We get it. The same is true for many of his former business partners and allies and probably the women who married him.
All of us – left, right, center, uncertain – can think of things Donald Trump has said that aren’t true and things Donald Trump has done that are not wise.
But in the present race for president of the United States we have two choices, not many.
One is Kamala Harris, an empty vessel whose rise to power began with her affair with California kingmaker Willie Brown, a married man 30 years her senior. The other is Donald Trump, an entrepreneur and politician, whose character flaws are there for all to see.
You might think in a great nation of 300-million-plus people we might have better leaders to choose from. But we don’t.
Now, it is possible to vote for someone else or to not vote at all, of course.
Yet is that the right thing to do?
It might be if both candidates had nothing to recommend them.
But that’s not the case in 2024.
Consider foreign policy, the first subject of NewBostonPost’s planned three editorials on the presidential election that takes place (or rather, finishes)15 days from now.
The President of the United States is the Commander in Chief of the nation’s armed forces. Specifically, Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that “the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” In other words, the President is responsible for defending the nation against foes, foreign and domestic. This requires the President to assemble a wise team of advisers and then use good judgment and courageous actions to defend our nation.
And how are we to decide who can best fulfill this responsibility? Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?
With Donald Trump, we do not need to speculate; we can examine his record when he served as President between 2017 and 2021. It’s good. During his four years, there were no major conflicts around the world. In Afghanistan hostilities were diminishing, and the number of U.S. service members killed each year had dropped significantly from prior years.
His administration negotiated the Abraham Accords — bilateral peace treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. They were historic agreements signed in 2020 that brought hope of a lessening of tensions in the Middle East.
More importantly, Trump’s sanctions on Iran, the nation whose government promotes terrorism around the world and is a mortal enemy of America, helped reduce revenue that Iran received from selling oil abroad. In short, Iran was broke. And that meant the Iranian government was unable to fund its proxies in the Middle East – Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. That’s why the Middle East was relatively peaceful when Trump took office.
Now let’s examine the record of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. (It’s fair to link them, by the way, because Harris insists she has been a major player in the Biden administration, and her association with Biden is the only possible reason to consider her a serious candidate for president. She also recently said she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently from Biden if she becomes president.)
In 2021, in one of the most boneheaded and shameful foreign policy decisions in American history, President Biden, against the advice of his military leaders, unilaterally pulled out of Afghanistan, betraying tens of thousands of our allies and handing the country over to the Taliban. None of us should forget the photos of Afghan allies clinging to a U.S. military plane, a C-17, which was on the tarmac about to take off. In the withdrawal, 13 American service members were killed at Abbey Gate in late August 2021. Billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and equipment were left behind, much of which was sold to Iran and other enemies.
Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster on its own, and also had dreadful consequences. It telegraphed to the world that America did not have the will to use its military might with good effect against its foes.
Six months later, in February 2022, Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine. The two are directly related. Putin saw America’s weakness under Biden, just as he had seen America’s weakness in February 2014 under President Barack Obama before he invaded Crimea. The Ukraine invasion have would never happened on Trump’s watch.
Now let’s consider how Biden and Harris have dealt with Iran since taking office. In one of its first decisions, the Biden/Harris administration removed sanctions on Iran, allowing Iran to sell oil abroad. That brought hundreds of billions of dollars into Iran’s coffers, which funded Iran’s proxies in the Middle East – Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Iran went from economic penury under Trump to flush with cash under Biden and Harris.
The result was the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel a year ago – the worst attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. More than 1200 civilians were killed and more than 200 hostages taken, with no conceivable military justification beyond inflicting pain on innocent people. The entire operation was funded and endorsed by Iran.
Due to Biden’s and Harris’s timid foreign policy, the Middle East is in the midst of a full-scale war, which threatens to draw in other countries.
No such thing happened on Trump’s watch. And it’s not a coincidence. Enemies of America were afraid to attack our country and our allies when Trump was president, for fear of what he might do. So they didn’t attack.
Projecting strength often means not having to use it. Projecting weakness gets people killed.
The United States, and indeed the world, was safer when Trump was at the helm.
What can we expect from Kamala Harris? More of what we have experienced under Joe Biden – expect perhaps worse. Biden, whose sad decline is obvious, at least has a reservoir of experience to draw on. Harris has no experience and no judgment, and is surrounded by poor decision makers hoping she will become their figurehead.
If you want peace, you can’t want Kamala Harris playing Commander in Chief.
The road to peace begins with Trump.
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