Fall 2020--The Unlikeliest Of Champions: Voting For The Republican Party Of Trump
We are now in the final stretch of the year 2020, and judging from the jokes my friends tell as well as the nonstop social media posts I see on platforms like Facebook, I think I am safe in assuming that many people feel glad about moving on from this particular moment in our shared history. Certainly, 2020 has been an incredible year, complete with world-changing and attitude-altering developments that have shaken many of us to our very cores, especially with regards to our relationships of trust and friendship with others in our lives. Concerns about this sort of thing definitely dominated my last post on this blog, and I willingly count myself among those who are still reeling from this past year's implications for our politics and culture, not the least of which is what some have already referred to as the worst pandemic of the last one hundred years. We have watched as a major political party came insanely close to nominating an outright socialist as its candidate for the presidential election taking place just a little over a week from now. The candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders was forestalled just in the nick of time by a Democratic Party leadership that, for a precious short moment, seemed to favor slightly more covert methods of forwarding their increasingly radical agenda. The eventual Democratic nominee for the White House, former vice president Joe Biden, is an empty vessel; he is a Trojan horse candidate being led about by radicals in his party who now control and dominate the Democratic agenda to a degree that should worry decent-minded people from all walks of life. As a party, the Democrats are asking the American people to ignore concerns for Joe Biden's mental capacities even while we stare his campaign's "unity" agreement with Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the face. Joe Biden is almost completely beholden to the Marxists who now have the initiative and momentum to dominate the Democratic Party. These Marxists seek to abandon the Electoral College, to open up our country to illegal aliens in ways that seriously undermine the virtues and sanctity of citizenship, and to finalize their hijacking of America's institutions through their increasingly aggressive use of "cancel culture." Joe Biden does not offer us what our country needs most right now: leadership in a time of increasing chaos.
It is my firm and unyielding belief that the Democratic Party of 2020 is controlled by some very dangerous people who are wedded to some very destructive and regressive ideologies; I earnestly seek to illuminate this viewpoint and to keep as many of my fellow Americans as possible from lending the Democrats more political power and influence than they already possess. From the very moment I first learned that Joe Biden was to be his party's candidate, something inside me squealed in quiet delight: initially, it seemed almost too easy for President Trump and the Republicans to run circles around candidate Biden, a seemingly tired and well-worn Democratic politician with a rather uninspiring electoral history. Biden ran behind others in the Democratic primary pack including Bernie Sanders, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, and former mayor Pete Buttigieg. At the time, the choice of Biden as their political champion indicated to me how very much the leftist takeover of the Democrats' party seemed to be weighing upon the party leaders who understood that the cultural momentum was not behind Biden and the liberal wing of the party, but the radical leftist wing manifested by leaders like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez as well as embarrassments like Senator Warren, who demonstrated a willingness to shapeshift without principled limits.
As time went on, however, I grew more and more concerned about President Trump's chances against the remarkably lazy and lackluster Joe Biden campaign. As we have all seen, race riots in major American cities and pandemics exported out of communist China tend to shake things up in ways very few of us can predict, and relying upon the reasonable attitudes of others has also proven to be of relatively limited value in an age when "cancel culture" is on the ascendance and big tech and legacy media crusades against those of a right-wing or libertarian persuasion have become the order of the day. Although my gut had long told me that the presidential election of 2020 is there for Trump and the Republicans to win or lose at their own discretion, the political and cultural insanity of 2020 has combined with the now-evident intelligent (desperate though I think it actually is) decision by Democrats to run an under-the-radar campaign using an uninspiring and allegedly nonthreatening Trojan horse like Joe Biden. What this means for November 3rd is anyone's guess.
