, but now it will be the Voice of Maga.  And I know that over 300 million people are listening to it every day who are going through their life circumstances like mine, where there is no ray of hope but maybe a little 30-minute radio broadcast in the middle of the night, and that’s all they have to hang on to live for a few more minutes.  The world needs to hear more about how great America can be and is.  Kari Lake is just the person who will do it as the new Director of the Voice of America.  As history remembers it, this will be one of the most essential things that Trump does as President.  And we’ll reflect on how great it was that Kari was available to run VOA back to greatness for the many lives worldwide looking for a positive message.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Rats in MAGA Hats: The FBI has to be punished for what they did on January 6th, lying about their 26 paid informants at the heart of all the trouble

There is a lot that will change, and keep in mind that as hurt as everyone was over the CR from Congress, nobody has seen anything yet in that regard.  Congress should have never packed that bill entirely of so much nonsense; the CR should have been presented as one page and provided with it a plan.  When we talk about D.O.G.E with some of the wealthiest people in the world volunteering their time to bring sanity to the process, don’t expect there not to be broken eggshells.  This will not be politics as usual on any front.  And I would say to all those involved in putting together that 1500-page monstrosity full of garbage that the Democrats wanted, remember, they did not win the election.  America turned them away.  So act like it when thinking about spending money.  All the pain that everyone is going through is better than jail or worse.  So tighten up your belts, shut your mouths, and thank God a Constitution is protecting you from the punishment you deserve for the way you have screwed over all of us for years.  It will get very pushy, but it’s for everyone’s good.  This is why it is good for Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to be independently wealthy and to be attached to the Trump administration voluntarily because they can afford to be critical of horrible government efforts like this December CR that otherwise would have been passed mainly unnoticed by the public for over 100 billion dollars of additional debt to fund the government only for two more months.  In February, they’d all be back doing the same stupid stuff and looking for another global distraction to keep stupid media from reporting the details. And that whole process would continue, spending another trillion dollars in debt every 100 days and tying us all closer to the enemies of the world financially who want to destroy us.  No, it’s time to start saying no and sticking with it.

And that same mentality has to be enacted regarding the FBI.  Everyone is fortunate that we are talking about putting Kash Patel in a position to head the FBI and clean up all this mess.  Now we know for sure, beyond speculation, that the FBI had over 26 informants working the crowd for January 6th 2021 and that Christopher Wray lied about it to Congress. That’s why the day before that information was released to the public, the FBI Director announced that he would resign. Many people wanted him to stay on for his full ten-year term to shield them from further investigations.  But Wray doesn’t want or need any of that.  He’s already in trouble for participating in trying to destroy Trump, the guy who picked him to be in that role after Trump had to fire Jim Comey, and with Trump back in the White House, there is no future for Wray.  He played an evil, dangerous game of letting the Biden administration weaponize the government, and now they have all been caught.  His best option is to resign, take himself off the map, and run for the hills, which is what he’s doing.  That leaves a lot of bad guys exposed in the wake, and as to that, tuff tootles.  They did the crime; now they can do the time.  It’s not going to be nice; what happens to them?  And there will be a lot more media overall than there was over this continuing resolution that Congress tried to push through. 

January 6th, we always suspected, was a set-up job, standard practice for the three-lettered government agencies over many decades.  People were upset that there was election fraud and that they were going to lose President Trump to vast government corruption.  So they showed up to protest it, as they had a right to do.  The FBI decided to try to work the situation to its advantage by putting paid informants, 26 of them, at the Capitol and instigating trouble by leading the effort to vandalize and destroy property, which Ray Epps was essentially caught on camera doing.  Christopher Wray denied that he had any FBI assets at the site and that the accusations of such misconduct were purely conspiratorial.  Few believed him.  However, in December of 2024, we learned otherwise that there were 26 such people the January 6th committee had not interviewed or anybody for that matter.  We know the names.  We know what their financial compensation was.  We know everything except who told them to do what and what they told the angry mob to do to provoke violence and start a scandal they hoped would lay cover fire for their coup against a people’s picked government.  Trump was the pick of voters, and they played their part in running a coup against him to maintain control of the government against the people of our nation and the voting system we use to establish authority.  This is all nasty stuff to add to a series of horrendously terrible things.  That’s how it will be for a while; I’ll be reporting a series of horrible things that must be punished aggressively and without mercy.  Otherwise, we won’t have a future as a country. 

