My Case For Trump

When Donald Trump first entered the political scene almost a decade ago, I did not like him. That is a generous way of putting it. I really did not like him. The only thing I knew about Trump at the time, aside from the fact that he was a reality TV star, was that he was a longtime Democrat from New York who was friends with all of the worst people in media and politics. All of those people hate him today and openly root for his political and physical demise. But that wasn’t the case in the early days of Trump’s political life.

So, back in those days, I thought Trump was a leftist infiltrator. I thought that, no matter what he promised, he would govern from the Left. I thought that electing him would be the same as electing a far-Left Democrat — because that’s what he was, I believed.

It turns out, I was wrong. Not for the first time. Sadly, not for the last. But I was wrong. 

Trump did not govern like a Democrat infiltrator sent by the Clintons to destroy the Republican Party from within (a conspiracy theory that, I admit, I once entertained). If he did, they wouldn’t have spent the last four years trying to send him to prison, or failing that, to the morgue. If I had fallen into a coma in January of 2017, missed the entirety of Trump’s tenure, and woken up in January of 2021, I would still know that Trump was a successful conservative president based entirely on how they’ve treated him ever since. Indeed, I would have all the reason that I needed to vote for him on that basis alone. They have tried to destroy him. Leftist elites have waged a campaign of vengeance unlike anything ever seen in the history of American politics. That’s reason enough to vote for him in 2024. I don’t need to know what happened from the years 2017 to 2021.

But I do know, because I was thankfully alive and conscious during that time. So I saw that Trump fulfilled his promise to appoint constitutionalist justices to the Supreme Court, who then went on to overturn the most abominable decision in the history of the court — a decision that cost 60 million American lives. I saw that Trump enforced our immigration laws, defunded sanctuary cities, and sent criminal illegal aliens to prison. I saw that Trump’s time in office was also a time of relative peace all over the globe. He prevented wars rather than starting them — a novel strategy, at least compared to every other president in my lifetime. And I saw that Trump presided over a strong and growing economy. The unemployment rate hit a low not seen in 50 years. Manufacturing jobs started coming back to America. The stock market hit record highs.

I saw all of that. We all saw it, if we were paying attention. Here’s what we didn’t see: any of the dystopian horrors that Trump’s opponents keep warning he will visit upon us. He did not govern like a fascist tyrant drunk on his own power. He did not install himself as dictator for life. In fact, he exercised great restraint. He didn’t start any new wars. He didn’t move to expand his own executive powers. He didn’t even issue that many executive orders, compared to the three most recent presidents before him.

That’s why I’m voting for Trump. And why I believe you should too. He earned our vote. He earned it by governing successfully and leading competently. Trump was already a good president, which is very compelling evidence that he will be a good president. Nothing is sure in this life. You cannot predict the future with absolute certainty. Yet you can be extremely confident that someone can do a job well if they have already done it well. So that’s the best selling point for Donald Trump. The best selling point is who he is and what he has done.

But the second best selling point is who he isn’t. He isn’t Kamala Harris.

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I’m voting for Trump because we need him in the White House. I’m also voting for him because we need to keep Kamala Harris out of the White House. I’m not going to spend a lot of time making the case against Kamala here. I’ve done that literally every day for the past three months. I suspect that anyone who reads this, anyone who is even potentially reachable at this stage of the game, already knows that Kamala is bad — a bad leader, a bad Vice President, a bad person. Totally unqualified for the job she currently holds. Even less qualified for the job she wants to hold. She is a far-Left radical. No matter how much she has backtracked over the past couple of months, her record speaks for itself. She wants to open our borders, defund our police, start more wars, kill more babies, take more money out of our pockets, destroy our right to free speech, make the world less safe and our communities less safe. She may be profoundly incompetent, but she is capable of doing all of those things. And she will.

That’s the point I want to emphasize. Kamala Harris may be a bumbling, empty-headed buffoon. But she does have an agenda, she will use the powers of the presidency to enact it, and it will be a catastrophe for your family and mine. I would vote against Kamala Harris no matter who she was running against. I’d vote for a houseplant over her. We’ve already had one of those running the country for four years. It’s been a disaster, but Kamala will be worse. Kamala gives us more than enough reason to vote for Trump. But the good news is that we don’t have to hold our nose. We can vote against Kamala and for Trump, and do it proudly.

On that note, I want to say one last thing. Trump’s critics like to say that character matters. They’re right. It does. They say we should think about Trump’s character before we consider voting for him. They’re right. We should. Well, there is no character trait more important than courage. CS Lewis once wrote that courage is the form of every virtue at its testing point. What he meant is that courage contains all of the other virtues. Courage is how all virtues are expressed when push comes to shove.

If you are the most virtuous person in the world but all of your virtues disappear when you’re under fire, then you have no virtue. A man is defined by how he acts in those moments. So when you boil everything down, only one question matters: Do you have courage? That’s what separates the men who shape history from the ones who will be forgotten by it. That’s the dividing line.

Now think about the iconic picture of Trump raising his fist in the air right after he was shot in the head. Most pictures are worth a thousand words. But I think for the best pictures you only need one. That picture of Trump screams one word: courage. Trump’s enemies may hate to admit it. They may never admit it. But Trump proved in that moment, and in the weeks and months that followed, that he is a man of exceptional courage. He was shot. A few weeks later, he was nearly shot again. It takes immense courage to continue along unfazed, still campaigning, still appearing in front of massive crowds, even after a bullet came half an inch from blowing a hole in your skull.

The best thing I can say about Trump — the thing that most testifies to his character — is that if I had spent the month of July living in a cave, and only re-emerged in August, and had been following Trump closely ever since, I would never know that he escaped death by ten millimeters. That’s because the media has done everything they can to bury it and pretend it never happened. But it’s also because Trump is so completely unshaken by the event. He doesn’t come off like a man who just suffered a severe trauma, though he did.

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When you face down your own mortality and are not remotely rattled by the experience, and then you continue to put yourself in vulnerable positions because you simply refuse to run and hide, you have courage. You have shown a kind of courage that nobody in American politics today has ever shown. Trump’s relentlessly theatrical enemies have to invent all kinds of fantastical threats that they are supposedly facing. They pretend that Trump is some sort of existential danger to them. That their very lives hang in the balance. It’s all performance.

The truth is that most of them are living lives of great comfort. And the irony is that, if Trump wins, their lives will only become more comfortable as the economy improves. They are not facing down any threat. They are not showing any courage. They don’t know what courage is. They’re on the same side as Hollywood and the media and corporate America and almost every powerful person in DC. They are safe. Trump is the one under fire. Trump has actually taken a bullet in real life. It’s not a performance for him.

Trump is not a perfect man. Neither am I. Neither are you. But what I know is that when the bullets were flying, he stood tall. That’s the kind of man I want in the White House. It’s the kind of man we’ll need in the times ahead.