With less than 40 days until the election, former President Donald Trump needs to make three strategic decisions to bring victory home.
First, he must agree to debate Vice President Kamala Harris again, but only if she agrees to a debate hosted by Fox. Democrats will holler and scream that Fox will not be fair to her, but then neither was ABC News fair to Trump.
Why would she agree to another debate?
Because an aggregation of the polls documents that Harris won the first debate, mostly through style and presence, she only incurred an average of 1% bump in the national polls. This blip is not enough to carry her to victory even if the aggregation of all national polls was to come true because she is only a couple of points ahead of Trump.
At this same point in the 2016 election, Hillary was ahead by ~5 points and Biden in 2020 by ahead by ~ 7 points, so Harris still has room to make up and being soft-interviewed by the black journalists, or any Main Stream Media outlet is not going to change the race enough to help her to victory.
It is important to remember that this is not just a two-person race. One has to factor Jill Stein for the Green Party, Cornell West for the People’s Party, and Chase Oliver for the Libertarians and all will suck votes off of either Harris or Trump, or both.
The Green Party has already swung a remarkably close election in 2000 when George W. Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes, while Ralph Nader racked up over 97,000 votes and the Libertarian Party candidate got 16,415 in that election, so while fringe candidates cannot win a state, they can surely toss a state into a different win column.
Trump, on the other hand needs another debate too so he can finally initiate solid attacks on her lack of specifics in her policies that have been heretofore better enunciated by her handlers than by her. This means that Trump has to do what he did when he debated Joe Biden and so many of us thought he could do again. But he did not.
Why?
In hindsight, I believe he did better against Biden because he knew he had him down on the ground and Biden would not be able to get back up. But when the Democrats brilliantly (in their simple minds) started a coup d’ etat to oust Biden, Trump was no longer fighting a frail, absent-minded octogenarian; he was now fighting a younger woman who had nothing to lose and a Main Stream Media that would do anything and everything to prop her up and tear him down.
Many will say that he has already sworn off another debate, but he has changed his mind before, and nothing stops him from challenging her now except his ego.
Second, Trump can beat Harris by providing more substance than she does on key policy areas that Americans believe are the most important to them, such as inflation, economy/jobs, Southern Border, energy, and crime. He not only has to clearly articulate his vision on these issues going forward (not what he did when he was prez, but what he will do in a second term), he has to do it succinctly so that he is a contract to word-salad Harris.
He also must buttress his going-forward policies by simultaneously attacking Harris for what she has advocated for in her past and during the Biden-Harris administration.
Her top two economic policies that she outlined in the debate but did not fill out were:
1. $50,000 to small business owners. That sounds great, but how does the government choose who to give money to? There isn’t enough money to give to everyone who would come up with some hare-brained scheme to start a new business and defraud the government, and even if Congress could agree to do so, it would certainly be inflationary, which Democrats seem to be very good at making happen.
2. $25,000 to new first-home buyers. Again, how does the government pick these folks, and where does the money come from? Some economists believe this will, in fact, drive up the cost of homes instead of lowering the cost to consumers because demand will outstrip supply.
There are so many fault lines in just these two proposals to allow easy attacks, notwithstanding her agreement that taxpayers should pay for sexual transgender surgeries for prisoners, that fracking is off the table, that parental rights in education don’t exist, that criminals have more rights than crime victims do, and that social services are more important than funding our military in a very unstable world.
If, as so many political experts far brighter than me have already said, Trump will stick to the issues he will win. The electoral map favors him if he can win Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina in addition to the already likely Republican states. Which means that he could still lose Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin and be the president-elect (here is an interactive Electoral College map that you can use to test your own combinations ).
Third, he needs to behave like a President. Obviously, this is the most formidable challenge because it is so out-of-character for him, but he has done it before. Think back to the daily press conferences during COVID-19 when he stood before the press almost every single day. He proved to be a leader then and his initiation of Operation Warp Speed was as critical to winning the war on COVID as just about any decision a President has made since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He did it again when he told our NATO partners that they must pony up the dollars to 2% of their national economic output if they expected the US to help defend them in a future war. It was not pretty or diplomatic at all, but it got the message across, albeit some countries still are underperforming but they are slowly progressing.
He did it when he was meeting with Russia, China, and North Korea. Regardless of whether he likes them, none of them trust him one bit, and that is the way it should be. Trump carries a big stick and if our virulent foes do not know what he will do, well many of us believe that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if Trump was president. Likewise, Hamas would not still be holding American and Israeli hostages in Gaza.
I understand that some our military leaders do not like Trump, but do you know what, if they cared less about implementing WOKE policies and more about projecting our strength, we would all be better off. Biden-Harris have promoted only the wimpiest of military leaders that they know will succumb to their weak-kneed policies. Biden-Harris are so scared of expanding a current war, they are willing to let the Axis of Evil, as President Ronald Reagan called them, to call the shots around the world.
Trump also exhibited a strong, principled stance on those towel-head mullahs in Iran. He took away the Muslim-loving Obama privileges, he sanctioned Iran to hell and back to the point where their economy was tanking, their oil was dripping, and their money was not able to fund their proxies as they are doing now.
Diplomacy is for nice folks, for the genteel bureaucrats who are willing to argue with a stop sign endlessly. But America’s greatness is our ability to believe in ourselves yet still help others. But in this ever-changing world, some things have just gone out of fashion, and for Trump and me, you can start with the United Nations and go from there.
Biden-Harris diplomacy has gotten us a war we refuse to let Ukraine win and another war in which we will not help Israel, one of our two best allies in the world, to defeat Hams/Iran, our blood-sworn enemies.
Trump can be gruff, he can be unpolished, he can be uncouth, but for America to win and be feared by our insane enemies, he must convince independent voters and suburban women that he can be trusted to put America and Americans first and foremost. He will win if he can show an intelligent path forward, a brighter economy, and a safer country.
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