There were laughter, tears, raucous cheers and awkward silences. But more than anything else, it was a punch in the gut that President Trump delivered Tuesday night.

Time after time, on issue after issue, he laid down a marker about the remaining two years of his term — and the outlines of his re-election campaign.

Speeches that are too long — as this one was — often smother their key points in windy verbiage. But there was no mistaking Trump’s meaning or his intent to seek a second term on the platform of a strong economy, strong defense and secure borders.

The state of the union is frighteningly divided and hostile, but the state of the president’s aim is sound. For all the talk of chaos and churn in his administration, Donald Trump knows what he’s about. As he always has, he’s playing to win.

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Not that President Trump will get any credit.

The news obsesses over the recent government shutdown, the latest Robert Mueller arrest, and, of course, fake news — from the BuzzFeed Michael Cohen non-story to the smears of the Covington Catholic High School students.

But aside from the weekly hysterias, the world has dramatically changed since 2016 in ways we scarcely have appreciated.

The idea that China systematically rigged trade laws and engaged in technological espionage to run up huge deficits is no longer a Trump, or even a partisan, issue.

The world did not fall apart after the U.S. pulled out of the flawed Iran nuclear deal. Most yawned when the U.S. left the symbolic but empty Paris Climate Accord. Ditto when the U.S. moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In retrospect, most Americans accept that such once-controversial decisions were not ever all that controversial.

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Of the many memorable scenes and sequences from the film, “Casablanca¸” one that stands out for both its subtlety and its continuing resonance comes when the Bulgarian Bride—her name is Annina Brandel in the script—sits down with Rick Blaine (Bogart) and asks for some very important advice. Watch the scene above first before we discuss it.

It’s a quandary to which we can all relate. One of her lines of dialogue, however, has an especially timely meaning: “The Devil has the people by the throat.”

In the context of the film, the Devil is Hitler and the Nazis; the Brandels were lucky to escape with their lives. Today, the Devil is much closer to home – right here in America, wearing a pink pussy hat on his horns.

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Fascism and Communism—those tragic sisters from the 1900s that led to the greatest human suffering, poverty, and mass starvation in human history—should barely be remembered today.

Instead, they are ascendant in the Democrat Party. Cultural Marxism and fascist socialism are the new Democrat chic. The entire country is in an uproar. Everyone feels a sense of doom and gloom.

Conservative pundits have latched onto the fun words “hysteria” and “Trump derangement syndrome.” These words, though cute, mask the seriousness of what is actually happening.  The Democrat Party has become the enemy of America and all it stands for.  It’s time to get real about this.

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After news broke of Robert Mueller’s pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone's home Friday morning in Florida by twenty-nine heavily-armed agents in nineteen vehicles, lights flashing, CNN serendipitously on hand to film the raid, millions of us realized once and for all that we are no longer living in the America we knew and loved.

Mueller was appointed to conceal and obliterate the volumes of evidence of crimes committed by Hillary Clinton; her campaign; and a group of higher-ups in the FBI, DOJ, and CIA, all of whom were involved in a scheme to prevent Trump from being elected.

Mueller’s pure Gestapo tactics make it catastrophically clear that America is no longer a constitutional republic, a nation of laws and justice.  An unelected, tangential officer of the DOJ has for two years abused his position of power to destroy many lives in the cruelest of ways with impunity.

No one is stopping him and his band of legal bullies. Including the President of the United States.

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