Let the record show that I’m not the world’s biggest Donald Trump fan. I voted for him in 2016, but I didn’t do it in 2020 (I wrote-in a protest vote). I agree with him on a lot of issues, but also he frustrates me. He’s often a poor proponent of his own ideas. In the public eye, he’s needlessly antagonistic and not very clear. His campaign surrogates do a much better job communicating with the electorate - men like J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis. Yes, it’s true that without Trump people like them would have been sidelined by the Republican Party of the Bushes and Cheneys. They owe Trump their careers. But when I hear one of them speak, it’s hard not to wish that they were at the top of the ticket, unburdened by the baggage of Trump’s brand.
But in 2024, Donald Trump is clearly the much better option than Kamala Harris. I will vote for him this year from the swing state of Pennsylvania and I will do so enthusiastically. A few things have changed to make me an enthusiastic partisan for Trump this time around.
First, us voters got the rare chance to compare the two options on offer - we had four years of Trump in office, followed by four years of Biden and Harris. For me and many others, the comparison was illuminating and motivating.
Second, Trump is surrounded by a much larger and more impressive coalition of supporters than in either of the previous elections. I believe this will enable him to staff the White House with better people and be more effective in a second term.
I don’t have the hours to write a 20 page dissertation and my readers don’t have the patience to read it. So let’s discuss a few highlights of my argument for Trump:
The economy and American competitiveness
Peace and Civil Rights
Immigration
That said, many smart and thoughtful people have reasonable criticisms of Trump. I’ll address some of the common ones in a future post.
1. Economy and American Competitiveness
Many smart, motivated builders have noticed the natural experiment between Trump and Biden/Harris and concluded that Donald Trump is the better candidate for American competitiveness and industry. These aren’t people who are particularly ideological. They spend their time building businesses, not following politics. But if you’re pouring your effort into building the future, over the last 8 years you noticed that you’re more likely to find a supportive regulatory apparatus under a Trump regime and a stifling regulatory environment under Biden-Harris. See Marc Andressen’s podcast originally titled The Little Tech Agenda: Why We’re Supporting Trump.
There’s an anti-growth faction on the left wing of the Democratic party and it’s gotten some wins under the Biden-Harris administration. Energy is at the foundation of a modern economy. Among the first acts of the Biden regime was cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have helped supply America with energy abundance. Kamala Harris has in the past voiced hostility to fossil fuel production in the United States with an anti-fracking stance, which she began backtracking after seizing the Democratic nomination. Make no mistake about it - much of the economic outperformance of America over Europe for the last 30 years is due to the fracking boom keeping energy prices low. There is no such thing as a low-energy, rich country. High energy prices feed inflation throughout the system and compromise our economic and military competitiveness. Our primary geopolitical rival, China, understands this. Trump does too.
When she was in the Senate, Kamala Harris was ranked as the most Leftist member of that body. This is a big achievement since Bernie Sanders was a colleague of hers. The Democratic Party is home to an anti-capitalist fringe, but not every Democrat supports these suicidal policies. For example, Jimmy Carter was a big deregulator and Bill Clinton was a pro-market moderate. Barack Obama wasn’t quite as good as Bill, but he was tolerable. Harris, on the other hand, is talking about new asset taxes and price controls on food - policies which reliably impoverish the countries that implement them. Places like Venezuela. We don’t want to be Venezuela.
Price controls and asset taxes are insanely unpopular among people that know economics and business principles. Her campaign surrogates get raked over the coals on CNBC whenever they show up. Plenty of finance people are Democrats, but they’re embarrassed by Kamala Harris. I guess they are counting on Congressional Republicans to stop her from getting what she wants, if elected. I’d rather just not give her the chance.
As far as builders go, in 2024 a far larger crowd of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors are supporting Donald Trump openly, sticking their necks out in the furthest left bastion of American politics. Elon Musk, in particular, didn’t support Trump in either 2016 or 2020, but in 2024 he’s going to the mat for the former President. This is a big deal.
