The American people want an America First policy.
We will start by containing our nation’s borders. We’ll deport illegal aliens and criminal aliens and finish building the border wall.
We will extend the Trump tax cuts (gets the largest applause)
He emphasizes our duty to restore American energy dominance, stressing the word dominance.
We will pass legislation to eliminate the green new deal. We will end the ridiculous EV mandates.
We will roll back the totalitarian fourth branch of government known as the administrative state ( I have no idea what that means.) < br />
We will make sure parents have the right to choose their child's education.
We will create a lean and faster more efficient federal work force.
He then attacks Democrats claiming "They tried to replace our military with social justice warriors. We have to put an end to this madness."... It is time to reinstate fear in our enemies.
He recites a religious prayer he claims was given or written by Thomas Jefferson that ends with the words "Jesus Christ Our Savior".
Shorter version: The military-industrial complex reigns supreme.
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Update: See comments to this post below: The prayer likely wasn't written or recited by Thomas Jefferson once, let alone every day of his presidency for years, as Johnson claimed. According to the Monticello Organization, which is a repository of Jefferson's works and words, most likely it is from a 1919 revised version of the "Book of Common Prayer". Also see the linked sources at the bottom of this post.
(Disclaimer: My only knowledge of a "Book of Common Prayer" is the 1977 novel by Joan Didion, referred to in Wikipedia. (I had no idea <"http://www.talkleft.com/bookofcommonprayer_350.jpg">my hard cover version of the novel is a First Edition. It is such pristine condition I'm not sure I ever finished reading it, even though Joan Didion is my favorite author.) In any event, the point is that Joan Didion's novel is hardly an uplifting work or anything like a prayer. It takes place in an fictionalized country in Central America she calls Boca Grande and is about a woman named Charlotte Douglas. From Wikipedia:
Charlotte's beloved daughter Marin has run off with a group of Marxist radicals and taken part in an absurd act of terrorism, and in the wake of her daughter's disappearance, Charlotte's marriage to a crusading Berkeley lawyer (not Marin's father), has fallen apart.
Or, as Joyce Carol Oates described it in a book review she wrote for the New York Times:
Marin, Charlotte's 8‐year‐old daughter, was seen with several other young people detonating a crude pipe bomb in a San Francisco office building and later hijacking a plane to Utah, where they burned it in time for the incident to interrupt the network news. Now a fugitive, she participates in revolutionary activity, mainly by making tape recordings in which she speaks of “expropriation” and “firepower” and the need to destroy imperialist symbols. “The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character,” Marin says with solemn, mindless circularity, “is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary.”
The use of the word "imperial" strikes a new chord. Isn't that how Donald Trump how envisions himself, with his offer to purchase Greenland from Denmark and take back the Panama Canal? It's a good thing Mike Johnson has such a pious backbone. He will need it to survive as speaker of a House where Trump believes he gets to call the shots, set the agenda and fire the person in charge should he fail to bring home the bacon. Last word: I wonder if it turns out Johnson made a fool of himself by referencing Jefferson as the author of the prayer he recited, whether he wrote the speech or a speech-writer wrote it for him. If it's the latter, will he fire the speech-writer? He should. If he can't correctly fact-check his own speeches, how badly will he butcher other facts -- ones that matter --- during his tenure as Speaker?
Does anyone want to venture an opinion about how he came up with Thomas Jefferson for the prayer, and whether he was right or wrong?
