MORE: A message from W.S. Morris IV, President and CEO of Morris Communications
A chaotic, trivial, unpleasant multi-year presidential campaign has yielded much more heat than light on our choice for the White House on Tuesday.
But rest assured: This choice could not be more pivotal or consequential, or more stark. The very nature of America hangs in the balance.
Will we be an increasingly socialist nation that looks at success, wealth and hard work with envy and resentment, and which sacrifices our unique and historic freedoms to the cold comfort and phony security of a controlling government? Will we turn our backs on the rugged individualism and free-market capitalism that made this nation the crown jewel of human achievement?
To bring about those empty, repeatedly failed promises of collectivism, are we truly willing to elevate the most corrupt, scandalized presidential candidate in memory, perhaps in U.S. history? Will we elect someone under criminal investigation by her own sympathetic government? Is that how far we have fallen?
The clear alternative is a vote for all the things that built this nation – most importantly, limited and accountable government, and individual liberty. A country where we are free to keep most of what we have earned; sovereign over our lives and, yes, our health care; free to bear arms; free from terror and secure from invasion; free to speak our minds without retribution; free to keep our religion against the prevailing cultural winds; and free from the tyranny of Washington’s increasingly imperial power, reach and control.
That’s a vote for Donald Trump.
You’ve been treated to an abundant buffet of red herring this election season. But by every important measure, the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton isn’t even close:
National security
Hillary Clinton talked in a speech to Brazilian bankers of an “open borders” policy. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton:
- set the Mideast aflame with misadventures in Libya – including the failure to protect our consulate in Benghazi, where four Americans died on her watch (the cause of which she bald-faced lied about);
- oversaw a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, leading to the rise of savage ISIS;
- oversaw the imploding of Syria and American influence in the region;
- trumpeted a “reset” of relations with Russia, which resulted in Putin’s “annexation” of Crimea and unprecedented military incursion into the Mideast;
- compromised national security with her unsecured, unauthorized private server, illegally exposing innumerable classified documents;
- now wants to bring into the U.S. tens of thousands more inadequately screened refugees – and no doubt some terrorists among them – from the Syrian mess she helped create.
Donald Trump promises to secure our border, take the fight to the terrorists and stop the importation of unvetted refugees. He also promises to rebuild the American military – which, under Clinton and Obama, has been reduced to “the smallest Army since 1940, the smallest Navy since 1915,” as Sen. Lindsey Graham put it.
Jobs and the economy
Hillary Clinton promises higher taxes on the so-called top 1-percent, who already pay nearly half of all individual income taxes – part of her class warfare on the very people who create jobs; doubling down on the collapsing Obamacare; maintaining the war on coal and other American energy sources; and more government regulations, not fewer. According to a government research site, she’s as liberal as it gets on economic issues. She once called the Trans-Pacific Partnership the “gold standard” of trade deals – but then withdrew her support as public opinion shifted against it.
Donald Trump promises to reduce taxes, repeal Obamacare, nurture American energy, take a blowtorch to overregulation, and defeat the disastrous TPP and renegotiate other bad trade deals.
Second Amendment
It was actually only recently that an individual’s right to own firearms was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In both cases (District of Columbia v. Heller [2008] and McDonald v. Chicago [2010]) the vote was 5-4. That fifth vote, in the person of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, is now gone.
In other words, one Supreme Court appointment could overturn those cases and open the door to gun bans – even for self-defense in the home (see cases above).
Hillary Clinton has said, as CNBC summarized it, that she will appoint “justices who would defend women’s rights, back (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) rights, support Roe v. Wade and reverse the Citizens United decision and its ability to funnel (money from unnamed sources) into elections. Clinton said she wanted a court to ‘stand on the side of the people’ rather than wealthy donors and corporations.” In other words, she wants advocates for the liberal agenda.
Donald Trump has released two lists of potential Supreme Court nominees that his campaign says “were selected, first and foremost, based on constitutional principles” – in other words, chosen for how they would govern their rulings, not what they would rule ahead of time.
We’ve been watching this campaign just as you have. We understand the circumstances are not ideal. Yet, Donald Trump is a successful businessman who knows how this country works and loves it deeply. His opponent is a career government functionary shrouded in ignominy. And she couldn’t be more wrong on the issues most important to most Americans.
Given the stakes, and given the night-and-day contrasts between the candidates on the issues, the choice is clear and urgent. On terror and immigration, trade and the economy, taxes and regulations, self-defense and individual liberty, there is just no comparison between these two candidates.
For both prosperity and posterity, we simply must elect Donald Trump on Nov. 8.