A 2024 presidential hopeful made stops at Smokey Rows in Oskaloosa and Pella on Thursday to spread a campaign message focused on finding unity in a “broken” culture.

Ryan Binkley is a Texas-based businessman, pastor and father of five children. He’s also hoping to become the next President of the United States.

A Republican, Binkley is currently facing off against a field of world-famous career politicians, including former President Donald Trump, current Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to name a few. Binkley says God put on his heart to run for president about eight years ago, and wants to focus on fixing the nation’s “cracked foundation,” manifested in the divided culture America is plagued with today.

“Our country is really broken. Really broken, mainly culturally,” Binkley says. “The foundation is what’s cracked a little bit, and it’s the culture.”

Binkley likens America to a company with a toxic work environment and says that this “atmosphere” is harming decision making at the highest levels.

“Our country’s atmosphere is hurting, very divided, unable to make good decisions … Unable to connect like we used to,” he says. “It didn’t always be this way, historically. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, they would argue, and fight, and go have a glass of wine, then do it again the next day.

“Now, even in our own parties, if we don’t agree with each other 100 percent on everything, we’re not friends, and so we vilify each other to get points and we act different in front of media and on social media than they do behind the scenes to get attention.”

Binkley says the first step to fixing the country’s “broken culture” is for leadership to admit that the nation has a problem and to want to fix it.

Nothing in today’s headlines says “difficult working relationship” quite like the looming debt ceiling crisis and threat of an upcoming national default if Republicans, led by Speaker of the House Keven McCarthy, and Democrats, led by President Joe Biden, cannot work together to come to an agreement on the national budget.

Binkley says the key will be making a budget and sticking to it.

“At the end of the day, we need to have a budget, and we need to stick to it, and that’s the problem,” Binkley says. “We haven’t approved a budget on time in 27 years, so what happens is we keep doing these just reconciliation measures where we just pass on an ongoing measure to just pay for our bills, when in fact, we actually need to pass a budget on time. It needs to be brought up by the President, he needs to be approved by the Congress, and that’s a challenge today.

“Because we’re doing what we’re doing, Republicans don’t really have a strong leg to stand on,” Binkley says. “I think they’re doing what they can do to kind of keep spending in check, and I think that hopefully they’ll come to an agreement soon. Hopefully President Biden will bend a little bit on it, which I think he will, but at the end of the day, they’re going to have to agree to do something soon.”

Read the full article at oskaloosa.com