Elon is potentially the greatest businessman of all time, and the first great space entrepreneur. His company SpaceX alone accounts for 83% of mass to orbit, representing 13x the launch capacity of the entire nation of China. In return for being a great American industrialist and champion of American competitiveness, he has been targeted by regulatory and legal persecution by the Biden-Harris administration and its allies. He complains that it takes longer to get the paperwork to launch a starship than it takes to build one. I say, let the man cook! The American dominance in space power is solely due to Elon Musk. Before SpaceX’s launch debut in 2010, America was getting beaten in space by Russia, which, let’s face it, is a second-rate power.
But SpaceX isn’t the only one of Musk’s ventures that have been harried by the Biden-Harris administration - to the detriment of American citizens. His satellite broadband company, StarLink, won a small piece of a $42.5 billion bill passed in the first year of the Biden administration intended to extend internet access into underserved rural areas. Later, the Biden FCC revoked StarLink’s contract in a move that looks like it was motivated by partisan pettiness (Elon’s public twitter feed began to lean Right). In an astonishing display of incompetence, not a single home has yet been connected through that $42 billion appropriation as Biden prepares to leave office.
The tragedy of Hurricane Helene compounds the price of that incompetence. Mountainous areas have been devastated in seven states, hundreds are dead, roads are gone, homes are washed away. StarLink is the only option to communicate in communities devastated by flooding. FEMA and other rescue agencies have been begging for StarLink access points as the only way to stay in touch in areas where cell phone towers have been destroyed. Biden has personally thanked Elon Musk for donating StarLink kits to the affected areas. The unfortunate irony is that tens of thousands of StarLink access points would have already deployed in the affected areas had not his FCC canceled the contract in the first place. How many lives did this mistake cost?
We’ve grown accustomed to government incompetence. We’ve grown accustomed to government spending mountains of cash with politically connected contractors and getting nothing in return. We’ve grown accustomed to government hindering productive people in the private market. Maybe we shouldn’t be. Maybe we should demand change. Elon has promised to head a government efficiency commission under Trump, and I’d like to see him work his managerial talent for the Federal Government.
The Biden-Harris administrative state is a parade of failure. Ensconcing DEI as a core principle of government has led to a degradation of capability in every major department - from the Secret Service, to FEMA, NASA and beyond. With anti-merit policies in place, the government becomes merely a jobs program for Democratic Party constituencies. Even the NSF is awarding science grants more and more based on DEI criteria rather than advancing science. 27% of NSF grants now include DEI terms, compared to 1% when Biden came into office.
Sometimes it’s hard to criticize the Biden-Harris regime because it is so comically bad that people have a hard time believing you. But there’s one more DEI anecdote I have to tell. Remember when Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, PA? A bullet clipped his ear, an inch from killing him. Yes, the Secret Service planning was so boneheaded that calling it “amateurish” would be an insult to amateurs. Well the current Secret Service lists “DEI” as one of its top priorities. And you know what happened a few weeks later? Another Secret Service agent at a Trump rally got in trouble because she left her post to nurse an infant. That’s right, we’re hiring breastfeeding mothers to put their bodies in front of bullets. I know “diversity” is something people are afraid to criticize. But just maybe, putting nursing mothers in the way of bullets is too much “diversity”. When sanity is returned to the White House, all the breastfeeding mothers will be taken off the frontlines and given desk jobs.
I’d also like to mention their persecution of the crypto industry and the attempt of the Biden SEC to sue it out of existence, on a dubious legal basis. I view private cryptocurrencies as a bulwark against state sponsored surveillance and totalitarian controls like they are developing in China. In my view, the enemies of crypto are either ignorant or else they are enemies of human freedom. The Biden-Harris administration has given me plenty of evidence where they stand.
I want to see a human settlement on Mars. I want to see America continue its economic dominance. I want to live in an American economy with cheap energy, plentiful jobs, and cutting-edge industries. I don’t want the American advantage squandered on the altar of various leftist pet-causes and petty resentments. I know enough about economics to know that investment in productive enterprise is ultimately what makes us a rich country, not price controls, taxes, or burdensome regulations.
So, Trump, right? It’s an easy choice.
