The Case for Trump

or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the bad orange man

On the threshold of election 2024, I put forward my three vital reasons for voting for Trump.  When you view the choice with these three critical filters, despite Trump’s drawbacks, the choice is very clear.

The Three C’s.  Competence, Candlepower and the Constitution

These are the three C’s of civilization.   Despite the attempts to break with the Biden administration, Harris has been unable to articulate how she would be different from the current regime.  And we’ve seen the sheer incompetence of the Biden team.  I defy you to identify a single high ranking individual on the current team that I can objectively say is truly competent. Pete  Buttigieg?  His tenure at Transportation has been filled with train derailments and airliner near misses.  Jennifer Granholm at Energy has no background in energy and she laughed off concerns about high oil prices, draining off the strategic petroleum reserve.   Antony Blinken?  Perhaps the worst Secretary of State in history as he sat staring at the Chinese delegation in their first meeting as the Chinese berated and abused him.  His hapless and fruitless insistence on a “two state solution”  for Palestine has been ignored by the Israelis.  There is not one official in this administration that is supremely competent and Kamala promises more of the same with the likes of hyperpartisan radical Keith Ellison as attorney general.

In contrast, a second Trump term brings a great deal of intellectual heft and ability and will be better than the first Trump administration.     Elon Musk. Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr. and his VP selection J.D. Vance are all of high intellectual ability.   Harris and Walz themselves have been on full display since the summer and neither is in the same league with any of the people behind Trump.   J.D. Vance’s debate with Tim Walz was so one-sided that even partisans began to feel badly for Walz.   A debate with Vivek Ramaswamy would have had a similar outcome.  We have serious issues facing us and we need as much competence and candlepower as we can muster.   Having learned from some self-admitted bad hires in his first term, Trump brings people of real ability to the table.  Scott Adams has termed this collection as a “second founding,” and represents the greatest collection of minds since the Founding.

Our founding documents must be protected and fortified.   The Biden/Harris administration has repeatedly flouted, circumvented, and bent the Constitution to fit their agenda, and the signals from the Harris camp indicated that they will go even further with a Harris presidency.   Biden/Harris brushed off the Supreme Court and has forgiven student debt in thousands of instances anyway.   It rewrote Title IX, giving the force of law to the utter destruction of women’s only spaces and other changes to our society without a debate or taking it through Congress.  Harris just proposed a forgivable loan program that would be available to Blacks only- clearly unconstitutional. The Harris/Walz team has vocalized contempt for the 1^st and 2^nd Amendments, as Harris has openly talked about a “mandatory gun buyback.”   Walz recently asserted that the First Amendment doesn’t protect hate speech or misinformation.   It does, and someone that has such a poor understanding of the Constitution shouldn’t be anywhere near the controls of government, much less a heartbeat away from the presidency.  Team Harris considers the Constitution an annoyance and all of her team’s body language tells us that she is willing to circumvent, if not shred it at every turn.   None of this even considers the abuse of the FISA Court, the abuse of the judicial system to indict Trump, the payment from the IRS to Facebook to suppress free speech or the attempt by the DOJ to establish a “Ministry of Information” until it was ridiculed out of existence. 

Despite all of the shrill calls of Trump as a fascist, as Hitler, a dictator, and on and on, Trump has nearly always respected the Constitution and federalism.  His bump stock ban should have gone through Congress, but other than that one minor exception of action through executive order, it’s hard to find instances where he ran roughshod over the Constitution.   During the pandemic, he let individual states determine their own restrictions.   And despite the fuss about Jan. 6, he did relinquish power.   If your choice is over who will be more likely to uphold the Constitution, the choice is pretty clear.

DEI

I consider the unwinding of DEI of prime importance to the Republic.  Some say that DEI stands for Didn’t Earn It.   I say it stands for Destroys Every Institution.  DEI has a corrosive effect on all of our vital structures.  It conveys advantage to underqualified individuals and gives others a free pass to others for failure or bad behavior.  It eats away at all our institutions like termites or mold in a building.  Government has allowed it to leach into all of its activities and departments.   DEI statements are required to get government research funds.  It lowers qualifying standards in everything from college admissions to exams for public safety employees.  It is inextricably linked to the rank antisemitism that has gripped much of the Western world.  The Biden administratioon institutionalized it at the highest level when he said that he would only consider a Black woman for the vacated seat on the Supreme Court.  With Black female lawyers comprising only 2.28% of all lawyers, it would be a statistical improbability that KJP was the best choice available, yet DEI prevailed.  Harris herself personifies DEI.   Singularly unaccomplished and inarticulate, she would not be in the game but for her racial identity and gender.

DEI played a role in the rewrite of Title IX to make it more “inclusive,”   but it is most dangerous in places in which physical prowess is linked to security, like the military.  It almost certainly has played a role in our military services falling 45,000 short of recruits.  If you’re a white male,  why put your life on the line when you will actively be discriminated against for promotions and leadership opportunities?

Perhaps no one personifies the corrosiveness of DEI more than former Harvard president Claudine Gay?   Upon examination of her background, she was woefully short of the publications that are normally seen on the cv’s of applicants for jobs at similarly situated institutions.  Moreover, she was discovered to have plagiarized parts of her publications.  While she was pressured to step down as president, she still receives her $900K salary, so she has not suffered any financial accountability for her theft of intellectual work.  And that is the twin hazard of DEI.  You obtain a position that would normally unavailable to you but for your skin color, and you escape consequences for bad decisions or bad acts.  As government mandated DEI tightens its grip in the vast government labyrinth, like a python around its prey, its function declines.   It becomes really scary and deadly in places like the military, where the feckless Mark Milley infamously stated that he needed to understand “white rage” and began a program that required the reading of Ibram X. Kendi.   A fighting force that must be cohesive to win cannot allow splintering by gender and racial identity.  The “full stop” ordered to purge “extremists” ordered by Lloyd Austin turned up nothing.  Zero.  A Trump administration would begin to unwind this destructive trend, starting with the military—a military that is currently short of the manpower and infrastructure needed to face the multiple challenges we face.  He would rightfully place a higher priority on merit and social cohesion.

