Why I’m voting for Donald Trump for the first time

In 2016, I simply didn’t believe Trump was a conservative, and as a debt hawk whose vote didn’t really matter in the Indigo State CaliforniaI voted for the only general election candidate committed to rights reform: Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.

In 2020, I was pleasantly shocked by Trump’s tenure as president, who was otherwise conservative and ignored his refusal to reform entitlements, and the most successful foreign policy record of my lifetime. But Trump’s deference to the draconian and unelected executive bureaucracy during the coronavirus pandemic and his self-obsessed and terminally “too online” campaign didn’t exactly convince me that he wanted my vote, let alone that he had earned it. So I, then a resident of decidedly cerulean Washington, DC, spent 2020 stupidly, pathetically, and delusionally believing Joe Biden’s lie that he would at least try to restore the norms and decorum of a bygone era.

Instead, Biden blew up the fragile but peaceful geopolitical order carefully constructed by Trump, unlocked a secure border by executive fiat to welcome 10 million illegal immigrants around the world, and created the worst inflation crisis in four decades.

It is necessary to vote against a candidate for being worse than the alternative, but that is not enough. By objective measures, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s tenure has clearly been more disastrous than Trump’s. Real disposable income per capita has fallen by 4% in four years with Biden and Harris. In contrast, real disposable income per capita rose 12% under the Trump presidency, including an increase of 8.5% even excluding the pandemic. Trump has also neutered Iran, completely decimated the Islamic State, stifled Russia while empowering Ukraine, and set the stage for diplomatic and economic normalization between not only Israel and its Muslim neighbors, but also Serbia and Kosovo.

But this measurable success story isn’t really why I voted for Trump. It is necessary, but not entirely sufficient.

When Trump was accused of playing politics with Ukraine, Congress impeached him, and Trump ultimately released legally authorized funds to Ukraine in accordance with federal law. When Trump claimed he had actually won the 2020 election, a whopping 97% of Republican appointees to the federal judiciary voted against the legal challenges he and his allies brought to the 2020 results, and 83% of all votes of the Supreme Court on this issue were aimed at Trump and his associates.

In contrast, when the courts ruled against Biden and Harris’ attempt to buy votes with massive student debt forgiveness through executive fiat, Biden and Harris moved forward with little opposition from their own party. They were celebrated as Biden’s Justice Department launched criminal proceedings against Trump. And after rigging the Democratic presidential primaries to exclude challengers from the ballot, the party replaced the Democratic nominee with Harris, who has never won a single national primary in more than four years of campaigning for the top position.

And all along, the entire administrative state and national press corps have been cheering this charade. In other words, January 6 was a terrible day after two months of outrage that saw a massive shutdown by the federal judiciary amid Democrats’ multi-pronged efforts to manipulate 2024 through legal warfare, excluding challengers including Trump of ballot access, and an eleventh-hour bait-and-switch with a candidate none of us ever voted for is a four-year success.

I must say enough about that.

Combined with his opposition’s increasingly desperate and extreme attempts to retain power, Trump has never waged a more serious campaign that actually relied on to ask for my vote instead of demanding it. Harris, pretending she is not yet the sitting vice president of the United States, proudly shouts that “we are not going back,” but Trump promises to bring back at least some of the growth, strength and security of just half a decade to take. past. “Make America Great Again,” as a slogan, may have fallen a little flat after the relative banality of the Obama years and when Trump was an incumbent during the unprecedented chaos of COVID. But after four years of whatever this has been? Sign me up.

As a white, highly educated, working woman living in a suburb (technically in the Virginia half of the Washington metro), I am a member of the swing demographic that emerged from the neoconservatives’ security moms. to the forefront of the #Resistance. The Karen contingent, which Harris is betting on, will turn out to be a single-issue voting bloc obsessed with abortion, and will surely wonder how an apparent equality feminist could ever vote for a man who has said what Trump has said about women.

Putting aside the logical reasons to vote for Trump’s record and against the Democratic Party’s four-year plot to imprison Trump, silence reporting on Biden’s decline, and disenfranchise its own primary voters, vote I indeed like women.

It should be enough that I vote against the court hearing Harris has plagued and the elimination of the legislative filibuster she has promised. The most important issues for women should be restoring the stability and strength of the dollar and the private sector, resealing the southern border, and ending the catastrophic experiment that has been the multipolar world order, with America’s global leadership has been suspended. But just in case that’s not enough, I should explain who I mean when I say I vote for women.

I vote for Shani Louk, Amit Soussana and the countless other Israeli women whose bodies formed the basis of Hamas’s declaration of war on the world’s only Jewish state on October 7, 2023, a raid that would never have happened without Biden and Harris paying back the Iranian regime.

I vote for nearly 300 Ukrainian victims of sexual violence by Russian soldiers identified by the Ukrainian Attorney General since the start of the Russian war, a war that did not happen under Trump and would probably never have happened without Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the subsequent green light for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

I vote for the women and children destroyed by the transnational human trafficking crisis, welcomed by Biden and Harris’ opening of the US southern border. I am voting not only for our own women and girls murdered by illegal immigrants – Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin and Ruby Garcia, to name a few – but also for the unknown number of victims abused during the trek that has become industrialized and commodified for global access and advertised on social media. I vote for the 676 victims of sexual violence as I walk the dangerous Darien Gap treated by Doctors Without Borders in 2023, and I vote for the 328 treated in the first two months of this year alone.

I’m voting for Donald Trump because, whatever misgivings I may have about his deplorable rhetoric and personal foibles, my own pearls and fragile feelings matter far, far less than the lives and deaths of millions of citizens in Israel, which the Democrats would leave to the destruction of Hamas, even after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. My feelings are less important than the chance to quickly end the carnage in Ukraine, than the risk of nuclear escalation, than the 320,000 lost migrant children trafficked into the abyss of our own increasingly lawless soil, and then the threat of our dollar crisis. losing its reserve currency status to an axis of our enemies.

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I’m voting for Donald Trump because, unlike in 2020, I am no longer idiotic enough to believe that the Democratic nominee will maintain any of the guardrails that have proven successful in keeping both parties in check, and, unlike in 2020 , the Democratic candidate will no longer be guardrails. any longer pretending to respect these rules, a truly awful mask-off moment that cannot be rewarded with complacency, lest Democrats move from loading up the court to outright codifying their disdain for the third branch of government.

And unlike in 2020, the stakes are too high to gamble that Democrats won’t mess with the world’s economic engine and global stability too badly over the next four years. Unlike in 2020, Trump has laid out positive policy prescriptions for the multifaceted problems that have arisen over the past four years. I don’t agree with every proposal, nor will I stop being a bad team player and pointing friendly fire at my fellow conservatives when they deserve the criticism. But after surviving two assassination attempts and four criminal raids coordinated by his political opponents, Trump, should he become president again, will win with a resounding mandate to make America great again, in a way we never really needed in the 21st century. have had.