What Joe Biden's very candidacy means for the country, however, has already been clarified. Regardless of his own personal record, Biden has now effectively signed on to most of the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez set of policy proposals. This is why we have been subjected to the most unusual sight of Joe Biden, a six-term senator who has represented the old guard of Democratic party leadership so sincerely that he once counted the upper crust elitist Ted Kennedy as one of his most important life mentors, telling bemused old-school Democrats all over the country that he is the most progressive presidential candidate in Democratic history. The selling power of a "progressive" Joe Biden would have been unheard of at the start of the Democratic primary season, but this is what happens when the Democratic Party seeks to have its cake and eat it too; it seeks to coopt the restless and at times violent energy of its leftist base even as it clings to the hope that it can also hold on to more traditional Democrats who are already in the habit of voting for kindly, old, and supposedly trusted politicians like Joe Biden who also, of course, have that all-important letter "D" marked after their names. With Joe Biden, the Democrats also hope to grab more than their usual share of independents as well as the stubborn "Never Trump" faction of Republicans, fickle and fractious though those two groups may be. For the Democrats, Joe Biden represents a calming face to campaign around, a face that stands in stark contrast to the pompous and bullying President Trump, whose personality and character persists in offending the sensibilities of so many voters.
The tragic truth about the Joe Biden candidacy is that behind the kindly old face likely lies nothing more than a quickly shrinking mental capacity and, most certainly, an emptying vacuum of political principles perfectly suited for manipulation by the cultural Marxists who now control the Democratic Party.
What do these cultural Marxists promise to deliver with the Harris-Biden (no typo there) presidential ticket? Mainstream Democratic politics haven't been this overtly radical and outright revolutionary since the late 1960s and early 1970s. With Barack Obama, the creeping leftism of the Democratic Party was exactly that: creeping. Effective and destructively transformative, yes...but creeping. With Bill Clinton, fresh off the economic boom and cultural reinvigoration of the 1980s, the Democrats were forced by circumstances to finally pay limited lip service to conservatism's triumph on issues ranging from low taxation, small government, and free markets. With Jimmy Carter, the Democrats ran a legitimately "good, old-fashioned Southern boy" who managed to wreck America's foreign policy through sheer ineptitude, but not necessarily from any allegiance on the part of Carter to hardcore leftism.
But with Joe Biden, the Democrats are giving us something far more dangerous just as it appears to be so relatively nonthreatening and even preferable to the crudely bombastic President Trump: they are giving us a presidential candidate with the kind face and ineptitude of Jimmy Carter, the supposedly moderate record of Bill Clinton, and first-hand experience with the "fundamental transformation" enacted while serving in the ranks of the Barack Obama presidency. Added to all of this is a leftist-dominated Democratic Party that hasn't been frothing this much at the mouth in anticipation of revolutionary change since perhaps 1968, another year of incredible urban violence in America. Indeed, in the words of commentator Conrad Black, "crime--especially violent crime--is rising sharply in most cities and the mainly Democratic city governments are hopeless and inert (e.g. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle)...in the meantime, it should sink in on the country that a vote for Biden is a vote for hardcore authoritarian socialism."
What gets so many radical Democrats up in arms these days? What is it that they want? To be a Democrat in 2020, one deserves to know that you stand with the party of open borders, of giving illegal residents full rights of access to the benefits offered by the United States' educational and welfare systems. To be a Democrat in 2020 means to support, to one extent or another, limitations on or outright seizures of private property with regards to gun ownership. It means standing with the party that endorses the notion that the federal government should be in charge of paying for "free" health care for millions upon millions of additional dependents, regardless of the federal budget's ability to take on such monumental costs in the long term. It means supporting tax increases, heightened levels of business regulation, and a more unionized workforce. To be a Democrat in 2020 means that you stand with the party that is racing headlong towards implementing the now-infamous Green New Deal agenda, a collection of policy proposals that include the banning of fossil fuel production and use, outlawing the use of gasoline-powered vehicles, and reducing Americans' consumption of beef products for the sake of a natural environment which, according to leftists, can no longer stand up against the threat of climate change instigated by massive herds of cattle passing gas. Apparently, Mother Nature can only handle so many thousands of years of animal flatulence.
To be a Democrat means to extend "loan forgiveness" to America's college students, students who will also be guaranteed a completely government-subsidized higher education if the party of "moderate" Joe Biden has its way. To be a Democrat is to tolerate, to one extent or another, the hypocrisy of your party leaders; as they seek to guarantee a free college education to millions of young adults, they seek with equal passion and enthusiasm to limit American families' choices to enroll their children in private, charter, or homeschool organizations. Democrats sustain this public education monopoly even though state school systems are both underperforming and over-unionized.
