On Thursday, May 23rd, Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump held a rally in The Bronx. This borough in New York City has earned a reputation for three things: being ethnically black, for crime and poverty, and for deeply rooted support for the Democratic Party.
When the Trump campaign planned its rally there, it knew it was doing something that Trump’s Democrat opponent, Joe Biden, would never do; despite the Bronx being politically far to the Left, the sitting president does not dare to show his face there. Therefore, it was a bold move by Trump to plan the rally in the first place. They expected perhaps 3,500 people to show up.
Then the crowd started forming. When Trump began speaking, he had an audience of 25,000 in front of him. Thousands were still waiting to get into the event.
If you listen to Trump’s leftist detractors and their mantra about him being a racist and misogynist, and a racist again, he should not be able to fill a school bus of supporters in the Bronx. Yet there he is, setting a crowd of supporters in motion that would make New York’s black, Democrat mayor Eric Adams green with envy.
The Trump rally in the Bronx illustrates two things that make the 2024 presidential campaign absurdly unique. First, it shows how much the voter tides have turned: with opinion polls giving Trump 25% of the black vote—and that share is rising—the Republican candidate is on his way to stealing one of the most reliable voter constituencies the Democrats have enjoyed over the past half-century.
Statistical models show that if 14% of blacks vote Republican, the Democrats lose in a landslide.
Secondly, the rally in The Bronx stands in stark contrast to what is happening in the neighboring New York borough of Manhattan. There, a Democrat district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is trying to get Trump convicted of falsifying business documents, with a jury selected from one of the most rabidly anti-Trump communities in America: the very rich, upscale, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘educated’ hard-left people who can afford to live on Manhattan.
Never before has a former president, or a presidential frontrunner, been on trial during the campaign. Never before has a presidential candidate been on trial while drawing massive crowds wherever he goes (a couple of weeks ago, 80,000 people showed up to a Trump rally in deeply Democrat New Jersey).
Never before has it been so easy to get the impression that the incumbent president and his power machine are doing everything they can to stop the incumbent president’s foremost opponent from winning an election.
The absurdities of this campaign cycle started already last fall, when the Republican party launched a series of primary debates. Those debates took place months before the first Republican primary election was going to be held; never before have we seen debates that early in the election cycle.
Then there was the set of Republican candidates: four carefully chosen neocons against four more Trump-friendly candidates. The neocons conducted themselves during the debates as if they were a ‘party within the Republican Party.’ Their comments, statements, questions—their very debate techniques—were well scripted and carefully coordinated. The goal was clear: to drive Trump (who did not show up for those debates) out of the race long before the primaries even began.
They failed. One after the other, the neocons withdrew from the race. Even Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, had to leave the debate. His one memorable contribution was to show that the only thing bigger than his New Jersey ego was his gross miscalculation of who was going to emerge as the Republican presidential candidate.
Strange things kept happening. The Democrat party decided to do its darndest to void their primary elections of meaning. The party elite went out of its way to shut down even a pretense of competition with Joe Biden. They were so successful that they drove Robert F Kennedy Jr. out of the Democratic race and onto a campaign of his own. Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat and activist lawyer turned independent, is now running around the country stealing votes from the Democrats.
While the Democrats convinced themselves that they had shored up their party’s voter support behind the hopelessly inept Joe Biden, it became clear that Trump would secure the Republican nomination for the November election. In a panic response, Democrat operatives tried to kick him off the ballot in a few states.
It took an intervention of the Supreme Court to put an end to such shenanigans. But their ruling had barely been released before a slew of lawsuits mushroomed across the Eastern Seaboard. A new chapter in the ‘Stop Trump at Any Cost’ saga had been opened. From New York to Florida, politically driven prosecutors are using the judicial system to charge Trump with everything from election interference to bribing a porn star and falsifying business records.
So far, the perfectly timed lawfare attack on Trump has not led to any conviction other than a civil case where he has been told to pay a penalty to the aforementioned porn star. In the coming week, the jury in the court in Manhattan is going to decide whether Trump did indeed falsify any business records. Anyone who has followed the trial knows that District Attorney Alvin Bragg has presented no evidence that Trump himself falsified any documents, or that anyone did it on his behalf.
