In 2016 I was not on the Trump Train. I had serious doubts about his candidacy. Why was he running? What was he in it for? It isn’t as if he needed any additional notoriety or a higher profile. He had everything a person could want. He was responsible for a good chunk of the New York skyline. He had world class golf courses, hotels, and resorts all over the world. He was well known in the popular culture. Millions of American kids had grown up wanting to be like Donald Trump. He was a billionaire, had a beautiful wife, and great kids. He had it all already. No one would blame him if he just kicked back and enjoyed a well-deserved retirement.

I was reminded of another billionaire who said he wanted to be president; one for whom I was ready to vote back in 1992. A man I still believe could have been the first Independent candidate elected to the office in my lifetime. Except of course, it turned out that he really wasn’t interested in being president. He was simply interested in getting his voice out there and, more importantly, keeping George H. W. Bush out of office. Having been burned once, I was not interested in a repeat performance. I needed to know, why was Trump running? Was there a particular candidate he wanted to obstruct? Did he just want to hear his own voice? Or was running for president just a “bucket list” thing he wanted to do before he died?

I supported Ted Cruz in the primary. I live in Texas. I like Cruz. I thought he was a man of his word and would make an outstanding president. I was bitterly disappointed however when, after talking for 23 minutes he was booed off the stage amid a chorus of chants of “endorse Trump”, which he did not do, despite having pledged to do just that regardless of who won the contest.

I still like Senator Cruz. I think he is a good Senator and represents the State of Texas well. I enthusiastically supported him this year in his run for re-election. I think he also would be great on the Supreme Court someday. I no longer consider him a “man of his word” however and will not support him in a primary run for President in the future, as I no longer think he is well-suited to that office.

So, like many, I voted for Donald Trump with some trepidation. I was still uncertain of why Donald Trump wanted to be president, but I certainly could not vote for Hillary Clinton and definitely did not want to see her in power in Washington.

I have never been so pleased to be so pleasantly surprised. Donald J. Trump, even hobbled, with his hands tied behind his back by the Congress, the Press, the Democrats, and the courts, managed to do (or tried to do) everything he promised and achieved things of which any conservative Republican should have been proud. I have always held Ronald Reagan to be the greatest president that ever took office in my lifetime. Now, after his first term in office, Donald Trump was standing with him neck to neck. If someone had told me in 2016 that I would feel that way in 2020, I would have said they were crazy.

There can be no greater contrast between two men than Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Reagan was a smooth talking communicator. Trump is confrontational; sort of a bull in a china shop; pure New York City. Some have called him a "wrecking ball". However, although the press and the Democrats tried to paint him in a highly detrimental light, the more you looked past their opprobrium, the more it became apparent that the real Donald Trump was quite different from the way he was portrayed.

I voted Trump again in 2020, this time with no trepidation at all. Like many, I went to bed, secure in the knowledge that he had won re-election; he had a comfortable lead, so why not? Like many, when I woke up in the morning, I was shocked to find that he had apparently, somehow while everyone was sleeping, lost the election by a wide margin.

Despite garnering more votes than any previous sitting president, somehow, a thoroughly unlikeable, corrupt candidate, who spent the entire election period cowering in his basement, whose entire campaign revolved around the ringing message “I am not Trump,” managed not only to win, but to obtain more votes than any other presidential candidate in American history, including Barack Obama. Somehow, all the predictors, which had predicted elections for decades, all turned out to be wrong on this one.

Do I think this election was stolen? You bet I do. But like many things in life, sometimes things we think are bad turn out to actually be for the best. These four years of the Biden/Harris/Whomever is really pulling the strings behind the curtain Administration have enlightened many who otherwise might not have been enlightened as to what has actually been going on in America for some time. The left came fully out of the closet, believing that the revolution had been won, their vision for America had prevailed, and the Republicans were doomed to forever be an inconsequential minority party, kept around only to “prove” that democracy still existed in “their democracy.”

But the left overplayed their hand; championing overt racism in the name of “equity”, “freedom of speech” that only included speech they approved of, “tolerance” that only included things they deemed “appropriate”, and other perversions most Americans had been told were “conspiracy theories” that now, shockingly, were found to be only too real. In this moment of cognitive dissonance, many Americans for the first time found out how the Democrats on the left and the press had been lying to them for years. The corruption became so obvious and in your face that the only way you could miss it would be if you deliberately refused to look, were willfully ignorant, or totally brainwashed. Or, of course, on board with the agenda.

So, having reluctantly voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and enthusiastically voting for him in 2020, I would have crawled over broken glass to vote for him in 2024.

The past four years have not only provided the glimpse behind the curtain that millions of Americans needed to see, they have provided the contrast between Trump’s four years in office and the past four years of policies that, while they may have seemed good from the perspective of the “progressive left,” have been demonstratively bad for the American people as a whole.

The Democrats have eagerly embraced the lunatic fringe at the expense of the American people at large, wasted our money, flouted our laws, lied to our faces, and treated working class Americans as sub-class citizens who can be replaced by hordes of illegal aliens from all over the globe.

We have seen the very same people who, during Trump’s first term, were “horrified” by the language he sometimes used, claiming it “incited violence,” spend the last four years claiming he was a fascist, literally Hitler returned, bent on destroying democracy and stripping every American citizen of their rights. Language that has culminated in at least two assassination attempts against him, one that failed only by the grace of God, the other by an alert member of the Secret Service. These same people claim that their language does not incite to violence, and, undeterred, they have continued to spew it right up to the election.

We have discovered that much of what we thought we “knew” about Donald Trump, what he has said and what he has done has been spoon fed to us by a captive, biased media using neatly clipped and edited snippets neatly crafted to present the picture they wished to paint regarding President Trump instead of reporting the news, unadulterated by their political slant, as most people thought they were doing.

We also discovered that the same was being done in the opposite direction as well; crafting a narrative in word and carefully edited video of a President Biden as hale and full of vigor as he was in 2016 when he was President Obama’s vice president, instead of the declining old man, incapable of competently executing his office that he truly was.

Another word for such presentations to the public is propaganda. In growing numbers, it became clear to many Americans who had not been aware of it before, that a propaganda war had been waged against them for at least eight years, and probably a good deal longer.

These things and many more have resulted in a groundswell of support for the re-election of President Trump; a groundswell that made the 2024 election “too big to rig.” And make mistake about it; rigging happened in this election just as it did in 2020. A thorough investigation, both of the 2020 and 2024 election needs to happen, to ensure that it does not happen again in 2026 during the mid-term elections and also in the presidential race of 2028. Indeed, such an investigation is necessary for us to regain confidence in our election processes going forward.

The past four years have given Donald Trump time to retrench and reassess what he hopes to accomplish. To come up with a solid plan backed by solid picks in the offices he needs to back him up in executing his agenda. Seldom does one get a “do over” in the real world. This second four years is that rare “do over” granted to Donald Trump, and he seems driven to make this four years at least the equal of eight for an ordinary president.

Certainly, the team he is putting together is without equal in any previous administration when it comes to fighting for the American people (even those who are fighting against it). I look at the combination of Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, Vivek Ramaswamy, J D Vance, and all the others, as well as those who support them, and all I can think of is a paraphrasing of the quote attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; “They (the Left) have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

I said before that after his first term, Donald Trump stood shoulder to shoulder in my mind with Ronald Reagan as the best president of my lifetime. If he is able to succeed this time in the things he has said he will do (and after his first term I have no doubt he intends to do so), then he will stand first as the best in my lifetime, and perhaps one of the most consequential presidents in American history.

I pray he gets the chance to do so.