Sovereignty and Foreign Policy. 

Shani Louk and Laken Riley lived some 6,400 miles apart but they had something in common.  Their states failed them.  Young, beautiful, spirited, and full of life, their lives were mercilessly cut down by foreign invaders in their territory, like marauding Huns of a couple thousand years ago.  Shani was among the hundreds murdered in the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival last October.  Laken had her head bashed in by an illegal immigrant in Georgia.  In both cases, their governments failed them in its primary task—to protect its young.  Please Google their images and let your blood boil over their avoidable loss.

The difference in the reaction to the murders between these two countries pretty stark.  Israel has responded by dismantling Hamas, ignoring Biden administration admonitions to attempt a ceasefire and refrain from going into Rafah.  Tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced from northern Israel due to the rocket attacks from Hezbollah and the IDF has commenced wrecking Hezbollah, killing its leader and wiping out much of its top leadership.  It has even hit the source, the “head of the snake” and destroyed its spanking new Russian S-300 air defense system.  Israel has shown that it means business when it comes to defending its sovereignty.

In contrast, Biden/Harris has shown little interest in defending the sovereignty of the U.S.  The death of Laken Riley (and others like her) at the hands of illegal immigrants triggered little more than a shoulder shrug from the administration.  Border Czar Harris now asserts that she will deport people but had not done anything substantive for 3 ½ years to stem the invasion.  The Chinese spy balloon that traversed the skies a couple of years ago was a stunning display of the administration’s unwillingness to defend our borders.   One hundred thousand fentanyl deaths a year in the U.S. also gets a muted response from Biden/Harris.  Again, there is no articulated plan to address this grim situation head on.  We know that the precursor chemicals originate in China, yet nothing serious has been done to get the attention of the CCP.  With nearly 300,000,000 Chinese students being educated here, it would be worth considering Scott Adams’s notion to ship one student back for every fentanyl death we suffer.  It’s yet another area in which the Biden/Harris foreign policy has failed to protect its citizens.

Israel slipped up but then stepped up.  The U.S. still continues to permit a flood of illegal, unskilled and unvetted into the country, and gives them food, housing, and health care.

There is every indication that a Harris administration would not.

It is in this dimension that the strongest case for Trump exists.  Historian Niall Ferguson said, “I have to tell you, the foreign policy of the Biden/Harris administration is what got us into this mess.  We lost deterrence January, 2021 and the only way to get it back, it seems to me, is to throw these bums out.”  Victor Davis Hanson has echoed these sentiments about deterrence.  British Colonel Richard Kemp stated that Trump’s unpredictability was a strategic advantage because adversaries were never sure what he would do.   In contrast, the Biden/Harris administration has permitted hundreds of attacks on our ships in the Red Sea without a response.  U.S. troops in Iraq were injured in an attack last spring.  Again, there was no response. 

A common attack on Trump is that he is unpredictable and offends needed allies.  But the unpredictability is a strategic advantage, a view echoed by British Colonel Richard Kemp.  Adversaries that are never quite sure what he will do are deterred.   The surgical hit on Soleimani sure quieted Iran down for awhile.  In contrast, Biden/Harris granted sanctions waivers EVEN AFTER 10/7.   And as to the topic of our relationship with allies, Biden/Harris initially talked a good game after 10/7, then quickly pivoted to pressuring Israel not to go into Gaza or Lebanon, began to slow walk aid, and have pressured the Israelis into accepting various deals with Hamas that Hamas has rejected, all without a word about our own hostages caught up in this.   The abandonment of our allies in the cut and run in Afghanistan was unconscionable, with Jake Sullivan looking right into the camera asserting that he didn’t see any chaos.   Right.

The Biden/Harris treatment of international agreements is another area of sovereignty forfeiture.  They are all too eager to sign on to the Paris climate agreement, obligating the U.S. to certain mandates, while exempting the Chinese.  Even worse has been the negotiation with the WHO, effectively giving the WHO power over how the U.S. would respond to global pandemics like COVID.  That agreement has dragged on but that it is even on the table is frightening.  Trump, on the other hand, stopped U.S. funding for the WHO.

Biden/Harris have demonstrated over and over that they are not capable of defending our sovereignty, even when it comes to our own territorial integrity.  Donald Trump will defend our sovereignty, and that to me makes his obvious flaws—his vanity, ham-fistedness, crudity—seem trivial in comparison.  HR McMaster, no devotee to Donald Trump, stated in his book, At War With Ourselves, “His penchant for saying whatever was on his mind with no filter was, at times, jarring, but it was also sometimes effective.  Heads of state were unaccustomed to unambiguous language, and some found Trump’s directness refreshing.”   He has often referred to Trump as a “disrupter.”  There are times in history when things need to be disrupted.   Now is that time.

And if you don’t buy my pitch, I implore you to listen to the case brought by clear-thinking former Democrats – Bill Ackman (Triggernometry #33), Maud Maron (Honestly Oct 15), Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (Dark Horse Podcast #249). I urge you to listen to the podcasts referenced in parentheses for each of their respective rationales for turning to Trump.