In 2014, I was elected by South Bay voters to the California State Assembly. My election was a (relatively) big deal: I was the first South Bay Republican elected in 20 years, I defeated an incumbent, and I brought some balance to California by helping break the Democrats’ legislative supermajority.
I voted over 5,000 times in my legislative term, but my toughest vote was the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. As I announced here almost 10 years ago, I could not support either candidate. I considered both unworthy of the presidency.
On November 5, the American people again face a choice between two deeply flawed presidential candidates. But this time I am voting for Trump. What has changed? Read on.
President Trump was a better president than I expected. I continue to detest much of his rhetoric and his eagerness to inflame America’s tensions. But his term in office was characterized by peace and prosperity. Working Americans enjoyed economic growth, rapidly rising wages and low inflation. Abroad, Trump preserved the peace without giving ground to America’s adversaries.
President Trump also showed courage in challenging America’s political establishment, and he was mostly right. America needs to regain control of our borders. Free trade with China creates unacceptable security risks for the US. America’s NATO allies were nevergoing to invest in our common defense unless the US credibly threatened to leave the alliance. Peace in the Middle East will not come from appeasing Iran or the militias and terrorists Iran funds, it will come from the US supporting Israel and fostering Arab/Israeli relationships such as the Abraham Accords. Trump led the way on these big issues, and he took on both Democratic and Republican politicians to do so.
Note: you are halfway through this article, and I haven’t said a thing about Vice President Harris. But to finish the job, I now have to compare the two candidates.
In any normal universe, I would consider Trump’s unwillingness to concede the results of the 2020 election and his indifference to the January 6 Capitol assault to be disqualifying. Trump did not incite the Capitol incursion, but when the chips were down he took no action to end it. That fact alone makes it a painful decision to return Trump to the White House. So why am I voting for him?
The Biden/Harris administration has been disastrous on policy – blowout spending, bigtime inflation, three years of open borders and disasters abroad in Afghanistan, Ukraine and the Middle East. But even worse, the Biden/Harris administration and its allies in the Federal bureaucracy and Big Tech represent an existential threat to American liberties and political norms.
Censorship. Whether it was the Hunter Biden laptop, the origins of COVID or the risks and limitations of COVID vaccines, the Biden administration has pressured or conspired with social media companies to suppress free speech.
Weaponizing the legal system. Trump has been repeatedly subjected to politicized legal actions that Americans would laugh at if they happened in a corrupt third world country. New York State’s civil case and Manhattan’s criminal charges against Trump are nakedly political. One American whose name should live in infamy is Matthew Colangelo, who left a senior position in Biden’s justice department to join the Manhattan DA’s office and then led Manhattan’s prosecution of Trump. Lawfare anybody?
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Even now in the weeks before the election, the Biden Justice Department continues to try to advance its politicized indictments againstTrump. We also find out the Fulton County, Georgia prosecutors against Trump were inappropriately meeting with Biden officials. Trump taking classified documents to Mar a Lago was wrong but trivial compared to Hillary Clinton keeping a private server for State Department emails, and she was never charged. The double standard is obvious.
Finally, the 2024 gaslighting of the American people by the Democratic Party and its media allies continues. They tried to hide Biden’s obvious frailty from the American people until they couldn’t. They considered Harris an unpopular and failed vice president until they needed her after Biden’s collapse, at which time she became a revered stateswoman. Harris has tried to walk back every major leftist position she has long advocated for – open borders, free transgender treatments for illegal immigrants, a ban on fracking – and is suddenly a centrist. And Trump is the liar?
So this year, I am swallowing hard and voting for Trump instead of accepting the certainty that bad public policy, censorship and banana republic style justice will continue if Harris prevails. Whatever the outcome, may God bless us with a decisive result and grant our elected and appointed leaders wisdom.
David Hadley represented the South Bay of Los Angeles in the California State Assembly 2014 – 2016.