What I wish Trump said in the Debate

News sources are reporting that Donald Trump is backing out of any further debates with VP Harris. I think he's missing a great opportunity.

I happened to tune into the Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump exactly when the former President arguably was at his worst. Harris said that people leave his rallies early because they are bored. This clearly agitated Trump. His response reminded me of all the cringe-worthy defenses of crowd sizes at his inauguration, his need to remind everyone of his margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 well after he won, the size of his hands, the strength of his golf game, etc. etc. I thought that Donald Trump of all people would realize when someone was trying to bait him.

If that weren’t enough, he felt it necessary to then remind the 67 million viewers that immigrants were abducting pets in Springfield, OH and eating them. Maybe. But is that really mentionable at a time like this? Who was coaching this man? Perhaps he is uncoachable? I closed my computer and went to sleep knowing what headlines the next day would bring.

I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I was a much different person back then. By my standards today I was hopelessly naive eight years ago. I even held on to hope after he clinched victory. He said he would drain the swamp. Maybe he would? But then he appointed John Bolton as National Security Advisor and Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, who he then replaced with CIA director Mike Pompeo. Billionaire Betsy Devos as Secretary of Education. Coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler as administrator of the EPA.

I thought he duped his supporters but in his single term as POTUS he found a lot of support. Extreme support, in the form of a large, intensely loyal group calling themselves Q-anoners who believed that Trump was secretly planning on exposing the Deep State as the de facto leader of “white hats” in the military and intelligence agencies that were waiting for a Commander in Chief with the right ideas and sentiment to act. Be patient. Stick to the plan they told themselves.

But his four years came to an end without an executive order to pardon Edward Snowden or use his power to free Julian Assange. His stocked his administration with swamp creatures and then didn’t lift a finger to help the two biggest whistleblowers on the planet. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice shame on us.

Then the pandemic came and apparently went, and like his successor in the White House, Joe Biden, Trump declined to debate any challengers to his candidacy in a primary. Democracy in the United States, if it were still alive, was taking its last few breaths.

Then something happened. Trump narrowly survived an attempt on his life. He seemed to have a reckoning of sorts. He asked RFK Jr. to help him. He received the blessings of former Democrat and Iraq War Vet Tulsi Gabbard. Could it be that he finally understood the reality of what he had been saying for eight years? There really is a deep state and they are not to be trifled with.

Bobby Kennedy knows about the renegade CIA that took the life of his uncle and father. Tulsi destroyed Kamala Harris’s campaign hopes in a single exchange early in the Democratic primaries in 2020 by highlighting how Harris abused her power as a prosecutor in CA by pursuing unlawful convictions and withholding exculpatory evidence. Trump is surrounding himself with the right people for the right reasons. Finally.

But Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating Fido and Fifi and it’s Kamala’s fault…

Bro: Try this instead…

I don’t know what to make of Trump’s announcement that he won’t debate Harris again. It seems like a strategic blunder that will draw nothing but more taunting from the Harris campaign who found a way to get under the skin of the guy who made their own skin crawl for four years. Neither will it encourage those still on the fence to support him.

ABC, host of the debate, is getting some criticism with regard to one sided real-time fact checking. Maybe that’s why Trump is unwilling to get back in the ring. But with all due respect Mr. President, with so many Americans suffering under inflation that is clearly underreported while paying for a costly and un-winnable war in Ukraine, it shouldn’t be so hard to come out on top. There are tens of millions of Americans (or more) who are miffed that they were forced to vaccinate or lose their job or vaccinate their children so that they could go to summer camp or attend college. There is overwhelming evidence that the present administration has taken unprecedented action to muzzle the free speech of citizens. You don’t need a fair referee to win the next round. In fact, you will win even more support if the next set of debate moderators are not impartial. Americans love the underdog, remember?

Debates are much different than they used to be. There’s no audience. Participants cannot be heard if it’s not their turn to speak. Questions are chosen by the moderators and response time is enforced more strictly than ever. But candidates can use their allotted time to say whatever they want to.

Say this please (I took the liberty of writing in your voice to make it easy):

On Dick Cheney’s Endorsement

“Vice President Harris says she was honored by Dick Cheney’s endorsement. This man was the biggest proponent of advanced interrogation techniques during the years following 9/11. It makes me wonder what kind of prosecutor would get a nod from a person who believes in torture to get a confession. Given her record of punishing innocent people you really do have to wonder.

Kamala says her values haven’t changed. What exactly are these values she claims to have? Has she forgotten that Cheney voted against an MLK day, against imposing sanctions on South Africa during the years of apartheid and against a resolution to call on the government of South Africa to release Nelson Mandela from prison. It seems she has a penchant for keeping innocent people of color in jail.”