The modern Democratic Party proactively seeks to transform the United States of America into a pacifist, socialistic "democracy" that rejects its allegedly oppressive, capitalistic, elitist, Manifest Destiny past, and it has been seeking this without interruption since Barack Obama first took up residence in the White House back in 2009. The only thing that has changed since 2009 is the intensity of the radical wing of the party and its unwillingness to hide its revolutionary methods and motivations any longer. All of the Democratic politicians making the most noise right now, attracting most of their party's energy, are extremists in one way or another. They openly invalidate our society's need for police forces while failing to adequately condemn or even address, in some cases, the mob violence that has swept over our nation this past summer and continues to threaten the future domestic tranquility of our neighborhoods and communities.
If we are to believe the "moderate" Joe Biden when he claims to be the contemporary Democratic Party, we are left to assume that the Democrats seek to resurrect the disastrous Obama-era policy of empowering the militant Islamic theocracy in Iran in its quest for nuclear weapons, and they seek to do this in an international environment in which the United States military is yet again downsized and degraded. If the Democrats have their way, the national defense posture of our country won't be the only thing suffering from degradation; the American economy, the more favorable trade deals negotiated by the Trump administration, the resource extraction, energy production, and manufacturing jobs of millions of working citizens...all will greatly suffer from a Biden administration and accompanying Democrat Congress that will do nothing to protect American sovereignty or preeminence; all will be left behind as brutalized victims of a globalist-oriented leftist-liberal political elite that will wield the federal bureaucracy in an accelerated renewal of Barack Obama's "fundamental transformation" of our country. And this time, the gloves will be taken off. In the words of Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez herself, we will all be pressured to "radicalize" the way we think about our country. According to these leftist Democrats, we must radicalize the way we think about our past, giving the Democratic politicians who lord over us the power to take our tax dollars for the purposes of paying out race-based reparations for historical slavery. Our futures will also be radicalized as we are forced to watch those same tax dollars pay for abortions-on-demand for all comers who simply wish to shout their feminist bona fides and publicly demand societal affirmation for killing the unborn.
Before I explain myself, I really should make one thing perfectly clear: since 2016, the Republican Party has indeed become Trump's party. And while I did not vote for the man back in 2016 precisely because I feared his takeover of my preferred political party of choice, I have come to deeply regret my decision to abstain from supporting him. I have come to enthusiastically embrace the Trump agenda for our country, and I have rarely been so happy to have my worst expectations about a political figure proven wrong. The 2020 election has always been a referendum on Trump himself, and on his merits as a political champion for what is best for our country, I am happily planning on voting for our incumbent president.
In preparing for the upcoming election, we shouldn't ignore President Trump’s “uncouth authenticity” and wide appeal to those of us who are perfectly willing to put up with his bawdy and childish behavior even as he is busy slaying establishmentarian dragons for us. Nobody with a lick of sense would deny that President Trump has a venomous personality. This venom has always had an odd way of energizing Trump’s base, the core supporters who will not abandon him as long as he never reneges on his promises to address illegal immigration, trade injustices, job growth, and foreign policy challenges that previous presidential administrations have completely failed to confront. Trumpism, as a phenomenon, is about the many critical social, political, and cultural subtexts surrounding so many things that have been going wrong in the United States of America for the last thirty years. The outraged media, the Democratic opposition, and even the Republican establishment have all failed to appreciate these subtexts that make Trumpism such an unprecedented movement of the people. Trump’s enemies always seem to focus on the president’s ugly rhetoric and cruel, childish behavior. Meanwhile, his supporters have never forgotten or missed Trump’s tenacity at resurrecting the working class and bringing it what it has been unconsciously clamoring for for so many years: economic justice. Not social justice, but economic justice.
