Voting to Save America

In 2016, I made no secret of the fact that I wasn’t an ardent Donald Trump fan. I admitted that I liked the fact that he seemed to fight like Hell, and wouldn’t back down. Unfortunately, I also thought he wouldn’t make a very good president because I’d bought the popular lie that he was basically an unprincipled New York liberal in conservative clothing. Reluctantly, I decided to vote for him because I had previously voted for Romney in 2012, despite similar misgivings about his fake “severe conservatism.” I knew I couldn’t support Hillary, but more than that, I couldn’t vote third party because quite honestly, it was more important to make a defensive vote, just as I had in 2012. In 2008, I supported John McCain despite similar misgivings, but also because I was gambling that due to his age, he might not serve out the term, and we’d instead find ourselves with President Palin, a prospect I still view wistfully. She’s another true fighter, and while not a doctrinaire conservative, she was much more appealing politically to me than the top of the ticket on which she ran. All of this firmly in mind, I decided in 2016 to vote for Donald Trump, because, I admitted, Donald Rumsfeld had been right: “You go to war with the Army you have,”.and not necessarily the ideal fighting force you might imagine for a particular engagement, because the world doesn’t present us with “ideal” choices or options very often.  I voted for Donald Trump expecting a string of disappointments that would make me regret my vote, but ladies and gentlemen, I have never been more wrong about a political choice in my life. It’s not that there haven’t been disappointments, but I must say that Donald Trump is, to date, turning out to be the best and greatest President during my lifetime. Yes, better even than Ronald Reagan.

Different? Yes. Could he still turn into a terrible disappointment? If he spends too much time listening to his daughter on some of her claptrap, I’m afraid I’ll be inclined to dissent. I don’t believe it’s the tax-payers’ job to fund child-care. I don’t think there should be paid family leave for Federal employees, or anybody else. Having a family is your choice, and thus the burdens associated with it should be entirely your own. If you can negotiate for it with an employer, that’s one thing. If an employer decides to offer it to attract employees, that’s fine, but as a mandate by government? Hell no! As a hand-out benefit to Federal employees who will be considered “essential” anytime there’s a government-mandated quarantine, while business owners are told to close their doors and shut down their lives, but be forced to pay for it all? Not a chance! I also disagree with him on the question of “pre-existing conditions,” and although as popular as his position may be even among a majority of voters, again, I do not believe we should expect insurers to cover houses at full value after they’ve already started to burn.  It’s a ludicrous proposition, whoever makes it, and I’ll maintain that to my dying day. These are the sorts of things where a conservative like me will always cringe on Trump’s positions that stray far afield from conservatism.

There are issues on which it is clear I will never consider Trump to be conservative, or conservative enough for my liking, but there are others in which I think Donald Trump has made a logical and reasonable case where conservatism had gone astray.  One of those issues is in the broad area of foreign entanglements and military deployments and engagements.  Like many conservatives, I had over time fallen away from Reagan’s basic view toward the Bush view. The question has been: Which is truly the conservative position? It had been the Bushes and Clintons who re-ordered the use of our military from a defensive institution focused on a narrowly-formed set of ideas about what comprise America’s vital national interests to a broader set that had begun to encompass ideas like “democracy-building” and “humanitarian missions.” After all, the catastrophe in Somalia was launched under George HW Bush.  The intrusions into the Balkans of the 1990s were an outgrowth of the same theory, and so were so many of the excursions since the outset of the current century.  Rather than focusing on the defense of the US, we had begun to get roped into various quagmires.  Even our attacks into Afghanistan, started as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, slowly mutated into something else: An attempt to convert a primitive, tribalistic culture into something more modern and responsive to contemporary ideals of society and governance. It is in this latter attempt that we have failed. Rather than having our military focus solely on the mission of vanquishing an enemy, we had begun to “nation-build” a primitive wasteland.

In Libya, Moammar Gaddafi was a miserable human scumbag, and he kept a forcible lid on various factions, but we armed his antagonists and wondered why we wound up with al-Qaeda running the show. This fanciful approach to foreign policy, with this asinine idea that we could somehow convert the whole of the primitive world to our general way of thinking led to the whole “Arab spring,” which in truth had led to an Arab catastrophe. Trump could see this from a mile away, and he was right to re-center our foreign policy and defense stature back to the traditional conservative view. We have no business being involved in nation-building. To the degree we become engaged with enemies abroad, it should consist of overwhelming force to wipe them out, removing the threat to the United States, and then some sort of staged withdrawal, hoping to leave a stable country behind, but unwilling to remain in perpetuity to do any “democracy-building.”

