When the results of the American election came rolling in, I had two reactions, one of which puzzled me for a while. My first reaction was surprise. I have no powers of political prophecy and so had no expectations for the election, but I was amazed at the scale of the Donald Trump victory, especially in the popular vote.
I have a high regard for the accuracy of opinion polls (our own were pinpoint accurate in the May election) but the US ones were all over the place. I don’t think any predicted such a huge popular vote for Trump. My second reaction was great relief. I felt immediately that the world was now a safer place, a more sensible place. It took me a while to figure out why.
The answer is that Trump seems poised to end mad ideas. He seems poised to return to the traditional, sensible, proven ideas that have been successful in the past. The new mad ideas have already done immense harm and threaten to do more. Some threaten world peace. So while the mainstream media depict Trump as a crazy maverick and his opponents as enlightened ones, the reverse is true, as you can see by all of Trump’s actions during the four years he was president.
He is highly unconventional in his manner and highly conventional in his deeds, vulgar and crude in speech but thoughtful in his actions. He will set out to correct the crazy, destructive ideas that are now doing such harm to humanity and the environment, ideas such as the anti-science nonsense of climate hysteria; the opening of America’s borders to uncontrolled, illegal immigration; the sick perversion of persuading six-year-old children to take sex-changing hormones; the catastrophic abandonment of proper medical science in the case of Covid and the imposition of untested, very dangerous, ineffective vaccines utterly different from the safe, effective vaccines of the past. All of these ideas were mad and bad. Trump will try to end them and replace them with sound, tested, scientific ideas.
Frothed at the mouth
Our mainstream media, as you would expect, practically frothed at the mouth when Trump won so convincingly. The revealed their massive snobbery, their great disdain for ordinary working people, whom Hillary Clinton had called “deplorables”, and to whom the snobbish Democrat leaders had patronised, talked down to, lectured endlessly in sneering, superior tones. Our mainstream commentators launched into long fact-free diatribes against Trump, without offering any good evidence to support their ranting. He was a fascist, racist, liar, madman and so on. When asked to give examples of Trump’s lies, the examples they give are trivial, none worse than those of Biden, Harris, Bush, or Clinton.
One said that Trump would “end democracy”. But in practice Trump has never done any such thing – quite the opposite, he has increased it, especially in the area of free speech. It is the Democrats and the big media that are the enemies of free speech; they believe in the “cancel culture’ and censorship. John Kerry, who was the Democrat “Envoy for Climate”, thought the First Amendment, confirming free speech was a dangerous impediment to policy. (It is, of course, if the policy is to lie about climate change.) Facebook and Twitter tried to censor the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, fearing the truth would be bad for the Democrats. This is a reason Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it “X”. He wants it to be free and open. This horrified the Democrats and the big media.
The US economy did very well under Trump, with record low unemployment and rising living standards. Covid spoilt his last year and he, I regret to say, gave in to a disastrous lockdown and the awful Covid vaccines that the corrupt drug corporation-medical industry complex tricked him into. Nonetheless, he left Biden a fundamentally sound economy, which Biden proceeded to curse with the highest inflation in 40 years, leaving ordinary Americans reeling under sky high prices for petrol, food and materials. The American economy is inherently very strong, for the simple reason that it is highly capitalist. The more capitalism, the more prosperity.
Capitalism in America has two enemies: socialism and corporate monopoly. Many leading Democrats want socialism. They admire Cuba’s communist dictatorship, which has wrecked its economy and sent a million working class Cubans fleeing; during the 1920s and 1930s, The New York Times adored Stalin’s communist tyranny in Russia, which had starved to death millions of people. Some of the big corporations, notably the big drug corporations, hate capitalism; they hate free competition and open information about their products. They spend inordinate time lobbying powerful politicians to give them special status and to shut down competition.
Pfizer had compiled a very long list of adverse effects following its own Covid vaccines. The adverse effects included death, heart disease and permanent disability. Pfizer tried to suppress public knowledge of this list, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully supported suppression of this information. They did not want the people to know how dangerous the Covid vaccines were. They just wanted them to take them and shut up. Anyone who questioned their safety was cancelled, shouted down as an “anti-vaxxer”, mocked and jeered at.
Nuclear weapon
There has never been a nuclear weapon used against people since 1945, when America dropped two bombs on Japan to end WW2. I am very grateful for this but I don’t understand why. Everyone knows how to make a bomb. If you have enough highly enriched uranium you could make a crude Hiroshima-type bomb in the workshop down the road. Yet, despite terrible conflicts around the world since then, there has been no nuclear war. Trump has the best record of keeping the peace of any president since World War II. During his four years in office, he never started any stupid war and America was never attacked by anyone. Bush and Obama started horrible bloody conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, spreading terror and chaos throughout the region. Trump kept the peace.
He argues that Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if he was US President. He is surely right. Trump’s diplomacy was a strange combination of bluster, menace and then negotiation and dealing, even with tyrants as bizarre as Kim Un Jong of North Korea. He was highly unpredictable in a predictable fashion.
I want Trump to end the ghastly war in the Ukraine. I think he can do it. Repeating myself, I think the West lost a wonderful opportunity to make peace with Russia when Gorbachev ended communism, dissolved the Soviet Union and liberated its colonies. The West should then have scrapped NATO and given every support and encouragement to Russia. Instead the West gloated and moved aggressively towards her, essentially handing her over to an ex-KGB Mafia, headed by Vladimir Putin. Putin, feeling resentful and humiliated about the fall of his empire, started taking out his grievances on the Ukraine, which he invaded in February 2022.
