The first thing I noticed when I walked into the Trump rally in Nashville last night (5/29) was that Trace Adkins was singing. Not bad! (Hey, it’s Nashville.)

The second thing I noticed was that Jim Acosta wasn’t smiling, virtually the only person in the auditorium who wasn’t. If you don’t like Adkins, either you don’t like music or your Trump Derangement Syndrome is so great you couldn’t even groove to Bach or The Beatles in their heydays. Too bad for Jim.

Which leads me to another Nashville moment. Being here in Music City, isn’t it high time for the right to take back the arts, or at least some decent part of them?

Why is it CBS, NBC, and ABC are all slavish soldiers of the moribund and increasingly boring Left? (Can you watch “Good Morning America” without feeling you are having your brains drilled?)

But enough diversion. Trump’s on.  Time to enjoy the show.

The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.  And not because Trump wrecked it.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

Historic forces have made post-war thinking obsolete and thereby left many reactionary “experts” wedded to the past and in denial about the often-dangerous reality before their eyes.  This is true everywhere you look – from Turkey to Russia to China to the European Union, not to mention North Korea and Iran.

The “experts” deny the reality while America’s president sees it clearly – which is why they hate and fear him so much.

Italy’s pro-euro elites have overreached disastrously. President Sergio Mattarella has asserted the extraordinary precedent that no political movement or constellation of parties can ever take power if they challenge the orthodoxy of monetary union.

He has inadvertently framed events as a battle between the Italian people and an eternal ‘casta’ with foreign loyalties, playing straight into the hands of the insurgent Five Star ‘Grillini’ and anti-euro Lega nationalists. He unwisely invoked the specter of financial markets to justify his veto of euroskepticism.

Taken together, his actions have made matters infinitely worse.  First the background, then what’s happening right now.  Italy has had 65 governments since WWII, so political chaos is almost the norm – but this is bizarre even by Italian standards.

Yet this crisis has been wholly manufactured by Berlin, Brussels, and the EU power structure.  They may have made a mortal blunder.

The “Deep State” is in a deep state of desperation.

It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

Here’s how that is backfiring.

On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference.  Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.

Russia responded by calling the actions “Cold War déjà vu.”

In the two years that have elapsed since, it has been learned that the “intelligence” that formed the basis for the sanctions was beyond dubious.

As a dog that chases its tail, the fake “intelligence” was being used to cause the investigation which itself lent credibility to the notion of Russian interference.

James Comey’s FBI and John Brennan’s CIA thumbed the eye of an armed nuclear state based on false intelligence.  Why?

Many liberals and critics are under the mistaken belief that President Trump is violating the rule of law and civil liberties by criticizing the Robert Mueller investigation and by ordering the Justice Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not the FBI spied on his 2016 presidential campaign.

In fact, the president is behaving totally lawfully, and it is Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who are acting unconstitutionally and who are violating Trump’s civil liberties.

As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week (5/13), Robert Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional under Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion in Morrison v. Olson. In this investigation, Mueller is acting like a U.S. attorney, who is a principal officer and who must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The unconstitutionality of Mueller’s appointment renders everything he has done since May 17, 2017, unconstitutional as well.

[Note by JW – When even Karl Rove denounces Trump Derangement Syndrome, of which he was once afflicted, you know the Trump Takeover of the GOP is nearing completion.]

State Rep. Stacey Abrams’s victory in Tuesday’s (5/22) Georgia Democrat primary is historic: She’s the first black woman to win a major party’s nomination for governor in any state.

But it’s also an example of the gamble Democrats are taking this midterm season.

Unlike most Democrat candidates for statewide office in the South, Ms. Abrams shows little interest in appealing to independents or disaffected Republicans. She blames the Georgia Democrats’ poor showing in 2014 on efforts to appeal to what she calls the “very middle of the road.”

Is support from the Democrats’ “Resistance” base enough to carry her to the governor’s mansion?  In a state that has a GOP Governor, both Senators, 10 out of 14 Members of Congress, and which Trump won by 211,000 votes in 2016?

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech Monday (5/21) at the Heritage Foundation marked a pivotal moment in U.S. foreign policy.

Pompeo made several important arguments in the course of his half hour address, in which he set out President Donald Trump’s policy regarding Iran in the wake of his May 8 announcement that he is abandoning Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The key line in his speech was, inarguably, “As President Trump said two weeks ago, he is ready, willing and able to negotiate a new deal [with Iran]. But the deal is not the objective. Our goal is to protect the American people.”

The basic insight that there is no intrinsic value to any agreement – or foreign policy initiative of any sort – that does not advance the interests of the United States or protect the American people is striking, because it has been absent from American foreign policy in relation to rogue regimes and entities for better part of the last generation.

Welcome to the Trump Doctrine.  It is brilliant in its simplicity and straightforwardness.

From its start, the Trump administration has been plagued by charges of “chaos.”

From the revolving door of senior staffers — including two secretaries of state, three national security advisers and two chiefs of staff — to the president’s brash and sometimes boorish personal style, to his politically incorrect taunt-tweeting, Donald Trump has refused to conform to his political opponents’ conventional notions of what constitutes an effective White House operation.

Yet, because Trump is such a Black Swan, his has been the most effective administration since FDR’s first term.

And it’s being accomplished in the teeth of the so-called “Resistance,” which includes the overt hostility of nearly all the mainstream media, the embedded civil service, the Democrats, the never-Trump Republicans, rogue elements of the intelligence and investigative agencies, and Robert Mueller’s witch hunt regarding charges of “collusion” with the Russians.

If you want to understand why Donald Trump is President today (and why he could very well win a second term), look to the Democrats' hysterical response to two of Trump's major foreign policy achievements over the past week.

Last Thursday (5/10), the President traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet three American hostages whose release he had secured from North Korea. Unlike his predecessor, Trump did it without sending the offending regime an unmarked plane loaded with hundreds of millions in hard currency.

The return of these American captives should have been a moment of celebration and bipartisan unity. So how did Democrats respond? By blasting Trump for the way he welcomed the U.S. hostages home.

Seriously? How do Democrats take a positive event such as the release of American hostages and turn it into an excuse to attack Trump?  Are they so deranged with hate they can’t see their behavior helps Trump, not hurts him?