Op-ed by Paul Ingrassia | Photo: Alamy
President Trump is on a historic tear in the weeks since his charade of a show trial ended. Over the past ten days, he made pit stops to Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., Racine, Wisconsin, and various locations in Michigan, culminating with a bedazzling speech at a Turning Point USA event in Detroit on Saturday.
In a few days, the President will descend upon Philadelphia, the city that produced the Constitution, in what is sure to go down as a critical moment in what has already been one of the most historic presidential campaigns in American history.
Pennsylvania, of course, is, according to most “experts,” the most important battleground state this election year. Basically, whoever wins the Keystone State wins the election. Virtually every poll has the 45th President trumping Biden, and by margins that only appear to be widening as we enter into the summer months. The fact that President Trump is spending a lot of time on the ground in the Keystone State – in addition to nearby Michigan – demonstrates the importance of these two states overall.Subscribe
Coupled with Wisconsin, home of next month’s Republican National Convention, the trifecta of rust belt states, which memorably represented the once “impenetrable” blue wall back in 2016, will yet again prove critical in deciding who of either Trump or Biden will return to the Oval Office.
Throughout the week, the credo of President Trump’s remarks has been unity. This message was on full display just last week when the President met with Congressional leaders from both the House and Senate in Washington. Facing unprecedented political prosecution by a rogue Judge and District Attorney, who are both aided and abetted by a weaponized Department of Justice, the President needs all the help he can get from Republican allies on the Hill to circumscribe the all-out lawfare being waged against him this year.
Of course, the President faces the prospect of being imprisoned by a Judge acting well outside the boundaries of his office and the law at next month’s sentencing, which will take place in New York City. That was partly the reason why he met with high-profile Senate and House leaders, giving him an opportunity to strategize and create a display of unity with Republican lawmakers. A unified front, however internally fractured that party might otherwise be, is invariably a sign of strength – particularly in a make-or-break election year.Subscribe
The importance of unity, now more than ever, is underscored by the bleak forecast out of New York. Obviously, the Biden Regime is hellbent on subverting the election, no matter the cost. Biden and his henchmen in the Justice Department and various state actors will resort to just about any means to interfere with the presidential race, no matter the damage rendered along the way to the integrity of the justice system, due process, and the rule of law. All of this lawfare is being waged intentionally: the goal is to keep President Trump off the campaign trail, where he is at peak power, and removed from the American people as much as possible.
That is the only way Biden can win the election – by sabotaging his opponent. However, so far, the strategy has backfired: President Trump’s poll numbers, across the map, continue to skyrocket. He commands leads in once unthinkable states like Nevada, Virginia, and even Minnesota. President Trump has done so well so far that even conventionally blue strongholds, like New Jersey and New York, are dashing rightward – with no end in sight.
For context, Nevada, a state where the 45th President has a double-digit lead by some polls, has not been won by a Republican in 20 years. Ditto Virginia, which also last handed its 13 electoral votes to a Republican in 2004. Minnesota, for its part, has not voted for a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1972, over half a century ago! Now, President Trump looks poised to achieve a feat that not even the Gipper could accomplish when he took 49 of 50 states in his historic landslide victory in 1984.
The expectations for another Nixonian or Reaganesque landslide make perfect sense, especially given the state of the economy, the wide-open borders, and ongoing chaos overseas. As inflation reaches forty, fifty, and possibly even one-hundred-year highs, Russian and Chinese warships have entered Florida’s waters.
The United States has become vulnerable like never before to the world, which sees in its illegitimate Commander-in-Chief the personification of human weakness, moral uncertainty, and terminal decline. The twenty or so million foreign invaders that have penetrated our wide-open borders over the past four years alone have brought untold devastation to our country: violent crime, drugs, and gangs are just the tip of the spear. Major cities have been flooded by illegals, significant swaths of whom are military age men who loot and ransack cities – from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles – for food, housing, clothes, medicine. All these supplies are freely handed out by Democratic politicians, themselves in many cases immigrants or people with subversive allegiances to foreign nations.Subscribe
The economic toll of mass immigration, both illegal and legal, has been massive. Resources that should be otherwise used to improve our infrastructure, educate American children, and provide housing and care for homeless veterans, is instead being recklessly misallocated on illegals – many of whom are being placed in luxury resorts, like the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, a national landmark once in the same league as The Waldorf Astoria and Plaza Hotel.
The border crisis, which is the number one issue concerning voters this cycle, is a great worry for every single American. Typically, Americans vote their pocketbooks in presidential elections – and while so-called “Bidenomics” has undoubtedly driven millions away from Democratic politicians, it is the border that has unified Americans of all parties – Republicans, Independents, and even many Democrats – who increasingly are in consensus that the current trajectory is downright suicidal. Now, 7 in 10 Americans, according to many surveys, want mass deportations – that number also includes a majority of Hispanics, once a reliably Democratic voter bloc, who are jumping on the Trump Train in droves.
