As a longstanding Reagan conservative, my initial preference was Ted Cruz; yet I would have voted for any of the candidates over Hillary.  I held my nose for McCain and Romney, and hope some at least hold their noses and vote for Trump.  However, I’d rather you do more than that, I’d rather you consider actually voting FOR Donald Trump.  The case for Trump is a good one.

Let me start with how I changed my mind in January.  My preference had been for Cruz, I liked his stances, and I thought he would make a great president.  I didn’t change because I thought less of Cruz.  I was not angry at him, I realized that Trump was the better candidate, and in spite of my reservations (that I still hold), I found him someone to support.

When Trump announced, I thought he was a joke.  I thought he was in it for his own vanity, money, or suspected he was a stalking horse for Hillary.  I thought lots of strange things, not one of them positive.  He first spoke of the problems with illegals from Mexico.  He was called a racist (wrongly, but you know our media), and given the raspberry by every one of the GOP candidates other than Cruz.  As you may have guessed, I think the issue of illegals is one of the biggest that face us today.  I watched as Trump was given the normal crucifixion by our media, our own party joining in.  I begrudgingly watched him gain a victory and marveled as he actually won one of the first PR campaigns against illegals in the public mind.  Sanctuary cities were shown to be wrong, and the American public saw that, indeed, illegals were a large source of violence and wrongdoing.

Okay, I still considered him a joke, a rube, a charlatan, a stalking horse.  I disliked him and his style.  I thought Cruz would do better at presenting the same case.

The campaign continued, I was paying attention, but not to Trump.   One problem:  I found it impossible not to pay attention to Trump.  He had a catchy slogan, Make America Great Again.  Sure Donald, but anyone else could be better than a carnival barker.  As the candidates are giving us their story, giving us their issues, the candidate always in the forefront, always in the media, and I mean all the media, was Trump.  Interesting, but I still disliked most everything about the man.  I learned about what he considered the great issues of the day.  It was almost impossible to not know what he was saying, or claiming he was standing for.  He was on MSNBC, CNN, all the networks.  Suuuuure Donald, you really stand for these things, you undisciplined swinish panderer.  Yep, that was all in my mind.

There he was, standing for the most important issues of the day, and I couldn’t stand him.  He was a fraud, a liberal, an embarrassing celebrity.  Yep.  I also knew that Cruz was better, a conservative who could explain himself, he was intelligent, he could handle the media, he was great.  My candidate.

In December, Mr. Celebrity made his first comments on Islam.  Among other things, he said there was ill will for us, that we needed to have a temporary ban on Muslim immigration.  Boy, was he lambasted by the media, and once again by all the candidates, and various GOP celebrities.  What a hateful, spiteful man, he was a hater, he wasn’t even human enough to be human now.  Or so we were being told.

Okay, he had my attention.  I was no longer forced to listen to him, I actually listened.  He was saying something no one had brought up for public consumption.  Ever.  This was an issue that I had already found extremely important, much like the border.  Trump was saying the unsayable, virtually the unthinkable.  He had brought to the forefront a truth, an unpopular truth, a non-PC truth.  Once again, not only did he not suffer from saying what was previously unthinkable, he was the clear frontrunner.

I still felt he would be a bad candidate, and still loved Cruz.

In January that changed.  I found I liked what he said, but not him.  Then the earthquake happened: Hillary attacked him as a misogynist and a sexist.  Oh no, he’s done for now.  But no, he retorted with one tweet, and one paragraph lambasting the Clinton’s prior activities with women, highlighting the Clintons’ hypocrisy.  The press reported it.  The Clintons skulked away without responding.  The press wrung their hands, talked about it, had panels, articles, and in the end Trump won the first victory any GOP representative has had with the Clintons.  Her popularity dove, an entire generation was hearing for the first time what had happened.  Inconceivable.  One tweet, barely one paragraph.

That shook me to the core.  Then someone showed me an article in December where Ted Cruz had stated that the Clintons’ sexual history had no place in his campaign.  The light went on.  Two weeks later after reassessing my preference, I switched from Cruz to Trump.  I still liked Cruz, but I had discovered they were the only two highlighting essentially the same issues.  I also recalled that it was Trump who had brought those important issues to the forefront, it was Trump that was taking the grief for being a racist, a bigot, literally all the normal things said about any member of the GOP, and yet, he was consistently climbing in the estimation of the GOP voters, not falling. 

He was doing the unthinkable.  He was forming the narrative, and the media was reporting it.  He was forming the narrative above the heads of the PC police, something I had not seen since Reagan.  I started paying attention to those things he was saying, I started hearing about his rallies.  I began reading about how the people surrounding him, people that had worked for him in the past really liked him, and thought he was genuinely brilliant.  He was also highlighting the most important issues of our day, all of them:

1.  The Wall.  He wants to stop illegal immigration.
2.  The Islamic threat.  He does not want it to come here.  He did not want a repeat of Europe’s mistake.  He is the only candidate to say what needs to be done:  a temporary moratorium on Muslims coming here.
3. Our need to have a great military again.  He knows we need that and to give help for our veterans.
4. We need to smash ISIS, and radical Islam everywhere.
5. We need to jump start our economy.  Bring jobs, be pro-business, pro-capitalist, better trade agreements.
6. Protect our Second Amendment.
7. Repeal and replace Obamacare.
8. His pro-life conversion is actually believable.  He is pro-life.
9. He wants to cut spending, except for the military.
10. He wants to make America strong, respected, and for us to be proudly patriotic once again.
11. He is against common core, and wants locally controlled education.
12. He is for reducing regulation and the scope of the federal government.
13. There are lots more good and conservative policies, but this is enough to say for now.

 Notice those encompass two things:  They highlight the most important issues of our day, and they encompass the three-legged stool of Ronald Reagan.  These are issues most conservatives like.

The first two are the most important of our day.  We have to stop our country from being overwhelmed by illegals, and we have to win the war with Islamists, culturally here, and by defeating Islamists everywhere else.  Without these two there will never be a conservative movement worth anything, let alone a country.

His other issues are icing on the cake.  They are a conservative wish list.

One last thing, the reason a lot of people don’t like him:  That in-your-face, seemingly out of control, nasty, over the top, attacking, unfair campaign style.  You may not like it (sometimes I hated it), you may not like what he did to some of our candidates (many times I hated it), but understand this:  It’s why he will beat Hillary, or any other candidate the Democratic Party puts in her place.  It’s a strength.  He knows how to win.  He will win, which means we can work on the agenda above.

Finally:  When he wins, he will have to implement the agenda; we need someone who has that same strength to take the barbs that will be flung by the democrat/media complex (and our GOP sellouts).  The new (R) President will need to be strong; they will try to destroy him every day.  He will need to be able to form a narrative about the media, he will need to handle the PC police, and he will need to be resolute.

That’s Donald Trump.