2. Peace and Civil Rights
The other notable new arrivals to the Trump coalition in 2024 are centrist Democrats, peace-lovers, and dissidents of various stripes from the bipartisan project of endless war. Among them is the #1 third-party candidate of this cycle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s supporting Trump because he is against war and government censorship.
If I examine my own voting history, I’ve always voted for the candidate who was most pro-peace and that was not a socialist (sorry Bernie). In the Bush/McCain years, I voted Libertarian. In 2016, I supported Rand Paul in the primary, but I also noticed Trump making criticisms of the disastrous Iraq War on the campaign stump. I voted for him in the general election, and in return he was the first President in my lifetime to start no new war. Trump was the first President to visit North Korea in a stirring display of detente with the Chinese satellite regime. More practically, he negotiated the Abraham Accords by which several Middle Eastern Muslim countries began mutual diplomatic recognition with Israel.
RFK Jr. saw the fruits of the first Trump presidency and he was eventually persuaded to come on board. It took some time because his wife, his friends, and his entire social circle are Democrats and he is embarrassed to be a Republican. But he understands the value of peace, and he sees that the world has exploded into a tinderbox of conflict since Trump left office. War is simply too profitable in an American context and there are too many forces pressing for war for peace to last for long. It takes a dedicated executive pressing against these forces to preserve peace.
Trump can be a loud mouth. But nonetheless he is respected on the world stage and he has good instincts in foreign policy. There was no war in Ukraine in his term, and I don’t think there would be a war now if he had won reelection. Biden and Harris both were empty suits who couldn’t really be negotiated with, so America blindly followed the path of most profit for the military-industrial complex, directly into war.
The Ukraine war is a giant tragedy, costing many lives and a lot of treasure. It would have been better to be avoided. It’s especially painful to me as an Orthodox Christian to see my brothers slaughtered on both sides, my holy sites threatened, and the church split.
On the other hand, one of the primary boosters of the disastrous Iraq War, Dick Cheney, is crossing the aisle to endorse Kamala Harris. Good riddance!
Government censorship is another area where RFK and I see eye-to-eye. I am appalled that the Biden-Harris FBI contacted Twitter and Facebook to pressure them into censoring posts and accounts. This is un-American. It borders on the treasonous. Censored information included discussion of the lab-leak theory of the origins of COVID which nowadays is a reputable position held by many mainstream news organizations. Government regulation of public speech in the name of combatting “misinformation” has been endorsed by a who’s who of Democratic politicians - including Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris herself.
The worst malfeasance of the FBI was the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October of 2020 by lying to news organizations and social media companies, telling them it was “disinformation” from a foreign government. Now we know that is not true. The 2020 election was decided by less than 50,000 votes, so its quite likely that censorship swung the election. The Hunter Biden files show that he enriched himself from Ukrainian and Chinese firms, trading on his father’s prestige and influence. The emails suggest that Joe may have benefited as well. You got to have some prior on that possibility. Joe Biden has not been sufficiently investigated for the potential crime of selling influence in US policy for personal gain. Government censorship needs to end so that American democracy can function.
Let’s teach the Deep State that who’s boss. Let’s have a strong negotiator in charge with a bias for peace.
Let’s get Trump back.
3. Immigration
Donald Trump won his first election campaigning against a leaky Southern border overwhelmed with economic migrants. After he left office, it got much worse than it’s ever been. The first priority of the Biden administration was removing all new restrictions that Trump put in place in order to stem the flow of migrants. The result has been the worst immigration crisis in US history.
The government is now actively aiding and abetting illegal migration. As far as I can tell, we’ve ceased all deportations since 2022. Anyone can just walk across and stay here. The border patrol no longer has the authority to kick anyone out. Not only that, but the federal government has published a new CBPOne app to make it easier for traffickers and migrants to bring people into the country.
In response to this laissez-fare attitude towards illegal migration, even greater waves of migrants have started heading towards the American border. When Texas put up physical barriers to prevent them crossing into Texas, the Federal government sent officials to remove the razor wire and help people cross.
Not only that, but the federal government has spent tax payer money flying in hundreds of thousands of migrants into the American interior. FEMA funds have been diverted from disaster preparedness towards settling illegal migrants in America.
