A Trump voter returns to finish the job.

A college classmate voted for Donald Trump.

Today he explains why.

I learned that Matt Naitove had voted for President Trump twice. Last Thursday I published his guest post that reported what he didn't like about Democrats. Today he says what he likes about Trump. 

Matt had a long career writing and editing material for Plastics Technology magazine. Matt told me he had Fox News on his home TV 12 hours a day, but that he doesn't watch it constantly. He said that six days a week he performs the chore of reading The New York Times.

I disagree with much of what Matt wrote. I expect many readers to sputter with frustration and objection as they read. But today is his turn.

Naitove

Guest Post by Matt Naitove

The Awful Truth: Six Reasons We Need Trump

After failing my last assignment for a guest post on Peter’s blog, it’s only fair that I complete the job. The question was simple, the answer less so. How did a son of solidly Democratic New York Jewish parents, educated at Harvard and Columbia Journalism School, become a Trump voter?

Last week, I got only so far as to enumerate the failings of the Democrat Party that alienated me. Peter now wants to know what are my positive reasons to vote for Trump.

Some readers will upbraid me for neglecting their litany of objections to Trump and his policies. But, as I said, my assignment is to identify the positives.

So, why is Donald Trump the essential leader for America at this time?

1. He does what so many other Presidents only talked about or hoped for.

• He closed the Southern Border to illegal immigration. Obama turned a lot of people back at the border; Biden (falsely) claimed he lacked authority on his own to dam the flood. Trump started building a modern, durable border wall equipped with electronic sensors in his first term and is completing it now. He has empowered the Border Patrol to do what it was created to do, not serve as concierges for new arrivals. He is pursuing dangerous illegals throughout the nation, not just at the border. His well publicized antipathy to mass immigration alone has staunched the inflow; and he repurposed the CBP One app (now CBP Home) to facilitate “self-deportation.” The results were immediate and (so far) lasting. The benefits to beleaguered cities (like NYC) and the blow to the child-trafficking and human-trafficking profits of the drug cartels are rebukes to the appalling policies of the previous administration.

• He has actively addressed wasteful government spending and rampant fraud. Every president rhetorically targets “waste, fraud & abuse.” Most presidents (Biden excepted) laud the value of minimizing fiscal deficits and the ballooning national debt. Trump created DOGE to attack the problem; its success has been limited, except in drawing public attention to the obscene waste of public tax money on cronyism, beyond-absurd pet projects, and money laundering among a maze of NGOs. Trump has made wide-ranging efforts to shrink, defund or abolish what he considers redundant, unproductive, or counterproductive Federal agencies. Though Trump opponents have enlisted a phalanx of lower-court judges to resist these efforts, Trump’s success, once again, is to educate the public to the waste and outright theft of their tax dollars.

• “Affordability” is not just a slogan or talking point for Trump, but a campaign of action. He has held inflation on a downward curve by curbing wasteful spending, launching an assault on crippling regulations that inhibit business growth and increase costs, and – above all – bringing down energy costs (see below). Prices have declined for some key foodstuffs (eggs!), medicines (rounding up drug companies to cut Medicare costs) and services (home mortgages). He is addressing others by selectively modifying tariffs and import deals. A catastrophic tax increase was forestalled by the One Big Beautiful Bill (with no help from Democrats), and a raft of tax breaks were instituted for all U.S. citizens, especiallythose at lower income levels (not the lie of “tax breaks for billionaires” squawked endlessly by Democrats).

• He is bringing more order to our chaotic healthcare system. Lower drug prices for Medicare is the most immediate effect. Current efforts are underway to design a payment system oriented to patients, not insurance companies, using HSAs to give subsidies directly to individuals, and releasing the shackles of Obamacare (ACA) that impose a limited menu of insurance plans, so that a free market can operate.

• Trump has done more than anyone to cultivate prospects for peace in the Middle East. He is building on the Abraham Accords created in his first term. He has repaired relations with Saudi Arabia, arguably our strongest ally in the region. He did what no other president dared to do in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, ending (for now, at least) their headlong rush to atomic weapons. (In his first term, he made good on past presidents’ promises to move our embassy to Jerusalem.)

• Trump (in his first term) forced NATO allies to increase their military spending that was far below mandated levels. That effort has continued with success.

• Trump acted to end (or critically weaken) the downward spiral to tyranny and alliance with America’s enemies (China, Russia, Iran) in Venezuela.

• Trump is pushing for a resolution of another threat to America’s security that many presidents have fretted about but not acted on: Greenland. Look beyond the bluster to recognize the important underlying issue and the first effort in living memory to move off the dime on this. Let’s also remember that Denmark already sold one of its territories, now the U.S. Virgin Islands, to us as recently as 1917.

