I don’t like President Trump. I don’t think he is a good man, and I didn’t think he was the best choice for Republicans in 2016. I certainly don’t like everything he does, says, or tweets. But I am still going to vote for him, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Unlike four years ago, Trump is now a known political quantity. He has fought to keep his promises on the issues I care most about: abortion, religious liberty, and the rule of law. Meanwhile, the radicals running the Democratic Party have demonstrated that they will do anything for power — and that they view people like me as enemies to be punished and destroyed.
My tipping point was the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation fight. After Trump’s election, the Democrats tried to claim the moral high ground; in the Kavanaugh battle, they shelled that position into oblivion. The Democrats not only tried to defeat the nomination, but they also promoted even the most grotesque and lurid smears — accusing a respected, mainstream judge of having been a high school gang-rape mastermind.
Democrats profess alarm over Trump’s prevarications, only to match him lie for lie. Most egregious was the Russian collusion hoax that they and their media allies invented. Supposedly serious people argued that the president was a Russian agent who had colluded with Putin to steal the election.
Other, more reasonable, criticisms of the president are undermined by Democrats’ hypocrisy. It was foolish for Trump to downplay the dangers of the Chinese coronavirus. But Democrats would be more persuasive on the point if they had not praised mass protests and feted the disastrous efforts of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ordered infected patients into nursing homes.
Likewise, Trump’s flattery of foreign dictators has been unseemly, and it does not seem to help his negotiations. But as vice president, Joe Biden did worse by endorsing China’s murderous one-child policy. Nothing Trump has said is as obscene and wicked as that. Indeed, established elites such as Biden are more like Trump than they care to admit.
Of course, there is more to the case for President Trump than the flaws of his enemies. Trump broke open a Republican orthodoxy that had become staid and unwilling to adjust to the tasks of conservatism today.
He has also compiled a strong foreign policy record, being less belligerent than his predecessors while still using American might when necessary, as demonstrated by the strike on Iran’s terrorist mastermind, Qassem Soleimani. Most of Trump’s judicial selections have been excellent, and our legal setbacks have resulted not from his mistakes but from members of the conservative legal establishment betraying their originalist principles and promises.
It is nonetheless important to acknowledge the compromises of supporting Trump, especially for Christians whose idea of good character is very far from that the president often exhibits. But this does not require us to follow Never Trump writer David French, who recently scolded Christians who support Trump — how dare we vote for such a bad man!
French highlighted the civil rights movement as an ideal example of Christian political engagement. But the civil rights movement worked with and voted for some of the wickedest men to ever inhabit the White House. If the goal of civil rights for black Americans was worth working with Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (whose respective adulteries, election fraud, and vulgarity, among other sins, are well known), civil rights for those in utero is worth working with President Trump.
As French put it in 2012:
Your vote can help determine whether we have a fighting chance at overturning a constitutional atrocity or whether you secure the right to kill yet another generation of unborn Americans. The lines are crystal clear. Where will you stand?
Even if French now refuses to see them, the lines on abortion and many other issues have not become blurrier since 2012. The moderate Democrats who voted for Biden in the primary won the battle but lost the war as Biden shifted left and chose Kamala Harris as his successor. A Biden administration will force Democrats’ cultural radicalism on the entire country, and Harris will be even worse when she succeeds him. Don’t expect moderation from her: Harris has fundraised for a group that bails out accused rioters, murderers, and sex criminals.
On everything from abortion to energy to health care, Biden is more radical than he was in 2008. The supposed moderation of the Biden-Harris ticket consists mostly of being friendlier to Wall Street and big business than the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. But left-wing corporatism is not centrism, it is just oligarchy with a veneer of social justice buzzwords.
Biden is the candidate of the rich and famous who incessantly criticize the United States but won’t say a word against the genocide being committed by the Chinese communists. He is the candidate for those who use the idea of free trade to require American workers to compete with Chinese slave labor.
The blue-collar Democratic Party of yore is long gone. Biden is an empty vessel whose administration will be filled by the radical left. He will not return the country to normalcy, nor will he unite us, because the identity politics his party has embraced preclude unity. If you want a preview of Joe Biden’s America, look at what Democrats say; even more, look at what is happening in Democrat-controlled areas.
In Joe Biden’s America, taxpayers will fund abortion on demand until birth. In Joe Biden’s America, men will be allowed in every women-only sport, shelter, and locker room. In Joe Biden’s America, public school teachers will encourage students with gender identity issues to transition over parental objections (if they even tell the parents). In Joe Biden’s America, religious dissenters, even nuns, will be relentlessly harassed by the government.
In Joe Biden’s America, there will be blackouts as our energy infrastructure is intentionally crippled in the name of the environment. In Joe Biden’s America, the rioters, looters, and murderers who have taken over the streets in Democratic areas will have the tacit approval of the federal government. In Joe Biden’s America, the president will work to make China great again.
No, thank you. I’d rather have Trump.
