Former President Donald Trump announced another run for the White House yesterday. I’ve seen enough. No thank you, Mr. Trump.
I voted to re-elect Trump in 2020 because he kept a very important promise. During the 2016 campaign, Trump released a list of potential nominees for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. On that list was Neil Gorsuch, who is now doing a great job as an Associate Justice.
But I won’t support Trump this time. No one is entitled to the White House, not Trump, not Hillary Clinton, no one. They need to earn it. So let’s have a contest and not a coronation.
Trump lost in 2020 and since then he hasn’t taken up a cause, hasn’t created an organization, hasn’t implemented any plans. Nothing for a political purpose. If you didn’t like Trump before, he hasn’t done one thing to change that.
Instead of trying to expand his coalition, he’s only tried to feed his base while purging his camp of anyone who is less than 100% loyal to everything Trump says. He’s held rallies where he lambasts whoever he wants without any critical pushback. He hammers the media, the establishment, Democrats, and any Republicans who don’t list Trump first in their Twitter bios. He fills stadiums with entertainment, not information. It’s a show. It’s not leadership.
Prior to the midterm election results, Trump supporters were claiming that Trump orchestrated the coming Red Wave. Well, do they still want ownership of what turned out to be a historic underwhelming performance by Republicans?
There is a one question loyalty test to attract Trump’s support. The question is simple: Did Trump win in 2020? The answer is no, he lost, and if that’s your answer then forget about it. Trump won’t join you to put America First, he won’t join you for anything, and that’s how his re-run re-election will be handled by Trump, his surrogates, and his supporters alike.
If you think Trump won in 2020, then please ask yourself the flowing; How do you reconcile that Trump failed at preventing the “steal?” How do you reconcile that Trump failed at proving that he really won? And how do reconcile that Trump has given up trying to overturn the results? Don’t you think, Trump failed when it mattered most, right?
For all the 2A supporters out there, this one is disappointing, maybe even disqualifying. Trump said, “I like taking the guns early.” And he also said, “take the guns first, go through the Due Process second.” He said it in the White House during a meeting on gun violence after the shooting in Parkland, FL in 2018. So Trump is for Red Flag laws. I’m against Red Flag laws and most 2A supporters I know agree that Red Flag laws are unconstitutional violations of Due Process. Trump and I disagree on that one. It was tough to vote for Trump in 2020 after that, but he was running against Joe Biden, who would’ve done the same thing. This time Trump is running against other Republicans (they haven’t announced yet), so we can now hold him accountable for his baffling anti-Due Process position by voting for someone else.
For House leadership, Trump said he supports Rep. Kevin McCarthy for Speaker. I don’t. I wrote about that yesterday, link here.
While Trump did go after the regulatory state as president, he failed to decrease the National Debt, which increased by over $6 trillion. Thomas Jefferson said, “I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.” Jefferson is right. The National Debt is a national security problem, one that went unaddressed during Trump’s administration.
During his presidency, Trump supported and signed the First Step Act, a justice reform bill which reduced some needlessly harsh sentences. That was then. Now Trump is claiming he wants to execute drug dealers. Well, that’s a huge difference in criminal justice reform. So which is it? Let out first time drug dealers or have the government kill them? Ah, the perils of principle lacking populism. Good luck figuring out that one.
Yes, the economy was good, the federal courts were looking better, things were not terrible under Trump. He was a C+ president at best. I’d rather have a winning A president than re-run a losing C+. People really like Trump for all the bully pulpit work he did. He pushed back against a ridiculous media, which was long overdue. But c’mon, he has already done that, so we don’t need Trump anymore to show us that mainstream media outlets such as NBC are garbage.
Right now, I like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He’s been doing a great job. More on a possible DeSantis campaign later.
Hillary Clinton ran for the Democrat presidential nomination with an attitude that she was entitled to win. That sense of entitlement hurt her in the General Election. Donald Trump running on that same sense of entitlement is a fool’s errand.