Yes, the FBI lied to us, as has most of the government.  And the January 6th prisoners have to be released as soon as possible, and they deserve recourse against those who put them in jail.  All those who participated in orchestrating that coup against Trump and then tried to incite violence to cover up the attempt and put the shoe of violence on the other foot have to be punished brutally.  And some out there will wonder if it needs to be that excessive.  Hey, it doesn’t matter if it’s a small or big culture; if people do wrong, they must be punished.  And pushing them out of their jobs and getting them out of the culture you want to fix is the first big step.  Many people have done wrong that has to be removed, starting with Christopher Wray.  But there will be many more to come and remember as you watch them cry and scream like little kids who didn’t get candy at the checkout line.  They are lucky we are so righteous.  Because they deserve it.  But continuing with the mess they created and expecting to slide fake money under the door to pay for it all is not how we will do things in the future.  Our government must work for our country’s people; it must serve them.  Not the other way around.  The people do not serve the parasites who have been running it.  And we are putting a stop to it.  That’s why we elected Trump, and he understands that.  And he has committed to the job.  And that’s how the spaghetti in the kitchen will be made with D.O.G.E.  Placating evil with friendships got us into this mess.  Now, there is going to be pain, lots of it.  And nobody has seen anything yet.  Get ready because 2025 is going to be a wild, historic year.  But more than anything, it’s all necessary because so many did so many bad things leading up to this.  And honestly, they are lucky to be alive after what they did. And in this case, they put rats in MAGA hats and tried to use that ruse to commit a vast series of crimes.  And they got caught.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Dealing with the Covid Bioweapon: If we don’t punish the terrorists, they’ll do it again

The truth is a lot of people pay close attention to the things I say and write about here on this site, and there are many things that need to be talked about that nobody in the world is bringing up quite the way I do.  After Trump won, I thought very seriously about taking a rest from doing all these articles.   I have achieved what I wanted in doing all this work.  However, the fact remains that over time, I have earned a lot of respect for many reasons that can remain unsaid.  Many topics, like the one today, need to be talked about by an administration and political structure suddenly in a position to do something about some of these terrible things or dramatic considerations.  That is certainly the case with COVID-19, what I consider the most significant menace ever to be injected into mass society, and the people who did it, by the many thousands, need to be punished.  Of course, chaos is being dispelled to hide what these evil people did, but if you read the Coronavirus Pandemic report from the Select Subcommittee After Action Review on the COVID-19 PANDEMIC: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward report published in December of 2024 clearly what we experienced was an artificially created bioweapon that was unleashed by globalist forces hostile to the first Trump administration to impose mass casualties on the human race to prevent a massive political change that had been occurring at the time and is now returning out of the sheer will of the people to make it so.  It was an attack on America every bit as vicious as Pearl Harbor was.  It was a military attack that impacted every single person on planet Earth, and people have to be punished for it.  Much of what I said about COVID is not how Congressman Brad Wenstrup, who was chairman for the report, said it.

