Some Unsolicited Advice to Donald Trump for Winning the White House in 2024

I’d like to offer some advice to Donald Trump. This offer comes from someone who in November talked about following him into a raging inferno then in January questioned whether supporting him was worth the fight. 

How does one go from being such a rabid fan to sitting on the fence in such a short period of time?  Messaging.  As I mentioned in my January piece, Trump’s embrace of the grifters running the GOP suggests that he might be taking his eye off the ball.  As such, I’d like to offer three bits of unsolicited advice to the former and hopefully future president. 

First, stop focusing on the stolen 2020 election and focus on America today. Not that 2020 wasn’t important, it was. But it’s 2023 and we’re 20 months away from the next election.  There simply isn’t time to fix 2020, and any energy spent trying to do is that much less energy going into saving the country in 2024.  Given the trajectory of the country, if we’re not victorious in 2024 there will likely be no more America as we know it by 2028. 

Second, to stop taking credit for the vaccine.  The more Americans know about it the less they like it, and many of us hated it from day one. While putting the development in motion was understandable at the time, the fact is that it was used as a cudgel to coerce the American people into submission, and may have terrible long term consequences to come.  It’s an issue best let go as his supporters hate it and his enemies wouldn’t give him credit for it regardless.    

Third, and most importantly, focus on issues that impact Americans where the proverbial tire hits the road.  Here are seven.

1)  Immigration:  Promise to build a wall. Guarantee that the first thing he will do in office is begin the process of building a wall from Brownsville to San Diego.  No nation can be a nation if it doesn’t have a border and the invasion on our southern border is far more of a threat to Americans than anything going on in Ukraine. We’ve seen the virtual elimination of our border since Joe Biden was installed as president and watched as over 5 million illegal immigrants walked in virtually unimpeded. At the same time we’ve seen 100,000 deaths a year from Fentanyl overdoses and are forced to watch as cartels bring their violence to American streets and mimic Mexico by bringing their infrastructure here and having comrades take powerful positions in government.  He should promise that if Democrats and activist judges throw roadblocks along the way again, he will use the military to patrol the border where no wall exists until the wall is actually complete.

2)  Wokeness in government: He should promise to eliminate every element of the racist Critical Race Theory in government along with the DEI “diversity, equity and inclusion” treachery.  He should tell America the government will stop operating programs based on race and will stop setting various groups of Americans against one another in the name of “equity” and victimhood. The police power of government will no longer be used to favor any group over another or to use demographic data to achieve “diversity” objectives. He should promise that every single element of the federal government will be agnostic as it relates to immutable characteristics. 

3)  Energy independence: Promise to return the United States to energy independence.  He will stop the demonization of fossil fuels in and by our government. We will stop having the nation’s economic well being taken for granted and sacrificed at the altar of the “climate change” hoax.  He will stop wasting American tax dollars pursuing the fiction of green energy as the destruction of the environment associated with the mining and production of materials used in car batteries, solar panels and wind turbines is far greater than that associated with the production of natural gas and oil.      

 4)  Return to gender normalcy:  Eliminate every element of the federal government that blurs the lines between men and women.  While there may indeed be a tiny number of Americans who actually suffer from “gender dysphoria” the reality is, men are men and women are women. This has been a fact throughout all of human history and remains so today for 99.995% of human beings. Our government should no more base public policy on the desires of .005% of the population who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria than they should base it on the slightly less frequent existence of Siamese twins. And he should promise to pass a federal law outlawing “gender affirming poison and operations” for children under the age of 18.

5) School Choice: Work to give every parent in America school choice.  School is often the primary place where children learn about the history of the nation as well as the 3Rs.  Increasingly our schools are not only not teaching students to read, write and do arithmetic, but they are becoming indoctrination camps for anti-American, anti-science, racist poison that is undermining the foundations of American liberty, opportunity and prosperity.  Although most education is administered at the state level, the Department of Education plays a significant role and he should promise to harness DOE’s resources to encourage every state to give parents control over their children’s education.    

6) Crime:  Use every Constitutional resource available to reverse the Democrat’s war on police and the American people in the name of “equity”.  Democrat soft on crime policies have put citizens’ lives at risk, and cost the lives of thousands of people across the country since the fiction of Michael Brown’s “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in 2014 and the riots in response to the death of Saint George Floyd in 2020. Gone will be the days when the justice system is more interested in the rights of criminals at the expense of the rights, the safety and lives of victims.  If Democrats were really interested in helping POC and poor Americans they’d call for greater police presences and longer prison sentences for criminals.  But they don’t.  Trump should make it clear he does. He wants to protect night clerks, subway riders, kids walking to school and every other law abiding American as they simply go through their daily lives.  Victims’ lives matter. Certainly more than those of criminals who prey upon the innocent and the weak.

