(Conservative Playbook)—Social media is buzzing from a report by CBS News that Donald Trump is asking allies about Nikki Haley as a possible running mate. My initial reaction was outrage over the notion that he would even consider it. Then, I took a breath and realized it may not be true.
IF it is true, the Trump learned nothing about engaging with the UniParty Swamp during his first term. That experience with establishment Republicans like Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and at least a dozen other high-profile members of his administration should have been enough for him decide only like-minded America First patriots need to be on his list.
Thankfully, I don’t believe it is true for multiple reasons. And while I know that a simple inquiry by his staffers means nothing, it’s still worth watching. There’s no reason to react negatively to a corporate media report based on anonymous sources.
Here are three reasons it’s a best practice to question the validity of the rumor:
She Is Nikki “Birdbrain” Haley
Trump has been known to make up with political enemies in the past. He went after Ted Cruz with some of the most brutal attacks imaginable in 2016. Months after the convention the two were practically buddies and Cruz’s name was on a couple of Trump’s lists as possible Supreme Court Justice nominees.
With that said, Trump never seriously considered Cruz or any of his primary opponents as running mates. Even though Pence had endorsed Cruz as Governor of Indiana, his “endorsement” was seen as lukewarm and included multiple compliments about Trump. Some speculate that it actually helped Trump more than Cruz. That almost certainly helped land him the VP nod.
Trump has gone after Haley pretty hard. He hasn’t unleashed the same level of fury that he used in 2016 against Cruz, but giving her the nickname of “Birdbrain” is very personal. Haley has been extremely critical of Trump as well and if she’s on the ticket, then Democrats will quote her heavily in ads. These circumstances don’t leave a whole lot of room for a unified ticket in the general election.
It’s CBS News
There’s fake news, and there’s there’s CBS Ultra-Fake News. There are other major outlets that are more biased than CBS, but no other outlet has been as inaccurate in recent years. They’re the Rolling Stone of network television. CBS News has built a reputation of reporting rumors that don’t pan out and this may be one of those instances.
Until we hear it from a credible source close to Trump himself, the rumor should be treated like a life experience retold by Brian Williams.
Nobody Actually Likes Haley, Polls Be Damned
Polls aren’t just wrong. They’re manipulated. They’re used to drive a narrative and push whatever agenda the powers-that-be want at any given moment. That’s not to say all poll results are manufactured, but every poll should be questioned.
For example, there’s a poll that shows Haley down by 4-points in New Hampshire. That’s so ludicrous I won’t even link to it nor will I ever mention that clearly corrupted source again in my writing. The closest she MAY be in New Hampshire is 20-points down, and I suspect it’s worse than that.
Ask yourself if you know anyone in the real world that supports Nikki Haley. I don’t, and I interact with dozens of Republican voters daily. Haley supporters are ghosts. They’re rumors. They’re figments of the UniParty Swamp’s imagination.
I've never encountered a Haley supporter, online or otherwise.
Are they all in New Hampshire? https://t.co/x4k4psnRUQ
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) December 23, 2023
Here’s the thing. The only reason Trump would even entertain the idea of having Haley on the ticket is to get support from the globalist powerbrokers like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Boeing. If that’s the case, then Trump isn’t the guy I thought he was.
Sound off about this article on my Substack.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
