by Meshawn Maddock
President Trump has started using the line, “whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.”
Some people are unhappy, but is he wrong? Is that so different from what so many Michiganders recognized they were voting for in 2016?
Maybe some of Donald Trump’s early supporters loved The Apprentice so much they were predisposed to support his run for president, but it wasn’t his “likeability” that carried Donald Trump to the Republican nomination and then the White House. The President doesn’t even drink, so he can’t even be “the guy you want to sit and have a beer with.”
It was the President’s brash, iconoclastic attitude that won him the hearts of Republican primary voters, not his affability. Trump’s fearless determination to say what no one else would, to destroy the sacred cows of both American political parties, and to force Americans to face truths they would really rather forget is what allowed him to beat Hillary Clinton in the general election.
Ultimately, Donald Trump is President because he was the only man in America prepared to call out the hypocrisies and self-serving absurdities of the American political establishment.
In 2020, Donald Trump is going to win reelection because he’s the only one who can stop those destructive elements from coming back with a vengeance. Every one of the Democrats competing to run against him would be an utter disaster for Michigan.
Electing any one of the Democrat candidates would mean complete surrender to China on trade and a return to the abusive practices that Beijing used to exploit American workers and businesses for decades. Their front-runner, Joe Biden, apparently hasn’t been paying attention for about 30 years and thinks China is “not competition for us.”
Michigan’s manufacturing industry, thanks to President Trump’s masterful economic maneuvers, is booming again, with tens of thousands of new jobs and strong wage growth. Michigan’s steel and aluminum mills, which are finally being protected from China’s dumping of subsidized metal products by the President’s 25 percent counter-tariffs, have undergone a genuine renaissance.
To the 2020 Democrats such as Joe Biden, throwing that all away is a worthwhile price to pay in order to spare Wall Street some short-term consternation. Everyone in America, on Wall Street and Main Street alike, will be be better off if we can achieve a genuinely fair trade deal with China, but Beijing is counting on Democrats to make sure that doesn’t happen.
You can see the same logic at work on immigration. Every one of the Democrats — including Biden, who later walked it back — has endorsed plans to use your tax dollars to provide “free” healthcare to illegal aliens, which would create a powerful new magnet for poor, low-skilled workers to come to the U.S. and drive down wages. Most of the Democrat candidates even want to completely decriminalize illegal immigration.
Today’s Democrats aren’t pitching a return to the Bill Clinton era, or even the Barack Obama era. They want to create an entirely new era of unrestrained far-left radicalism. The Democratic Party’s left wing believes that Donald Trump is “unlikeable,” and they think this means they can get away with embracing an extremist platform encompassing all of the liberal policies that voters have consistently rejected for decades.
They’re wrong on both counts, and Michiganders know as well as anyone that President Trump is the only serious option when we cast our votes for President in 2020.
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Meshawn Maddock os the co-founder of Michigan Trump Republicans.
