(Daily Signal)—The Trump administration is partnering with conservative state legislators to codify the “Make America Great Again” agenda throughout the country.
The White House has met with lawmakers from states including Louisiana, Missouri, and Wyoming about how states can enact back home what President Donald Trump is doing on the federal level.
But because Republican state lawmakers often vote like Democrats once they’re elected, the White House’s most trusted friends in legislatures are members of the 13 State Freedom Caucus chapters, according to Andy Roth, president of the State Freedom Caucus Network.
“We are their biggest allies,” he told The Daily Signal about the relationship between the state chapters and the administration. “We are the ones that most closely believe in and most vocally support their efforts.”
The White House’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs has proactively reached out to state lawmakers to share the administration’s priorities and how state lawmakers can help advance them.
“I’ve never known another administration to reach out directly to state legislatures the way that the Trump administration is currently reaching out,” Louisiana Speaker of the House Beryl Amedée told The Daily Signal.
Louisiana Republicans met with members of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council and Cabinet members Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Aug. 12 at the White House.
Nick Schroer, a Missouri state representative who was part of his state’s delegation to the White House, said he thinks the president’s interest in state legislatures could pressure state-level Republicans who often vote with Democrats to get in line with the party platform, particularly when it comes to redistricting.
“I think if Trump engages on certain things like school choice, like returning the power back to the states, like election integrity, like the 7-1 map in the state of Missouri, you’re going to have a lot of these people that normally won’t vote the right way—pursuant to our party platform—all of a sudden they’re going to jump in line,” Schroer told The Daily Signal.
A 7-1 map for the state of Missouri refers to a proposed redistricting plan opposed by Democrats and some Republicans that would result in seven Republican districts and one Democrat district. Missouri currently has a 6-2 map favoring Republicans.
According to Amedée, the White House officials who spoke to the Louisiana lawmakers encouraged them to take full responsibility for their state’s education system as the Trump administration works to shut down the federal Department of Education.
“The effort at the federal level is to return education back to the states, and to accomplish that, the states are going to have to take the lead, because every state has individual needs and priorities,” she said. “Instead of waiting for the federal government to tell us what to do in education, they’re going to free us up so that we can just move forward with whatever Louisiana needs.”
State Freedom Caucus members believe they will be particularly valuable in advancing the president’s agenda on election integrity, redistricting, education, and energy.
“It’s just been a perfect marriage where the Freedom Caucus and the Trump administration are working to combat all that the Left has done in all of these states where they’ve gerrymandered like crazy,” Schroer said.
The Missouri congressional map is a result of “weak Republican leadership,” said Justin Sparks, another Republican state representative.
In 2022, 14 Republicans in Missouri, including Senate leadership, joined 10 Democrats in rejecting the proposal for a 7-1 congressional map in favor of a map where Democrats get two seats.
But Sparks said he has hope that Trump’s leadership will inspire Missouri state leadership to call a special session and redraw a 7-1 map.
“We have a strong executive in the White House that is really doing what it takes to lead by example,” he said. “You have to hit some of these Republicans over the head to get them to wake up.”
“That’s really what the Freedom Caucus does,” he continued. “We try to bring the the reality of what is actually happening in the world and to get outside of the institutionalization of the Capitol building and understand that Democrats are playing for keeps.”
He said the president is “leading by example,” inspiring wayward Republicans to enact the MAGA agenda.
“They [the Trump administration] recognize how important this is, and are leading by example and telling Republican legislatures, ‘Start being Republicans and start doing what the people have elected you to do. Start actually using the mechanisms of power that are available to you, constitutionally and statutorily, to do and represent your people well,’” he said. “And it’s about time.”
Roth, the State Freedom Caucus president, said the White House understands that the idea that politics is Republicans versus Democrats is an old way of thinking. The real battle, Roth said, is conservatives versus the swamp, due to the “unholy alliance” that exists in state legislatures between liberal Republicans and Democrats.
But State Freedom Caucus members are “on the White House’s side, and a lot of these so-called Republicans are not,” Roth said.
Wyoming is an example of how conservative state lawmakers can codify the MAGA agenda, according to Wyoming state Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams. The Legislature in the Cowboy State has delivered on Trump’s priorities of requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, enhancing voter list maintenance laws, and banning ranked-choice voting.
After Trump called for a ban on mail-in voting and voting machines, Wyoming Freedom Caucus members announced plans to pass such laws in their state.
“I believe that the battle is within the states, and the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’ priorities with state legislation definitely align with President Trump’s agenda,” Rodriguez-Williams told The Daily Signal. “We are working very hard to carry out the priorities of this administration through state legislation.”
Missouri’s Sparks has never seen an administration work with state lawmakers in this way, he said.
“This is the first time that I personally have seen an administration recognize that, in order to accomplish their policy goals and their agenda, they have to do it on the state level as well as the federal level,” he said. “That is actually really a novel approach and understanding. We have all these Republican states with Republican governors and Republican legislatures, but they’re not necessarily governing that way, and so we need to identify that, recognize why that is, and then take steps to remedy it.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.