When conservatives argue for economic justice, we are not referring to the materialistic envy of Marxism. Instead, we reference all the abuses of creeping socialism the American people were forced to put up with for eight years of Barack Obama being in the White House. Although nothing could prepare us for the tidal wave that later on came in the form of Donald Trump's 2016 run for the White House, President Obama's abuses didn't go unnoticed or unopposed. By January of 2014, Obama and the Democrats had lost control of Congress to the Republicans. President Obama’s infamous response to this setback to the progressive agenda was to declare that he would act without waiting for Congress to legislate, making clear he would use executive orders to move the ball forward on progressive policy initiatives. He was especially aggressive with the way he put significant sections of the country off-limits to oil and gas exploration. He empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to effectively start creating its own legislation with the new regulatory powers he granted it. With Obamacare, he pushed the Democratic Party ever closer to its now obvious goal of nationalizing American health care. President Obama and the Democrats raised capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, and the top income tax rates. Obama’s tenure in office was characterized by job growth stagnation and redistributive government that more and more often sounded and felt like creeping socialism. Of all the economic downturns in American history, the bounceback after 2008 was one of the slowest and most disappointing, and the American working class eventually came to blame, correctly, Obama and the Democratic Party. Obama’s was the first two-term presidency in modern history to never achieve three percent growth in annualized GDP. Not much else could’ve been expected from a president who forbade capitalists from giving themselves bonuses, arrogantly told people when he thought they’d “made enough money,” and preached that economically successful individuals would be nothing without the help of the state.
How refreshing it therefore was when Donald Trump arrived on the national scene as a political campaigner who not only celebrated the private sector's generation of wealth as a well-earned success that not only blessed capitalists, but also the society in which they lived. Even though Donald Trump's enemies criticize his incessant reminders of just how very financially wealthy he is, what they fail to understand is that Trump supporters through the years have actually appreciated the implication of Trump's braggadocio: pursuing and achieving financial success is not a sin. After eight years of Barack Obama as president, many Americans on the political right had grown weary of sanctimonious politicians like Obama who habitually lectured Americans about being too materialistic and pursuing wealth far beyond limitations supposedly necessary for the greater good of society, and yet who had stealthily amassed great fortunes to their names while leveraging political power. Understanding President Trump's electoral success in 2016 requires understanding that for many Americans at that time, weariness with almost a decade of inauthentic leftist political corruption masquerading as proper presidential behavior and decorum had resulted in wide electoral support for Trump's iconic uncouth authenticity.
From the beginning of his foray into the world of politics, Donald Trump has broken all the old "rules" of political campaigning. In a manner that I wouldn't be surprised to learn leaves families like the Clintons and Kennedys completely baffled, Donald Trump is a political operator who actually plays up his relative lack of prior political experience, dispenses with large campaign staffs or micro-managing political handlers, and boasts of remaining relatively financially independent of traditional big political donors. To find support for this argument, all you have to do is look at the election of 2016; by the time he had been elected president, Donald Trump had not only defeated Hillary Clinton's veteran campaign team, but had done so despite being outspent by that campaign team by around half a billion dollars. He had come out on top in a presidential election despite an egregious record of exaggerating facts at almost every twist and turn of his campaign. The American people learned to cut Trump a great deal of slack in his exaggerations as long as they understood that through all his exaggerating, Trump was a candidate who managed to convey some unusually compelling truths about issues ranging from China's exploitative trade relationship with the rest of the world to the degrading state of America's nuclear arsenal.
On the subject of illegal immigration, Trump was refreshingly clear and bold: he would serve as a president who was actually and actively serious about cracking down on illicit border crossings, and his rhetoric about building a wall on our country's southern border and using taxes on Mexican nationals' remittances to Mexico to pay for it did nothing to dissuade his supporters from voting for him even as it enraged America's coastal and urban elites. His extreme-sounding language calling out the occasional poor quality of illegal immigrants who came through our southern border also infuriated the more cosmopolitan and allegedly cultured among us, but his words rang true and connected on a very emotional level with Americans like me who live in the Central Valley of California. We live with the heartbreaking and even tragically violent social problems of illegal immigration every single day of our lives.
