For those suffering from election fatigue, take heart: we are now just one day away. This is the most important election of my lifetime. The situation could not be more dire. At stake is the very survival of our republic. We meet on a battlefield where the forces of liberty represented by the unlikely figure of Donald Trump will do battle with the forces of an invidious establishment. Their avatar this time around is Kamala Harris, but she in no way leads them. She is a puppet, albeit an inarticulate one, for their will. The Democratic Party is a machine, taken over by the far-left wing of the party; a force with which to reckon. That is why this election really is crucial.
We began four years ago in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat and January 6th. It looked then as if the former President would never recover from the withering public outrage leveled against him, shortly followed by a ceaseless barrage of lawfare. Trump seemed a vanquished foe. For my own part, I doubted that Trump would run again, not because I didn’t think he had the resolve, but because I thought he must be fed up with the attacks on himself and his family.
I also doubted that President Biden would last the full length of his term. About that I was right. Biden’s cognitive decline was obvious for years, but when he shuffled across that debate stage and struggled out his first few words — a scene I shall never forget — the whole country knew that the race was over. Though Biden tried to cling on, the beleaguered President, under tremendous pressure, eventually gave way to his second-in-command.
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The Harris campaign brought in hundreds of millions of dollars. The polls rebounded in her favor and it seemed as though the switch of Harris for Biden had genuinely caught the Trump campaign off-guard. However, slowly but surely, Trump whittled away at Kamala’s lead. In the last month of the election, Trump has pulled off a succession of media coups, including his McDonald’s stint, his appearance on Rogan, and his repurposed garbage truck ploy.
Harris, meanwhile, has proven to be an enormous disappointment for those who anointed her. Besides the one and only Presidential debate between Trump and herself, Harris can’t go a week without committing another of her famous “Kamala-isms, taking off to “word-salad city” as David Axelrod, a frustrated commentator who supports her put it. She has flip-flopped on dozens of positions, most especially her stance on fracking and energy production. She continues to hemorrhage support from progressives, men of all stripes, Hispanics, and even Arabs and Muslims. Across nearly every demographic, save for college-educated white women, Harris is down in the polls compared to Biden just four years ago.
Trump and his team have become wise to the tactics of the left. The first Trump administration and his campaign in 2020 were naive on this issue. They seemed surprised that the left would cheat to get their way. But the left – along with a Republican minority who dubbed themselves Never Trumpers – refused to accept Trump’s win in 2016. They never accepted his administration. His first four years were riddled with pure sabotage. This was typified by Nancy Pelosi tearing up Trump’s State of the Union speech on live television in 2020. Trump won’t make the same mistake twice.
Knowing all I have seen and learned since 2016 about both parties, I want to take this opportunity to explain why I am voting for Trump and the GOP this time.
I will admit that in 2016 I voted for Hillary Clinton. At the time, I bought into the mainstream media’s rhetoric about President Trump. I expected the country to be torn apart by his presidency. Instead, none of that happened. In fact, the country and the economy were in great shape for most of his tenure. His policies were sound, his administration was on the whole staffed by competent officials. The chaos came mostly from the left’s and the media’s persistent efforts to undermine Trump at every possible turn. When the left says, “We don’t want to go back to the chaos”, remember who was causing the chaos. They were.
Then, in the spring of 2020, came Covid. Covid gave especially the far-left revolutionary wing of the Democratic Party and the media everything they needed to seize control of the country and undo Trump’s presidency. They tanked the economy, they locked people at home, they created huge distrust in the minds of the public.
When Biden and Harris took over, they undid much of what made the first Trump administration good. Almost immediately, I hated all of their policies. There is not a single one which I can say I liked.
The transgender issue is just one example. The Biden-Harris administration went all in on the most wicked policy objectives of the trans lobby. Take hormone blockers, for example. Medical evidence shows that puberty blockers are not, in fact, reversible. Countries all over Western Europe are rolling back so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, yet in the States, the Democratic Party refuses to relent on this issue. Why tie your administration to this statistically miniscule identitarian movement, the tiniest of minorities? Why elevate the mutilation, the mental and physical disfiguring of children into a civil rights cause?
Or consider the way the Biden-Harris administration abandoned Afghanistan. The videos of Afghans falling from the landing gear of departing American aircraft are stuck in my head. Since our departure, the Taliban have been able to rush back into control, such that the area has become a hotbed for terrorist organizations again. We left billions of dollars in military equipment behind, empowering a terrorist army and breaking our promise to the millions of Afghan women we pledged to stand with.
