This country has plenty of enemies. And they’re on the move.
Now a US Congressman sounded the alarm on a huge national security threat everyone needs to hear.
A Congressman Nobody Listened To Enough — And What He Wants You To Know Before He Leaves
Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota is leaving Congress in January. He did not choose to leave — he ran for governor and placed third in a crowded Republican primary. He accepted the outcome without bitterness, which itself tells you something about the kind of politician he is. And sitting down with Fox News Digital at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, he used the time left to say the things he has been saying for four terms that have not, by his own assessment, been heard with sufficient urgency.
The biggest one is China.
“I think the biggest mistake is that we’re basically sleepwalking through this competition,” Johnson said. “I mean, every day the leaders of China get up and they try to figure out how to beat America, how to destabilize our country, how to get an advantage. And we’re frankly in this country spending more time fighting one another than we are trying to think about how to compete with the Chinese Communist Party.”
Johnson has been a leading congressional voice on U.S.-China relations and agricultural policy throughout his tenure as South Dakota’s at-large representative. He served as leader of the Republican Main Street Caucus, the center-right coalition focused on practical governance over ideological performance. His career has been defined by trying to solve problems in a chamber that has become increasingly rewarding to people who prefer to perform problems.
“It’s a tough time to be normal,” he said — one of the more quietly devastating assessments of the current state of American legislative politics you’ll hear from anyone currently occupying a seat in the building.
The Debt, The Entitlements, And The Bipartisan Honesty Nobody Wants To Hear
Johnson also said the thing that virtually every serious economist agrees with and virtually every elected official refuses to say clearly in public. The national debt cannot be fixed by one party alone. The entitlement programs that drive it — Social Security and Medicare — cannot be reformed without a bipartisan agreement. And every candidate in recent presidential cycles has effectively promised not to touch them, which guarantees failure.
“Well, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” Johnson said, capturing the fundamental political cowardice that has allowed the debt to compound for decades. “I’ve certainly rolled out a number of plans that would have some pretty substantial reforms to our entitlement programs. I’m not looking to take away grandma’s Social Security or Medicare. But we simply are not going to restore solvency to those programs with a status quo approach.”
He drew the historical parallel that makes the argument most clearly. “The last time we made much-needed reform to Social Security in 1983, it took Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill and Republican President Ronald Reagan to get it done. If we do not start thinking about avoiding fiscal calamity as a bipartisan problem, we will fail.”
It is the kind of statement that is almost impossible to make in a competitive primary — which is part of why Johnson placed third in the South Dakota gubernatorial race despite entering as the frontrunner. He acknowledges exactly what happened: negative ads calling him a RINO, a career politician, a liberal did their work. “I have 13 of my colleagues in Congress who have lost their races for governor or senator,” Johnson said. “Normally, running as a House member, that gives you a bit of an advantage if you’re running for a different office. That’s no longer the case.”
What His Primary Loss Tells Us About The Current GOP
Johnson’s assessment of why he lost is also an assessment of where the Republican Party currently is. Primary turnout produces voters who want purity rather than progress. Nuance doesn’t play as well as “let’s go fight.” The people who are best at social media — and particularly at negative, emotionally charged social media — set the terms of the debate.
None of this means the current Republican majority is wrong on its core priorities. It means that a party that is winning elections is simultaneously losing the kind of legislator that can govern once those elections are won. The work of actually balancing a budget, competing with China, and reforming entitlements before the fiscal reckoning arrives requires exactly the qualities that primary voters have been systematically penalizing.
Johnson, 50, says he isn’t ready to retire and has no shortage of “piss and vinegar.” He doesn’t know yet what comes next — business, nonprofits, something else. What he is sure of is that the competition with China will not wait for the American political system to stop fighting itself long enough to take it seriously. He leaves office still waiting for the country to listen.
