The case for Trump: Antics aside, he has many achievements, and a win by Biden would do vast harm.
Editor’s Note: If you would like to read more pros and cons on voting for President Trump, further essays on the subject, each from a different perspective, can be found here, here, here, here, and here. These articles, and the one below, reflect the views of the individual authors, not of the National Review editorial board as a whole.
It is a squeeze to reduce the number of logically indisputable reasons why President Trump should be reelected to a single column, but I will attempt it. Reelection is the only way of restoring the conditions that Trump created that eliminated unemployment prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. This, coupled to his near-elimination of illegal immigration (against fierce Democratic resistance), generated greater percentage income growth amongst the lowest 20 percent of income-earners than among the top 10 percent — a noteworthy start on addressing the universal income-disparity problem. Only a Trump victory will ensure retention of the present relatively low personal and corporate income-tax rates and the avoidance of insane, highly damaging, and counterproductive shutdowns in cowardly terror of the coronavirus, which only mortally threatens 1 percent of the population, who can be isolated and protected.
Only a Trump victory will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power within five years and North Korea from resuming its missile tests over Japan and South Korea. There are no grounds for confidence that the Democrats would maintain a firm but not belligerent economic and strategic containment strategy towards China, coordinated with India, Japan, South Korea, and other key allies in south and east Asia and Australasia. We know that if Trump is defeated, the country will be subjected not just to the self-flagellating provisions of the Paris Climate Accord, but also to the $100 trillion Green Terror assault on the petroleum industry and a bone-cracking rise in electricity costs after closing gas-fired electricity plants. The Democrats remain committed to giving the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas a veto over any resolution of their conflict with Israel, and since they do not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, that will ensure continued stagnation, attrition, and terrorism, financed by a newly enabled Iran. The Trump strategy is steadily lining up the support of the Arab states in favor of a comprehensive solution that will give Palestine a modest state and a great economic incentive for peace, and security at least for Israel.
Only a Trump victory would continue to promote private, charter, community, and separate schools that will reverse the steady decline of educational standards generated by the teachers’ unions, to which the Democratic Party is bound hand and foot. Although he has been tactically mistaken in not producing his full alternative health-care plan, Trump will not reinforce Obamacare’s destruction of doctor–patient relationships with the Democrats’ low-user-price but hideously expensive public alternative.
If President Trump is defeated, America will never know the proportions of or the people responsible for the greatest breach of the Constitution in the country’s history: the politicization of the intelligence agencies and of the FBI in an attempt to alter the 2016 presidential election, both before and after it occurred. Nor will it ever be established whether the Biden family’s receipt of millions from Russia, China, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president constituted crimes, or just mere improprieties compounded by lies and disinformation. Only a Trump victory would ensure that the whole concept of freedom of religion would not be bulldozed by such tyrannical outrages as requiring the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for the contraception and abortions of their students and employees; and only Trump’s reelection will prevent the legalized infanticide of “aborting” newly born children judged at that late stage by their mothers to be disposable.
President Trump is the only candidate in this race who has any real interest in penal and prosecutorial reform. Both former vice president Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, have spent most of their careers increasing the sentences of all categories of convicted people and have some direct responsibility for the fact that the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its incarcerated people, and that an utterly scandalous 99 percent of criminal prosecutions are at least partially successful, 97 percent of those without a trial. The U.S. has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, the most comparable large, prosperous democracies. The American criminal-justice system is a disgrace, and both of the Democratic candidates for national office are complicit in that disgrace.
The Democrats are tainted by their intimate dependence upon their corrupt urban political machines, personified by the grossly incompetent Democratic mayors of New York (de Blasio), Chicago (Lightfoot), Los Angeles (Garcetti), Washington (Bowser), Seattle (Durkan), and Portland, Ore. (Wheeler). The Democrats are also severely compromised by having maintained total silence all summer as the worst rioting in America in over 50 years raged across the country and white-hating urban guerrillas and white hooligans burned and stole and vandalized billions of dollars of property and tried to destroy statues and monuments of inoffensive people such as Columbus, and of some America’s greatest leaders, including those most dedicated to the advancement of African Americans: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant.
The reelection of the president is the only way to avoid a Democratic onslaught upon the existing constitutional system, including a neutralization of the Electoral College by imposing the victory of the candidate with the most votes nationwide even in states that voted for other candidates, effectively disenfranchising the 25 smaller-population states in the country. It would also include packing the Supreme Court and a renewed relaxation of entry of illegal migrants and the confirmation of the inability to screen noncitizens as ineligible voters in presidential elections. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico would be admitted as states to provide four more Democratic senators, and the lowering of the voting age to 16 would ensure virtually permanent Democratic predominance.
The defeat of the president would also reward the most disgraceful, comprehensive, and prolonged media smear campaign in American history: the solidarity of 95 percent of the national political media in a constant denigration of the president and the aggressive whitewashing of his opponents. These practices have reduced the public regard for the media to the mid-teens. A free press is essential to a functioning democracy but it cannot exist if no one attaches any credence or significance to its existence because of its own grievous dishonesty.
Only a Trump victory will suitably chasten the many sensible and somewhat highbrow Reagan Republicans who deserted Trump for reasons ranging from outright treachery to tactical misjudgment to mere snobbery. They deserve to be shamed and given an incentive to repent. They do not deserve to ululate in victory over the elevation of a pathologically mediocre aspirant to the presidency and a vice president whose constant refrain is to burst into inexplicable peals of uproarious laughter: an enervated old wheelhorse who has faced in every direction on every issue, and a chucklehead, standing together on a socialist platform and shored up by disreputable elements.
The country is called to choose between a very effective executive whose behavioral foibles are sometimes outlandish and the dual personification of weakness and vacuity.