The difference between Biden's inclusion and Trump's, however, is that Biden's is a cover for excluding Americans of faith, who love their country, who want to exist without constantly being told what to think, who seek unity despite differences, while Trump's is simply evident in the response from voters of all races and faiths, each of whom he brings in with his message of optimism and hope for a great future for a great nation. Trump is a man of action, Biden is not.
When Donald Trump announced his first presidential run in the famous "golden escalator" speech of 2015, it would've been hard to conceive of a candidate with less concern for who he offended. Who among us, after all, can forget Trump's instantly iconic formulation regarding Mexican immigrants: "They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people."
Because Trump was treated as a joke by the media class initially, this and other, similarly confrontational moments were brushed off as amusing sideshow antics. Nevertheless, as Trump's so-called "gaffes" began to fade, to be replaced by the instantly memetic quality of his campaign promises—most famously, to "build a wall" on the Mexican border—and his standing in the polls continued to improve, rather than crater, the sniggering turned to panic. And from panic to loathing. And then, from loathing Trump to loathing his voters, the so-called "deplorables." And then from loathing his voters to loathing everyone of a supposedly Trump-friendly race. Or sex. Or sexual orientation. Or whatever else they could come up with to try to scare everyone.
All this spiraled out of control, until finally, it became clear that for all their claims that Trump— who was by then the President of the United States—was a threat to democracy, a racist, a sexist, and a fascist, what they really meant was you either get in line behind the Democrat and Never Trumper thought police and buy into their "moral clarity" (read: authority) or suffer cancellation and vilification. Biden has famously said that "no Amendment is absolute" and he meant it. For him and his ilk, believing in constitutional guarantees like the right to bear arms, due process of law, and especially free speech were enough to make you untouchable. How is that even remotely inclusive?
Donald Trump's first campaign for President of the United States was built, at its core, on the importance of creating limits in order to ensure American liberty. Liberty cannot exist amid a free-for-all, it needs containment or it is simply anarchy. One of those limits, encapsulated by the famous "Build a Wall" slogan, is that when people show that they have no interest in freedom and, in fact, plan to either try to destroy it or exploit it for criminal ends, they must be excluded, whether through prison time or deportation. Trump's promise to "Build a Wall," his willingness to evict Leftist protesters from his rallies, and his repeated promise to conduct mass deportations was proof positive that he understood this principle. And ironically, because he understood it, many drastic actions proved unnecessary simply because he projected such an image of strength. During Trump's term in office, for example, we started no new wars. We returned rights to states and to individuals. We reduced illegal immigration to a trickle relative to what it is today. America – and more importantly, Americans – prospered.
While Biden works to tell everyone how awful the country is and how their rights don't count for anything, Trump— the man himself— has walked into environments so seemingly hostile that they must've made his advance team tear their hair out.
We refer to Trump's rally in the Bronx and his visit to the Libertarian National Convention. The Libertarians booed, but Trump took it in stride. He even offered to open the party and his platform to them, if they voted for him. This was the first time a presidential candidate of another party had addressed the group, and while they are allergic to political reality, Trump still made himself available to them.
To the shock of Dems and legacy media, Trump was also very well-received in the Bronx by black and Latino voters, many of whom were from the Bronx. And, while it is probably too optimistic to expect him to be a serious contender for New York State's electoral votes, the fact that the Democrats felt compelled to respond at all shows that they, at least, are worried. Their plans to tar and feather Trump and those who vote for them as the ultimate bad guys has backfired.
Since Trump walked down that escalator, the Left has attempted to draw Hitler moustaches on anyone and everyone who disagrees with them and their pretend inclusivity. The problem was that in the process of doing this, the proverbial moustache got so overused that it stopped looking like a Hitler moustache and started looking more like a yellow star. In other words, you can call someone Hitler all you want, but if you treat dissidents the way fascists did—by purging them from their workplaces, mounting specious prosecutions against them, conspiring to deplatform them on social media, or by freezing their bank accounts — people are going to start to find the performance unconvincing.
The Left did all that. Then they went a step further and began to celebrate criminals, drug addicts, freeloaders, groomers and bigots who hate the "right" people. Resentment of their ideas and the policies has percolated not just among those excluded, but also among those for whom crime, drug addiction, and freeloading are real social problems, and who do not want to see them legitimized for the sake of a "tolerance."
In fact, to a sane person, that "tolerance" looks indistinguishable from racism in an empathetic coat of paint. The fact that anti-racism was used as a pretext to get rid of gifted classes, for example, might be the most racist thing to happen since the era of Jim Crow: in essence, the real message of such actions was "yes, black people are stupid, which means that if you have a problem with stupidity, you're racist." With "allies" like this, who needs the Klan? The Left may speak the language of "inclusion," but its actions have been viciously exclusionary, on nakedly unfair grounds. Mean Girls are Mean Girls, even when they wave rainbow flags—or maybe especially.
Most of the people who any sane person wants to exclude are on the Left today: criminals, terrorists, antisemites, freeloaders, and predators who all swear allegiance to the dogma of DEI, and worse still, who do so under the insulting premise that to not accept them is somehow evidence of moral failure, rather than the zenith of moral sense.
President Trump, on the other hand, tells people that no, actually, it is right to want to exclude these Leftist positions and the crazy people who preach them. He reminds us that the instinct to recoil in the face of what the Left wants America to look like—half-naked drag queens reading to kids about sex acts while junkies shoot up in the streets and criminals with gang tattoos flood across the border— is right and just. Trump promises most importantly that he will make America not just great again, but sane again.
Those in thrall to defunct ideologies may not like this. But for the welder in the Bronx who struggles to put food on the table for his kids? For the mom working two service jobs to pay rent in a city succumbing to crime after years of safety? For the hard-working black students in the Bronx who know how to program a computer despite their governor's insistence that they don't even know what one is? They all know that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in a DEI training manual. It is to all such people that President Trump speaks, without regard for color, creed, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. Because beneath those cosmetic markers, so long as we all bleed the same red blood of patriotism, we are all Americans.
And that is what inclusion really looks like.
