There are times when even history’s most famous leaders need to follow a leader. Sometimes it is another famous figure who rises to the occasion. Other times, it’s not-so-famous faces.

But this is one of those moments when all who genuinely want to “Make America Great Again” need to rise to the occasion. Follow your hat and your heart. Lead your leader. He needs you now more than ever before.

You trusted him to be true to you. Sort of. But when you knew, deep down, that he probably was not really being truthful, you didn’t really care. You voted for him for president three times.

Now you’re seeing what can go wrong. And today we’re going to talk about what you can and must do to make things better.

But first let’s look at what can happen when a president follows a personal leader – and ends up on the wrong pathway. We’ll start by envisioning our news screens as a split-screen history lesson.

Split-screens: We’re seeing what looks like the same scene on both screens. It’s a stage, dominated by a huge floor-to-ceiling American flag backdrop, stretched across the entire stage.

Left Screen: A man walks slowly to stage center and faces us, with the huge flag behind him. He is wearing a U.S. Army helmet, a chest-full of medals, and his left hand is clutching a riding crop whip that he seems willing to use. He is four-star U.S. Army General George S. Patton (portrayed by actor George C. Scott), in the legendary 1970 film, “Patton.” In his hard-bitten, gravelly voice, Patton begins the film by speaking to his unseen World War II troops (that’s us). He says he expects us to go through the enemy forces “like crap through a goose.”

In the spring of 1970, President Richard Nixon watched this “Patton” flick multiple times in his White House theater and his Key Biscayne, Florida home. I know of three times; others reported two more.

Then Nixon ordered his controversial April 29 invasion, expanding America’s Vietnam war into Cambodia. Massive antiwar protests erupted. On Ohio’s Kent State campus, national guard forces shot into the crowd, killing four students, wounding nine. Nixon gave America his full Patton: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” America’s Vietnam War support was forever transformed.

Right Screen: A man walks briskly onstage, with the huge flag behind him. He is wearing black pants, a black shirt, a black waist-length jacket (the style was once called an Eisenhower jacket) and not quite a war helmet but a yellow wedge cheesehead hat. Reaching center stage, he jumps and lands facing us – legs spread wide, arms thrust skyward. His Green Bay, Wisconsin, political rally crowd cheers. He is Elon Musk, the richest man on earth.

Musk and his affiliated groups just spent $20 million hoping to elect a Republican state supreme court justice before this swing state reapportions its congressional districts. Musk also just gave two voters $1 million checks. But it all backfired.

Wisconsin, which Trump won in 2024, easily elected the Democratic justice. Why? Wisconsin saw Musk running Trump’s effort to massively slash federal agency employees – which meant slashing services, Social Security customer help, health security and many safety programs.

Musk had gleefully danced waving a chainsaw for Washington cameras after destroying the lives and families of patriotic workers. Trump’s voters suddenly couldn’t get Social Security help, online or on the phone, to assure they’d get their entitled payments, after a lifetime of paying into the system. Musk once promised he’d save America $2 trillion. Now he says it’s just $150 billion. And now we hear that includes all sorts of already cancelled contracts and so on.

Now this: Trump/Musk officials just ordered Social Security to declare undocumented workers from another country legally dead – even though they were alive and making Social Security payments. Why? Because they couldn’t get work without proving in person they are alive. Then Trump’s forces will snatch and deport them.

This cannot be our Constitution’s America. Today, patriotic MAGA voters and all of us hate seeing that America is no longer respected as the trusted leader of the Free World.

And finally, there’s one more thing you hate to see. You wish Trump would stop his reflexive lies – his tired old refrains about the 2020 election being stolen; his repeating of Musk’s lame lies about dead people getting massive Social Security payments – allegations proven false long ago.

Trump has always acted like his lies made you like him more. So now is the time for you and your friends – and Washington’s famous invertebrate Republicans – to spine up and just say no. Tell Trump he will always have your vote, if he never again lies to you about anything – not Social Security, not 2020, not tariffs. Nothing but the truth.

Rise to the occasion. Lead your leader. Make America Great Again.

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