A brilliant entreaty @Smokin Joe , as always. 
My thought turns to Theodin, the King of Rohan in Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'...
When we first meet Theodin, he is a husk of his former self - Despite having been a beloved and honored regent in his past...
My interest is not in his 'present' state, but rather, how he came to be that way.
The Republican rank and file could learn much from that tale, I think.
Sooner or later, you're gonna have to draw a hard line. I drew mine in 2007.
And I am a Republican no more.
Thank you for your kind words, but I'm not a Republican, either.
I quit donating to them back when Daddy Bush was in office. Why? Well, I wrote a little white paper on he impact of the oil bust here. Increased divorce rate, unemployment, increased welfare/medicaid costs, repossessions, foreclosures, crashing housing market, all things which I have since come to see as sadly normal in a boom/bust market.
I explained my positions and advocated a tariff to normalize the price of imported oil at $20/bbl, which tariff would drop out as the price went above $20. No, not
laissez faire, but a possible source of revenue for a government going into debt, and a way to develop our own resources as a hedge against another embargo, as a matter of National Security.
Of course, steady employment in the patch was a nice idea, too (full disclosure, that), but that would keep a larger active supply of career hands out there up to date on the latest developments in case it became a situation where we had to provide for ourselves without imports.
Now, that may have been a little wrongheaded, but it made sense at the time. After all, tariffs are a Constitutional means of getting revenue.
After about a month I got a letter back thanking me for my opinions and concerns and stating that the Administration was working hard on
farm policy. Farm Policy? All they read was the zip code.
At the time all our Congressional delegation was Democrat. They got the same paper, I got similar or no responses. I had researched everything, and cited my sources (it wasn't just a 20 page rant), and frankly, that pissed me off. I never donated to the Democrats anyway, but that ensured the Republicans didn't get any money either.
That leaves me voting on issues, either for policies that abide by the Constitution, or against those which definitely do not. While the Republicans usually come closer to the mark than Democrats, neither is running on Original Intent, just one is ordinarily a little closer, at least in stated policy.
As time has proven, there is often a wide gulf between what's said on the stump and what they actually do, and
Beltway Fever has been known to set in even before they get sworn in. That happened to the TEA party effort, with about half of those elected paying lip service to the Conservative ideas they espoused apparently forgetting all about that in a matter of weeks or days, and some were likely outright frauds in that sense, just trying to suck in a voting block.
That demonstrated the danger of seeking a saviour, of wanting to believe, when track records don't flange up with verbiage.
Trump's fiscal inflection point came from COVID, from listening to the 'experts', and trying to mitigate the effects of mitigating an unnecessarily deadly disease in the face of lies by those who were held in high regard in their fields. Unfortunately good intent doesn't count for much; the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I'd wager Fauci wasn't far off from the sort of pre-med students who would steal and burn other students' notes just so they did better. It's that dog-eat-dog among the least scrupulous in the field, and we got to see that wholesale, on a global scale.
Yep, speaking of dogs, he screwed the pooch on that, but who knew? There was tremendous misinformation out there, unfortunately anything to the contrary was likely filtered out by the people who wrote the briefings and the "experts" whom it appears had fiscal incentives of their own. And there was active censorship on many platforms, and creative editing on others which was designed to make anyone who didn't buy the Narrative look like a kook or worse.
A bunch of well educated, often correct, and very competent people were and continue to be smeared because of that, even as they are being proven right, time and again.
While track records provide the data by which you can extrapolate a likely future, I listened to Trump's talk with Elon Musk, and it sounds like the lesson has been learned about fiscal responsibility.
They talked of (and Elon volunteered to help) finding ways to get more for the procurement buck than has been in the past. Put jobs up on bids, cut the expenses without cutting quality, don't build for the last war, but the next. Interesting. National Defense need not look like the next iteration of i-phone, with yet another more expensive model waiting in the wings. At least move in bigger increments, have that much vision, and save it for our enemies, not our citizens--and tighten up the security around it. It's hard to have an advantage when for a few million here and there, our adversaries get our research results for pennies on the dollar.
Taking a more businesslike approach to that end of things will meet with resistance (lots of unnecessary fingers in that pie), but it needs to be done.
On fiscal responsibility we agree. It's gonna be a tough row to hoe, and there are an awful lot of weeds sucking the sustenance from the crops.
There are a couple of ways to rein in spending.
One is to just not do the stuff that the Government was not tasked with by the Constitution. That will be a fight, because somewhere between 50-90% of the Administrative State would disappear overnight, with all the lobbyists and lackeys and baksheesh.
Armageddon on the Potomac.
Housing values in the surrounding communities (D.C., NOVA, and surrounding counties of MD) would crash, and there would be an exodus unlike any since Pharoah was in hot pursuit. Maybe they could find jobs at the State level, but I'd wager most States would pick and choose whether those jobs were needed at all, especially since the a lot of 'need' was imposed by the Feds anyway.
It would be a great step toward returning to original intent and the de-homogenization of government. Back to 50 test beds for ideas, back to what works best for those who would decide if it was even needed, power returned to the States and the People.
On a National level, if we really need a 'black ops' R&D budget for our military, then deal with that separately and quit skimming everything else--and shrink the pool for kickbacks and bribes. If the people who have all those six figure jobs in DC and environs can't make it on that, maybe they should try working in industry (what's left of it , anyway, after all the asinine regulations they cook up).
That sounds like shrinking government, especially after all the lawfare and misapplication of resources Trump has experienced since he stepped into the government space, as a candidate and elected official. We'll see, if we're lucky (sad to put it that way), if not, we might not see the dollar maintain reserve currency status by the end of another eight years of 'fundamental transformation'.
The other way is to negotiate over prices, get competition back into the government procurement process, and expand the supplier market for things really necessary to reduce costs without reducing quality. We have to do it in our daily lives. Industry does it. The government should be no different, and, if anything, should be able to get better deals than we do because they're a volume buyer. (Suppliers make money on volume or margin in industry, but only rarely both. If you're doing volume there is a lot of meat on the bone without upping the price beyond the private sector.)
Frankly, I am a fan of both approaches.
And let DEI die. If people are supposed to be hired, loaned money, be admitted to college, whatever,let it be on a basis of merit and do away with all the check boxes on the forms (since all that is supposed to be irrelevant, anyway). Save paper, save money, and get the best people you can. 'Diversity' will follow as diverse people will show cause to be hired (other than check boxes).
As for the 15 minute cities and such, we haven't heard much about that lately. Is that an election move, or is it that the floated idea didn't go over very well? After all, Trump doesn't do well in most cities, it's the more rural minded America that really supports him.
While that 'vision' of America's future may have its problems, and doubtless I have imposed some wishful thinking of my own there, just in explaining what I'd like to see done, I'd definitely prefer even a watered down version of that to living in a political HOA, with block mothers (read that how you want) snitching to the Party if you infract. "Mo-om! He looked at me wrong!" or "He used the wrong pronouns" will be all it takes to send you off to camp and steal your assets.
But that's why, barring some epic stupidity, I will mark a ballot against Kamala and pray for the best. Like I said before, God knows what He is doing. He's got this, and whatever the outcome, in the end it will work out. At least when the time comes I'll be able to say I didn't have much to choose from, but I gave it my best shot. If He uses Trump to further His aims so be it. It wouldn't be the first time he has used an imperfect person to do His will.
