A very dear friend and a former Heritage Foundation associate responded to my last column on American Thinker with the following:

Happy to tell you in a private email why the GOP needs to dump Trump (for whom I voted twice), but it requires too many bad words that would cause my dear late mother to go for the soap for use in a public forum. For starters, let's just say he's a thin-skinned, immature, undisciplined **shole who is ignorant by choice, erratic in his behavior, and disloyal. And those are some of his better points. Do I hate him? No. But I hate his type.

I dearly hope he’s still my dear friend after he reads my response:

I see your point, XXXX, but I don't give a rat's ass about his personality. The world is loaded with megalomaniacs in charge . All I care about is what he does and did as president. Considering the fact that he has been seriously attacked and maligned since announcing his candidacy, he is not the same as he was before and much of what he has become has been a reaction to the barrage of the vilification.

Then another political ally of mine weighed in to comment:

I voted for Trump twice. I won't do it again. Trump today is not the Trump of the previous elections. I find the fact that he is even running to be preposterous. With all his baggage. He's chaos in human form. The notion that he can get the votes of disaffected Democrats and Independents in a general election is a fantasy. The list of why I don't support him is long. His disloyalty to anyone who doesn't kiss his arse is offensive to me. Example: Mike Pence, who was so loyal to Trump. Trump doesn't even appear to be getting the support of his wife, who is MIA on the campaign trail. I see Trump as nothing but a spoiler and egotist now. DeSantis is my choice and I think he'll be the nominee?

Needless to say, my allies are now on a different wavelength than mine so my response to her may seal that relationship:

Everything you mention about Trump is probably what you've read about him. I believe nothing I read about him from both sides as it's written with an agenda. Do you know him personally? I haven’t met him but know many who have met him including my husband. He is a flawed man but I will judge him by his actions not his tweets.

I’m sure there will be many who view my responses as coming from a Kool-Aid drinking, brainwashed Trump cultist but I have never been a crowd follower. I loathe crowds. That’s why I turned down an invite to Woodstock in 1969. Unlike many brain-dead New Yorkers, I consider my choices in any election very, very carefully.

So why has my vote for Trump morphed from reluctant in 2016, enthusiastic in 2020 and now for 2024, there is no one else.?  Donald Trump was that man in 2017 and still remains the one that the feckless global community still fears.

Were you  as embarrassed as I was watching President Barack Obama scrape and bend to world leaders all the while apologizing for American past mistakes?     

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After 8 years of observing the decline of the biggest superpower in the world, it was sheer heaven to finally see us return to that position under Trump.

There’s not much a President can do domestically without a supportive Congress and even though POTUS Trump appeared to have a GOP majority in both Houses, the party was filled with RINOs and rivals who blocked his reforms at every turn. What was in his power was the ability to change our dismal foreign policy and he did this magnificently.

Trump’s critics and fair-weather friends have failed to appreciate the enormous steps he took to undo the damage that Obama did to our nation’s position as a global power.  Take a look at his marvelous foreign policy achievements.  The one that most impressed me was in 2017 when he withdrew the nation from the Paris Climate Accord, a ridiculous agreement negotiated by Barack Obama that would have impacted our country negatively. That meant to me that he was smart enough not to fall for one of the biggest hoaxes in history which has cost us billions of dollars in useless green projects. All we should be concerned with is clean air and water not saving a billion-year-old planet.

When he stared Angela Merkel and NATO leaders in the eye and told them to start paying more for defense, they huffed and puffed and said “No Way.”  Trump calmly told them he’d start withdrawing U.S. troops from Germany. He warned them not to build that pipeline to Russia for oil transport to Europe and now Putin is getting richer than ever holding them hostage for Russian oil. He was right and Merkel was dead wrong.

If you look over all of Trump’s foreign policy decisions, there is one defining element in all of them:  he did everything to benefit the Americans. Nothing was to line his pockets unlike those in Congress on both sides taking Chinese moolah for their positive legislative decisions.  

In spite of his successful term in office that benefitted all Americans, especially in the minority community, Trump’s enemies managed to have him impeached on a lie even after he left office. Can you blame him for being thin-skinned?

I know that President Trump or at least, someone in his campaign, read my last column because it was posted on Truth Social under his verified account so I will take this opportunity to add a few words of advice.

Please do not ever compare Andrew Cuomo to Ron DeSantis as a better governor. He was my governor and he was awful. He’s responsible for causing the deaths of thousands of seniors when he ordered Covid victims admitted to their nursing homes. Tone down the insults to any rival because it seems that voters have lost the gift of critical thinking and are more impressed with gentle speech spouted by demented souls.

I plan to vote for Trump in the GOP primary because I can’t imagine anyone else as leader of the Free World.  Whoever is managing DeSantis campaign has made a serious error in allowing that ad claiming that God chose him which is why Trump called him sanctimonious. It was an awful decision. It is also telling that those billionaires who are backing him are Never/Trumpers  who have little concern for anything except power and money.

If you view his interview with Rona Barret in 1980 during the end of the Carter administration, you will see someone who cares very much about our nation but knows that the presidency is “a mean life.” What finally made him take that leap was knowing he could take the mean…and he did.

Make America Great Again. Vote for Trump.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0 license