On other issues, Trump continues to represent a refreshing change of direction for a country that to many of us has felt forsaken by the political class long before Democrats and Republicans started yelling at each other over who is more to blame for the coronavirus situation or the breakdown of law and order in our major cities. President Trump fights and wins trade wars with other countries that other politicians refuse to even acknowledge as the exploitative adversaries and rivals that they are. President Trump has fought for and reclaimed many of America's manufacturing jobs long assumed irredeemably lost by others in the professional political class. In my mind, it is an indisputable fact that President Trump wins more of our country's wars while also starting new wars less frequently than his immediate predecessors have. On the foreign policy front, President Trump and his son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, have accomplished more for Middle East peace than any American presidency in the previous fifty years, and President Trump has redefined America's approach to world diplomacy with a realistic dog-eat-dog mindset that most contemporary politicians foolishly decry as outmoded and inappropriate.
And on the subject of what is appropriate or not, I have to say here and now that if you pay any attention at all to the mainstream media in the United States, you might actually be tempted to see everything that is said or done by Donald Trump and his administration as inappropriate. I will be the first to admit that Trump's preposterous way of handling himself invites the easy scorn of a media elite that has revealed itself to be more and more leftist by the year; however, I have frankly been amazed at how irresponsible and willing news organizations and personalities have been to characterize President Trump as some sort of fascist dictator and destroyer of the republic simply for being a shrewd businessman who uses the art of exaggeration, verbal intimidation, and spun fantasies to get the better of his adversaries. In other words, I have been deeply disturbed at how eager the American media class has generally been to punish President Trump for committing the supposed sin of rejecting--even in his childish and petty ways--their failed narratives. I have also been disturbed to see how many of my fellow Americans think it's acceptable for our media organizations and personalities to act this way, to act out in the service of such an obvious and obsessive political crusade. On the subject of Donald Trump and what he represents for the United States, the media has gotten it wrong from the start because it refuses to accept what he accomplished in 2016: he coopted a major political party, shaped it along the lines of his own vision and agenda, demonstrated that he understood how to create a legitimate movement based upon middle class populism, and channeled a generation or more of pent-up conservative rage at our country's political status quo. From the start of Donald Trump's rise to power, this has been seen as a threat to not only the Democratic Party, but to political, cultural, social, media, academic, and bureaucratic elites on both sides of the aisle. They have invested themselves so completely in the Obama era "fundamental transformations" of our country that they no longer are even capable of understanding why "deplorables" and "bitter clingers" in "flyover country" would don Make America Great Again hats and vote for the frumpy reality TV star and billionaire playboy real estate mogul with the funny-looking hairdo.
Is it actually fair to say, like so many of his opponents insist, that President Trump's crudity is unprecedented? We all have to realize that Trump, like so many of us and those we claim to look up to, is in part a product of our modern media culture. Many past politicians and U.S. presidents have been just as crude as Trump, though perhaps far less forthcoming, open, and honest about their own bawdy presentations of themselves. These individuals have all had relatively disturbing skeletons in their closets, but they had the benefit of enjoying support from a sympathetic media willing to help conceal their more morally uncomfortable actions. Liberals and leftists go out of their way to excuse the atrocious personal behaviors of men like Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Bill Clinton because, according to liberal-leftist dogma, the universal and supposedly enlightening cause of progressivism is worth the sordid indiscretions of its sainted messengers. Conservatives have never been given the same fine treatment by liberal media elites, leftist street activists, or college dorm philosophers who obsess over every little Donald Trump imperfection they can detect. The point is not to downplay Trump's many and widely advertised character flaws and moral failings; conservatives like myself simply seek to remind others that a warped news media industry has built up a perpetually distorted viewpoint of our country's sitting president. When we judge U.S. presidents, we should keep the past and present in proper perspective as we compare Donald Trump to previous national leaders who have had their own moral failings while additionally failing to achieve the kinds of historic successes for our country that President Trump has.
