(The Daily Signal)—Though it’s been just a month since his return to the White House, President Donald Trump is making his presence felt at home and abroad, from the Department of Government Efficiency to tariffs to setting the stage to negotiate the end of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Republican Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Eric Burlison of Missouri, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Andy Harris of Maryland, and others experienced just how Trump is shaking things up across Europe as they attended the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London this week.
The Daily Signal accompanied them as they engaged with European leaders and citizens.
“What’s loud and clear to me is that Europeans aren’t happy,” Norman said. “The people aren’t happy; the leaders are.”
“It’s like the United States: The people were not happy with Joe Biden and his policies. In England, the people are not happy with what’s going on with their leaders, with regulations, the price of living, and they’re willing to do something about it.”
Last week, Vice President JD Vance delivered remarks at an AI summit in Paris and the Munich Security conference in Germany. Vance took European nations to task for their regulatory environment on matters ranging from energy to speech to artificial intelligence, and he reasserted America’s national interests in U.S. foreign policy.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright had his turn to address a European crowd when he virtually joined the ARC conference and lambasted Europe’s energy policies. “Energy realism is critical if you want to have humanism,” he said, specifically addressing Vance’s critique of European energy policy.
Wright said what’s happening in Europe now is “lunacy.”
“This is impoverishing citizens for the delusion that this is somehow going to make the world a better place,” he said.
Harris told The Daily Signal he was “not surprised at what happened at the Munich Security Conference.”
“I mean, that’s the deep state of Europe,” he said.
“The bottom line is there are people who don’t believe that Western civilization is something to be prized, treasured, and developed,” Harris said.
“We have nothing to apologize for. We have the strongest economy. We have the strongest military. We’ve preserved freedom a couple of times in Europe, and we’re not going to stop doing that,” the Maryland lawmaker continued. In Europe, the Trump administration is making “a call for Western civilization to bring back the ideals of Western civilization and the success of Western civilization.”
“I think that was brought out at the conference,” Harris said, “and that’s the message that Donald Trump brings—the end of wokeism, economic security, low energy prices, and a nationalistic pride that precedes economic success.”
“Donald Trump is going to, once again, make the United States the leader of the free world,” he said.
“In general, I think that it’s reminding Europe that it’s time to get serious again,” Burlison told The Daily Signal. “We need to get serious about our manufacturing. We need to get serious about energy production, and we need to get serious about the threats to national security.”
Though many European elites in government have responded in dismay to the Trump administration’s message to Europe, the people the members of Congress met in London feel differently.
Hageman told The Daily Signal that Vance and Wright took “absolutely the right tack” in engaging with European nations over the past week.
“Energy security is national security,” the Wyoming congresswoman continued, “What you’re seeing of these European countries, and what the U.N. is demanding, is that we all live under energy poverty, and none of us believe in that. We believe in prosperity. I think that that’s exactly the message that Donald Trump and JD Vance are sending, and I think it’s what the European people want.”
“The government and the leadership in Europe for so long has been focusing on ‘net zero’ and carbon and global warming, and all of this nonsense,” Hageman said. “It’s costing their citizenry dearly, and they’re tired of it.”
For Hageman, the new sheriff in town is not only Trump, “the new sheriff in town is common sense, and getting back to what governments are supposed to be.”
“The ones that I’ve spoken with are happy that Trump is rolling back regulations and calling Europe out for not [doing so],” said Norman.
DOGE has been a buzzworthy topic in London as well. “With DOGE, Trump and [DOGE chief Elon] Musk are more than investigators. What have they done? They’ve just exposed where the money went.” Europeans are now starting to desire a thorough accounting of where their money has gone, Norman said.
“We can’t continue [on] the same path that’s put us in debt,” Norman said of the reckless spending. “And I think many Europeans feel the same way. They wanted to take the same path Donald Trump is taking, and go a different way.”
“We’ve wasted a lot of time and a lot of money on foolish things,” Burlison said of the West. “America, sadly, has led in some of these foolish wastes, like studying [critical race theory] and this woke ideology and climate. But I think that, given the problems that we’re facing today, Trump is kind of a wake-up call, and it’s kind of the sobering message that Europe and America really needed to hear.”
With tariffs and charting a new path for foreign policy, “Trump is sending a message: Europe has got to defend itself,” Norman said. “Their percentage [of gross domestic product] that they spend is minuscule [compare with] what we spend, and we got a bigger GDP. He’s putting the pressure on them. They’re going to have to make the decision about how to keep their countries safe, and I think it’s long time in coming.”
“You can tell, at least at this point, that they’re taking that seriously and kind of walking through what that would mean,” Burlison said of Trump’s policies. “So, I hope that England and the European countries that have been relying on America for so long recognize that America is taking things seriously, but we also need Europe to do so as well.”
Because of her interactions in London, Hageman thinks Britons are “coming around to the Trumpian point of view,” because European leaders are not changing a failed course.
“Instead of changing course, instead of fixing this mess they created, “ the Wyoming lawmaker said, European leaders “are telling all of you to shut up. That’s what’s happening in Europe, and that’s what JD Vance was calling out.”
Almost more than on any other issue, European leaders “made bad policy decisions on migration.”
“It has caused severe issues and problems within these communities throughout their countries, and their response isn’t to say we need to fix this. Their response is to say we’re going to make it illegal for you to point it out,” Hageman said. “I think that it is absolutely fair for JD Vance and all of us to stand up for our brethren, to stand up for our brothers and sisters in Europe and say we’re not going to allow you tyrants to get away with that.”
Whether at home or abroad, she said, “We’re going to stand up for the citizens, and we’re going to fight to make sure that they have a voice.”
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.