However, the absence of evidence is no guarantee that the jury won’t find Trump guilty. As mentioned, the jury pool is drawn from the most affluent boroughs in New York City. The residents of Manhattan are among the most fanatically Democrat and anti-Trump voters you can find.
As if all of this was not enough, we now learn that when the U.S. Department of Justice raided Trump’s home in Mar-A-Lago in Florida (in an alleged search for classified documents), the FBI had been ordered to use whatever force necessary to get the raid done. In a series of documents published on X, Julie Kelly, a writer with RealClearInvestigations, reveals that their agents were told they”may use deadly force when necessary” during the Mar-A-Lago raid.
To further heighten the tensions—and raise more than a few eyebrows—the FBI personnel executing the search warrant were told to “be prepared to engage with FPOTUS and USSS Security Team.”
In other words, if the former president of the United States—FPOTUS—was there, the FBI could have shot him and alleged that he was obstructing their raid. Since Trump as former president had the right to protection from the Secret Service, the FBI agents were also authorized to “engage with” his bodyguards.
This is such an absurd twist of reality that it can only be reality. A law enforcement agency of the United States government, the FBI, was given clearance to get into a shootout with agents of another United States government agency, the Secret Service.
For what purpose? To arrest Trump?
No, of course not. The Mar-A-Lago raid was not carried out to arrest Trump—not even President Biden’s Department of Justice could stretch the law that far. The comment about ‘engaging with’ Trump and his Secret Service detail, looks a lot more like the wishful thinking of a Trump-hating legal bureaucrat somewhere in the U.S. Department of Justice.
Regardless of who added the formulation about a possible shoot-out between the Secret Service and the FBI, it conveys the same feeling of witnessing an absurd, eerily unreal series of events. So apparently political is the campaign against Trump that even a lukewarm Trump supporter like me is becoming increasingly determined to vote for him in November.
It will be a vote for Trump, obviously, but more than that, it will be an expression of political defiance. With the Biden administration going after Trump like Putin’s regime went after Alexei Navalny, even we who think Trump is less than an ideal candidate are gradually losing reasons to sit this election out.
On the contrary, voting for Trump is now becoming an act of civil disobedience. Casting the ballot for him is a way to exercise democratic defiance. With Congress morphing into an anti-Trump uniparty, driven by the same neoconservative ambitions that hegemonically ruled the Republican party until Trump entered the scene, the scope for the people’s voice is shrinking precipitously.
With so much energy, effort, and—obviously—money being invested in ‘any means necessary’ to stop Trump, the least we the people can do is to use our last recourse: the ballot box.
With all that said, there is one question that still requires an answer—a sober, official answer, not the well-entrenched talking points on the conspiracy theory circuit. That question is simple: what is it that so many people in power fear they will lose if Trump returns to the White House?
If you ask Biden supporters, you get the Democrat standard-issue talking points: Trump is a danger to democracy and hates everyone. If you browse the conspiratorially minded layers of the internet, you are told that Biden protects globalists who want to destroy America for the sake of globalism and the culling of the world population.
Let us stay away from those conspiracy theories. All we need to know about them is that in recent years, an eerily high number of them have turned out to be true.
Still—I would like to know what makes the Washington elite hate Trump so deeply that they are willing to sacrifice anything—seemingly even what remains of the integrity of our constitutional republic—to stop this man from returning to the White House.
We have more than five months to go before the election. With everything that has happened thus far along the 2024 campaign trail, we can expect literally anything from the coming five months. But regardless of how genuinely uncertain America’s future may look right now, I know that Donald Trump was a good president when he was in office. When people with power and money go to these lengths to stop him from a second term, they—not—Trump, are the bad guys.
When bad people try to take down a good man, it is my civic duty to exercise democratic defiance.
It is my duty as an American to vote for Donald Trump.