7) Overhaul of the security apparatus:  Trump should promise to return the American security agencies to their original mandates, i.e. protecting the lives, property and rights of the American people and their country.  Promise to clean house of the leadership in the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA and the NSA so that the American people can once again have confidence that their government is there to protect them, not act as the enforcement arm of a political party and persecute them for exercising Constitutional rights.  In addition, he should promise passage of legislation that makes explicit a prohibition of government agencies working with social media firms to infringe on 1^st Amendment rights guaranteed in the Constitution.  

The entire point of this suggestion is for Trump to make it crystal clear that his sole focus is the saving of the American Republic, securing for all Americans the ability to exercise their God given rights and the ability to go through their daily lives without fear that the borg of government or the thugs empowered by it will destroy all that they live for. 

If Trump can convince voters his focus is on their future and not his past, the White House is his for the taking.  

Barack Obama and Benghazi: What is the body count that separates a president from a candidate?

There have been three different parts to the Benghazi story. Not surprisingly, Barack Obama has managed to fail spectacularly in all three.

The first aspect of this failure has to do with the run-up to September 11th. Given terrorist’s general penchant for anniversaries and the fact that September 11th is such a trophy date for them, the Obama administration should have had every American embassy and consulate on the highest security level possible, with terrorist friendly places like Libya, practically on lockdown. Add to that the chaos associated with the fledgling government and Libya should have been ground zero for extra security measures.

Sadly, it was not. The State Department, in the specific person of Hillary Clinton, denied repeated requests for increased security. Indeed the American mission at Benghazi "was like a cardboard building, there wasn't even bullet proof glass” and security personnel “were not even allowed to have bullets”.

The second aspect of failure at Benghazi was the response to the attacks themselves. The attack on the American compound began on September 11th at 9:40 PM local time, 3:40 Eastern time. In addition to dozens of people storming the front entrance to the compound the attack included small arms fire, mortars and RPG rounds. By 6:00 AM local time the attacks on the compound and the annex were essentially over and the survivors were being transported to the airport. During the 8 hour siege no support came from outside of Libya – although a six man security team from Tripoli (including 2 DOD employees) arrived at 1:30 AM to help evacuate personnel and retrieve bodies of those killed, including Ambassador Stevens. There was however never any military support sent. Of note is the fact that 3 hours after the attacks began, the Secretary of Defense ordered anti-terrorism security teams sent from Spain, but five hours later, by which time the attacks were over, they had not even gotten off of the ground. More consequentially however is the fact that prior to the attack on the annex a Special Forces unit in Tripoli was preparing to fly to Benghazi. They too never got off the ground because they were told to stand down, that they couldn’t go because they didn’t have authority. This is in stark contrast to the administration’s claim that no one was ever given a stand down order and that all available resources were used.

The third aspect of failure, and the most consequential for the American people as a whole, although certainly not for the families of the victims of the attacks, is the obfuscation and cover-up. Coming just 2 months before the presidential election, Barack Obama made the conscious decision to lie to the American people. Indeed, in an attempt to further his administration’s fiction that terrorism was on the wane and that America was once again loved around the world, Barack Obama tried to pretend as if nothing of consequence had happened as he jetted off to Vegas on a campaign stop. What’s worse, five days later, despite knowledge to the contrary, he trotted Susan Rice out in front of the nation to lie and blame the events in Benghazi on a YouTube video. Later, Hillary Clinton claimed that she had never denied any increased security requests from Libya. Today, eight months later we know that both were lies.

What is particularly disturbing about the events surrounding Benghazi is that they are sequential, i.e. they compound one another. After any one of the three they could have decided to make good, honest decisions. They didn’t and taken as a whole the Benghazi affair is a disaster. We all know that mistakes get made in life and in any organization, government or otherwise. As they say, nobody is perfect and we should not expect our politicians to be so. And we don’t. We do however expect them to be competent and honest. In this case Barack Obama and his administration showed themselves to be not only imperfect, but incompetent, dishonest, and most of all, self-servingly callous with the lives of four Americans who were in Benghazi serving as representatives of the American people.

It’s possible for Americans to believe that in the chaos of Libya in the summer of 2012, that somehow security measures were not quite what they should have been or that the security in place seemed adequate but turned out to fail in a perfect storm of events. After all, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”.

What’s not possible for Americans to believe however is that in the midst of a raging battle of unknown duration, the President of the United States would refuse to allow Special Forces to attempt to protect and rescue those Americans who were being attacked. From the very beginning the administration understood the gravity of the situation – both on the ground and for their campaign. Rather than jettison the fiction of a terrorism free middle east, the president choose to order reinforcements to stand down. Additionally, later pronouncements that military aid from outside Libya would not have arrived in time are simply absurd. As far as we know the terrorists do not punch clocks for an 8 hour shift of causing mayhem. By definition a terrorist attack timetable is not coordinated with the victims beforehand. In the middle of the battle there was no way of knowing if it would last 5 more hours or 5 more days. In that light the decision to refuse reinforcements shows Barack Obama to be at best an incompetent Commander in Chief and at worst a narcissistic politician for whom his power is the only issue of concern.

