Why I can't support Donald Trump in 2024
Though innocent of absurd allegations of sedition and inciting to riot, the former president has allowed his ego to override his common sense in his reelection effort
Former President Donald J. Trump has destroyed the good will he built up over four seemingly successful years in office through divisive attacks on his fellow Republicans and childish, arrogant social media posts that make him appear unhinged and irrational. (File Photo: We The People)
This isn’t going to win me any friends or influence many people, but I want you to carefully consider my arguments herein. I am among the millions who twice voted for Trump. In 2016, I had to hold my nose to cast that vote, but there was no way I was going to vote for crooked, murdering Hillary.
Trump proved himself to be a tough, business-like manager of the federal government and thus it was easy to cast a vote for him in 2020. He twice won my home state of Missouri. But there is not a chance in hell I will support him in 2024.
Look, I’m MAGA through and through. I’m absolutely America First, a patriot who faithfully served his country as a U.S. Army aviation officer and helicopter pilot for over 22 years. I loved what Donald Trump did to restore my faith in the United States of America. I even believed — and still do — the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and the GOP by the a corrupt, criminally intent Democrat Party.
But all the faith and trust Trump earned from me and from millions of other Americans disappeared like fog on a warm spring morning with his post-January 6 actions.
First, let me make clear: His remarks made on the Ellipse, just south of the White House, were innocuous, the furthest thing from an incitement to riot and certainly nothing near a subversive effort to overthrow the U.S. government. Those are Leftist lies.
Where I part ways with the former president is his vicious, unprovoked and unfounded attack on his friend and running mate, Vice President Mike Pence. Trump has grown more obnoxious in his adolescent behavior the last two years as he continues to claim that Pence had the power, even the obligation, to reject the slate of electors from as many as seven closely contested states.
He did not, nor does any vice president have such power. All claims to the contrary are patently false.
The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution says the vice president, as president of the Senate, is to open envelopes containing Electoral College votes from each state, count the votes and announce the winner. Nothing in the Constitution allows the vice president to change or reject votes, as Trump and his diehard supporters have erroneously claimed.
He and those same supporters further cite the Electoral Count Act of 1887 as an additional basis of their arguments that Pence could have rejected the electors from those seven states. Again, that law makes no such provision.
Trump and his diehard supporters have claimed for two years Vice President Mike Pence had the power, even the obligation, to reject slates of electors from seven contested states in the 2020 election most in the country at least suspect was stolen. (Photo: Fox News Channel)
Only objections heard from the joint session of Congress to ratify the election may be considered, and those must come by one member elected in the previous election. When such objections are formally read into the record, the Senate withdraws to its chamber to vote on those objections regarding the presidential electors while the House takes up a session to consider objections regarding the vice president’s electors.
Much has been made of a so-called bipartisan effort to amend the law, changing the rule allowing just one member to challenge electors to one that would require 20 percent of the members of each chamber. Trump and his most vehement unhinged supporters have claimed this is “evidence” Pence had the power to reject a slate of electors. Obviously the rule change had nothing to do with the vice president’s role in certification of the election.
Even so, the proposed change would have potentially blocked a slate of electors from being successfully challenged. It would have required 107 members of Congress to challenge a slate, an absurdly high threshold given the divisive, polarized nature of Congress in recent years. Thankfully, the changes were voted down when a cloture motion in the Senate did not receive the required 60 votes.
All the vice president never had any role beyond managing the process, with no voice in it beyond opening certification envelopes and announcing electoral vote totals. The bill that failed would have done nothing but affirm the language in both the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act that made that role abundantly clear, particularly since the Electoral Act echoes the language of the Twelfth.
Trump is dead wrong and his supporters are being uniformed and irresponsible in taking his word for it without doing their own simple research.
These egregious errors — I’m being generous in not calling them lies — are not the only reason, however, I cannot and will not support Trump in the primary campaign season. On the other hands, if he is the Republican nominee, I will have no choice but to hold my nose and vote for him once again.
Because many of the allegations are absurd and because they are still a legal matter for adjudication, this article will not address the multiple indictments Trump is facing at the time of publication.
Suffice to say, however, he rants daily on his Twitter-like platform, Truth Social. It's mostly juvenile and should be ridiculed but like the story of the emperor who had no clothes, no supporter calls him on it. Even more so since January 6, he has grown more petulant, childish and irrational with these missives. His core supporters have become just as unhinged and irrational as he has since that date.
Though facing multiple indictments and a loss of support among suburban women, primarily for his alleged sexual misconduct, Trump nonetheless continues to lead by a large margin in 2024 presidential election polls. (Photo: Tim Reynolds/Associated Press)
I must point to the fact Trump is running a campaign like he was never in office before, like he is an "outsider." He is no longer the lone voice in the wilderness he could claim to be in 2016. He denigrates moderate Republicans mostly because he has a base of malcontents who blame RINOs for every ill the GOP now suffers. The truth is, the party has never been fully united since the Civil War.
