Securing our borders, tackling homelessness, and tightening the screws on trade with China

Can you tell Dov Fischer is one of my favorite writers to read? In the American Spectator he writes in part,

...Yet every cynical critic on the Democrat side, every member of the Corrupt Journalist Corps, gleefully recounts each new COVID-19 case in America as another ringing indictment of Trump. So it behooves us to pause a moment and note three things that Trump has been advocating and advancing from day one, issues utterly unrelated to the coronavirus — and yet strangely among the most important.

Securing Our Borders

If the United States manages to figure out effective strategies that place us ahead of other nations in disease control and mass-infection avoidance, a porous border on the south effectively sabotages the effort. Either we control our borders and ports of entry or we don’t. If we do not, we cannot prevent outsiders from bringing in infection. To the degree that the Trump administration regularly finds itself in Obama courts and before Obama judges who want to impose national injunctions against Trump efforts to secure the borders, the coronavirus concern now empowers the administration to add a compelling new legal argument that porous borders represent a threat of immediate and irreparable damage to the nation’s health and, thus, to America’s national security.

The Homeless Mess in California, New York, and Other Democrat Strongholds

It is not denied on either side of the political aisle that the great majority of homeless people find themselves in that life station not as much because they cannot afford housing (though that factor does define a small sector of the group) but because they suffer from severe mental problems and addictions. If and when coronavirus hits the homeless of San Francisco, for example, that is going to turn a mess and national disgrace into an even worse mess and possible catastrophe. They urinate on the sidewalk, defecate there, leave their drug needles replete with blood there. An epidemic awaits eruption. They live in the open, congested near each other, walk into stores, hang around public places, and are not mentally situated to adhere to government requests for voluntary quarantine.

By standing firmly and publicly against California’s and other Democrat states’ mishandling of homelessness, President Trump has begun a great and critical crusade that also will help, in some degree, to impede the spread of the coronavirus if he ever gets his efforts implemented in the face of obstructive Obama courts.

Tightening the Screws on Trade With China

Until President Trump stood up and told China that the free lunch is over, the Chinese have blatantly violated international trade norms, stolen our intellectual property, imposed outrageous requirements on American companies trying to do business there, and manipulated their currency illegally to advantage their exports and reduce their imports — always at our expense. President Trump became the first sonovagun to call them on it. He imposed tariffs, threatened a massive trade war, actually implemented the first steps towards that threatened trade war, and shook up China–American trade. The usual voices from the Democrats and their Corrupt Journalist Corps mocked Trump as a rube, out of his league. “Tariffs never work. Never. Free trade is what best helps markets and American workers. Trump will destroy the farmers. We are only hurting ourselves. If we impose tariffs, they will impose tariffs. Blah. Blah. Blah.” And of course Biden chimed in: “China’s going to eat our lunch [economically]? C’mon, man!”

Through all the free trade agreements America has been making over the years with countries that do not engage reciprocally in pure free trade but do in fact impose their own restrictions and tariffs on us anyway, we have seen manufacturing jobs lost overseas, factories closed, and critical industries diminished to the point of nearly disappearing. We all hope and pray that we always will be at peace, but if war comes can one imagine an America that no longer manufactures ample steel and aluminum? Where will we get it — from the United Kingdom, from France, from Japan, from South Korea? They themselves will need all they can produce to manufacture their own fighter planes, tanks, naval vessels, armaments, and munitions. Will we get it from China, from Russia? C’mon, man — especially if they are the countries against whom we are fighting. Among many things we learned from World War II, it became clear that our massive industrial base gave us a leg up on the enemy as we converted automobile factories and so much more overnight to wartime steel and aluminum manufacturing and weapons production. But if our automobile plants shut down and we rely on Germany, Japan, and South Korea to make all our cars there, and on Britain and China for our aluminum and steel, and on the Arab Muslim Sheikdoms and Iran and Iraq for our oil and other energy, what happens in the event of war? On that day, America better not find itself waiting for Obama to wave that famous magic wand of his, and for Biden to say: “Uh-oh. We are on the brink of World War Five. C’mon, man.”

As Trump tightened the screws on China, he not only helped save our domestic steel and aluminum industries, but he also prompted American companies to reconsider profoundly whether or not they have become too invested in China in their urgent flight to avoid American labor unions and instead to reap the benefits of cheap Chinese labor by the millions. Thus Trump has prodded a diversifying in the corporate sector, as American corporations move factories they had in China to alternative nations less inclined to confront America in trade wars.

In these three areas unrelated to combating the coronavirus, the President’s “America First” focus, augmented by his campaign to make America great again, saw him fighting to secure our borders, combat homelessness in California and in other Democrat strongholds, and tighten the screws on trade with China. Although the president did not launch any of these initiatives in anticipation of a COVID-19 outbreak, those initiatives have left America that much better positioned to confront and deal with this enigmatic pandemic that threatens so much.

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