Brad is a good Ohio congressman and hardly a crazy conspiracy theorist, so the revelations in that report are alarming.  The evidence points to COVID-19 being an artificial virus that leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, and the Chinese people knew all about it.  I know where all this is going.  I have read many, many, many books now that there is plenty of after-action reporting, specifically from Robert F. Kennedy, and I know the details, many of which were confirmed by Wenstrup’s report to Congress as politically correct as they could have possibly have made the greatest crime of this century or any for that matter, be.  The only answer for me on all this would have been for Kennedy to be a part of the incoming Trump administration and to be able to do something about all this.  And that is going to happen and I couldn’t be happier about it.  However, the fact remains that Congress and the Senate have to face the facts of what happened and who did what.  We must admit that Covid was not public health crisis management.  It was purposeful terrorism by unhealthy people who can never be allowed to pull on the government’s levers of power again.  And we must caution ourselves always into the future how much faith we put in static-generated experts who appear to be our friends, the way that Dr. Fauci suckered the world at the time, and who are globalist terrorists inflicting as much damage as possible to drive a personal ideology of politics that is a danger to mass society. 

These are people who lied to the President of the United States with such disrespect that they essentially spit in all our faces as Trump was our representative in the White House, and they went into his office and told him to shut down the economy or else.  There would be millions of deaths because of Covid, and they would be all his fault.  That was what Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci told Trump in January of 2020, an election year.  And Trump got suckered into playing the COVID game of global domination.  And the white-coat terrorists worked on a plan that was obvious to them at the beginning.  I know it very personally because in Ohio, we had Amy Acton, the Health Director for the DeWine administration, and I knew the people fighting on that front.  And Amy Acton was a crazy leftist who was out of her mind.  When she was telling Ohio to shut down all our businesses and to yield to the virus and was citing Joseph Campbell’s books as the crisis management tool in dealing with a global pandemic, I knew we were dealing with phony boloney.  There aren’t too many people in the world who have read as much from Joseph Campbell as I have, so I know how Amy Acton was taking that author way out of context to drive a social and political narrative rooted in massive Marxism and was far more an act of war than healthcare policy.  I was one of the few people to question it at the time.  Governor DeWine was surely suckered into COVID-19, but then again, so was Trump, for a few months anyway.  They eventually figured out what was happening and acted to reverse the trend.  This extends into this re-elected administration and puts Kennedy in charge of the fix in the future. 

So before anybody feels sorry for the big pharma companies that will be put through the paces, some probably won’t survive; remember what they did.  Once Trump returns to office and does a lot of what must be done, read the report from Brad and many others and get familiar with the facts of the matter.  I have said the politically incorrect aspects of it to help everyone get where they need to be on this issue.  Let’s just cut to the chase if you don’t want to read all the research for yourself.  However, Kennedy wrote the two best books on the case against the criminals of COVID-19.  Or published by the Children’s Health Defense, specifically the early work by Judy Mikovits, which all turned out to be spot on, even in those first few scary months of 2020 where stupidly, the world shut down based on the advice of terrorists like Dr. Fauci and a complicit media who put him on top of the world to rule from it and impose global socialism as a direct policy correction to the released effects of the Covid bioweapon.  Because that’s what Covid was, a designed bioweapon meant to inflict mass casualties, and it was attached directly to work at the Department of Defense.  And that weapon was used on us not for national defense but to change our style of government.  It was hostile, purposeful, and highly criminal.  And people have to be punished for it.  I would go as far as to say that capital punishment should be the means in most cases.  It was that brutal, and we have to deal with it for what it was, not lie to ourselves, point to the past, and say it belongs back there.  We must deal with it proactively, or the bad guys will try again.  And the next time, we might not survive.  If they are left alone, you can bet they will do it again because the bad guys will not like the changes coming with this new Trump administration.  If we don’t want to see a repeat of Covid over the coming months and years, we need to attack the attackers before they get another chance because they are indeed planning another one as we speak.  Without question!