In terms of historic success, President Trump has done more good for this country than perhaps any other president since the time of Ronald Reagan. Certainly, if you believe in conservatism as a belief system that brings fulfillment to the principles of the United States' founding, you should embrace President Trump as your champion, imperfect though he is. Think of the legacy he will leave behind for conservatism even after his time in office will come to an end: no matter how much his tawdry behavior annoys you, how can you deny that his judicial picks for the Supreme Court have been excellent conservative choices that will help protect Constitutional originalism for years into the future? How can you deny that he has resurrected and revitalized the traditional conservative argument that lower and simpler taxes combined with eased regulations can and will bring about robust economic turnarounds? And if his crafty yet blustery approach to achieving long-term conservative imprints on the nation's future development still bothers you, would you at least be willing to admit that the rough-and-tumble Trump has proven capable of securing victories that someone like the perfectly-behaved Mitt Romney would never aspire to?
I myself never expected Donald Trump to fulfill his role as our president in the ways he actually advertised. It has been so nice to have as our leader a man who actually means what he says and follows through with his stated goals. As I have paid attention these last four years, I have witnessed as he has attempted at every turn to fulfill his campaign promises and to govern as an unexpected but long-sought-after conservative. Donald Trump has reassured me that a Washington outsider can still accomplish great good in our nation's capital, and his election in 2016 came as a mind-blowing relief to me that a man with no prior political or military experience can still be elected to the highest office in the land, even in the face of bureaucratic corruption and administrative abuses of power. Trump has crafted a middle class populist movement like nothing I have ever heard of before, at least not since the birth of the progressive movement a century ago, and the president's electric bond with his conservative supporters is stunning, heartfelt, and heartwarming. Trump has willingly offered himself up as a defender of the middle class against cultural threats from both Hollywood and academia; in an environment in which conservative Christians are told by leftists that America has, on the balance, a horrible and oppressive history, that white people are inherently racist, and that Christians are hopelessly hateful bigots and sexists, Trump has stood up for religious freedom and for commonsense alternatives to critical race theory and cancel culture. He has stood up for freedom of speech on college campuses, daring the indignation of intolerant and un-American leftist ideologues who fear losing their domination over popular culture. As one commentator recently put it: "no prominent public official has stood athwart this fraudulent, toxic narrative" like Donald Trump has, and no other "Republican president would have had the guts to stand against this high tide of political correctness and challenge the left's divisive ideas" by banning federal sensitivity training. "Trump has given freedom-loving patriots a voice, and they will never forget it. Despite efforts to portray him as a carnival barker, he has proven his sincerity on the things that matter to his supporters. They see his genuine love for America and his steadfast commitment to their shared agenda." Trump has kept his campaign promises, and he has produced results: "on the economy, rebuilding the military, defending life and religious liberty, his stellar judicial appointments, his restoration of America's energy independence (which Biden wants to reverse through his quixotically reckless promise to eliminate fossil fuels) and his decisive rejection of the Democrats' nationally suicidal Green New Deal agenda. Indeed, Trump has vigorously resisted enormous pressure from radical environmentalists to surrender our sovereignty to international bodies guided by pseudo-science and a Marxist worldview, hellbent on returning us to the horse and buggy. He has also kept his promise to secure more favorable trade deals for the United States," and he has "studiously protected American manufacturing jobs, which is not lost on American workers. Unlike his predecessors, he honored his promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Granted, some single-issue border-enforcement Trump supporters were frustrated for a time when he was unable to secure Democratic approval for even modest improvements to the southern border wall. But despite gratuitous Democratic obstruction, Trump is proceeding with the wall and has made substantial progress. Though the Democrats and media have savaged this president every day for four years, falsely accused him of unspeakable acts, mounted ceaseless investigations and impeachment proceedings against him, and given him no favorable coverage, he remains undaunted and presses forward."
If these successes aren't enough for you, I don't know what else could possibly convince you of the value of a continued Trump presidency. If you are a conservative and you believe that Donald Trump's endlessly melodramatic lifestyle only hurts conservatism's larger message, I would ask you to reread the first ten paragraphs of this blog post; I would ask you to reconsider the notion that one man's lifestyle and interpersonal approach--even a man as high-profile as the sitting president of the United States--is enough to make you abandon the very real national push for conservative values that Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign stands for. As someone who did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016, I would ask you to support Donald Trump in 2020 and thus avoid the regret I feel for not having supported him earlier on.