The economic costs of illegal migration are legion: wages are artificially depressed to accommodate low-skilled laborers, who compete with native born Americans for jobs whose employers can get away with paying less. The quality of the work is lower and usually takes longer – and all the deadweight of caring for foreign born migrants, including housing, schooling, and medical costs – proves colossal, outweighing any negligible economic benefit from the labor they provide. Meanwhile, more people mean more congestion, more pollution, and invariably, more crime.
The Venezuelan cartels have erupted like a volcano in cities like New York, where they are being sent in buses and planes by Alejandro Mayorkas. Due to the extremely liberal laws that will only prosecute you if your name is Donald John Trump, roving gangs have exploded – and with them, human trafficking. In many cases, underfunded and underskilled police forces, such as the NYPD, are ill-equipped to deal with criminal organizations this vicious and bloodthirsty. Even if they had the means to take them on, they are being hamstrung by Democratic mayors and governors across the land, who, since the George Floyd Revolution, now believe that cracking down on crime is tantamount to racism. The prevailing Democratic credo is it is better to be dead than to be called a racist. And so, the new status quo under Biden has been unsafe cities and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians – all entirely preventable, all entirely attributable to the regnant Regime.Subscribe
As barbarians literally storm our gates, much like Rome before the fated downfall, Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C., coolly indifferent to the mounting crises on the homeland, send more and more resources, that we can neither afford nor account for, to winless overseas entanglements. The current negotiating strategy is recklessly incompetent. Even if one were devoutly committed to, say, preserving the Ukraine from “Russian aggression,” why send $200 million wantonly overseas when, very clearly, $20 million would be more than sufficient?
The current strategy for foreign policy is emotionally overwrought and intellectually bankrupt: that, invariably, makes for a catastrophic combination. The result has been as expected; Americans are poorer, indeed much poorer, than they have been in decades, generations, even. Meanwhile, our idiotic leaders have negotiated us to the brink of World War III. There is a land war in Europe for the first time in eighty years. Middle Eastern powers are bloodthirsty for vengeance, and nobody has the sensibility or level-headedness to achieve a resolution that would limit the number of casualties, on all sides, and furnish a peaceful settlement that will put an end to the wars swiftly and humanely.
That is, nobody other than Donald Trump. Richard Nixon once famously said “The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.” Donald Trump is the living embodiment of that famous phrase – under his first term he mitigated conflict in every part of the world, from the drug cartels in Latin America to ISIS in the Middle East to nuclear proliferation in the Pacific. Nobody in their right mind believes that either the Ukrainians or the Israelis would be in a state of warfare, at this very moment, if the Donald, rather than braindead Biden, were in office.
The 45th President had the disarming ability to curb the blustery, vengeful urges of the Zelenskyy’s and Netanyahu’s of the world. He could negotiate peace, without being stampeded by those like Putin, Xi, and the Iranian Regime, who make mincemeat of ignorance and weakness, neither of which are in short supply under Biden.
Peace abroad means prosperity at home. Every American would be a beneficiary of that peace – we would never be dealing with record-high inflation, because the drive to print money incessantly would be put to a screeching halt.Subscribe
Instead, that money – those precious domestic resources – would, under a second Trump administration, be directed inward. Our manufacturing base would be reignited, with automobile manufacturers opening their plants here in the United States, and not in Mexico, which has been converted into a quasi-vassal state for the Chinese under Biden. As a result of all that inward investment, coupled with overseas peace, the American economy would ignite a national renewal like never before. Our resources, now hampered by senseless regulations, would be unleashed – the United States would become the leading global superpower in natural energy, dominating Russia and the Middle East in terms of supply. All of that would have an appreciable effect on growth domestic product. A robust economy would attract only the best and brightest industries to build here, and hire American workers, which would in turn forfeit the need to bring in low-skilled laborers from the Third World.
A strong economy would spur a baby boom like no other – and America would, in a matter of time, once again become the preeminent superpower of the world – outpacing China, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Brazil, and the rest of our competitors, now vying to (quite literally) colonize this once great and mighty continent.
The real tragedy is how simple, common-sense solutions can turn this country around in one fell swoop. We are presently being needlessly hamstrung by a Regime that is hellbent on managing America’s destruction. Donald Trump has the solution that is clearer than ever.
The American people, this November, will be tasked with deciding whether they are finally fed-up suffocating under the leveling decadence of Joe Biden, representative par excellence of chaos, decline, and weakness. And choose an alternative course of action – one away from superstition and tyranny, and towards prosperity and freedom.
Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.