What made the first Gulf War relatively successful was that we went in, we ejected Saddam from Kuwait, and we demolished his ability to make war beyond his immediate borders. Then, and for years after, we simply contained him and his forces. We did not take him out on our first trip because it was not part of our multi-lateral mission and mandate. This had been another failing of the Bush doctrine: We would seek to do everything within a coalition of nations, seeking buy-in from other UN or NATO nations. Their cooperation is always appreciated, but it’s entirely unnecessary. The United States doesn’t need the permission of anybody to pursue its defense/security interests.  One of the great things about Trump’s foreign policy has been his plainly evident willingness to go without “allies” and also to tell them to get bent when they, as they so often do, forsake their treaty commitments to the United States.

In the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, we carried the burdens of funding NATO to a large extent, but at least the member nations like Germany made an attempt to meet their fiscal obligations. Since the premature reunification of Germany, we’d let the NATO members skate on their annual contributions. They made partial payments, and in a few cases, symbolic, token payments. The American people continued to fund it all. Donald Trump has made strong moves to end that practice, and for the first time, Germany and others are making payments to the maintenance of NATO at more substantial levels.

This is something I believe had become a blind spot for conservatives. So accustomed to carrying those burdens, we let the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama continue to send our money, unmatched, to the defense of a continental superpower that had been increasingly adversarial in issues of trade and culture and law. Trump ended this procedure. He challenged it by prompting the fundamental question: Do we still need NATO, and if we do, how much should we be paying for its maintenance? As a man who spent his youth in Europe, in field exercises all over Germany and manning the defense of the West, for the first time, I actually wondered: Is it time to bring our soldiers home? This is a question two decades late in arriving. Partly, I believe, we had become accustomed to the arrangement – an extension of the human tendency to maintain the status quo even in the face of underlying change – but in other ways, we’d forgotten the plot: We had been there to stabilize post-war Europe and to repel the Soviet Bloc, but the Soviets were gone, and some of the Soviet Bloc was now on our side. While we had reduced our troops in Europe, we still maintained a substantial engagement there. Why? Trump is the first President in over twenty years to rightly ask that question, and I am thankful for that change.

President Trump arrived in Washington DC truly as an outsider. Despite outward appearances, the Democrat and the Republican establishment fear and hate him.  This is because he created problems for their status quo also.  Since he was an outsider, they feared that he might open too many closets, and look under too many rugs.  Slowly, but lately more rapidly, he’s begun the process of cleaning things up, and they intend to oust him by any means necessary.

One of the things for which I appreciate President Trump most is that he has been a stalwart defender of veterans, the US military, the police and other first-responders. This is important to me, because as a veteran, I have known too well the long train of abuses and neglect to which our veterans have long been subjected.  I know how poorly our first-responders are treated in county, city, and state budgets.  I know that our military has always been the first line item to be slashed, and the last to be restored.  These ridiculous stories, now falsified, about Trump looking with disdain upon our war dead were always obviously false.

There are many, many issues in which Donald Trump has surprised me, pleasantly, but there’s one area in which he’s done more to improve the country than in perhaps any other area: The news. President Trump has finally exposed that which I had long believed, but could not prove. You may not have noticed it before, or if you had, you might not have grasped fully its significance.

The media is essentially a one-party affair. More than this, however, it’s a highly focused media. It revolves around the New York, Washington DC axis. It has branches on the West coast, and it has smaller extensions elsewhere, but in the main, the way America is portrayed is with a projected mindset and ethos of what you see in Washington DC, as if that had been the whole of the country.  Ladies and gentlemen, thankfully, mercifully, this is not the case.  America is not Washington DC, or New York, or Chicago or Los Angeles. America is not like those places. Most Americans have little in common with the so-called “leaders” in those places, who have built empires of graft and corruption, and these demons view the American people, their homes, their properties, and even their jobs as spoils to be won and lost in a perpetual war for power.  The media vultures are part of this war, and many bureaucrats in the upper echelons of government play in this same game.  All of them collude against the American people. All of them are at war with you, and therefore, with Donald Trump.

What Donald Trump has uncovered, if you care to notice it, is a vast governmentally-focused system of graft, corruption, favoritism, profiteering, and in not a few cases, treason. How many Congressmen and Senators use their Intelligence Committee briefings to make buy and sell decisions in their stock portfolios? We do not yet know the whole number, but we can get a clue from the entire COVID19 disclosures. Diane Feinstein’s husband is now under investigation, and Richard Burr is under investigation for using their access to information to make buys or dump stocks after Intelligence Committee briefings. Note that these are the Chairman(Burr) and the ranking member(Feinstein.) I’ve told you many times: This is a bi-partisan swamp, and a large number on both sides of the aisle are flat-out crooks. Do you think Pelosi and McConnell don’t know about all this? Hell, they lead it in their respective houses of Congress. While kicking this one or that one out of Congress may solve the immediate problem with that individual, it doesn’t solve the broad problem.  Trump knows how this works, and he’s slowly working his way to expose it.  This is why there are “NeverTrumpers” all over Washington DC. All of the phony posturing about “principle” and so on is simply that: Posturing.