It sure looks to me that the goal of the Federal Government has been to maximize uncontrolled illegal migration over these last four years. Who benefits? Maybe it is businesses who want cheap labor. With government and NGOs subsidizing living expenses, they can often work for less than American workers. Maybe it is the Democratic Party, who sees the opportunity to gain a crop of loyal voters in 15 years or so when they can be naturalized - turning the whole US into a macrocosm of the California electorate.
I don’t know. But I’m sure who is not benefiting from all this is current American citizens and voters. The government is actively defecting against its people.
Americans are generous people. We are willing to let people move here, including for humanitarian or economic reasons. But Americans deserve that their legal process is followed for deciding how many and which immigrants are allowed in. If someone thinks we should 10x the number of newcomers, then let them bring it before the voters. A change of that magnitude should not be snuck in through the backdoor.
I don’t like the way Trump demonizes immigrants as a way to whip up the voters. Sure, some of them are criminals, and we should know who they are. But most are not. Most are normal people seeking a better life and the case against an open border shouldn’t depend on such rhetoric. The fact is that perhaps as many as 20 million people have illegally migrated to the country over the last four years - about 10 million caught-and-released by border patrol, and unknown numbers of others. We simply don’t have the ability to acculturate and assimilate that amount of people in such a short amount of time. It’s not in our interest to change over our population at such a rapid speed. No national culture can survive such a rapid influx of newcomers.
What does another four years of this administration look like for the border? Will there be another 20 million migrants? 50 million? Do they recognize any limits? What our their plans for our country? Where are they trying to take us? I don’t know and they won’t say.
…a personal aside…
I don’t travel much, but me and my bride saved up enough for a Caribbean honeymoon. While there, we visited a neighboring island called Anguilla and had to go through border control. It was a serious process. Police officers checked our baggage and paperwork. Signs at the border checkpoint informed us that we were not allowed to work or sell anything during our stay without a permit. We had a time limit on the island which were expected to obey.
This is a very normal thing for a country to do. The government is looking out for its own citizens. Anguilla is a tiny dot in middle of the ocean, yet it’s a middle-income country. It knows that being located on Anguilla is a business advantage, taking advantage of the tourist traffic. If you sell fruit or rent umbrellas on the roadside just anywhere, you’re probably pretty poor. But if you do it on Anguilla, you’ll do okay. Anguilla citizenship is valuable, and Anguilla safeguards those benefits for its own citizens.
Anguilla is also fairly close to South American coast where there are several poor countries. Maybe a million people would move from there to Anguilla if given the opportunity. But that would reduce the quality of life for Anguilla and the Anguillan government would never allow it.
What would it look like if America were governed like a normal country?
4. Conclusion
In my view, the country has been mismanaged over the last four years. I don’t think it’s headed in a good direction. Biden and Harris are cut from the same cloth, and if anything that’s generous to Kamala Harris, who seems like a more radical and less pragmatic Democrat than Biden.
Four more years of Trump won’t fix our country. There are still plenty of voters who think its a good thing that we have nursing mothers as Secret Service field agents. How diverse! They also support unlimited migration, endless war, and restriction on speech for their enemies (like me). Our ruling ideology is insane, and we have to address the education system that is indoctrinating voters into fringe Leftism - the ideology of national suicide.
But losing won’t help the matter. I know Trump is far from perfect. I wish he were kinder and had a more winning personality. But a new Trump administration will provide an operating base for those who want to reorient the federal government to put the interests of America and American citizens first. I think that is right and good.
Despite the length of this essay, I’ve only gotten to a small bit of my argument. There’s a lot more to say about judges, about stemming abortion, about second amendment rights, about Trump’s character, and about securing the voting system in the US. But I’ve tortured myself by writing this long, and I’ve tortured you if you read through all this. If there’s anything more to say, let’s hash it out in the comments.
Great post. And brave!
I notice you accept his loss in the 2020 election. He doesn't.
What are your thoughts on putting someone in the Presidency who has demonstrated he will flout the constitution and foment violence in order to retain power?