• Trump’s capture of Maduro and assaults on drug boats offer the first hope in ages that the “war on drugs” may end better than the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

• While numerous past presidents have wished for a substantial banquet space at the White House, Trump is building it – at no public expense.

2. Trump ended the war on fossil fuels and acted on many fronts to reinforce America’s energy security and affordability. Energy is the fundamental cost component of the overall economy. Making it abundant, affordable and secure is the most basic economic policy.

• Increasing opportunities for oil/gas exploration and leasing.

• Removing environmental and other regulatory barriers to energy production. One of Trump’s first acts in his first term was to reverse the Obama halt on the previously approved Keystone XL pipeline (since halted again by Biden).

• Ending the subsidies for EVs and draconian emissions restrictions on gasoline and diesel vehicles that were intended to help force them out of the market.

• Abolishing regulations limiting market choice in appliances (and shower heads) that do little or nothing to improve the environment and mainly frustrate and insult consumers.

• Halting (or trying to halt) offshore wind farms that are being built over the national-security objections of the U.S. Navy (suppressed by the Biden Administration) and in willful violation of wildlife (birds) and marine-life protection laws. Trump is simply insisting on the environmental and national-security vetting of these projects that is required by law.

3. Trump has helped along a growing international trend toward awakening the public from the “Sleep of Reason” imposed on them by the climate-change cult of junk-science charlatans, careerist academics and opportunistic consultants – abetted by a gullible, ignorant and incurious popular press.

• Ensuring that the U.S. government does not contribute funds or prestige to agencies, international bodies, virtue-signaling treaties or publicity events (conferences) that promote phony alarums of climate catastrophe; fraudulent (knowingly or uncaringly unrealistic) demands for reduced standards of living by advanced societies; preposterous claims for “reparations” to poorer nations allegedly harmed by the environmental emissions of richer societies; and concurrent demands that emerging economies invest in costly and unreliable renewable energy instead of more functional and cost-efficient fossil-fuel power generation.

• Appointing an EPA Administrator (Lee Zeldin) with the good sense and guts to withdraw the senseless agency “finding” that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that is hazardous to humans and thus must be regulated by the Agency. So CO2 – plant food, the basis of all life on earth – is a pollutant? Might as well make the same finding about nitrogen (78% of the atmosphere) or H2O. They’re equally essential to life and equally hazardous under certain conditions. And CO2 has been part of the atmosphere since the earth began (a much larger part back then and only 0.04% now). Oxygen is more deserving of being termed a “pollutant” since it’s a relatively new addition to the atmosphere and had a dynamic effect on the earth’s topography, helping wash much of the early continents into the sea.

4. Donald Trump is restoring our military to be the strategic asset we need. Biden gave this lip service while presiding over the degradation of our services’ readiness across the board. (Clinton and Obama were actively hostile to the military.) Besides increasing Defense (or War) budgets, Trump appointed a new kind of Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has restored the prestige of military service and fostered a radical rethinking of procurement and war-fighting strategy needed to upset the sclerotic systems that threaten our security.

5. Trump is restoring a sense of freedom and fairness that was being eroded over previous administrations.

• The oppressive rule of “DEI” has been challenged. Terms such as whiteness, white privilege, critical race theory, and structural racism are no longer the cudgels they once were to beat dissenters into submission. Words like equity and inclusion have had their fraudulent trappings stripped away.

• Creeping encroachment by governments at all levels – abetted by corporations and academia – to police thought and speech and to disenfranchise promoters of “misinformation” and “disinformation” have been blocked. Threats of debanking and deplatforming – as befell Donald Trump, his family and numerous other conservatives – as well as blocking access to stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop in the NY Post, no longer bite as they did such a short time ago. 

• The nation at large is being forced to confront the motto of Chief Justice John Roberts: “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The Trump Administration is exposing how this applies to a myriad of programs throughout all levels of government as well as academia and corporate America designed to favor one group over others. The Administration denies the fiction that America has not advanced since 1860 or 1960. It dismisses the idea that present discrimination is the cure for past discrimination. It also objects to any group of Americans being regarded indefinitely as wards of the state.

6. Trump is a force for change, for shaking up the corrupt, sclerotic old ways. The Democrats (except maybe the Socialist wing) and the middle-of-the-road Republicans are happy to preserve the old grift and graft and comfy office perks. Donald Trump offers a ladder up from this foul ditch. Socialists offer a blind step into a darker abyss. I can see only one way to go.

 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog by email go to Https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]