Re-elect President Trump

Pomposity alert: In this post, I give my reasons for having voted for President Trump, and will urge others to do the same. You have permission to stop reading right now, and say, "Who cares what some retired Foreign Service weenie has to say?" Go ahead, say it. I even will refund every cent you have spent on this blog . . .

As noted many times, I voted for Donald Trump in 2016, although I did not initially see him as my preferred GOP candidate. The more, however, I listened to him, and not to what others said about him or said that he had said, the more I realized that this New Yorker seemed exactly what the doctor had ordered for what ailed America and the West. I soon found that he was not a buffoon, not a racist, not a xenophobe, and certainly not into gaining the presidency to get money and fame. It, of course, helped my decision to vote for Trump that he ran against somebody, Hillary Clinton, of whom I had some direct knowledge thanks to my old job at State. While at Foggy Bottom, I came to realize that she was a total, let us say a compleat fraud and crook. Hillary Clinton ranked among the most insincere persons I ever encountered: a disgusting self-absorbed character out to make herself and her corrupt family rich and powerful at the public expense. 

Donald Trump, on the other hand seemed, as noted, to have no personal material incentive to become President--he already had plenty of wealth and fame. More important, his message of "America First," hit me as one I had argued for, ineffectively I might add, during my many years at State; the bureaucracy seemed more interested in having good relations with foreigners by giving them what they want, i.e., providing "deliverables." Above all the bureaucracy opposed change. I, for example, saw the State bureaucracy's resistance to Ronald Reagan's drive to bring down the USSR. So when Donald Trump spoke of the "Deep State Swamp," I knew exactly what he meant. It is a real thing which threatens democracy and the pursuit of American interests.

On domestic issues, I felt a frustration bordering on anger with the facile manner in which our political-bureaucratic-Wall Street class (Democrats and Republicans) casually shipped away America's manufacturing base, lecturing us all the while on "free trade," and how we all gain by buying products from China and Mexico instead of making them here. It never made sense to me; I kept saying, "In that case why don't we buy our military systems from China, too?" These same elites told us we would benefit from millions of poor, uneducated, and often violent Third World aliens pouring into our country because they not only brought new ways of doing things, but, above all, they brought "diversity" to our society, something hailed as good in and of itself--no further explanation needed. We were told that "Islam is a religion of peace," while jihadis rampaged through the streets of the world murdering and destroying. 

This same elite's obsession, fake of course, with "Climate Change" also always seemed to translate into suffering for America's middle class and blue collar workers--big promoters of this Man Made Climate Change nonsense such as Gore and Obama have become quite wealthy and have lavish homes on the coasts, the very coasts the rest of us must avoid because of "rising sea levels." In the atrocious Paris Climate Accord, we agreed to destroy our coal industry while allowing those of China and India to prosper. Made no sense to me why Chinese coal would prove better for Gaia than American coal. The efforts to stop the building of oil pipelines and refineries, destroy fracking and our energy independence, and to impose ever higher "gas guzzler" taxes and automobile MPG requirements, all meant more suffering for the middle class and those aspiring to enter it, and put our national security at risk.

There are endless examples of this sort of elite diktat, one more being of course the hypocritical stance on gun "control": the uber-rich have guards and walls, the rest have 9-1-1, you know, "When seconds count, help is minutes away."

Trump spoke openly about all this. The reaction from the elites proved fierce. We have discussed all that at some length in numerous prior posts, and won't repeat it here.

So I have stuck with Trump for 2020. Simply put, he is the most honest and effective major American political figure I have found in my lifetime. He, above all, seems genuinely to love this country and its people: that, of course, should serve as a basic requirement for anybody aspiring to high office, but, alas, it is not--and, yes, indeed, I do question the patriotism of people such as Obama, Biden, Kerry, Omar, Harris, Sanders, etc. 

President Trump does what he says he will do. 

Bush, Clinton, Obama, Biden, Romney, et al, accepted, and profited from, the disappearance of American manufacturing. Obama, famously told us, no "magic wand" will bring back those jobs; McCain agreed, saying those jobs had gone forever. Trump did not agree, and acted to prove it. We have seen the rebirth of American manufacturing thanks to the actions undertaken by Trump in taking on the destructive "trade deals" of the past 30 or so years, his reform of our tax code, cutting crippling regulations, and in his insistence that America achieve energy independence, which has happened. That alone should earn Trump the vote of every American worker. 

Trump questioned, as noted in prior postings (here, for example), the assumptions that undergird American foreign policy since WWII. While at the same time confronting China, avoiding nuclear conflict with North Korea, destroying ISIS, and boxing in Iran, he has begun the process of disentangling us from pointless wars, and from seeking overly complex and unattainable solutions to long-standing problems. He has shown an ability to cut through the nonsense and focus on the real, e.g. in the Middle East. He has rebuilt the US military, suffering from severe neglect over the previous eight years.

Trump's opponent? Former VP Joe Biden, a semi-gaga crook of the old corruptocrat school, has been a fabulist, a fraud, and a hoaxer his whole political life; he now serves as the Trojan horse for a gaggle of leftists out to destroy America--AND YES, in fact, I do question his patriotism and that of his enablers. Biden and his family have become wealthy laundering money from China, Russia, Ukraine, etc. Biden is hopelessly compromised; his backers know it, and that includes the corrupt mass media running interference for him. They, of course, have no intention of letting him be the real President, as we have discussed many times before. 

Trump 2020.