Trump vs. Biden: Who Do You Want Flying the Plane?

This is the question Americans should be asking themselves right now; that is, aside from the fifty million who have already voted. Which of these two men – both in their seventies, both unafraid to go on the attack, and yet with two very different visions for America – do you want flying the plane at this particular moment in history?

This election is not about the offensive comments Trump made in an Access Hollywood tape in 2005. It’s not about the fact that Biden plagiarized his way through law school and lied about his academic record, forcing him to drop out of his first presidential campaign in 1988. We now have 2020 Trump and 2020 Biden. There are no realistic alternatives at this point; like it or not, these are the choices.

The Pandemic

Of course, the biggest political boon to the Democrats has been the COVID-19 pandemic; in the words of Jane Fonda it was a “gift from God.” Democrats have built their entire campaign around the pandemic, requiring them to make it seem as bad as possible, death and case numbers as large as possible, and economic and social life as miserable as possible, all in the hopes that Republicans will be hurt. They have tried to pin each one of the 220,000 U.S. COVID deaths on President Trump, suggesting that all 220,000 would still be alive were it not for his ineptitude.

This is patently absurd. The pandemic was certainly not handled perfectly, hindsight being “2020.” In the final debate, Trump noted that even Anthony Fauci was downplaying the threat and discouraging masks as late as March. The biggest credible charge Democrats have against Trump is that he was briefed on the disease’s severity in January, and did not communicate this to the American people. In the VP debate, Kamala Harris suggested that Americans could have used this time to “prepare”… but by doing what exactly? Buying more toilet paper? Shutting down two months earlier?

We cannot ignore the role of the media in all of this. If Barack Obama were still president, they would have been touting the “2 million American lives saved.” Recall that in late March some models were predicting 2.2 million deaths, with 200,000 presented as a “best case scenario.”

Far from winning on this issue in the final debate, Biden came across as incredibly pessimistic. To hear Biden tell it, there is no end in sight, not even a glimmer of the “old normal” at the end of this long tunnel. He remained open to future lockdowns, especially of areas where cases are rising. In Biden’s words, Americans are facing a “dark winter.”

Trump, by contrast, sounded optimistic on America’s chances of recovering from COVID-19, both medically and economically. Having personally survived the disease thanks in part to new therapeutics, he reassured Americans that we know a lot more about the coronavirus than we did last spring. Trump returned to a familiar refrain that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” something that likely rings true to the millions of Americans suffering from mental and other health-related issues, their lives thrown into chaos by school closures.

How bizarre and telling that after insisting upon the need for a vaccine, liberals and media elites are so uninterested in the fact that one may be just weeks away. Andrew Cuomo is even suggesting (on the basis of no evidence) that Americans should not trust a vaccine that is developed under the Trump administration. Behavior like this only reveals the extent to which the COVID media hysteria has been about damaging Trump.

Foreign Policy

While Biden did not quite appear to be a bumbling dementia patient for the entire debate, Thursday was not a good night for him, eliciting some rather bizarre statements. In criticizing Trump for working with Kim Jong-un to avoid nuclear war, Biden claimed America “had a good relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe.” This is untrue; FDR was president at the time and under no illusions about the Nazis. Obama was praised for making a (very bad) nuclear deal with Iran, an oppressive regime and state-sponsor of terrorism.

While I am personally disgusted by the North Korean regime – likely the most totalitarian state in the world – I am also glad that we did not go to war with them. In fact, we haven’t gone to war with any new adversaries under Trump’s presidency, the first time this has happened since Eisenhower. We did however, defeat ISIS — a threat that emerged after Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq and mishandling of the civil war in Syria.

We cannot forget that the North Korean regime only survives because of support from China, a country that in this and so many other ways is no friend of the United States.

This brings me to the elephant in the room: recent revelations about Hunter Biden suggesting massive corruption and unethical behavior at the very least. As the New York Post recently reported:  

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

Hunter Biden also received 3.5 million dollars from Yelena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and wife of the former mayor of Moscow, to help gain access to American markets. Several members of Biden’s family have grown rich trading off of his name. This is incredibly relevant to the election for multiple reasons. While the issue obviously speaks to Biden’s character, it is also concerning that hostile regimes like Russia and China might be able to use this leverage to get Biden to enact policies in their favor, to the detriment of average Americans.

The Biden campaign is literally trying to run the clock out on this story, a strategy that can only work with the help of a totally compliant and dishonest media. Big Tech recently obliged the Biden campaign by killing the Post story on twitter and suspending their entire account, while Facebook also slowed traffic to the story. The media is so desperate to avoid a repeat of 2016 that they have dropped even the façade of objectivity in their reporting.

Millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that Trump was impeached for something Biden allowed and that his son did… colluding with foreign governments in an apparent “pay-for-play” scheme and then lying about it shamelessly. Biden repeated the debunked claim that the whole Hunter Biden laptop story was just Russian disinformation… something you can apparently do these days with no supporting evidence.  On the contrary, Trump cited his record of getting NATO allies to contribute more to the common defense, an alliance that mainly exists to guard against Russian aggression.

Domestic Issues

Biden has likely grown so accustomed to the kind media treatment that he now believes he can spout outright lies with impunity and won’t be called on it. In the debate, he repeatedly claimed that he was never against fracking, despite video evidence to the contrary. Whether this was enough for the good people of Pennsylvania who care about this issue, Biden went on to commit his biggest unforced error of the night, claiming his goal would be to get rid of the oil industry. As any rational thinker knows, this can’t happen without destroying millions of jobs, eroding the foundation of our economy, and sacrificing our hard-fought energy independence.

