I am not important enough to endorse anyone formally in the 2024 election, and with some 40 million ballots already cast, I don’t expect to influence anyone else’s vote. But as the Washington Examiner’s resident economics columnist who is quite literally paid to offer my opinions and analysis to you, dear readers, I owe it to be transparent about why, for the first time ever, I voted for Donald Trump for president.
In 2016, I simply did not believe Trump was a conservative, and as a debt hawk whose vote didn’t really matter in the indigo state of California, I voted for the only general election candidate committed to entitlement reform: the Libertarian Party nominee, Gary Johnson.
In 2020, I was pleasantly shocked by Trump’s tenure as president, which was otherwise conservative, ignoring his refusal to reform entitlements, and the single most successful record of foreign policy in my lifetime. But Trump’s deference to the draconian and unelected executive bureaucracy during the coronavirus pandemic and his self-obsessed and terminally “too online” campaign didn’t exactly convince me he wanted my vote, let alone that he had earned it. So I, then a resident of the positively cerulean Washington, D.C., sat out 2020, stupidly, pathetically, and delusionally believing Joe Biden’s lie that he would at least try to restore the norms and the decorum of a bygone era.
Instead, Biden blew up the fragile but peaceful geopolitical order carefully constructed by Trump, unlocked a secured border through executive fiat to welcome 10 million illegal immigrants across the world, and manufactured the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years.
It is necessary, to vote against a candidate that they’re worse than the alternative, but it’s not sufficient. By the objective metrics, the tenure of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris has obviously been more disastrous than that of Trump. Real disposable income per capita has fallen 4% under four years of Biden and Harris. By contrast, real disposable income per capita rose 12% under Trump’s presidency, including an 8.5% increase, even excluding the pandemic. Trump also neutered Iran, fully decimated the Islamic State, throttled Russia while empowering Ukraine, and set the stage for diplomatic and economic normalization between not just Israel and its Islamic neighbors but also Serbia and Kosovo.
But this quantifiable record of success is not really why I voted for Trump. It is necessary, but not wholly sufficient.
When Trump was accused of playing politics with Ukraine, Congress impeached him, and ultimately, Trump released legislatively authorized funds to Ukraine in accordance with federal law. When Trump claimed that he actually won the 2020 election, a full 97% of Republican appointees to the federal judiciary voted against the legal challenges brought against the 2020 results by him and his allies, and 83% of all Supreme Court votes on the matter were cast against Trump and company.
By contrast, when the courts ruled against Biden and Harris’s attempt to buy votes with mass student loan debt cancellation by executive fiat, Biden and Harris went forward with little pushback from their own party. They were celebrated as the Biden Justice Department initiated criminal proceedings against Trump. And after rigging the Democratic presidential primary so challengers were barred from the ballot, the party replaced the democratically elected candidate with Harris, who has never won a single national primary vote over more than four years of campaigning for the top job.
And the whole time, the entire administrative state and national press corps have cheered on this charade. In other words, Jan. 6 was a terrible day following two months of a tantrum shut down en masse by the federal judiciary, while the Democrats’ multipronged effort to rig 2024 through legal warfare, banning challengers, including Trump, from ballot access, and an eleventh-hour bait-and-switch with a candidate none of us ever voted for has been a four-year success.
To that, I must say enough.
In tandem with his opposition’s increasingly desperate and extreme gambits to hold on to power, Trump has never run a more serious campaign actually contingent on asking for my vote rather than demanding it. Harris, who pretends she’s not already the sitting vice president of the United States, proudly screams that “we’re not going back,” but Trump promises to bring back at least some of the growth, strength, and security of just half a decade ago. “Make America Great Again,” as a slogan, may have fallen a little flat after the relative banality of the Obama years and when Trump was an incumbent during the unprecedented chaos of COVID. But after four years of whatever the hell this has been? Sign me up.
As a white(ish), college-educated, working woman who lives in a suburb (technically, in the Virginia half of the Washington metro), I am a member of the swing demographic that has oscillated from the security moms of the neocon aughts to the vanguard of the #Resistance. The Karen contingent, which Harris is gambling will prove a single-issue voting bloc obsessed with abortion, will surely ask how an ostensible equity feminist can possibly vote for any man who has said what Trump has said about women.
Beyond the logical reasons to vote for Trump’s record and against the Democratic Party’s four-year plot to imprison Trump, silence reporting on Biden’s decline, and disenfranchise its own primary voters, I am indeed voting for women.
It should be enough that I am voting against the court-packing that Harris has teased and the elimination of the legislative filibuster that she has promised. The most important issues for women should be restoring the stability and strength of the greenback and the private sector, resealing the southern border, and ending the catastrophic experiment that has been the multipolar world order with America’s global leadership in abeyance. But in case that is not enough, I must detail who I mean when I say I am voting for women.
I am voting for Shani Louk, Amit Soussana, and the countless other Israeli women whose bodies became ground zero of Hamas’s declaration of war on the world’s only Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023, an incursion that never would have happened without Biden and Harris refunding the Iranian regime.
I am voting for nearly 300 Ukrainian victims of sexual violence by Russian soldiers identified by Ukraine’s prosecutor general since the start of Russia’s war, a war that did not happen under Trump and likely never would have without Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and subsequent green light to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
I am voting for the women and children destroyed by the transnational human trafficking crisis welcomed by the opening of the U.S. southern border by Biden and Harris. I am voting not just for our own women and girls murdered by illegal immigrants — Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, and Ruby Garcia, just to name a few — but also for the unknown number of victims abused during the trek that has been industrialized and commodified for global entry and advertised across social media. I am voting for the 676 victims of sexual assault while trekking the perilous Darien Gap whom Doctors Without Borders reported treating in 2023, and I am voting for the 328 treated in the first two months of this year alone.
I am voting for Donald Trump because whatever misgivings I have about his lamentable rhetoric and personal foibles, my own pearl-clutching and fragile feelings matter much, much less than the lives and deaths of millions of civilians in Israel, which Democrats would abandon to the destruction of Hamas even after the single most deadly day for Jews since the Holocaust. My feelings matter less than the chance to negotiate an end quickly to the slaughter in Ukraine, than the risk of nuclear escalation, than the 320,000 lost migrant children trafficked into the abyss of our own increasingly lawless soil, and than the threat of our dollar-losing reserve currency status to an axis of our enemies.
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I am voting for Donald Trump because, unlike in 2020, I am no longer idiotic enough to believe that the Democratic nominee will uphold any of the guardrails that have proven successful at reining in both parties and, unlike in 2020, the Democratic nominee is no longer pretending to respect those rules, a truly appalling mask-off moment that cannot be rewarded with complacency lest Democrats graduate from court-packing to outright codifying their contempt of the third branch of government.
And unlike in 2020, the stakes are too dire to dither and gamble that the Democrats won’t fumble the world’s economic engine and global stability too badly in the next four years. Unlike in 2020, Trump has laid forward affirmative policy prescriptions for the multipronged problems manufactured over the last four years. I do not agree with every proposal, nor will I cease to be a terrible team player and continue to focus friendly fire on my fellow conservatives when they deserve the criticism. But after surviving two assassination attempts and four criminal incursions coordinated by his political adversaries, should Trump become president once more, he will win with the resounding mandate to make America great again as we’ve truly never needed it in the 21st century before.