The Four Main Issues That Gave Trump The Victory (Part One)

By John J. Duncan Jr.

duncanj@knoxfocus.com

There never has been a major party nominee for president like Donald Trump, and there probably never will be again.

If you had told me before Trump that either party would one day nominate a man who had major state and federal criminal cases going on against him during a campaign, and one of which he had been convicted on 34 counts, I would not have believed it.

If you had told me the same candidate had hundreds of millions in judgments in two major civil cases, handed down against him by juries, I wouldn’t have believed he could have been elected as dogcatcher, much less as president.

If you had told me that same candidate would be a man with a brash New York personality who had had several affairs and had been married three times, I would have said such a man could never win a nomination, much less an election.

I also would have found it hard to believe that the same man would be a billionaire who would become the champion of middle-income and working-class people.

Don’t get me wrong. I voted for Donald Trump all three times and wanted him to win. He has been very nice to me, and I supported his policies when I was still in Congress.

My Dad told me many years ago that people forget you when you leave office, about as soon as the ripples disappear when you throw a rock in the water.

I have been pleasantly surprised at how nice people have been to me since I left Congress because I did not expect much.

Thus, I was very surprised in October 2020 when the former political director of the White House called and said, “Congressman, President Trump talks about you more than any other former member.” He said the president wanted to give me one of only 30 tickets (because of Covid) to the presidential debate, and 15 of those tickets went to members of his family.

Then last year, the same man, Brian Jack, called and said President Trump wanted to invite me and my wife to have dinner with him in Nashville.

This was a dinner with the four top people running his campaign, Tennessee’s two senators, three members of Congress (Harshbarger, Fleischmann and Rose), and their spouses. That night, Mr. Trump spent over three hours with us, after he had been traveling and speaking all day, and then at about 11:30 he called in the cooks, waiters and waitresses to pose for photos and sign autographs for them. He can be a really nice man.

I believe Donald Trump won this election because of four main things: the economy, immigration, Kamala Harris, and lawfare – using our legal system in political ways.

1) The Economy: A CNN election day poll found that 72% of the people were angry or dissatisfied with the economy. Dana Bash, with her extreme bias, tried to explain in a convoluted way that that would be good for Harris.

Then Chris Wallace, on the same panel, said that was ridiculous. He never liked Trump, but he said it would be a “miracle” if Harris won facing a headwind like that, meaning the 72% upset with the economy. This panel was on before any polls had closed.

The economy seems to have been the main issue in almost every presidential election. Political junkies will remember the 1992 election when a young woman held up a sign at a George Bush rally that said “It’s the economy, Stupid,” and Bill Clinton won with just 43% of the vote.

Early in 1992, the country had a brief recession. Some economists have said you are six months into a recession before people realize it, and six months out of one before people know it. By that election, this country was already in a time of great growth, but most had not yet felt it.

2) Immigration: When Harris and her supporters tried to convince people the border was secure, everyone knew that was not true. On September 27, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency released figures showing that 13,099 non-citizen criminally convicted murderers were living in this country along with 662,566 non-citizens who had criminal histories of all types, including thousands of rapists.

CNN reported that Webb County, Texas, with a heavily Hispanic population, was carried by Trump this year after he lost it by more than 30% in 2020. Trump carried Dade County, Florida, this year after losing it by more than 30% in 2020.

In Pennsylvania, with more than half a million Puerto Ricans, Trump lost the Latino vote 57-42, but this was 30% better than he did in 2020. These and many other examples show that even Hispanic and Latino people want secure borders. (TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)