His invasion was both an atrocity and a monumental blunder, costing hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. The West supported Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Ukraine, quite rightly and gave him lots of arms, quite rightly, but discouraged him from negotiating with Putin, quite wrongly. Now he must. There must be a peace deal as soon as possible, very likely with Ukraine ceding Crimea and Russian-speaking parts of the Donbas to Russia in return for Russia’s full recognition of the Ukraine state with a guarantee that she shall never attack the Ukraine ever again. Something like that. I think Trump can make such a deal happen.
On Israel, I think Trump can return to the Abraham Accords, when he came close to bringing about a peace deal between Israel, United Arab Emirates and various other Arab countries. The butchery by Hamas against men, women and children on 7 October 2023 was almost certainly ordered by Iran to scupper the Abraham Accords. Israel has now struck back with devastating effectiveness against Iran and her proxies, and Iran seems frightened. So a good time for Trump to resurrect the Accords, while giving Israel all the support she needs.
Climate change
The climate change madness is already having devastating effects on humanity and the environment. Germany led to demented campaign against fossil fuels – and nuclear power! – and for tens of thousands of gigantic wind turbines and solar arrays. The result is that the Germany economy is collapsing and millions of poor people are suffering “energy poverty”. The German government has just fallen. The UK is not far behind. In the USA the Democrats led the madness, with Biden and Harris promising to shut down all oil drilling and end fracking. During the recent election campaign, both backed down considerably, both suddenly realising that plentiful cheap energy was a good thing for the USA; both in other words coming to the same position on energy that Trump had always maintained. In power, Trump will ensure plentiful affordable energy for everyone.
On immigration Trump wants nothing other than to return to the sensible policy of controlled, legal immigration that served America so well in the past. America is after all primarily a country of immigrants. The indigenous America people were mostly slaughtered a long time ago, leaving only a small, sad rump. Trump, himself, comes from immigrants, as he will be the first to admit – even boast. Successive waves of immigrants have enriched America, adding to her inventiveness and enterprise, adding to her prosperity and success.
But now the Democrats want to change this with open borders and floods of illegal immigrants flooding in without any control at all, displacing local populations, causing conflict and suffering. Anyone who objects is a racist, right-winger, fascist and so on. Trump promised he would return to the old, decent, fair policy of controlled immigration. I believe he will do so, or at any rate try his best to do so.
The wretched Covid vaccines have left a dreadful toll of ill-health in America, including death and permanent disability. There will be many long-term effects to follow, I’m afraid. But at least now Trump has brought along people, including the eccentric Robert Kennedy, who are admitting the problem and want to tell people all about it. At last the victims of the Covid vaccines have got somebody who will listen to them – rather than mocking them and jeering at them. At last somebody is going to expose the massive corruption of the Drug Corporation Industrial Complex.
Moderate policy
On sexual matters, Trump wants a moderate policy on abortion and the end to the campaign by transgender proponents. Human life begins at conception (this at any rate is my belief as an atheist) and so abortion is the taking of human life. But sometimes it is lawful and proper to take human life, as in war, self-defence, sacrificing on older, sicker person to save a younger, healthier person in a medical procedure, and so on. I believe in abortion in all cases of rape and in many cases in the first three months. I am adamantly against any abortion of a healthy baby in the last three months.
Trump’s view seems pretty much the same, so all the shrieking against him on “the women’s right to do with her body as she wishes” is basically nonsense. Transgenderism is an ancient condition afflicting a very small population. Some people, very few, genuinely feel that they have the wrong sexual body. Such people can be treated fairly successfully when they are adults and quite sure of their sexual being. But little children are not sure of anything; they are way open to persuasion and coercion; they can be made to believe anything a vindictive adult wants them to believe. The transgender perverts feel that little children should be persuaded into taking sex-changing hormones with permanent effects, irreversible effects. It is disgusting. Some Democrats campaign for it. Trump will do his best to end this horrid nonsense.
The contrast between cities and states ruled by the Democrats and the Republicans is striking. Inner-city decay, with homelessness and wide-spread drug abuse is very much a feature of Democrat-ruled cities such as San Francisco, Portland and New York. The best ruled states tend to be Republican, such as Texas and Florida, the worst ruled ones Democrat, such as California and Washington State. Now the Republicans will have more power.
Affect on South Africa
How will South Africa be affected by Trump’s return? The ANC government has gone out of its way to show how much it hates the West in general and America in particular. At every international forum it attacks America and supports her enemies. I really can’t see why America should continue to give South Africa favourable trading terms with AGOA. Trump might well end AGOA for South Africa, which would be completely justified. Then South Africa can trade instead with her BRICS friends such as China, India and Iran. Instead of our exporting heavily subsidised cars to America, we can import much cheaper cars from India and China, and send them our raw materials to make them from. Is this what the ANC wants? It seems so.
I’m delighted with the Trump win. But since I am a liberal who believes in equal opportunities for all, free democracy, free speech, free trade, and no discrimination by race or sex, it is hardly surprising that I am. Of course I have some disagreements with him. A major one is his stated policy of raising tariffs, which is potentially disastrous but which I don’t think he will actually implement very heavily. Another disagreement, which I have with all Americans of whatever persuasion, is in their use of political nomenclature. When Americans used the term “liberal”, they mean “socialist” or “illiberal”. This annoys me, and I resent having to call myself “a classic liberal” to explain the difference. The Republicans are more liberal than the Democrats. I wish they and Trump would realise that.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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