Voting for Trump: An Act of Democratic Defiance
On Thursday, May 23rd, Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump held a rally in The Bronx. This borough in New York City has earned a reputation for three things: being ethnically black, for crime and poverty, and for deeply rooted support for the Democratic Party.
When the Trump campaign planned its rally there, it knew it was doing something that Trump’s Democrat opponent, Joe Biden, would never do; despite the Bronx being politically far to the Left, the sitting president does not dare to show his face there. Therefore, it was a bold move by Trump to plan the rally in the first place. They expected perhaps 3,500 people to show up.
Then the crowd started forming. When Trump began speaking, he had an audience of 25,000 in front of him. Thousands were still waiting to get into the event.
If you listen to Trump’s leftist detractors and their mantra about him being a racist and misogynist, and a racist again, he should not be able to fill a school bus of supporters in the Bronx. Yet there he is, setting a crowd of supporters in motion that would make New York’s black, Democrat mayor Eric Adams green with envy.
The Trump rally in the Bronx illustrates two things that make the 2024 presidential campaign absurdly unique. First, it shows how much the voter tides have turned: with opinion polls giving Trump 25% of the black vote—and that share is rising—the Republican candidate is on his way to stealing one of the most reliable voter constituencies the Democrats have enjoyed over the past half-century.
Statistical models show that if 14% of blacks vote Republican, the Democrats lose in a landslide.
Secondly, the rally in The Bronx stands in stark contrast to what is happening in the neighboring New York borough of Manhattan. There, a Democrat district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is trying to get Trump convicted of falsifying business documents, with a jury selected from one of the most rabidly anti-Trump communities in America: the very rich, upscale, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘educated’ hard-left people who can afford to live on Manhattan.
Never before has a former president, or a presidential frontrunner, been on trial during the campaign. Never before has a presidential candidate been on trial while drawing massive crowds wherever he goes (a couple of weeks ago, 80,000 people showed up to a Trump rally in deeply Democrat New Jersey).
Never before has it been so easy to get the impression that the incumbent president and his power machine are doing everything they can to stop the incumbent president’s foremost opponent from winning an election.
The absurdities of this campaign cycle started already last fall, when the Republican party launched a series of primary debates. Those debates took place months before the first Republican primary election was going to be held; never before have we seen debates that early in the election cycle.
Then there was the set of Republican candidates: four carefully chosen neocons against four more Trump-friendly candidates. The neocons conducted themselves during the debates as if they were a ‘party within the Republican Party.’ Their comments, statements, questions—their very debate techniques—were well scripted and carefully coordinated. The goal was clear: to drive Trump (who did not show up for those debates) out of the race long before the primaries even began.
They failed. One after the other, the neocons withdrew from the race. Even Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, had to leave the debate. His one memorable contribution was to show that the only thing bigger than his New Jersey ego was his gross miscalculation of who was going to emerge as the Republican presidential candidate.
Strange things kept happening. The Democrat party decided to do its darndest to void their primary elections of meaning. The party elite went out of its way to shut down even a pretense of competition with Joe Biden. They were so successful that they drove Robert F Kennedy Jr. out of the Democratic race and onto a campaign of his own. Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat and activist lawyer turned independent, is now running around the country stealing votes from the Democrats.
While the Democrats convinced themselves that they had shored up their party’s voter support behind the hopelessly inept Joe Biden, it became clear that Trump would secure the Republican nomination for the November election. In a panic response, Democrat operatives tried to kick him off the ballot in a few states.
It took an intervention of the Supreme Court to put an end to such shenanigans. But their ruling had barely been released before a slew of lawsuits mushroomed across the Eastern Seaboard. A new chapter in the ‘Stop Trump at Any Cost’ saga had been opened. From New York to Florida, politically driven prosecutors are using the judicial system to charge Trump with everything from election interference to bribing a porn star and falsifying business records.
