RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/editorial/why-donald-trump-should-be-reelected/2020/10/21/

On the face of it, the choice on November 3 is straightforward. A president is running for reelection who brings with him a record of some remarkable achievements over the past four years, both domestically and internationally. Running against him is an opponent who seems locked in the past, with a failed leftist agenda, but with an overarching message that he will restore dignity to the presidency.

Few will deny that Donald Trump has a controversial personality (although Biden is hardly a saint himself), but look at what he has accomplished and the promise that four more years of a Trump administration holds.

The very fact that Trump is not headed for reelection by acclimation is a function of something very profound that has gripped America. There is a leftist movement afoot – with the help of a complicit, likeminded media – to advance a more socialist America that would provide for its people rather than help people provide for themselves.

That the mainstream media last week largely sat on – and sometimes tried to actively squelch – the explosive story of e-mails indicating that Joe Biden used his position as vice president to advance his son’s business interests in Ukraine suggests what’s at stake.

In any event, it’s remarkable that despite an implacably hostile mainstream media and a Democratic party that conducted a four-year, total war to delegitimize him and remove him from office, Donald Trump – warts and all – has produced for America.

Take the economy. Early on, President Trump lowered taxes and repealed regulations that were stifling business. We soon had a booming economy that was breaking records. Economic growth was exploding. Jobs were being created by the hundreds of thousands. Unemployment was at historic lows.
Even manufacturing jobs returned to this country – jobs that Obama derisively said Trump could only bring back with a magic wand

We also achieved energy independence – an amazing accomplishment that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Trump also took us out of trade treaties that had enabled other nations to feast on our prosperity.

The economy was flourishing – but then came the coronavirus lockdowns. We all know the result. But if Trump knew what it took to bring prosperity back to this country in the first place, why would we cut him loose when we need a recovery to bring us back at least to where we were? Don’t we need more of what he prescribed?

Ironically, the Biden economic recovery plan consists largely of raising taxes, restoring regulations, and rejoining regional trade groups – nostrums that have not worked for us in the past. (Parenthetically, the Biden plan to combat Covid-19 going forward mimics what Mr. Trump has already embraced.)

Also on the domestic side, Trump – to the howls of obstructionist Democrats in Congress – tried to reform Obamacare in order to bring premiums down. Many forget that Obamacare was originally pitched as a way to lower steadily rising insurance costs. Yet, since its enactment, premiums have risen more than 25 percent and are crippling young middle-class families.

However, Biden simply goes on and on about how President Trump is just trying to take away health care from Americans. He and his backers seem unable to abide any tampering with the work product of his former boss, Barack Obama. The Trump administration has not yet been able to replace Obamacare with a plan of its own due to Democrat obstructionism in Congress, but it has in the meantime come up with innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to lower health costs.

The Trump administration has also strongly backed school choice in the form of educational vouchers and charter schools. Positive results are already being noticed, as students are no longer forced to attend non-competitive and dispirited public schools.

In addition, the Trump administration’s policy of encouraging the participation of religious entities in federally-funded social service initiatives has not only ended the pariah-like status to which religious institutions had been relegated pre-Trump, but it has made possible the harnessing of heretofore untapped resources

From what we have heard, though, we can expect an abrupt about-face in both areas from a President Biden.

A hallmark of the Trump years has been an effort to get a grip on out-of-control immigration. The Biden crowd protests that we have historically been a nation of immigrants. True. But there was always order to their access and no welfare state to speak of back then. There was also pride in this country and pressure on immigrants to adopt the values and character of this country.

Today, in addition to the more than one million immigrants who come to this country every year legally, we have untold numbers of people who enter this country illegally, many of whom have little incentive to fit in and who are told by leftist radicals that this country is racist. A Biden immigration policy sounds very much like a plan for “open borders,” which would just create even more fissures in our already fractured society.

And does anyone really think that the redistribution of wealth and New Green Deal movements will not get a leg up with a Biden victory? Surely it’s all coming if Biden wins. (We won’t even mention the lack of support that law enforcement will feel – and a concomitant rise in crime that we will experience – under a Biden administration. There’s a reason police bodies across the country are backing Trump.)

There is also an important overseas story to tell. We looked on with admiration when President Trump figured out how to break through the morass in the Middle East that had confounded his recent predecessors. They were all content to insist on evenhandedness between Israel and the Palestinians even though that signaled to the latter that they need not seriously bargain with the more militarily, economically, technologically and politically advanced Israel since they had an American interlocutor that would always run interference for them.

Trump approached the matter differently. He told the Palestinians that they had better face reality or get lost in the downwind. And the rest is history.
Are we really prepared to jettison an American leader who singularly knew how to read the Middle East tea leaves and figure out that the Arab world was more than ready to tap into what Israel had to offer in trade, technology, and security and that the Palestinians had to get out of the way? Are we just to dismiss the growing number of Gulf Arab states cozying up to Israel?

Do the new maritime talks between Israel and Lebanon count for nothing? Are the indications that the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas is seeking ways to come back to the negotiating table with Israel of no moment?

Yet, Biden’s Middle East mantra continues to be the transcendence of the tired old two-state solution, which never had a prayer of a chance of working. Peace in the Middle East would be an unimaginable blessing, and Donald Trump has moved it a long way forward.

Finally, what about Iran and nuclear weapons? The Biden crowd bitterly complained when Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal, which would have resulted in Iran being free to develop nuclear weapons after the deal expired in 2030. President Trump has opted instead to hobble Iran with crippling sanctions so that Iran gives up its nuclear ambitions – on our terms and without war.

There are many more accomplishments that distinguish the first Trump administration. And more achievements in a second are certainly reasonable expectations. Yet, Democrats and the media are salivating at the prospect of Joe Biden dismantling most of it.

None of us should allow distaste for someone’s temperament to get in the way of common sense. Four more years!