On President Biden’s cognitive decline:

“The American people aren’t stupid. They know that our sitting President is unfit to be in the Oval office. Kamala Harris has known about this for a very long time. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that ‘crooked’ Joe stepped out of the race because she threatened to impeach him if he didn’t. We have a sitting President that is unfit to lead and she has shirked her duty as second in command by letting him remain in the White House or where ever he happens to be convalescing right now.

My fellow Americans, ask yourself why the people who are pulling the strings in the Democratic Party arranged a debate with me two months before their own National Convention? All you Democratic voters out there, do you realize what they are doing? They don’t trust you to pick your own candidate. They want to pick one for you and they have done it by first showcasing how bad your President is on a national stage.

It’s cruel, honestly. That’s why I am standing here debating someone who hasn’t won a Presidential primary in her life and has spent the last three years or more hiding the fact that there isn’t anybody driving the bus. I don’t trust her and you shouldn’t either.”

On the war in Ukraine:

“The Democrats under Joe Biden or likely Ms. Harris, or whoever is really running the country, are sending billions and billions of dollars of our money to fight a proxy war with conventional weapons against a nuclear superpower. You don’t have to be a military expert to see that this is not just futile but dangerous for the whole world.

These people are crazy. Good people in this country are getting crushed by the high cost of food and gasoline while the Biden/Harris administration are sending tons of cash to the clown Zelensky in Ukraine to pick a fight with Putin.

Slow Joe Biden openly admitted that he isn’t interested in protecting innocent Ukrainian people, he is interested in a drawn out conflict with Russia at their expense and ours. These folks in charge wanted us to believe that Russia blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—their own pipeline—to starve Germany of precious natural gas. They want us to think that Putin forgot to install a shutoff valve on their end. Biden and Harris really do think we are stupid.”

On the Pandemic

“Biden and Harris want us to forget what happened to this country over the last four years. I was responsible for Operation Warp Speed which gave us a vaccine for Covid faster than anybody would have expected. They said that they would never use any vaccine that I took credit for. Well, they did. And they forced it upon the American People.

I have said before and I will say it again: you can’t mandate it. A lot of people didn’t want to take the vaccine. A lot of doctors and nurses. A lot of our soldiers who protect this country. Joe Biden made sure those doctors and nurses lost their jobs when we needed them the most. And had no problem removing courageous men and women from their service to our fighting forces. Even today Kamala Harris mandates the vaccine for everybody working for her campaign.

It’s rich, isn’t it? These folks cannot stop talking about bodily autonomy and a person’s right to choose, but they have no problem taking away your livelihood when you don’t do what they want you to do with your bodies.”

On the First Amendment

“Just a few months after Kamala got to the West Wing Biden’s National Security Council warned us that Domestic Terrorists use misinformation. A few months later our Department of Homeland Security backed this up stating that folks in our own country use misinformation to undermine trust in governmental institutions.

Governmental Institutions? In other words, them! Misinformation can be anything that they disagree with. Do you see what is happening here? They want to be the only ones that can decide what is true and what isn’t, and if you don’t agree, they can call you a domestic terrorist.

And they’re not just going after individuals. They went after all the social media platforms that we use or would like to use, if it’s okay with them. They can deny it all they want to but Mark Zuckerberg let us know that that is what they are doing.

They closed down my account on Twitter. They cancelled my friend Bobby Kennedy’s account on Instagram and Joe Biden has put Tulsi Gabbard a former Democrat and Iraq War Veteran on a TSA Terrorist Watchlist because they didn’t like what we were saying.

The founding fathers of this country are rolling in their graves, folks. There’s a reason why the first amendment is first. Tim Walz, Kamala’s running mate, has openly declared that misinformation is not protected by the first amendment, but in fact that is exactly what it does. Misinformation doesn’t lead to fascism. Censorship does. This is the foundation of our Democracy. It makes me wonder what else this former school teacher has been teaching our kids.

They think we are too stupid to know right from wrong so they can decide for us.”

It’s not easy for me to trust your intentions after what you did and didn’t do during your first term, Mr. Trump. But I see that something very bad is happening behind the scenes and you are in a position to stop it.

Final Thoughts

I am not a Trump apologist. I am also fully aware that he very likely maybe saying what he feels is necessary to win the votes he needs while planning on installing the same kinds of people into his administration that he did last time. I don’t like to be fooled twice.

I also believe that when a bullet misses one’s cerebellum by 10mm most people will take another assessment of their life. So if you are certain you know what he is going to do if in office, great. I simply have no idea.

Today we are in a discussion void. Our leaders read from teleprompters and answer pre-arranged soft-ball questions at press conferences—if they choose to hold them at all. Most people listen to only one side of an argument and believe that being informed means listening to what their side says the other side is saying.

A debate, even if moderated poorly and kept highly controlled, is the only opportunity the public has to hear how our leaders answer the tough questions or observe how they avoid them. We voters deserve to see another one.