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Greatest Sin of All: God does not want low ambition, weak, people, he wants Heaven on Earth and warriors to defend it

The greatest sin of all mankind, I think, is choosing to be a loser and a meek participant in the world around you.  This was a topic of conversation during dinner recently. It was a Christmas gathering of brilliant and religious people. Of course, the topic of Trump came up and why God had picked him out of all people to save the world.  Because what is happening is nothing short of revolutionary, and there is a science to it. If you read the Bible carefully and free yourself of the many human interpretations of it that necessitate worldly politics in convincing people to be sheep and to flock to the shepherds of government for the global control of mass social movements, you’ll see that there is more to our usual thoughts on the matter.  I argue often, and I did at that dinner for a lengthy diatribe about biblical understanding that my take on God is that he wants and despises meek losers who grovel at a sacrificial monument and strive to cover their nakedness.  Of course, that point of view gets a lot of looks and even provokes anger.  Sometimes, a lot of anger.  But that wouldn’t make any of it any less accurate, and I explained why God picked Trump to save the world.  And it had nothing to do with being a good boy who followed the Ten Commandments, went to church every Sunday, and obeyed all the church rules of worship to earthly terrestrial figures.  No, it is because Donald Trump, the current President, and who has been for many years now psychologically dared to be something that few in the history of the world have had the guts to be, and that is to rise to the greatness of Heaven that God always intended for the humans he created.  And because Trump dared to rise above the station of humanity and its meekness, he has been rewarded in many ways and put in place to do all the great things we are now seeing. 

When God asked for Adam in the Garden, he couldn’t find him because his first man hid in the woods to cover his nakedness. God asked him why.  “How do you know you’re naked, Adam? Who told you thus?”  After some coaxing, Adam blamed it on Eve, his woman, and revealed that the lowly serpent had tricked them into eating from the knowledge of good and evil.  And that they were no longer qualified to reside in the Heavenly garden, and the cherubim cast them out and prevented them from returning.  The same cherubim  atop the Ark of the Covenant kept ordinary people from gazing into it to read the Ten Commandments for themselves.  The use of fear to keep ordinary people from seeing reality is a common theme in the Bible, and it’s not for God as if the rules were intended to be followed, but that they were designed to provoke in humanity a lofty disposition toward the preservation of Heaven on Earth as God created it.  These problems would arise again throughout the Bible but would most culminate in what I consider to be the two biggest sins noted in the Bible: the failures of King David and his son, King Solomon.  Even after all that God did to forgive them and prop them up with riches and power on earth, they both fell short because of their insecurity with women and did not live up to the lofty goals God intended for them.  Israel would never rise again to its former glory because God punished his chosen people for their meekness, the greatest sin that there is.

In King David’s condition, it was when he plotted to kill the husband of a woman he was watching bath, and he wanted her for herself, Bathsheba.  David had many wives and could have had any woman he wanted.  But he wanted this one who was married to a military man whom David had control over.  So David plotted his death to marry the woman, and all kinds of problems arose because of this scheme.  God wasn’t happy and decided that David wasn’t qualified to build a temple on earth to represent Heaven’s presence, so he left it to David’s son, Solomon.  King Solomon had wisdom, women, and wealth; God put it all at his feet.  But Solomon found maintaining all his wives difficult, and he built temples for their crazy gods, too.  And it upset God, Yahweh, so much so that God told Solomon that his kingdom would end with his death and be split in two by his sons.  And that Israel would never recover, which it never has.  But the sin was not so much in following God’s instructions, just as Moses had to be pushed into doing his great deed of freeing the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt only to stagger in front of the giants of Canaan because they doubted that God would give them a victory over such a terrible foe.  So they were punished with 40 years in the wilderness for doubting in themselves that God would grant them protection.  For that doubt, they were punished.  So, we see the trend in the Bible that God expects his chosen people to rise above and push forward and not fail to meekness. 

