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BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN OCT 31, 2020 8:18 PM ET
On May 11, 2016, I endorsed Donald Trump for president, under the headline, “In Alien vs. Predator, I’m for Predator, Because He’s OUR Predator.” Trump had just secured the nomination from his last Republican competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz (on whose foreign policy team I served). Many of my Republican friends (now ex-friends) balked. I voted for Trump in 2016 and mailed in my ballot for Trump two weeks ago. I’ve criticized our president on many issues but never have I had cause to regret my 2016 vote. If the last election was Alien vs. Predator, this one is Predator vs. Zombie. I’m still for Predator.
If you’re still on the fence, please consider the following.
First: There is a Deep State that abused the credibility of America’s Intelligence Community to overturn a free and fair presidential election. If you don’t believe me, listen to what left-liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald told Tucker Carlson last week. Greenwald brought out the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency spying on American citizens. He has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. Deep State for years, and he now warns about a dirty alliance between the spooks and the progressive Left. The whole “Russia collusion” scandal was concocted out of thin air in order to bring down a presidency. If a handful of self-appointed officials in cahoots with the liberal elite can destroy a presidency, your democratic rights are toilet paper.
Second: The grudge that the Deep State bears against Trump arises from Trump’s opposition to “endless wars.” The people running our Intelligence Community got their jobs through endless wars, and a careful look at how the covert side of this war was conducted would ruin a lot of careers, and worse. When Trump dissented from the Bush-Romney-McCain wing of the party over the Iraq war, he became anathema. Trump’s position has the overwhelming support of the American people. I don’t care what you think of him: He stood down a mutiny by a cabal of spooks determined to thwart the will of the people as expressed in a fair election.
Third: Trump’s “America First” foreign policy achieved tangible results, bringing about a new set of peace deals in the Middle East that the establishment thought impossible. As I wrote earlier this month at "The American Mind":
Some will argue that President Trump’s record of success is mixed, and that he might have handled some situations better.
But three things should be clear from the past three years of governance. First, “America First” reflects a vision for U.S. foreign policy, not a retread of isolationism. Second, the vision has produced some tangible successes. And third, although the Trump Administration’s record in foreign policy is imperfect, it has real accomplishments to show, in marked contrast to the disastrous performance of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations.
I do not write as a Trump apologist, although I supported him in 2016 and support him in the current presidential race. In particular I have been critical of his approach to China. Nonetheless, Trump’s record is vastly superior to the “Blame America First” stance of his predecessor, and to the utopian interventionism of the preceding Republican president.
Moving America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem didn’t produce a backlash on the “Arab street,” as the establishment warned. On the contrary: It told the Arabs that Israel is here to stay, and encouraged the UAE, Bahrein and Sudan to normalize relations with the Jewish State.
Fourth: Trump brought about real improvements in the economy, despite the setbacks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The corporate tax cut of 2018 had flaws, but the combination of lower tax cuts and deregulation encouraged American entrepreneurs to take risks, hire up and produce. That represented a vast improvement over the anti-business climate of the Obama years, which favored Big Tech and Wall Street, but no-one else.
Fifth: Trump has done a great job of selecting justices for the Supreme Court, our last defense against radical social engineering. In his last year in office, remember, Obama’s Education Department sent warnings to American schools that they would lose funding if they didn’t let boys-who-think-they’re-girls use the girls’ bathroom. The progressive agenda seeks nothing less than the erasure of the traditional concept of the family. A small but well-organized minority entrenched in American universities is attempting to impose social policies on Americans–including religious organizations–that most Americans find abhorrent if not insane.
Sixth: The Democratic Party refuses to stand up to the violent radicals in its own ranks. Democratic city governments allowed rioters to loot and burn; the Minneapolis city government evacuated its Third Precinct rather than defend it from rioters who then burned it. Biden and Harris are pandering to criminality. Here’s what Kamala Harris said after Philadelphia police officers shot a man closing on on them with a knife in his hand.
Our hearts are broken for the family of Walter Wallace Jr., and for all those suffering the emotional weight of learning about another Black life in America lost. We cannot accept that in this country a mental health crisis ends in death. It makes the shock and grief and violence of yesterday’s shooting that much more painful, especially for a community that has already endured so much trauma. Walter Wallace’s life, like too many others, was a Black life that mattered — to his mother, to his family, to his community, to all of us.
The police in this case did what every policeman in the United States is trained to do, but Harris blamed the cops.
I know all the arguments to the contrary: Biden, and Harris, if Biden doesn’t make it through his first term, supposedly are centrists who will control the radicals in their party. It doesn’t work that way. As Talleyrand said, you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. This is today’s Democratic Party — it isn’t the party of Clinton, let alone JFK or Truman or Roosevelt. Biden will be beholden to the radical wing of the party, which uses violence in the streets to force its agenda.
And I know all the objections to Trump. Biden’s recurring complaint is that the president didn’t handle the COVID-19 pandemic well. Does anyone really think the Democrats would have done better? Is there a single thing that Biden said in the first months of the pandemic that indicated that he had a plan? Would he have done better than Britain’s Boris Johnson or France’s Emmanuel Macron, who are locking their countries down again? GIVE ME A BREAK.
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