Elected to get something done, or elected just to try and get reelected?
Humanity is in a tough spot. As I’ve said over and over, we have more access to information than any people who have ever lived, yet at the same time possess less discernment and ability to make use of this information than any of these humans who walked the Earth before us. What exactly, then, is the point of having all of this information if we don’t use it? This extends into our political discourse as Americans, and impacts the way politicians behave on the campaign trail.
Let’s take a walk down memory lane to summer 2024. At the RNC and throughout the campaign season, Donald Trump and his campaign surrogates promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States. Here are RNC delegates in Milwaukee brandishing the proof of this marketing operation:
Here is left-wing NPR whining about mass deportations:
SHAPIRO: So to the promises that Donald Trump made last night, one of the things he said was mass deportations. What would that mean?
GARSD: The Trump campaign has been going really hard on that promise. There’s over 10 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., and the reality is the U.S. doesn’t have the manpower to deport all those people. It would require a massive investment. It would also create a hole in the economy.
It is well-documented that the Trump campaign ran hardcore on mass deportations. How did Hispanics, almost all of Mexican ancestry, in South Texas respond?
Trump won Hispanic South Texas, including the Rio Grande Valley and the Laredo area, by margins that would have boggled the mind of any analyst in 2012, when Obama won the region even bigger than he did in 2008. Trump won counties, like Webb, that hadn’t been red in more than a century, and some, like Starr, that had never voted Republican under their current boundaries. Trump took over 55% of the Latino vote in Texas, cruised to a landslide unmatched for 36 years in Florida, won Passaic County in New Jersey, Imperial County in California, and shifted the Latino population hard to the right everywhere they are to be found in significant numbers.
While campaigning on mass deportations.
If you read the chatter heads on X, you’ll see plenty of almost always anonymous accounts whining about the deportation operation as if someone can snap their fingers and run everyone out of town. They say we aren’t going to hit our numbers and the country will be doomed, despite proof from think tanks somberly stating that the foreign-born population under Trump 47 is plummeting for the first time in many decades. So, which one is it? The Trump administration isn’t doing anything about deportations, or we are acting in such Draconian fashion that we are going to lose Latinos who heard the man say “mass deportations” and responded with a modern-day Latino record vote share not even Dubya could pull off in Texas and Florida?
Someone tell Maria Elvira Salazar:
“This is a stunning ad from Maria Elvira Salazar, a south Florida House Republican. ‘Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. In July, 50% of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisers are …” — Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman), September 17, 2026
Salazar is a useless Republican who gets elected on the “female Latina Republican” gimmick in South Florida. She is a miserable squish who will sell out the President’s agenda to save her own ass, which didn’t work out for her in 2018, when she was unceremoniously canned for a Democrat. Clearly she made her way back to Washington, as her type usually does, but she doesn’t know her rear end from a hole in the ground. From Salazar’s video:
“The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today. You can be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism. I’m not talking about giving them amnesty. I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land.”
Salazar and her cocktail-hour consultants are listening to left-wing media bits about how Hispanics must feel about “mass deportations,” despite what the historic election results say. The media are recreating the 1994 campaign against California Governor Pete Wilson, who championed Proposition 187 (which passed) in the state and was portrayed as anti-Latino and anti-immigrant, which brainwashed Latinos into swaying heavily toward Democrats for decades (still persisting). Videos ran non-stop highlighting “heavy handed” immigration enforcement operations and the damage was done. That was then, this is now.
Don’t bother telling Salazar or the lobby-owned GOP space-fillers in Washington, D.C., who stand to benefit from the perpetuation of a national crisis. America cannot sustain the rate of demographic change brought upon the country by immigration of all types – legal and illegal, especially with a judiciary that betrays the American citizen.
Salazar, who is surrounded by an even stronger GOP constituency than the Latino coalition you’ll find in Texas, is clearly plugged into sources of fake news designed to influence bad policy. The result is her stepping out of line to try and save her seat, goals of the coalition be damned. This leads me to the question that makes up the backbone of today’s article:
What is the point of a majority if you don’t get the dirty work done?
The voters (if possible and without massive election fraud) elect the party that most effectively promises to fix the problems the country is suffering from. Among those problems are legal and illegal immigration, economic woes, domestic corruption, and foreign turbulence. Politicians like Salazar exist to enrich themselves and sustain campaign issues as long as possible. It’s like the medical industry and why they’ll never be in a rush to cure cancer – because the money is in the medicine and treatments rather than the cure. If we solve the immigration issues, and we take away all the pet projects that grease the skids for reelecting the same ineffective people, then what will they run on?
A more pressing issue impacting a larger swath of the GOP Congressional majorities is that of the Iranian conflict. It brings short-term pain in the form of higher gas prices and the potential for instability in investment markets. Trump has the energy picture gamed out for the long run, which matters a lot more, but don’t count on TikTok scrollers to prioritize much else over their own perceived inconveniences.
The people elected Trump to make hard decisions. I hope for an end to the Iranian conflict, but few will go to great lengths to understand what most likely happened to keep this thing raging. Here is how I read it:
- Trump gave the OK to decapitate the regime’s leadership and pummel military targets, crippling Iranian naval and air defense capabilities
- No conventional ground forces were deployed into Iran, and that remains the case here nearly seven months later
- No foreign nation in the Middle East wanted to commit the ground troops and sustain the casualties necessary to remove the regime, and then hold the terrain with the power vacuum wide open because it has historically been our cross to bear (when counterinsurgency doesn’t work anyway)
- We have a stand-off that has turned into an economic war of attrition that we are winning
Winning that war of attrition, without short-term relief immediately visible to the average voter, is likely to bring political consequences. In the age of polarization, I don’t think we are looking at a massive Democrat electoral takeover; however, the factors typically swinging middle-of-the-road voters in a midterm are present and are enough to cost Republicans seats like Michigan Senate, NY-17, AZ-6, and others teetering on the fence. Trump has posted about his decisions in Iran coming with potential electoral consequences, but he made them anyway.
You don’t have to support the conflict with Iran. My support for operations there has a limit, and that means I don’t support a conventional ground invasion and hope for the earliest possible exit from the region under the best possible terms. Morons on X think the conflict is all about Israel, but I think it’s about knee-capping China in the long-run. They were poised to overtake us by mid-century as the world’s superpower, but being limited on resources requires the full cooperation of nations like Iran and Venezuela.
Presidential candidates have been talking tough on Iran for over forty years. This president got tired of kicking the can down the road and struck them like you may expect a superpower to respond to a regime that chants, “Death to America.” With that comes electoral consequences in a world that never unfolds like the dotted lines suggest.
The point of winning elections is to take care of problems.
If the point of winning elections is simply to hold the majority because you don’t like the other party, then we have already lost the plot. If Republicans win elections on immigration enforcement and then fold on it, and forty years from now you live in a combination of Nicaragua, Bangladesh, and Somalia, then what good would it have done if the Republicans stayed out of controversy and held the House in 2026?
Times like these remind me of why we have to keep our eyes on God. With great power comes great responsibility, including that responsibility to choose hard rights over easy wrongs which may carry short-term consequences in the form of electoral setbacks. God, however, raises up those in positions of power to make difficult decisions to shape the future of the world. It is evident in our national foundation, and I believe the United States was brought into existence for a reason.
“Heroes do hard things.” – Pastor Steve Cassell
Seth Keshel, MBA is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy and a retired Army Captain. He publishes Captain K’s Corner on Substack.