On the economy, Biden had little more than recycled platitudes from the 90’s. When he started talking about average Americans sitting around their kitchen tables wondering if they could afford new tires that month, I half expected him to bring up the high cost of VCR’s. Trump called him out on it hard as empty politician-speak. Biden’s effort to connect with the American voter by referencing the “kitchen table” and the “empty chair” at the dinner table fell incredibly flat. It is also hard to imagine how raising taxes or upping the minimum wage would help small businesses right now who are currently struggling to make ends meet, a point Trump again hammered him on.

Demeanor

Biden was visibly angry by the one-hour mark. Either his medication was wearing off or the seventy-eight-year-old was simply wearing out after an hour and a half of actual work. The media likes to present Biden as a foil for Trump’s abrasive personality, but Biden has never been a “nice guy.” He gets incredibly hostile whenever the issue of his son is brought up. At a town hall, he even called an average citizen a “damn liar” and challenged him to an IQ test. He lashes out in the same way to journalists, as if the mere question of impropriety is an unwarranted attack.

As the debate wore on, Biden seemed increasingly unfocused and unhinged. At one point he called Trump a racist Abraham Lincoln. He claimed he only couldn’t do immigration or criminal justice reform in his eight years as Vice President because Obama was president and there were Republicans in Congress. To this, Trump reminded him that you have to persuade people. You have to negotiate.

Biden tellingly fell back on his standard interjection: “C’mon, man,” a crutch he uses whenever he gets frustrated. There were even accusations of “malarkey,” a clear sign that Biden has nothing substantive left to say.

By contrast, Trump was calm but tough, complimenting the moderator for her performance but routinely raising a finger to demand a response. He repeated his promise to replace Obamacare with something better that would cover pre-existing conditions.

Trump attempted to pin the cages at the border on the Obama/Biden administration, repeatedly asking “who built the cages, Joe?” This issue is probably Trump’s biggest liability among suburban women; more importantly, it does have important humanitarian implications. No one wants to see parents separated from their children. But it is also true that some adults were “renting” children from other families to gain entry to the U.S., hoping to take advantage of the catch-and-release policy that Trump ended. See more evidence of this here and here.

Heaven and earth must be moved to reunite the 500+ children to their families, but the fact remains… this election is about who we want flying the plane right now, not the mistakes of the past.

On race, Trump passed on a chance to empathize with Black parents who reportedly must have “the talk” with their children about how to behave in police encounters. Based on my twitter feed at least, this is a talk that many white men receive as well… keep both hands on the steering wheel and address the officer with “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”

Trump is no Bill Clinton. I think he does feel the pain of many average Americans, but he has no interest in saying so for political gain. He is not a Counselor-in-Chief, but rather a Commander-in-Chief. So instead Trump touted his record of helping the Black community through record pre-pandemic employment levels, full funding of HBCU’s, criminal justice reform, and Tim Scott’s plan to create opportunity zones.

Trump did not attempt to walk back his criticism of BLM, referencing their anti-cop chant of “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.” But while almost every major corporation has rushed to embrace the BLM movement, Trump has attempted to reach out to middle class African-Americans and Latinos likely tiring of the constant protests and now-routine violence. Trump has tried to address the material concerns of Black Americans without pandering to a blatantly political and quasi-Marxist group… one that has received millions of dollars in donations without improving the material condition of a single Black American.

By the end of the debate, Biden was checking his watch, with his campaign staffers likely counting down the seconds.

Unlike Mike Pence, who brilliantly concluded his debate performance with a heartfelt call to unity, Trump missed a chance to do so in his last question. He mentioned how Democrats had been coming to him to work together on issues before the pandemic hit and election season started heating up. Trump’s performance was sharp and effective, but not necessarily “presidential” or unifying. But at this point, does it really matter?

By now, we know who Trump is. He is a bold but flawed man: one who tends to take things personally, though he has recently shown some capacity for self-deprecation. Trump built a business empire on the basis of his own image: his brand, his name. It should be no surprise, then, that he more often sells himself as the solution rather than detailing overly-specific policies.

Again, imagine you are stepping onto a plane. Who do you want in the pilot’s seat: the guy with the detailed knowledge of aerodynamics and a plan that looks good on paper? Or the one with the right experience, the right instincts — someone who can take advice when needed, but also commit to a decision when necessary?

Would you even get on a bus, much less a plane, being piloted by Joe Biden? By electing a Biden administration, voters have no idea who would even be in the driver’s seat: Kamala Harris? Nancy Pelosi? The DNC? The extreme, progressive left wing of the Democratic Party? BLM? Antifa?

One thing is for sure – it would not be Joe Biden, not alone anyway. Between his old age, visibly declining cognitive faculties, history of aneurisms, and now the Hunter Biden scandal, Biden would almost certainly not complete even one four-year term as Commander-in-Chief. It was an insult to the American people and electoral malpractice for the Democrats to even put him forward as their candidate, as Democrats talk brazenly of using the 25th Amendment to replace him. It was dereliction of duty on the part of the media not to challenge Biden in any serious sort of way, as they should for any candidate seeking the highest office in the land.

You don’t have to love the character of the pilot flying your plane, or agree with all of his past actions; you just have trust that he is capable of getting you safely to your desired destination. There are stormy skies up ahead; we need a strong and capable leader to guide us. The final presidential debate was a clear win for Donald Trump, as he proved himself up to the task.