Why I Support Donald Trump

Like millions of voters at this time of year, I have been asked by loved ones why I support President Donald Trump.

The answer is simple: His policies have benefited our nation. His expansion of the economy brought pre-COVID-19 black and Hispanic unemployment rates to historic lows. He passed long-overdue jail and sentencing reform, rolled back threats to religious liberty, appointed judges that will interpret the Constitution and our laws, not rewrite them, and ended 30 years of misguided leadership that ignored the Chinese threat to the global order.

Trump is not what most of us would wish for as the personality to govern the country, but the country is also not what we might wish it to be at this point. Centrist Democrats have been pushed aside by socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders. Their increasingly extreme policies will destroy what made America the most powerful and beneficent nation on earth — our free market economy, which, alongside our free political institutions, has produced unprecedented prosperity and strength. And they are dividing the nation with a false narrative to do it.

The Biden-Sanders plan is built on falsehoods: that all American institutions are systemically racist and that only by equalizing outcomes through confiscatory taxation, government-enforced quotas, and centralized wealth distribution will we achieve racial peace.

The silky-tongued Barack Obama did the groundwork. He wooed the 2004 Democratic convention, promising to heal a divided nation saying, “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” Once in power, however, he never lost an opportunity to vilify his opponents and sow racial conflict. He described those left behind by the new economy as “cling[ing] to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” He called Republicans “racists” and the “enemy of Hispanics” for wanting to control immigration; pro-life Republicans were engaging in a “War on Women.”

Trained in the Marxist-type community organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky for whom truth was whatever you wanted it to be, Obama “searched out controversy,” interjecting himself into local law enforcement matters, “fan[ing] the latent hostilities” of the African American community.”

For example, when a white (half-Hispanic) captain of a neighborhood watch shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, Obama remarked, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” And when a jury acquitted the homeowner, he made clear his view that the system is racist and that justice had demanded a guilty verdict. Obama stayed “on message” when a Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury refused to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a black man. While riots were ongoing, instead of defending the rule of law and calming the community, he found the anger an “understandable” reaction to police and criminal justice system bias.

The racial tensions stoked by Obama and subsequent violence contributed to the birth of Black Lives Matter, a revolutionary organization whose co-founders are “trained Marxists.” The organization’s original website, which since the summer riots has been scrubbed, detailed its goals: to destroy the nuclear family and foment a worldwide revolution of black and other oppressed peoples. Of the 688 incidents of riots this past summer where perpetrators’ affiliation could be determined, BLM activists, by no means all black, were involved in 95%.

Democratic Party leaders, sensing an opportunity to use the riots against Trump, shamelessly vacillated between mild criticisms of the rioting and active encouragement.

Senate Democrats refused to support a joint resolution condemning the violence unless it was blamed on Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned that if Republicans did not pass the House’s version of police reform, “the street won’t like it.” The new Left’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer approvingly at her side, told her followers that if Mitch McConnell moves to confirm Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett: “We must act in unprecedented ways … We need to tell [him] he is playing with fire.”

Democrats consistently tried to protect the rioters accusing the president of “undermining our democracy” for threatening to send in troops to quell the violence ignoring his authority under the Insurrection Act of 1807 that had been used by four U.S. presidents to restore and maintain domestic peace in the 20th century alone.

New York City’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would go to court if Trump sent in troops to quell that city’s increasing violence.

When the president sent federal law enforcement offers into Portland to protect the federal courthouse that was on fire, Democrats came down on the side of the anarchists. Pelosi described the law enforcement officers as “storm troopers”; Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, called them an “invading” army.

Professor Douglas McAdams, a Stanford expert in social movements, recently observed: “These protests are achieving what very few do. We appear to be experiencing a social change tipping point — that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential.”

That tipping point is this election.

The question we have to ask ourselves, and the question whose answer for me is clear support for Trump, is simple: Are you willing to imperil our prosperity and our freedoms because Trump is lacking in presidential and personal decorum? Trump is 74 and will be long gone in the not too distant future, but the impact of an unprecedented left-wing government that uses race to terrorize a nation will be difficult, or impossible, to undo.

Mr. Schaumber is the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. This piece is written in response to his daughter-in-law, whose family has been sponsoring the opening of the Democratic primary in South Carolina since 1876.