TRUMP BEATS BIDEN ON POLICY
FABRIZIO GOWDY | NOVEMBER 3, 2020 | OPINIONS
President Donald Trump is an obnoxious narcissist with a fifth-grade vocabulary and a Twitter addiction. But we aren’t choosing a friend, we’re electing a president. And on policy issue after policy issue, the Trump Administration has delivered.
Under the Trump Administration, America has become energy independent for the first time since 1953. As a net energy exporter, we are no longer as dependent on oil from the tumultuous Middle East. On the economic front, Black, Hispanic, and Asian unemployment fell to record lows. President Trump and congressional Republicans enacted a tax cut that, according to The New York Times, saw virtually every taxpayer receive at least a modest tax break. Trump renegotiated NAFTA, an agreement Biden voted for, which devastated the industrial Midwest, replacing it with the USMCA.
In the Middle East, Trump crushed ISIS and killed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; as Vice President, Biden opposed the Bin-Laden raid. The Obama-Biden Administration gave us the Iran Nuclear Deal, in which we flew a planeload of cash to a state sponsor of terrorism in exchange for empty promises. The Trump Administration has given us a series of landmark peace deals, finally forcing Sudan, Bahrain and the U.A.E. to recognize Israel’s legitimacy. Saudi Arabia will likely follow, and there is hope for lasting peace in a Sunni-Israeli alliance.
President Trump is the first president in decades not to have started a new war; by contrast, the Obama-Biden administration deployed military personnel to Syria and Niger and began bombing Libya and Yemen. Trump has worked to bring our troops home from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and end the “forever wars” Biden helped start while in the Senate. In the process, Trump has faced resistance from the military-industrial complex and the defense establishment, who profit off our endless Middle East quagmires. Unsurprisingly, over 300 former Bush Administration officials, the architects of our ill-advised invasion of Iraq, have endorsed Biden.
Continuing on the foreign policy front, for all his warm rhetoric toward Russian President Vladamir Putin, Trump has ultimately been tougher on Russia than the Obama-Biden Administration. Whereas Obama and Biden stood by as Russia annexed Ukranian territory, Trump has armed the Ukranians with offensive weapons.
Biden has refused to call China an adversary, cozying up to Xi Jingping and the autocratic Chinese Communist Party. He supported giving China most favored nation status, cheered as China’s economy grew at our expense, and ignored the unfair trade practices and massive intellectual property theft enabling that growth. Although imperfect in his approach, Trump has confronted China with sanctions, tariffs, and diplomatic pressure.
We’ve been told President Trump is a racist white supremacist, but recent polling suggests he’s outperforming Mitt Romney among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters. Trump recently rolled out a plan to invest $500 billion in Black businesses, make Juneteenth a national holiday, and designate the Klu Klux Klan a domestic terrorist organization. He also signed a major criminal justice reform bill into law. The First Step Act aims to undo the damage done by Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill, which destroyed African American communities with harsh, “tough on crime” policies. Biden’s bill resulted in a generation of poor, disproportionately black men being locked up on minor drug charges.
Trump has appointed three textualist Supreme Court Justices who will interpret the constitution’s original public meaning. Biden would appoint justices who would force nuns to pay for birth control.
We’ve been warned Trump is a threat to institutional norms. And yet, it is the Democrats, not Trump, who are currently threatening to pack the Supreme Court, nuke the filibuster, and add states to the union.
Despite a pandemic, a recession, riots, and wildfires, 56 percent of Americans say they are better off today than they were four years ago, according to a September Gallup poll. Trump’s policies are understandably more popular than Trump himself. This election will come down to what Americans value more: policy or personality. I value policy.