Then there is the crown jewel of the Biden-Harris administration: the unfettered admission of millions of illegal immigrants into the country. That decision will go down in history as one of the most evil and destructive policy decisions in American history. To understand what I am talking about look across the pond and see what similar mindless migration cycles have done to Europe.
But what scares me the most about the modern Democratic Party is its capacity for dishonesty.
They said Trump would end democracy in 2016, but he did no such thing. They call him a Nazi, yet he is one of the most pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli presidents in modern history. They said Trump would imprison his enemies, but he never did. They said he would open internment camps for minorities, but to this day the only president who ever did that was a Democrat. They said Biden was in the best condition of his life, but he was barely able to run a campaign, let alone the country. They said Harris was hopeless prior to her taking over the ticket, and as soon as she did, they spun her from zero to hero.
Here’s the advice I would have given Democrats in July of 2024: Cut the nonsense. Come before the American people and admit your faults. Say “We messed up, we pursued the wrong policies, we see now why they were wrong. We experimented with these socialist woke policies, we truly did it out of compassion, but we were mistaken.” Harris should have committed to course correction. She should have said, “I will close the border because I know what an open border does to your communities, to your schools, to crime. We overdid it with the Inflation Reduction Act. We are going to undo it by reducing spending, fixing energy production, and tackling costs. I understand more than anyone else that criminals belong in prison. We experimented with bringing them out of prisons and into the communities. We were wrong, we will prosecute them. We used your taxpayer money for the wrong things. We are sorry. It’s time to get serious. I regret it but I was only the VP, and the VP doesn’t have a lot of say.”
Sadly, Kamala couldn’t say these things. It would annoy the donor classes and identitarian groups she desperately needs. More importantly, she herself believes in the innate goodness of those policies.
How will Democrats respond to losing the presidency? What will the Democratic machine do if Harris loses? They did not accept the results of the 2016 election. They similarly would not have accepted the results of the 2020 election had they gone the other way.
The good scenario is that the Democratic Party will have a formal autopsy. It will become clear that the Democrats lost to Trump because they had gone too far to the left. This will lead almost assuredly to a party civil war between the progressive camp, of which Harris is a member, and the moderate wing of the party. The moderates will successfully kick out the extremists. The Democrats will go back to being a 1990s Bill Clinton-style party. Their nominee in 2028 will be someone like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, who would likely be able to give Republicans a run for their money. They will bring back Kirsten Sinema and take Joe Manchin’s counsel. The party will embark on a wholesale reformation and revert to a commitment to uphold the American Constitution. I hope this is the path the Democrats take.
The bad scenario is the exact opposite. The party still has its civil war but continues its leftward lurch. The extremists win and they successfully bully the moderates into submission. No matter the abuse hurled their way, moderate liberals would rather stick with the Democratic Party than consider voting for a Trump-led GOP. The party further entrenches itself in the institutions it controls. They throw all their might into blocking Trump as much as they can. They continue to rent mobs and feign outrage every time they don’t get their way. They ratchet up the rhetoric, maybe even inspiring more would-be assassins. In this scenario, the country slides even further into domestic turmoil.
I fear this is the route they will take.
The irony of this situation is that it is a disaster of the left’s own choosing. If the Democratic Party had behaved normally from 2020 onwards, do we seriously expect that Trump would be in contention now? Trump thrives on the left’s efforts to undermine him. It gives him and his coalition their lifeforce. Without the tactics of the left, there is no Trump. Do we seriously believe the tech sector would be shifting rightwards right now if it weren’t for the extremists within the Democratic Party? Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg would likely still be center-left Democrats were it not for the ongoing progressive effort to stifle innovation with regulation.
At the end of the day, each person has their own reason for voting for Trump. Here’s mine. I came to the West to escape the chaos and tribalism I grew up with in Africa and the Middle East. I came to escape the reprisals, the injustice, the insanity. I don’t want to pack the courts. I don’t want to break the filibuster. I don’t want to add more states until we get the results we want. I want us to stick to our rules and our procedures. Americans don’t realize that the faith we place in these rules is what makes us so different from the rest of the world.
I think the race against Harris represents an even bigger opportunity than running against Biden ever did. If Trump had defeated Biden, it would have been treated as a technicality. Of course, Trump could beat an old and doddering man, far past his prime. It would have been the Democratic Party’s fault for putting him there when younger, progressive stalwarts were waiting in the dugout.
Beating Harris, however, is symbolically powerful. She is as progressive as they come. She had the furthest-left voting record of any member of the Senate in her class. She is a DEI candidate, a woman who has come so far only because of her race. If an embattled, beleaguered Trump can beat such a candidate, it sends an obvious message.
Beating Harris represents the best chance to defeat a malignant progressivism for a generation. That is why I am voting for Donald Trump.