When Jesus said upon the cross, “My god, my God, why have you forsaken me,” many interpret that as the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy.  But it’s just another abandonment of God of those he put his hand on who fell short in life and did not rise to the occasion and stand against the tide of evil.  It was the meek who interpreted the act as a sacrifice to wash away the sins of humanity, when in truth, God was always God, and he wanted to defeat his foes in the world who were trying to destroy his concepts of Heaven on Earth and that humans would be his direct representatives in this dimensional reality.  And yes, of course, I get a lot of nasty looks when I say this, and I certainly did at that dinner.  That kind of talk rocks the foundation of everything people want to believe about their relationship with God.  But with Trump, he didn’t back down and surrender his ego to meekness.  And no matter how much the world persecuted him, he kept fighting and never surrendered himself to the naked truth of existence.  Trump didn’t hide behind a tree.  It might have taken him three wives to figure it out, but he learned not to look out the window and plot the death of other women’s husbands.  There are better things to do.  And he didn’t let a woman distract him from the pursuit of building Heaven on Earth.  Through his companies, Trump has tried to develop his idea of Heaven in all his buildings and golf courses with an elevated sense of human accomplishment.  And when an assassin’s bullet missed as it did in July of 2024, God spared Trump by the literal grace of God.  When Trump was put before his version of Pontius Pilate, he didn’t say, “You have said so, that I am the son of God, the Messiah.”  Instead, Trump said, “Yeah, so what of it? I’m your president, and I’m coming for you next.”  And finally, God had someone who wouldn’t hide his nakedness in the Garden.  And wouldn’t blame women for his shortcomings.  And he endeavored to elevate himself above the standard, meek and weak, and to lead others to their lofty exploits.  And to the way I look at things, God was finally happy with someone who dared to trust that God had his back and would behave with divine understanding.  And would not hesitate to attack the Land of Canaan, filled with ancient giants that far outnumbered them.  Trump gets it, and God is happy about it.  And that happiness we are all feeling after this 2024 election.  That’s what I said anyway, and all my dinner guests got up and left and refused to speak to me for the heresy.  But deep down inside, they all know I’m right.  So I paid the check and went back to my books.  Truth isn’t what we want it to be; it is what it is.  In this case, it requires audaciousness, which God wants, to be seen.  Based on a straightforward reading of the biblical text, the greatest sin in the world is in striving to be a loser when God tried to inspire humans to greatness, to be representatives of Heaven on Earth.  And it takes a lot of courage to do so.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Why Trump Won: Brand building is the key to establishing and maintaining relationships

So many important lessons can be learned from the Trump election of 2024.  But, the reason Trump won has yet to be talked about much.  The assumption is that Elon Musk came in at the last minute, after the assassination attempt in July, and put many millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign as the world’s richest man.  But to assume that, you would have to believe that money wins elections and that those who raise the most money and spend it will win the election.  Of course, the media, which sells ads and makes its money off politics during elections, wants everyone to think that.  But it wasn’t true.  Kamala Harris spent on her 2024 campaign 1.5 billion dollars and ended up, at the end of it, millions of dollars in debt.  She spent more than she had, which was a lot.  Who in their right mind gave her money who had that kind of money?  I could have told them they were wasting their time.  Wait, come to think of it, I did tell them.  But they didn’t listen.  Reports say that Trump spent much less than that, hovering around the 1 billion dollar mark, which is what many think it takes to run for president these days, but I’m not even sure that is the case.  But the bottom line is that Kamala spent a lot of money and didn’t move the needle in any kind of positive direction.  So why?  That’s the most critical question.  If Trump and Kamala spent even more money, why did the money spent work more for one, not the other?  So you can’t say that Elon Musk bought Trump the election, that would not be accurate. Instead, something much more important happened, and Trump did a masterful job at it, as we would all expect. 

