In August of 2024, candidate Trump stood behind a table of groceries and promised that prices would come down “starting on day one.”
Gas was $3.44 a gallon that week. Today, it’s $4.50 where I live.
See, that’s the trouble with a measurable promise. You can measure it.
Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, and has made a lot more since being elected: end the wars, halve the price of energy, make foreigners pay for the tariffs, abolish the Department of Education, shrink federal spending, and many, many more.
A year in, and we’ve struck Caracas and Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is in a state of total dysfunction, more than 90 percent of the tariff bill has landed on Americans, the Department of Education is still cashing checks, and the national debt has risen to over $40 trillion.
He did free Ross Ulbricht like he said he would, and real credit to him for that, but the rest went the way campaign promises usually go.
I’m not willing to pile on one man. This isn’t a uniquely Trump problem—it’s mostly just what the office does to whoever sits in it.
A promise is a kind of currency. It’s worth something only as long as the person who made it intends to pay. Issue enough of them with no intention or ability to make good, and each one is worth a little less than the one before.
Political promises, like fiat currency, lose value over time. We’ve watched our politicians’ words inflate for decades. We just don’t call it inflation. Maybe we should.
This is why party loyalty has never made much sense to me.
Loyalty is what lets a man keep passing worthless verbal currency. If he knows he gets your vote regardless, what’s the incentive to back his promises with anything of lasting value?
The only voter he has any reason to worry about is the one who isn’t already on his team.
On Tuesday, a whole lot of people demonstrated they were willing to break with their party in the hopes that their withdrawn support would be a wake-up for future conservative candidates.
They used one of the few tools regular people have for trying to keep politicians honest.
I don’t know what the response will be. Will Conservative Inc. get the message, or will they double down on the lies and hypocrisy that cost them the midterms? If they do course-correct, will it be in time to save the country from the plans the DSA has for us?
What a mess.
None of this is new, of course. A lot of us have just stopped believing that Washington can ever fix any of our problems. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do to make life better.
For the last ten years, through Republican majorities and Democrat majorities and every arrangement of power in between, we’ve been doing work that actually compounds into real value.
The books and resources we create teach kids how the world around them really works: natural law, the real and limited role of government, sound money, personal responsibility and self-reliance, and the point most people forget: that it’s ordinary people, not the officials they vote for, who keep a country free.
You probably already have some of our books. Like the one where Ethan and Emily hunt down the “creature” slowly draining their grandparents’ savings that’s based on W.E.B. Griffin’s Creature from Jekyll Island but is retold in a way that helps a seven-year-old understand inflation better than most adults do.
Or The Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law, which is based on economist Frederic Bastiat’s famous 1850 essay and explains what a law is actually for, and what it inevitably becomes if people let it. There are a dozen more, just like these, each built on a complex idea and based on a famous book by experts in their fields—all distilled so that kids not only easily grasp the ideas, but genuinely enjoy learning them.
And now, just in time for the Flock Wars, book number 15 is available for pre-order.
The Tuttle Twins and the Shield of Liberty takes on the oldest political trick in the book: give up a little privacy, and we’ll keep you safe. In it, a town rattled by a string of thefts lets the cameras go up, one reasonable step at a time. By the time bank accounts are being frozen and neighbors are being arrested for something they didn’t do, Ethan and Emily are learning how quickly freedom fades when privacy is no longer a right.
You can watch the trailer for Shield of Liberty here!
Politicians will keep making promises they don’t mean to keep. But that doesn’t mean we just have to take it.
It’s pretty incredible what can happen when good and honest people finally decide that they’ve had enough. You don’t have to vote or be any kind of political activist to bring about meaningful change.
Millions of parents, just like you, are taking the education of their children into their own hands, and the results are beautiful.
You can pre-order Shield of Liberty here.
— Connor