I would also ask you to reconsider how you view the media's take on the Trump presidency. In general, the national news media has entirely failed us. The media has been unable or unwilling to explain to us why the immoralities while in office of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton are not the stains on their presidencies in the same ways that Trump's prior immoralities are supposed to be on his. Why is it that we are supposed to be shocked and outraged at the things Trump did with or said about women when we are cognizant of the fact that even someone like President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the picture of Washingtonian high breeding and good public behavior, was possibly guilty of extramarital affairs of shocking insensitivity? The issue we Trump supporters have isn't a question about Donald Trump's obvious and acknowledged moral weaknesses, but rather the double standard to which he is constantly and unfairly held.
Recently, I've noticed that a lot of otherwise good people in my life have continuously found themselves getting caught up by President Trump's less-than-admirable rhetoric and behavior. These people have publicly come out against voting for President Trump, usually citing the way he makes them feel badly about his "unpresidential" behavior. I am truly sorry for these people, especially because I used to be one of them; I know what they are feeling, but all the same, I wish I could help them understand that their misgivings about President Trump's personality traits do not in any way invalidate the greater issues at stake in this election. We now live in truly unprecedented times of societal peril not seen since perhaps the Civil War, and more than ever good people who believe, consciously or not, in the innate greatness of America's historical legacy and heritage need to unite around a politician like Trump who fights so hard for conservative policy victories. The "never Trump" camp needs to put its worries and fears about President Trump, stoked as they are by an irrational and partisan crusading media, to the sidelines. Really, really smart people I know and respect have informed me that they truly believe that Donald Trump is the greatest contemporary threat to American democracy, that he represents a budding American fascism comparable to the historical fascisms of Mussolini and Hitler, that he is truly corrupt and in bed with Russian oligarchs, that he is singularly stoking fears and divisions and hatreds among the American people, and that he is the central focus of all that is wrong with American politics in our modern era. In my firm and unyielding opinion, all of these fears range from highly suspect to utterly ridiculous. As for the honest conservative's objections to Trump's roughshod personality, all I can do is encourage them to think carefully about what is more important in the immediate here and now: a president like Trump who insults and belittles others on an almost hourly basis, or a political party taking power at the national level of our government and drastically expanding access to abortions-on-demand, intensifying our federal government's onetime obsession with all things climate change, declaring a practical war on police forces all over the country, raising taxes and increasing regulations, cutting back our military's strength, empowering the morally confused transgender political lobby, and engaging in a historic campaign of racism and race-baiting that will reverse our nation's progress on equality before the law back to a state reminiscent of pre-1960s America?
Never Trumpers have always failed to address the most important issue for many Republican voters: if not Trump's Republican Party, what of the alternative? We who support the president pointedly ask: is not putting up with Trump as the leader of our party and country a small price to pay for keeping the "fundamental transformations" of the Obama era at bay? Isn't it worth it to have a brawler like Trump in the White House, especially considering that he has a way of rallying Republican senators and representatives to the cause, especially when he has proven to do such a fine job of nominating an excellent set of originalist judicial appointments to the Supreme Court? Do Never Trumpers wish to abandon Trump's aggressive iteration of Republican politics for strategies of figures like Mitt Romney and John McCain, which often seem to boil down to little more than the humorous yet pathetically empty catchphrase, "lose with honor"? Republican politicians like Romney, like McCain, and even to a certain extent like George W. Bush, have had mixed allegiances to conservatism, and that is putting it mildly; these figures, for all their moral virtues, have failed in big ways to unite Americans around common sense conservative policy projects, especially projects that could excite the key battleground Midwestern states that were key to Ronald Reagan's electoral successes in the 1980s and certainly to the Donald Trump wave of 2016. In 2020, Republicans who fail to support Donald Trump are making a grave mistake. They are allowing their lost perspective on the things that really matter in national politics to paint an unfair picture of President Trump, a politician and leader who has worked hard and moved fast to pursue many of the same policies that Never Trumpers have been advocating for for years, but have failed to actually put into practice.