A person’s brand is one of the most essential attributes of their personality; it’s how people come to know you and what they think of you when you aren’t around them anymore.  In everything you do in life, you must build your brand and use it to gain cooperation from your peers.  I have a very strong brand presence on many fronts.  For instance, I was having a fancy dinner with many people with strong opinions about my brand.  We were all ordering dessert, and the people with us at this dinner were from all over the world.  So I ordered a cake with many special effects to demonstrate how extraordinary the desserts were at this dinner and encourage our guests to be a little daring.  After all, I figured my brand was so good that I could handle a little wildness.  So I ordered a special cake, which came out with dry ice spewing everywhere. A tree made of cotton candy came out on top of it.  Those combinations of things made my dinner guests laugh because of the contrasts.  They were not very “manly” things to do and seemed like something they would never expect coming from me.  But that’s also why the Trump Dance works for Trump at rallies; it contrasts his tough guy image.  That image is his brand, and it’s how people learn the nature of the values of the advocate.  Without a brand image to maintain, my ordering the cake and the reaction to it would have just been about food.  But I made it into something else to advance why we were having the dinner together in the first place, as a team-building event that people would not soon forget. 

Trump has been one of the best in the world at building and applying brands.  His family name, Trump, is recognized worldwide and establishes quality and luxury for those who see it.  Trump built the brand over a long period and, about ten years ago, decided to use it to put America on its back and to Make America Great Again.  When people saw the Trump Brand anywhere in the 80s and 90s, they think of wealth and luxury, which is a way for Trump to take The Power of Positive Thinking and apply it to wealth generation.  So when Trump decided to run for office in 2015, he just brought his brand with him and beat Hillary Clinton based on the strength of his brand, as he spent a fraction of the money most campaigns would to win such a high office.  When he disrupted the system and everyone in the world came after him, Trump used his brand to rise above the critics in a way only his extensive, positive brand would have allowed.  Like my story about the cake, if you have a strong brand, you can provoke much action that either supports or contrasts it.  For my dinner guests, expecting an uncompromising gunslinger to shoot anybody who does injustice is a sharp contrast to sitting there eating a chocolate cake with pink cotton candy all over the top.  Showing such a moment of comparison within my brand earns trust because it contrasts my customary behavior.  But without the brand, there wouldn’t be any opinions or jokes to evolve a dialogue of trust that was needed for such a moment.  On a much larger scale, Trump used his brand to carry the lofty goal of Making America Great Again into a value system people felt they could invest in.  And they did.

One of my favorite campaign items from the 2024 election is a Trump 2024 switchblade.  I obtained it under unusual conditions, and it was undoubtedly one of the best souvenirs of Trump I had ever seen during the election.  Trump’s name was on everything, from knives to hats to shirts, flags, glasses, anything and everything.  And that was because Trump had built a brand that gave value to obtaining those items.  That Trump knife would be just another knife if it didn’t have Trump 2024 written on it.  On the other hand, Kamala spent a lot more money trying to create an impression, but her brand didn’t have roots in which people could invest.  So, as she tried to make an impression on voters, she did not have a brand that people could understand and invest in.  Nobody was rushing out to buy a Harris hat or shirt.  But people were flocking to buy a Trump hat.  They couldn’t make enough of them.  And in the end, that is what ended up mattering most.  Even though Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the MAGA movement and Trump himself, it was Trump who built a brand worth investing in.  Without the brand, the money was tossed to the wind like drunk gamblers in a casino late at night. The brand allows people to invest in the person who built it, for better or worse.  But once you have the brand, you can use it to sell ideas to people who have enough rooting to grab on and take action.  And the Democrats, they didn’t do any of that.  They tried to create impressions but had no substance behind their brand to sell an idea.  That caused them to toss much money at the effort only to have it wasted because there was no brand worth investing in.  So the ideas that Democrats had couldn’t be sold to a public so empty that they’d buy any impression.  When it came to Trump, people bought into a brand he had built for over 4 decades, and he put it all at risk to become president.  And as a result, the brand outlasted the attempts to destroy it.  Now, with that brand value, America can do as Trump’s brand indicates: to Make America Great Again.  When people see that term, they think of quality, wealth, and tenacity.  And the nation can rally to the cause because a brand can sell the idea and sustain the results.  Rather than just creating more false impressions that people have become long weary of.  And this will be the case for politics over the coming century.  It’s not enough to spend money. Instead, the money has to have a brand that people want to invest in and make it their own. 

Rich Hoffman

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