How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Donald

Donald Trump was not my first pick for President. I shuddered a bit when he announced. After all, the man was a Democrat during the Bush administration.

I expected Trump to fade like the other outsider candidates. Failing that, I expected him to reach his ceiling and be passed be a more viable candidate when the crowded field narrowed down. None of that happened.

Going into the conventions, I was totally conflicted. Lots of columnists and pundits gave varying advice. Some supported Hillary because she was a known quantity. Others supported Trump for the same reason. The best description of this was that voting for Trump was like playing Russian Roulette but voting for Hillary was like playing it with a semi-automatic.

I watched the Republican convention and felt left out. This was not my party. I resigned myself to voting for Hillary, knowing that she'd likely be a disaster and defeated in a Republican wave in 2020.

Then came the Democratic convention. If Trump's Republicans seemed like strangers, Hillary's Democrats were people I knew all too well. There was no way I could vote for this crowd. So I resigned myself to voting for Trump or a 3rd party candidate.

In late August there were rumors about Hillary's health. Her campaign denied them until she collapsed during a 9/11 ceremony. At first her campaign insisted that she was just dehydrated. Then they admitted that she had pneumonia. So Hillary was caught in yet another lie. What's more, she blamed it on society. Women aren't' allowed to be sick and have to "power through" illness.

Imagining 4-8 years of Hillary lying when she didn't need to and playing the woman card made me warm to Trump a lot.

The debates helped, too. In the first debate, Trump spent his first question laying out an economic plan. Hillary spent the debate giving facile answers and trying to bait Trump.

In the second debate she left her seat and walked in front of Trump, positioning herself between him and a camera. The next day her campaign sent out a picture of it with a comment about hostile men looming over successful women's shoulders. That sort of staging irritated me.

Hillary's entire campaign irritated me. She never gave me a reason to vote for her. She dredged up a dozen Trump quotes, some of them real some of them taken out of context and some taken from decades ago and ran them constantly. She ran a few ads for herself but they were general feel-good ones.

Let's look at the shocking tapes of Trump's locker room talk. Several double standards were being applied there. Trump apologized but that didn't slow anyone down. No one even mentions his apology. But at the same time, Hillary apologized for her private email server and expected us to drop the matter. These tapes were 22 years old. Trump is being held to current standards but at the time that he bragged that women allowed him to touch them, Bill Clinton was sticking a cigar into an intern's vagina. When it came out, no one said that disqualified him for the presidency. Instead they insisted that oral sex isn't really sex.

I'm no fool. When someone is attacked unfairly, I feel the need to defend him. Too many of the attacks on Trump have no basis. He's been called a racist but you have to go back to 1980 when his father was still running the family business to find any anti-black actions. His statements about illegal immigrants are often given but he made it clear that he was only talking about illegal immigrants and they are not a race. Islam is not a race, either, it is a religion. Accusations that Trump is anti-semetic are just dumb and quickly disproved.

Between the weakness of the attacks on Trump and the attacks on Romney four years ago, I have to conclude that any Republican candidate would have been demonized. It's what the Clinton campaign does. Hillary is an uninspiring candidate so she tries to drag her opponents down. Even her debate coaching was on how to bait Trump instead of how to appeal to the voters. So I discount a lot of the anti-Trump animosity. It's fake outrage. If Trump was still a Democrat then the people who protest him now would be defending him.

So, by election day I was willing to vote for Trump and cheer when he won unexpectedly. But I wasn't a real Trump supporter until after the election.

There are daily protests. Some of them turn into riots. People are working themselves into a frenzy insisting that Trump's election is causing a wave of violence. This is repeated by the MSM without question. It was national news that incidents of Islamophobia are up. There were 257 incidents in 2015 (with the implication that Trump caused the increase instead of multiple terrorist attacks). Keep in mind that this includes a number of mild incidents that would never make the local paper to say nothing national news if it wasn't for the religious aspect. To put this in context, Chicago has had 487 homicides as of August. By the end of the year Chicago will have had twice as many homicides as nationwide non-fatal incidents involving Muslims. But the MSM never puts this in context.

Two things really made me think I voted the right way. The first was the whole safety pin thing. The idea that random people are going to be attacked and need someone safe to turn to. That's pretty offensive - the idea that half the country is about to attack anyone who's not a cis gendered, straight, white. The insistence that Trump supporters are all alt-Right white supremacists is also offensive.

The other was the protests. There was one close enough that I could see it from my front porch. While this one was peaceful, I could hear them chanting Black Lives Matter. That's a movement that regularly calls for killing cops. What would the marchers have done if they knew I was a Trump voter? Would they respect the individual right to choose who to vote for or would they react violently. A protest march downtown started peacefully but turned violent. I'd be surprised if there weren't marchers in common from the two events.

Regardless of how well Trump does, I can't associate with Hillary's supporters. They are too quick to shout down opposing opinions and demonize anyone they disagree with. They suppress speech and act like infants when they don't get their way. They are even trying to overthrow the election results by threatening the members of the Electoral College. This is the real threat to America and freedom and the real road to a totalitarian government. Each time I hear about the left acting out it makes me support Trump a bit more. He may not be much but he's our only defense against the crazies.