My apology to President Trump

I voted for Donald Trump twice. But I’ve never used the words “altruistic” or “generous” to describe him. In fact, whenever my support for Trump came up, I always hastened to add, a little too sanctimoniously, that I don’t like the man personally.

I might be changing my mind. Here’s why.

Trump didn’t need to go into politics. He’s a billionaire. He had everything a man could want, including a gorgeous ex-model for a wife. (Money is a more potent aphrodisiac than power. Sorry, Henry Kissinger – you’d have known that if only you’d had money.)

Trump went into politics anyway. Sure, there was an ego factor. I hope it doesn’t surprise you that successful men have egos. So do successful women.

But Trump could have exercised that healthy ego in many other ways for less risk and less cost. He could have bought a cruise ship, or a gold-plated 747, or donated a billion dollars to get a medical center named after him, or started a charitable foundation – a real one, not like the Clinton Foundation.

He instead chose to run for president back in 2016. That doesn’t make him Mother Teresa, but it makes him a lot closer to Mother Teresa than to Joe Biden – the guy who has spent a lifetime in politics because he’s been a failure at every other thing in life, including parenting, and whose lifetime in politics has been primarily for the purpose of lining the greasy, grafty and grifty pockets of himself and his cheesy, sleazy family.

After winning the 2016 election against all odds, Trump did a lot of good things in office. He tightened up the border. Inflation was low. Employment was high. He nominated and got confirmed three Supreme Court justices who think their job is to interpret the law, not make it.  

A bit afraid of Trump, the world stayed mostly at peace. There was no war in Ukraine or Gaza. There was no humiliating stampede out the door of Afghanistan.

Trump browbeat NATO into paying more (but still not the share they’d agreed to) for the defense of Europe. He boldly moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem – the capital of Israel and the ancient capital of Judea.

Hamas knew that Bibi Netanyahu backed by Donald Trump were not to be messed with.

Trump achieved these things over the objections of a truculently hostile media and Democrat opposition that impeached him twice and fabricated allegations of treasonous collusion with the Russians (who the Democrats stopped liking in 1989). Those knowingly false allegations of treason were themselves treasonous, and the Dems have still paid no price for making them.

Then Trump lost his re-election bid. Maybe he lost legally, and maybe not. We do know that the Democrats used the crisis of COVID to change the voting rules in the middle of the game. Now they’re making those rule changes permanent – changes such as mail-in voting with no requirement for ID to concoct another electoral chaos not followed anywhere in Europe, Japan, Australia or other democracies.  

After leaving office in the wake of that election day fiasco, Trump could have just gone back to Mar-a-Lago. As a billionaire former president in his mid-70s, he could have just played golf for the rest of his life. Most men in his position do that. Did Howard Hughes ever run for president? Did Hugh Hefner? How about a guy I admire, Warren Buffett?

No, no, and no.

Trump is cut from a different cloth. He disputed the 2020 election conducted under the COVID cloak. He did so angrily, too angrily. But he didn’t just talk the sore-loser talk. He also walked the I’ll-be-back walk. He immediately began campaigning for the 2024 election.

He has now beaten a very able pool of Republican challengers (the last of whom is beaten and doesn’t know it) before we’ve even gotten to Super Tuesday. For a non-politician, the guy’s got game.

Democrats are terrified of him, as they should be. Unwilling to engage him on substance, they’ve launched “law-fare” against him. They’ve put him on trial in a biased New York state court for bogus fraud allegations. They’ve charged him criminally in Georgia in a case already notorious for kickbacks and criminal perjury committed by the District Attorney, her incompetent boyfriend/special prosecutor, and the boyfriend’s former partner, all of whom should be awkwardly sharing a prison cell.

There’s also a BS case about Trump taking documents out of the White House, something you’re not supposed to do unless your last name is “Biden” and you put them in tattered boxes in your locked garage (ohwww!!!) and disclose them to no one except persons without security clearance who fraudulently ghost-write your book.

I would say that the jury is still out on these cases, except that quirks in the law have so far precluded even the impaneling of a jury. A weirdo New York state court judge visiting from Mordor slapped Trump with a $350 million judgement, sans jury, and refuses to stay it pending Trump’s appeal.  

Altogether, Trump is looking at some half-billion dollars or more of exposure. It’s possible that he could be sentenced to prison.

He soldiers on. Not to reap small-time graft for himself and a corrupt, druggy family the way Biden does – heck, Trump could buy and sell the Biden family shake-down business a thousand times over – but because he thinks the country needs saving.

About that, he’s right.

Trump and I have different lives, different personalities, different styles, different bank accounts, different hair, and different sizes. But whatever his failings, I admire and respect him for putting at stake his life and fortune for the country I love. Thank you for that, Mr. President.