For those who still worry about Donald Trump's alleged corruption and lawbreaking, I don't know if there is anything I can say or do to convince you that Trump has been the unfair target of one of the longest and most disturbingly immoral conspiracies ever launched against a sitting U.S. president. We conservatives who talk about the "deep state" are not empty-headed conspiracy-mongers when we express our perspectives on the sinister fourth branch of government and its unconstitutional power-hold over almost every level of American state power. The Mueller investigation was originally tasked with looking into potential collusion efforts between the Trump campaign team of 2016 and Vladimir Putin's Russia. Over the course of the investigation, however, it became clear that the entire effort had strayed from its original goals and had become an entirely partisan political attack on Donald Trump's character, seeking to expose the president's more outrageous behaviors and eccentricities of leadership style. The seemingly never-ending investigation certainly served the aims of leftist "resistance" fighters who sought to keep Trump's polling numbers low over the issue of constant administration leaks from those who are part of the "deep state," which simply acts as a stand-in term for all those federal bureaucrats and administrators who have, through the years, become indoctrinated by leftist-oriented statist ideology. Together with the mainstream media, the administrative state has waged an almost five-year crusade against Trump, his family, and his closest friends, advisors, and associates; the goals of this crusade have always been obvious and shallow: to hopefully stumble upon a bombshell of criminal indictment against President Trump, to distract the American people from the very real and substantive successes and victories of the Trump administration, and to delegitimize the Trump presidency to the extent that Americans would even lose confidence in the legal standing of a White House occupied by the Trumps. A legion of officials and operatives in federal government have led the charge against Trump through the years, and it has taken a lengthy amount of time for these partisans to be fired, demoted, and revealed to have been corrupt or even criminal in their treatment of Trump and his government.
The exhaustive efforts to delegitimize him and his agenda at every turn, the unending and unjust attitude of media operatives who make destroying Trump their personal and professional obsessions, and the chillingly frightening monopoly of control that liberals and leftists have over educational institutions and technology companies have all combined to make President Donald J. Trump the most unlikeliest yet legitimate of conservative heroes.
The very idea that Donald Trump could be anyone's hero may appall half the country, but nonetheless, Trump has become one for people like me...people who have been told for years that we are racists, that we are sexists, that we are "bitter clingers" and "deplorables" who don't have a clue about what it means to be modern or cosmopolitan. Indeed, for many of us Trump supporters, his non-traditional approach to politics is a form of middle-class populism that comes off as both refreshing and desperately necessary for the troubled times we are living through. One way of squaring Trump’s personal excesses with his accomplishments is to understand that his non-presidential behavior may have been what was actually necessary for bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy. President Trump is the perfect example of the unstable, brooding, yet totally indispensable and tragic hero who is self-absorbed, loyal only to his group and reciprocating loyalist friends. Trump's forte is not discourse but disruption, and for those of us who have felt truly left behind by the political class for the last decade or so, Trump arriving like a bull in a china shop is exactly what this country needed back in 2016 and still needs today in 2020. President Trump is intolerable for many people because he is out-of-touch with the social niceties of politics, but for us conservatives, his usefulness is abundantly clear. As one of my favorite college professors, Victor Davis Hanson, has said, throughout American history the threatened political establishment has always expressed embarrassment that it had to stoop to using figures like George S. Patton and Curtis LeMay to find salvation through anti-establishment methods that end up being the only ways to deal with real-world problems like Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. In President Trump’s case, crises ranging from deep state corruption to international outlaws and pariahs like Kim Jong-un and Iran’s theocratic Muslim radicals necessitate Trump's unconventional approach. On the cultural front, in a climate where simple realisms like gender are no longer matters of common public agreement, Trump's brash refusals to bow down before those who insist upon political correctness, intellectual race-baiting, and altered definitions of personal identities seized upon through brutal and hateful applications of "cancel culture" all come as refreshing breaths of fresh air. Ultimately, Donald Trump may join the company of Patton and LeMay in the annals of American history; like them, Trump will likely never be properly thanked or appreciated by those who most directly benefited from his unconventional tactics and timely eccentricities.
--Christopher Peterson, October 24th, 2020
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