SAUNDERS: A vote for Donald Trump, explained

Joe Biden is a much better person than Donald Trump. But that didn’t keep Biden’s poll numbers from tanking — and ultimately driving him off the 2024 campaign trail.

Kamala Harris’ performance as vice president? I don’t recall ever hearing that Harris was a great U.S. senator or great California attorney general or great San Francisco district attorney. Throughout her career, her biggest selling point has been that she was better than her less-than-formidable opponent.

Harris first won office in 2003, when she ran against her former boss, San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, whom the San Francisco Chronicle ranked dead last among California’s 58 county prosecutors in 1999.

She won her first race for California attorney general against a Republican who said he’d keep collecting his Los Angeles district attorney pension while pocketing the six-figure AG salary. He lost.

Her next opponent was a career lawman with no campaign experience.

Nobody voted for Harris in the 2020 presidential primary because she dropped out before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus.

Biden chose her to be his running mate after he committed to picking a minority woman — and that’s what he got. A running mate who got out early, after a Public Policy Institute of California survey showed her running behind Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — in her own state.

Because Biden chose to wait until July to back out of the presidential campaign, he was able to crown his veep as successor before the Democratic National Convention.

Which is amazing because Harris is the Democratic nominee nobody elected. She’s the candidate Democrats were stuck with, not the one they chose.

And she chose Tim Walz to be her running mate.

Say what you will about Donald Trump — and I’ll never forgive him for stoking the flames of discontent on Jan. 6, 2021 — but this year Republicans overwhelmingly supported him.

Trump lost primaries in Vermont and the District of Columbia, but dominated the race so completely that he claimed 2,265 delegates, far more than the 1,215 needed to win the nod. Nikki Haley was his strongest challenger and she finished with 97 delegates. She endorsed Trump in July, and I understand why.

I’m voting for Trump because he is right on issues that matter most to me.

When COVID slammed America, Trump put together a savvy task force that guided an anxious country through the early days of the pandemic, advised families and employers on preventive measures and launched Operation Warp Speed, which produced vaccines in record time and saved millions of lives.

As social media has grown, Silicon Valley progressives have used their platforms to enforce conformity. Team Biden, for example, leaned on social media platforms, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later revealed, to censor “certain COVID content, including humor and satire.”

I can see Harris using the awesome might of the federal government to muzzle dissidents. After all, Biden got away with it.

Biden and Harris effectively invited millions of people from across the globe to cross our southern border illegally — with no regard for the impact on American workers, schools and local governments.

Only when blue cities, many of them “sanctuary cities,” were overwhelmed and desperate did the administration change course.

Worse, Harris and company blame Trump for not supporting a bill that ostensibly would have stopped the migrant surge they created.

Just by being elected, Trump would discourage illegal border crossings.

With his brawler’s persona, Trump’s presidency produced a world that was safer. When Trump was in the Oval Office, Putin didn’t send Russian troops into Ukraine, Hamas did not wage an attack that killed 1,200 in Israel and Iran did not launch missiles into Israel. The Abraham Accords negotiated under Trump promised to stabilize the Middle East, where today there is so much chaos.

You have to wonder if America’s foreign policy rivals would have been so bold if Biden had not ordered an ill-considered withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that left 13 American service members dead in 2021. Biden made America look weak.

So when I hear people talking about what a bad man Trump is and how unworthy he is to be president, I don’t bother to argue. They don’t get that the Nov. 5 election isn’t about one man, it’s about the country and the world.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.