Moreover, his record as president shows he nominated RINOs. His choice for Homeland Security Secretary was John Kelly, a RINO who became his biggest critic after he left the office in barely seven months into the job. Trump nominated Wilbur Ross, a billionaire with deep ties to Russia, as his Commerce Secretary. That was despite the fact Democrats were bludgeoning Trump with false allegations of Russia interference in the 2016 election.
Kelly wasn’t the only Deep State RINO Trump promoted. The primary example is former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has since stabbed Trump in the back several times. Trump recently blamed Christie for the disastrous Chris Wray nomination to head the FBI and Jim Comey was fired.
Trump’s biggest mistake may have been how he chose to fight Covid. He unwittingly put a corrupt life-long bureaucrat with a Mengele complex in charge of the effort. Dr. Anthony Fauci has his fingerprints all over the virus, having sent U.S. tax dollars to China’s Wuhan lab for what is obviously gain-of-function research despite his multiple lies before Congress denying it.
It has been plainly recorded in NIH records since 2014 what Fauci had done but neither Trump nor his RINO White House staff did an investigation to uncover Fauci’s treachery. You could blame that staff, but Trump prides himself on the kind of thoroughness that should have prevented mass murder worldwide.
Perhaps that’s understandable, though, given Trump’s longtime desire to do business in China. Trump's own business history is filled with overseas financial deals, and some have involved the Chinese state. He spent a decade unsuccessfully pursuing projects in China, operating an office there during his first run for president and forging a partnership with a major government-controlled company.
Such activity may not be technically illegal, but it is certainly suspect. It calls into question just how seriously he took China as an adversary. It’s hard to bring pressure to bear on a country of 1.4 billion people that you want to do business with once you leave office.
Because he appointed three conservative judges to the U.S. Supreme Court who eventually voted with a majority to overturn Roe v Wade, Trump wants credit for the victory but has gone against the basis of the decision to put the abortion question with each state by advocating for a “vital role” in the policy by the federal government. (Photo: Dan Ellis/UPI)
He in reality took little action on the issues that got him elected in 2016, and he is now changing or abandoning many of those position. For example, suddenly he loves ethanol subsidies. He needs to win Iowa — where they grow corn. Iowa farmers have become strongly conservative the last few years but they still love their government handouts.
He wants to get credit for SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade but is now against the six-week abortion ban, suggesting it is too harsh. He has, since the Dobbs decision that negated Roe, said the federal government should have a vital role in abortion policy but has repeatedly failed to provide specifics. Dobbs actually held that it is the states, not the federal government, that should make abortion policy.
Another reason I cannot support Trump: He did not close the border. Though it was more secure under his administration than it has ever been under Biden, the most dangerous type of illegals entering the country steadily increased under Trump. In early 2020, officials told the Washington Post that got‐aways had “soared,” reaching over 1,000 in one day. They now average over 1,620 per day
He did not significantly reduce illegal drug flow into the U.S. and under his watch, human trafficking increased dramatically, as the cartels turned to new sources of revenue to replace what they did lose in drug seizures. His efforts literally drove the smugglers underground. Increasingly elaborate, well-engineered tunnels were built under Trump’s wall.
He did not build a “big, beautiful wall” as he often called it. Instead, illegals simply walk around his incomplete, fragmented wall. Where it is too long to allow that simple defeat, cartel smugglers with heavy-duty industrial saws are cutting the individual steel bollards that form it.
Dating back to before Trump left office, suspected smuggling gangs managed to hack through the wall 3,272 times between 2019 and 2021. In March of 2021, an entire section of border wall was cut away to allow two SUVs driven by cartel smugglers to enter the U.S. One of the vehicles, a Ford Expedition carrying 25 people, was hit by a tractor-trailer, killing 13 and seriously injuring the rest. immigration officials called it one of the deadliest highway crashes involving migrants sneaking into the U.S.
Trump’s tariff policies — especially with China — raised consumer prices, hurting the American consumer at least as much as they impacted China’s economy. There are claims that the tariffs, while in effect, were costing U.S. buyers as much as $1.4 billion a month. That number is absurd, but there is little doubt the tariffs were hitting pocketbooks hard.
In typical Trump fashion, he was there to take credit when things were good and was the first to point a finger when things turned sour. He did not unify the country. He divided us with his attempts to be all things to all people. He espoused traditional core values but the evidence mounts that he does not adhere to those traditional core values.
One cannot continue to ignore numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and the vulgar comments he makes about women. These issues all tell us something about Donald Trump:
He is unfit to be president.