Donald Trump just survived his third assassination attempt (fourth if you count Mar-A-Lago), this time at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night, where a heavily armed gunman tried to breach the room where the president and his cabinet were. A Secret Service agent took a round, saved by his vest, and Trump reportedly “fought like hell” to keep the dinner going before agents cleared the room. The president then walked into the briefing room with the same composure he showed in Butler, Pennsylvania, told reporters it’s a dangerous job, and got back to work.
One might think this would be the moment for the conservative movement to rally. One would be wrong. Some of the loudest voices on the right, the same ones who built their followings off Trump’s coattails, are busy explaining why the man dodging bullets is actually the problem.
Howard Kurtz of Fox News catalogs the troubles in a piece outlining how Trump “survives” the latest barrage of crises. The list is real enough — an unpopular Iran campaign, the Strait of Hormuz blockade, gas prices climbing, a 33 percent approval rating in one AP poll, a Fox News survey showing voters trusting Democrats over Republicans on the economy for the first time in fifteen years, and a redistricting fight that may go sideways. Yet what stands out is not the catalog of problems. It is the chorus of former allies who have decided that now, at the lowest moment of Trump’s second term, is the right time to declare the whole project a mistake.
The Cost of Doing What He Said He’d Do
Look at what is actually generating the heartburn. Trump moved on Iran. Whether one agrees with that decision or not, he made it because the regime in Tehran has spent decades funding terror, chanting death to America, and racing toward a nuclear weapon. The ceasefire fell apart when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a move Trump answered by closing it back. That is not erratic. That is a president refusing to let a state sponsor of terrorism dictate the terms of global commerce.
The Never Trumpers and the disillusioned podcasters insist this proves he is reckless. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times writes that Trump “looks desperate to run for the hills.” Andrew Sullivan calls him “completely out of his depth.” These are the same voices who have spent a decade telling conservatives that Trump was unfit. They are not new converts to wisdom. They are old critics finding a new audience among Republicans willing to listen because the headlines are bad.
What Fair-Weather Friends Always Do
Scripture has a phrase for the people who showed up when the parades were rolling and the polls were good but who vanished the moment the bullets started flying. “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”
Read that twice. A friend loves at all times. A brother is born for adversity. The translation does not say a friend loves when the approval rating is above fifty. It does not say a brother shows up when the Iran campaign polls well. The whole point of the verse is that anyone can cheer when things are easy. The character of a man is revealed by who stands with him when the room clears out.
Some on the right embraced Trump because he promised no new foreign wars. That was a real promise and it deserves accountability. But there is a meaningful difference between holding a president accountable for a policy and abandoning him the moment a hard call gets made. A serious movement wrestles with hard calls. A fair-weather coalition runs for the exits and tells the cameras it never really believed in the first place.
The Hard Calls Are the Whole Job
Easy presidencies do not exist. The men in that office face decisions that no campaign rally can prepare them for. Trump was elected to confront the cartels at the southern border, to break the regulatory state, to stop the bleeding on inflation, and to keep America from being pushed around by hostile powers. Every one of those tasks involves choices that will alienate someone.
Move on the cartels and the open-borders left howls. Cut the bureaucracy and the donor-class right complains about disruption. Confront Iran and the isolationists scream. Defend Israel and the new dissident influencers post videos accusing him of selling out. There is no version of this presidency that keeps everyone happy because the country’s problems are not the kind that can be solved by triangulation.
Yet look at what is actually happening while the commentariat composes its eulogies. The stock market is at record highs even with the Iran ceasefire in tatters. Trump is signing executive orders that move the agenda forward, including a reclassification of marijuana and an expansion of research into psychedelic therapies for veterans. He is taking calls from reporters at all hours. He is building. He is governing. He is, as Kurtz acknowledges, still the man who dominates the news cycle from morning to midnight.
The Democrats Are Not the Alternative
Here is what the apologetic former supporters seem to miss. The choice is not between Trump and some purer conservative president waiting in the wings. The choice on the ground, right now, is between Trump and a Democrat Party that openly rooted against American service members during the Iran campaign, that talks about impeaching the president on day one of a new House majority, and that has spent the last decade telling Christians their values are bigoted and telling parents their children belong to the state.
Hakeem Jeffries is not going to save the republic. The same media that spent years lying about Russia collusion, lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and lying about the cognitive state of the previous occupant of the Oval Office is not suddenly a reliable narrator now that the target is back to being Trump.
What History Says
Trump has been written off after the “Access Hollywood” tape, after January 6, after two impeachments, after four criminal cases, and after previous attempts on his life. Each time, the obituaries were premature. The reason is simple. The American people, when given a clear choice, have repeatedly preferred his fight to his opponents’ contempt.
That does not guarantee a rebound. The midterms are six months away and politics is unpredictable. But anyone declaring this presidency finished is making the same bet that has lost every time it has been placed since 2015.
The Faithful Remain
Conservatives who supported Trump because they believed in a borders-secure, baby-protected, faith-honored, energy-dominant America have no reason to walk away because a few influencers found lucrative audiences in the Never-Trump, anti-Semitic, pro-Islam camps. The agenda has not changed. The threats have not changed. The man taking the bullets, literally, on behalf of that agenda has not changed.
The fair-weather voices will be back when the polls turn. They always are. The question for the rest of the movement is whether to be the kind of friend Scripture describes, the kind that loves at all times and is born for adversity, or the kind that needs a good news cycle before it can find its courage.
Saturday night, a man with a rifle tried to end an American presidency. The Secret Service did its job, an agent took a round so the president would not, and Trump walked back to the podium. That is the man some on the right are now too embarrassed to defend. History will not be kind to that calculation.
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.
