April 29, 2023

While still early, this primary season is already turning out to be unlike any other.  It is not uncommon to see both parties experience a competitive primary with numerous candidates, however, that usually only occurs when the sitting president is concluding his second term in office, making him ineligible for another election.  Yet Biden already has two declared challengers seeking the Democrat nomination.  On the Republican side, President Trump is seeking to become only the second president in U.S. history to win a non-consecutive term.  Because of that, there are essentially two candidates in the race that, to some extent, hold an incumbency advantage.

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As always, candidates will attempt to separate themselves from the pack by informing the electorate about the greatest threats facing America, while also trying to convince voters that they have better solutions than their opponents.  However, the greatest present threat facing America is unlike any other in history: itself.

While this is an inconvenient truth, America was warned about this long before any of us were born when our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, stated: 

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

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If America is to be fundamentally destroyed, it will come from the people within, as opposed to enemies abroad.  Furthermore, Lincoln suggests that we must actively work together and remain united and strong as a nation to prevent our demise, or else it will surely happen.  This unfortunately sounds like a strikingly realistic possibility at this current time.

So yes, the greatest threat to the United States of America right now truly is those within government implementing the destruction we have witnessed for two-plus years, both at home and abroad.

To understand this, one must compare previous eras in our history to the current one.

From the time Donald Trump announced his candidacy all the way through his first term in the oval office, career politicians and media worked in lockstep, parroting the same talking points.  They repeatedly warned that Trump was a threat to American democracy, a maniac who was going to get us into nuclear war, provoke Kim Jong Un, embolden Putin, wreck our economy and become a tyrant.  Everybody would agree that if those things were to occur, whoever presided over such destruction would undeniably be the greatest threat to a nation, and that includes foreign threats.  Those things did not occur under Trump, but interestingly enough, many of the people warning about the dangers of Trump are now in power, and as a result, their warnings are coming to fruition under their own tenure.

In 2019, Kim Jong Un welcomed a sitting U.S. president onto North Korean soil for the first time in history. Kim agreed to work towards complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.  Fast forward to the present day and Kim has begun to increase North Korean nuclear capabilities, just a few short years removed from a promising period of peace.  The key change between then and now?  American leadership.

Putin has been emboldened, but by whom?  Prior to this administration, Americans constantly heard about the Russian president.  However, much of that coverage concerned the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative, as opposed to issues of substance.  In fact, as the collusion story dominated the news, the U.S. was hitting Putin hard by upholding previously imposed sanctions and placing additional ones that prevented U.S. banks from making loans or issuing credits to the Russian government after their role in a near-fatal poisoning was revealed. But recently, likely after seeing American weakness on full display abroad, Putin resumed expansion efforts by invading Ukraine after a rare hiatus from 2017-2021.  The key change between then and now? American leadership.