Why I am Voting for Trump and You Should Too

"There are no solutions, only tradeoffs." Thomas Sowell

We are now 22 days away from one of the, if not the, most momentous presidential elections in my lifetime. It is unprecedented on several levels. Never has an incumbent president seeking re-election been so unceremoniously ushered out of the way as Biden was and replaced by their vice-president before the convention and without so much as a single primary vote being cast for them. Harris made a bid for president back in 2020 and could not rise above single digits in approval. She folded her tent before the primaries. She became vice-president because Biden made gender and race his primary determinants in a running mate.  

Until her elevation to the role of democratic presidential candidate, Harris was best known as a hard-left ideologue, voted the most left-leaning in the Senate. She remained almost invisible the past three years and was best known for her incoherent ramblings, non-sequiturs, and cackling laugh, often at inappropriate moments. Through the magic of modern political legerdemain, her past has been erased and she is presented by the democratic machine as a moderate, the most qualified candidate ever, and the savior of democracy against the dreaded Trump.

The Trump vs Harris election is arguably the most fractious campaign of modern times and one which pundits have billed as a referendum on our nation and democracy itself. Both sides have accused the other of being a threat to democracy with the democratic machine pushing this narrative for all it is worth.

Both candidates have records that are easy to access, including stints in the White House. Let’s see how they fared. Harris first.

Explicitly selected primarily for her gender and race, Harris has largely been a ghost. Dubbed the “Border Czar” by Biden, she never made a visit to the southern border and when queried about this said, “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t … understand the point that you’re making.” Harris has claimed to have been in on every major decision as Biden’s VP and she said she would change nothing Biden has done, so she has to take her share of the blame/credit for such failures as the debacle of  the Afghanistan withdrawal leaving 13 servicemen dead, scores of dead Afghan loyalists, and $7 billion dollars in military hardware, not to mention the most advanced base in the Middle East. A strong argument can be made that this enabled Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasingly aggressive moves in the Pacific. Biden reversed all of Trump’s action on the border in his first day in office allowing a wave of more than ten million unvetted illegals to enter and provided them with assistance not available to American citizens. Kamala has pushed to defund the police, offered to raise bail for rioters from the George Floyd riots, wants to pay for gender-affirming surgery for prisoners and illegal immigrants, and seeks to eliminate private insurance. Along with Biden, she seeks to force Israel to the bargaining table with Hamas while it is engaged in a battle for its very survival against Iran and its proxies. She asks for Israel to respond proportionately to hundreds of unprovoked missile attacks and not attack Iran’s nuclear facilities when she and all the world know that Iran is committed to building a nuclear weapon and equally committed to the extinction of Israel. Kamala has billed herself as the change candidate but is consistently vague on just what she means by this. One of her campaign promises is to build an “opportunity economy” to include such things as rent control (a disaster wherever tried), price controls (same), and federal funding for downpayments on housing for those who cannot otherwise afford them. The latter, if you recall, gave us the housing crash of 2007 that wiped out trillions in savings for Americans.

Now Trump. Billed as a serial molester, criminal (before any indictments), loser in the 2016 election (by Hillary Clinton), and generally horrible human being, his win in the electoral college sent shock waves through the establishment. Rashida Talib (D-MI) danced in the House chamber immediately after the election saying, “Impeach the motherf*cker!” Trump was almost immediately subjected to an impeachment based entirely on a fraudulent dossier by a foreign national paid for by the Clinton campaign, which was used to obtain FISA warrants from the FBI. It took over 2 years and over $32M before the Mueller investigation declared that no Russian collusion had occurred, despite Attorney General William Barr’s odd, ambiguous summary. No one was ever held liable for this hoax.  Trump made missteps in his early appointments, including to his cabinet. His early days were undeniably chaotic and characterized by much staff turnover, but over time settled down to a functioning administration. Despite fears that he would be a loose cannon at home and abroad, his administration was surprisingly moderate and most of his policies were supported by more than half of the population including, border security, tax relief, bringing manufacturing back to the US, standing up to China on unfair practices, support for Israel, and making the US energy independent for the first time in 70 years.

Two things kept Trump from handily winning a second term: the Covid pandemic and the FBI’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. In the former, an unprecedented pandemic undid nearly all of Trump’s gains in employment and economic growth, in large part because he followed the advice of his head of the Covid task force, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Many of Fauci’s policies have been proven to have been either not helpful or actually detrimental to the country. Many polls have shown that a large percentage of voters were swayed by the claim that the laptop was Russian disinformation when, in fact, it was real. 51 past and present national security personnel signed off on a letter attesting that it was fake when it was known to be real. This alone could have cost Trump the election. This possible deliberate election interference was never properly investigated and, even today we know little of the laptop’s contents. No candidate for a presidential election has stirred such unhinged loathing that he was subjected to two assassination attempts and multiple plots by a foreign nation BEFORE he was elected. When Iran wants a presidential candidate dead, that should make you look closely at why they might be the best choice.

Harris is a progressive globalist who supports the entire agenda that comes under the heading of “woke”- race essentialism, identity politics, antiracism, and DEI; sex/gender as a construct and gender-affirming care for minors; climate catastrophism and a hard push for zero carbon (she was a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal). Trump is a Nationalist whose agenda is largely driven by an America first approach. He is the opposite of Harris on all of the above. I have avoided the abortion issues as I believe this is specious but has no relevance to how good, or bad, a president either will be.

In fairness, I will finally add that I am very unhappy with both Harris and Trump on the economy. Neither has proposed any plan that will reduce our national debt or deficit, and this one issue may eventually supersede all others as an existential threat to our country. If we go down some day, I believe it will be because of our profligate, unsustainable federal government spending.

In this, and every, presidential election, we are not choosing between who we like and who we don’t. We are selecting the person we feel will best govern the country during their four years in office. We are not electing a Sunday school teacher. We did that once and it did not go well. We are not asked whether we like our choices or either of the candidates. Faced with this reality, we will have to decide on November 5 who will represent us for the next four years. We must ask what their policies are and, if those are unclear, look to their past record while in office to get an idea how they will govern.

I believe Trump has learned from his prior stint in the White House and this one will be very different. Endorsement by former political enemies, e.g. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Elon Musk, both astute individuals not given to blind hero worship, should make thoughtful democrats and undecideds look at Trump more closely. Blind faith should not guide our decisions. We should ignore the most effusive opinions of Trump as well as the most derogatory. The truth is almost always somewhere in the middle. My father taught me that.

In this election, it comes down to which three-year period you would like to model in the next four years- Trump’s first three years, or Harris’. I think that any dispassionate, informed, and reasoned consideration of the candidates will strongly favor Trump.

I have tried to be dispassionate and rational in my assessment. I will admit my biases if others will admit theirs. I believe in transparency and clarity. Like every reader of this column, I have a personal world view that informs my positions on just about everything.

Richard T. Bosshardt, MD, FACS, Senior Fellow at Do No Harm, Founding Fellow at FAIR in Medicine .

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