Finally there is the cover-up. Every American understands that safety and security are messy affairs and that tragedy occurs and people die, often brave people who have willingly borne the burden of defending us. While Americans might be able to accept as human the misjudgments in preparation in the run up to September 11th, and while they might reluctantly accept the fact that they have elected an incompetent Commander in Chief, they will not, or at least should not, accept a president who, when four Americans die on his watch, lies to the American people about the cause so that he can win reelection. At some point you have to ask, is there nothing that rises above politics? What is the body count that separates the president from the candidate? What if the number had been 8 victims? Would 16 victims have been enough bloodshed to cause him to delay his trip to Las Vegas? Had 20 Americans died would they still have dared to blame it on the video?

Barack Obama has shown himself to be an incompetent president, an ineffectual Commander in Chief and most of all a pernicious politician. One has to wonder where things will go from here. Say what you will about Richard Nixon, when the time came he at least knew when the game was up and had the grace not to drag the nation into a constitutional crisis. If we get to that point with Barack Obama one wonders if grace will emerge as one of the character traits that’s been hidden for the last five years… Don’t count on it.

If the government can share your gun permit data with the public, why not your tax and income data too?

In the wake of the tragedy in Connecticut last month a newspaper serving the New York City suburbs, The Journal News, decided to post to its website the names and addresses of all of the legal gun owners in Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam counties. Gun owners were outraged. In response a blogger posted the names and addresses of the key players at the newspaper’s editorial staff. The Journal, a unit of USA Today publisher Gannett, accessed the names and addresses via a Freedom Of Information request which makes most government data available to the public.

This is a blatant misuse of government data and the government is complicit in that misuse. The state of New York requires that all handguns be registered. That means that in order to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, a law abiding citizen must request permission from the state of New York, something they don’t have to do with the freedom of religion, speech or anything else in the Constitution. (This doesn’t apply to owning a rifle, only handguns.) Bad enough that citizens must ask, but what’s worse, New York is a “May issue” state, which means that the state has the right to say “No, you are not allowed to exercise your 2nd Amendment right”. A denial can only be overturned in court if the denial is shown to be arbitrary and capricious. And don’t forget, in the case of New York City, the people making that decision are part of the same government that thinks it’s reasonable to ban large sodas.

If perchance the government deigns to allow you to own a gun in New York, and if you then want to carry that gun outside your home, you’ll now have to request permission for that separately – and that does apply to long guns as well. The state or local authorities then get to decide if you have a good reason to carry one. It doesn’t matter if you believe you need it for self defense, what matters is whether or not you can convince them that you need it for self defense.

So now that the government of New York has forced its citizens to beg for permission in order to exercise their Constitutional right to bear arms, it then keeps all their names and addresses in a database that it then shares with just about anyone who asks.

Of course this is a bonanza for criminals. Now they know where they can go to steal guns. Or they can know in advance which homes will require extra firepower or more men because the owner may be armed. What’s more, criminals are now able to use the database to harass and threaten police and prison guards and their families. At the same time victims who have fled domestic abuse and who have successfully navigated the gun licensing maze now have their names and addresses published for their tormenters to find.

This is a clear example of an abuse of government power. If a citizen is law abiding, and has gone through all of the hoops that government has established in order to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, (as unconstitutional as they may be) does the government then has the right to provide that citizen’s information to the public? That is a circular argument: The government imposes severe restrictions and registration requirements in order for a citizen to exercise their rights, then because they have collected that data they say their hands are tied and they must provide it to the public.

Well, if that’s the case, then shouldn’t income and tax information be made public? The government forces people to pay taxes and keeps tax information on every person. Shouldn’t the government make that data available to anyone who asks? Of course not. That would be ludicrous. The question is however, what makes tax and income data any more privileged than the notion that someone feels a need to protect their home and family? Losing your personal information is no doubt a bad thing, but worse is losing your life because some newspaper gave a criminal the heads about what to expect when they broke into your house. Just as there is no compelling reason for the government to open up its tax database to the public, there is no compelling reason for the government to open up its gun permit database to the public.

It’s situations like this that make gun owners weary of registering their weapons in the first place. Government collects massive amounts of data on its citizens, from driver’s licenses to arrest records to the medicines you take, the government at all levels has a plethora of information on every citizen. Because the government has that data – often coercing citizens to provide it – does that automatically mean that that information is available to the public? Obviously not. Freedom Of Information Act and government sunshine laws provide an important tool for citizens who seek to monitor government activity. Those laws should not be used to invade the privacy of law abiding citizens, whether it has to do with taxes, gun ownership or any other law abiding activity. As despicable as the Journal’s actions were, they were enabled by a government that misunderstands its responsibilities as they relate to protecting the information it collects on the citizens. Which simply demonstrates that the more power government accumulates the more opportunities it will have to negatively impact the lives of its citizens. Or put another way, small government = big freedom while big government = small freedom.