By John Kass

Jan. 22, 2025

No one who watched President Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration could avoid the infectious optimism of his words.

His speech was a rallying cry for the people who’ve been slapped in the mouth, again and again and again by America’s corrupt bi-partisan ruling establishment that detests them:

The Combine.

It cuts down any weeds standing before it. It chops them fine until there’s nothing left.

America and the world needed to hear those words from Mr. Trump in Washington, and our 47^th president delivered.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” Mr. Trump said. “From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

It was short. It was sweet. And, yes, as an American, I loved it. Perhaps you did, as well. Americans wanted secure borders, less crime in the cities, lower gas prices. It’s really not magical. It’s just simple American common sense. That is what America is all about—common sense.

Much of his speech was polite and direct, but there was no mistaking the president’s tone: Surrounded as he was by Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden, he made a clear break from their absolute corrosive administrative failures.

Bush and the neo-con Republicans promoted the endless foreign wars that broke the Middle East, sending refugees streaming into Europe. Obama’s Marxist obsession with race and gender over merit led him to champion the racism of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) that runs counter to the American belief in competence.  And Biden, who sat there with wife Jill, was the senile Democrat meat puppet who had just quietly issued a blanket pardon for his corrupt family members, including his bagman brother James and others who pocketed millions in foreign cash.

Yet in President Trump’s brief address there was none of the seething anger of former adviser Steve Bannon that helped sour the country against Trump when he first took office the last time.

It was a call of hope for those of us who stopped looking to Washington for anything resembling hope.

But it was also a clear repudiation of the bi-partisan Combine that has for decades loathed forgotten Americans, the people that played by the rules and served their nation and their communities with loyalty and honor.

Think of Mitch McConnel making his fortune through China shipping connections. Think of Nancy Pelosi killing the stock market. The Combine Way is the Washington Way, is the Delaware Way. And only suckers beef.

Theirs is not a partisan arrangement. It is the establishment prerogative. It is the Deep State. It hates American freedom and liberty. It hates what it can’t control. It protects its own and they hate us and they hate Trump.

The forgotten are the people who elected Trump twice, making him the 45^th and 47^th president.

“For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,” said President Trump.

Yes.

But he is also correct that the federal government has too often failed Americans in its essential job:

To provide for public safety and protecting the border and providing for basic services.

One of those expectations—as written down in our own sacred Bill of Rights—is our freedom of speech:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Journalists once believed this as a creed. It was a given. It was our secular civic religion at the papers where I worked, especially the last one that capitulated to the power-drunk Jacobin mob and essentially killed itself.

But as we know now, all of that sacred obligation changed once Biden and Obama, and the rest of the Deep State buccaneers used federal power to deny this freedom of speech to the forgotten Americans. It was another of their ways of leveraging fear for political power. Biden used it to suppress the news to protect their power, including legitimate news about his crooked son Hunter that he and other Democrats wanted to snuff out before the 2016 election. And left wing corporate media helped.

As we learned from sworn testimony and evidence in court, the Biden White House also used its leverage to stifle critics on social media. Democrats have cemented themselves in the public mind as enemies of public discussion.

Now though, the cancel culture is in retreat and the people reach out to Trump. That’s common sense too. They feel pain. And they don’t like being mocked by soft-handed men in suits. Somebody might write a song.

What Americans find particularly insufferable is ideological stupidity: like the left’s repeated and obnoxious insistence that there America is not only the land of unicorns and rainbows, it’s also the land of many genders.

Happily, he knocked that one down within minutes with one of his many executive actions designed to return to normalcy.

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said during his inaugural address Monday, taking an early step to fulfill one of his political campaign promises.

Ye gods!!!! Only two genders?

Titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the order says that “sexes that are not changeable, and they are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

Exactly.

The federal government will also shift from using the term “gender” to “sex,” and that sex is “an individual’s immutable biological classification,” Trump administration officials later told reporters.

Naturally, the left lost their minds, mouths frothing on CNN and MSNBC. They’re absolutely crazy. It is stupefying to have to say this, but we’ve all seen Democrats so terrified and confused about gender that Supreme Court Justice Katanji Brown Jackson was unable to answer a simple question about women.

It is amazing, said the writer David Marcus on Fox News. I like his writing. I find him reasonable and clear-thinking

“It truly is,” said the writer David Marcus in an interview on Fox News. “we have a sitting Supreme Court justice who refused to say that very thing on the grounds that she is not a biologist. It was always madness.

“But it’s good that Trump is taking such a strong tack on this, for a very long time I think conservatives thought there were some accommodations that could be made at least as far as adults were concerned, that we could deal with prisons and shelters and still let people pretend to be a gender that they’re not. I think Trump drew a line in the sand there and said no, this is actually make-believe, and the government is not going to play pretend anymore.”

For years before Trump, and recently as Biden the Obama meat puppet was installed in the White House, America’s middle-class was abused, mocked, scourged and jailed. Those days are now gone. Trump will not pretend. He isn’t going to play make-believe as America in Trump’s restoration.

We are a nation that reaches for common sense, as we enter the new Golden Age.

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

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