I have been happy to see President Trump say that we should not tear down monuments, because we must learn from our history… All of it. The good, the bad, the ugly: American children must be taught about all of it, so that they can understand the greatness of our country, the historic struggles of her people, and the epic advancement in the human condition our system of law and justice has created.  I am happy that we have a president who does not fold on such critical cultural issues. He does not cave-in to the prevailing popular notions in our media and so-called “popular culture” because he knows it doesn’t represent the whole of the people, but only a tiny, vocal, protected, entitled ruling class that does not represent the views and convictions of the many millions of people all across this country’s length and breadth. He knows the so-called “convention wisdom” is a thin veneer of opinion, spread out across the entire media to give it the appearance of a legion, when in truth its a comparative squad when stood alongside the whole body of the American people. We may have had other Presidents who knew that, but most of them feared the people would discover it. Donald Trump thunders about it in his rallies so that all Americans will know the truth.  Twitter isn’t reality.  The check-marked blue-ribbons there are mostly fake people, in the sense that their followings are not organic, and their basis for verification is to become “influencers” for the ruling class.  Yes, of course there are genuine people, like Mark Levin, and Dan Bongino, and a number of other conservatives, but nobody’s giving them instant followings made up of tens or hundreds of thousands of bots or dummy accounts. Donald Trump knows all of this, and it’s high time we learned it. He’s trying to teach us how to act like winners because we are winners, and because we outnumber our adversaries if only we would stiffen up our spines and fight.

Donald Trump is making a wreckage of the so-called “Deep State.” They tried, and still they try, to take him out. There is no lie they won’t tell, and no caper too big to attempt.  Even now, a number of senior military officers are gaming how they will take the President out of office in January. They’re telegraphing it all, but they too will be exposed before much longer.  We have former generals leading disinformation campaigns, like Stanley McCrystal, using technology taken from DARPA! Incredibly, they’ve named the group “Defeat Disinfo” in an Orwellian twist.  Despite all that is arrayed against him, Donald Trump still fights. Why? Think of it. He’s fantastically wealthy? Being President is really a financial loser for him. It’s all downside. He doesn’t need power. The man owns his very own Boeing 757. Why then does he persist in the battle? Some would say “vanity,” but is that true? After all, if he were motivated by vanity alone, he’d have capitulated to the swamp just to get along, and to get them to talk nicely about him.  He’s not making any friends in the swamp, so why does he fight on?  Ladies and gentlemen, I believe Donald Trump is motivated by a deep and abiding love for the country in which he’s been able to make so much of himself.  I think he sees that he’s nearing the end of a long and successful life, and that if this country is to remain for his children and grandchildren all that it has been for him, he will have to see to it, because he knows the swamp has been wrecking it.

There can be no “perfect” presidents, any more than there can be a perfect man. Still, despite my various policy disagreements with Donald Trump, the one thing he and I share, despite our vastly different stations in life, is our abiding love of our country.  America is still a great place, despite all the left’s attempts to destroy it. Even as they scurry around the West coast, lighting fires to add to the misery of those states, they cannot overcome the greatness of America or the overwhelming goodness of her people. Because the worst of us must not be permitted to ruin the country or defeat the best of us, in just more than seven weeks, I will cast my vote happily to re-elect Donald Trump, not holding my nose, nor as a mere matter of self-defense, but because I believe he will fight like Hell to make America great again, again.  I believe he will do what he says, and not spend a second term selling us out, or giving over the administration to people who will make wreckage of all his earlier efforts.  That was Reagan’s biggest flaw, because by the middle of his second term, it was all Bushies running the show, and they made a wreck of it with their tax plans and their amnesty and all the rest of their betrayals. I don’t think Donald Trump will be inclined to let that happen in his second term, but more, I think he intends to restore justice in our country. If he accomplishes only that, he will have been a great president, but if he carries out all his promises, he will have been the greatest president of them all. And we will have bought ourselves a chance to save America, not for a term, but for a generation. After that, the rest will be up to us.

Ladies and gentlemen, the plot to wreck our country, steal an election, overthrow a President, and evade justice is well under way. If you would stand against all of that, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to vote in this election with the urgency of the blindfolded lady, laying aside her scales, and swinging with finality her judgment in the sword. We must have Justice. The treasons have been too many.  The betrayals have been too common. The corruptions have been too frequent.  Our own government is in insurrection against us and our president. Voting for Donald Trump on or before November 3rd, 2020, is the only way to put it right. For all of us.