So far, the perfectly timed lawfare attack on Trump has not led to any conviction other than a civil case where he has been told to pay a penalty to the aforementioned porn star. In the coming week, the jury in the court in Manhattan is going to decide whether Trump did indeed falsify any business records. Anyone who has followed the trial knows that District Attorney Alvin Bragg has presented no evidence that Trump himself falsified any documents, or that anyone did it on his behalf.
However, the absence of evidence is no guarantee that the jury won’t find Trump guilty. As mentioned, the jury pool is drawn from the most affluent boroughs in New York City. The residents of Manhattan are among the most fanatically Democrat and anti-Trump voters you can find.
As if all of this was not enough, we now learn that when the U.S. Department of Justice raided Trump’s home in Mar-A-Lago in Florida (in an alleged search for classified documents), the FBI had been ordered to use whatever force necessary to get the raid done. In a series of documents published on X, Julie Kelly, a writer with RealClearInvestigations, reveals that their agents were told they”may use deadly force when necessary” during the Mar-A-Lago raid.
To further heighten the tensions—and raise more than a few eyebrows—the FBI personnel executing the search warrant were told to “be prepared to engage with FPOTUS and USSS Security Team.”
In other words, if the former president of the United States—FPOTUS—was there, the FBI could have shot him and alleged that he was obstructing their raid. Since Trump as former president had the right to protection from the Secret Service, the FBI agents were also authorized to “engage with” his bodyguards.
This is such an absurd twist of reality that it can only be reality. A law enforcement agency of the United States government, the FBI, was given clearance to get into a shootout with agents of another United States government agency, the Secret Service.
For what purpose? To arrest Trump?
No, of course not. The Mar-A-Lago raid was not carried out to arrest Trump—not even President Biden’s Department of Justice could stretch the law that far. The comment about ‘engaging with’ Trump and his Secret Service detail, looks a lot more like the wishful thinking of a Trump-hating legal bureaucrat somewhere in the U.S. Department of Justice.
Regardless of who added the formulation about a possible shoot-out between the Secret Service and the FBI, it conveys the same feeling of witnessing an absurd, eerily unreal series of events. So apparently political is the campaign against Trump that even a lukewarm Trump supporter like me is becoming increasingly determined to vote for him in November.
It will be a vote for Trump, obviously, but more than that, it will be an expression of political defiance. With the Biden administration going after Trump like Putin’s regime went after Alexei Navalny, even we who think Trump is less than an ideal candidate are gradually losing reasons to sit this election out.
On the contrary, voting for Trump is now becoming an act of civil disobedience. Casting the ballot for him is a way to exercise democratic defiance. With Congress morphing into an anti-Trump uniparty, driven by the same neoconservative ambitions that hegemonically ruled the Republican party until Trump entered the scene, the scope for the people’s voice is shrinking precipitously.
With so much energy, effort, and—obviously—money being invested in ‘any means necessary’ to stop Trump, the least we the people can do is to use our last recourse: the ballot box.
With all that said, there is one question that still requires an answer—a sober, official answer, not the well-entrenched talking points on the conspiracy theory circuit. That question is simple: what is it that so many people in power fear they will lose if Trump returns to the White House?
If you ask Biden supporters, you get the Democrat standard-issue talking points: Trump is a danger to democracy and hates everyone. If you browse the conspiratorially minded layers of the internet, you are told that Biden protects globalists who want to destroy America for the sake of globalism and the culling of the world population.
Let us stay away from those conspiracy theories. All we need to know about them is that in recent years, an eerily high number of them have turned out to be true.
Still—I would like to know what makes the Washington elite hate Trump so deeply that they are willing to sacrifice anything—seemingly even what remains of the integrity of our constitutional republic—to stop this man from returning to the White House.
We have more than five months to go before the election. With everything that has happened thus far along the 2024 campaign trail, we can expect literally anything from the coming five months. But regardless of how genuinely uncertain America’s future may look right now, I know that Donald Trump was a good president when he was in office. When people with power and money go to these lengths to stop him from a second term, they—not—Trump, are the bad guys.
When bad people try to take down a good man, it is my civic duty to exercise democratic defiance.
It is my duty as an American to vote for Donald Trump.
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