As Mothers We Must Vote for Freedom, Safety, and Prosperity
By Caroline Melear
Women in the United States are a vital block of the electorate. Many of us hold the most essential job in the country— raising the next generation of Americans to carry the torch of our great nation forward. As such, our choice of a Presidential candidate reflects our lives' priorities: our personal safety and the well-being and prosperity of our families.
Many women across the country have struggled with the idea of voting for President Trump, given his often brash rhetoric and quick Twitter fingers. But in this election year, with the aggressive leftist policies being promoted by the Democratic party and the total abandonment of law enforcement, it is vital that we look past imperfections of personality and vote based on policy.
Since the summer, we have seen violent riots and civil unrest, almost exclusively in Democrat-run cities. Many of the leaders acting purely on politics refused federal assistance with quelling the uprisings lest they give President Trump a "win." As a result, we have seen lives lost, businesses destroyed, and over $2 billion in property damage. Meanwhile, Presidential Candidate Joe Biden not only refused to call for an end to the violence, but he declined to disavow Antifa, which was largely responsible for much of the destruction. Fortunately for Biden, he can hide under cover of the mainstream media who refuse to report the truth. FBI Director Christopher Wray said himself, "Antifa is a real thing" and noted over 100 domestic terrorist arrests of individuals who identify themselves as Antifa. After being pressed on the matter by President Trump, Biden called Antifa "an idea." It’s quite the “idea” to the shopkeepers and small business owners who lost their livelihoods. Remember, Communism and Marxism are also just "ideas"— ones that have killed millions throughout history.
The safety of our families should be any President’s number one priority. While Biden has cowered away from standing up for communities ravaged by violence, President Trump remains committed to enforcing the ideals of law and order throughout the United States. As a result, he has received police officers and police unions' endorsements across the country, while Biden has lost police endorsements he previously held. Meanwhile, his running mate Senator Kamala Harris encouraged her millions of Twitter followers to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bailed out violent rioters, and told Jacob Blake, a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman in front of her young child, that she was "proud of him." These are not leaders committed to the safety of the electorate. These are individuals tiptoeing around the truth in an attempt to gain power.
Amid the COVID pandemic, one of the most bewildering examples of government overreach and intervention into our lives is school closures. The United States is one of the only developed countries keeping schools closed, and it’s difficult not to see the decisions as somewhat political. Data shows almost no risk of death or serious illness to children infected by COVID who are otherwise healthy, and studies have shown no evidence of “vertical transmission,” meaning a child's ability to infect an adult. While there are teachers who are vulnerable to worse outcomes from COVID, other businesses and institutions have gone back to work and taken the approach that life must go on. We can and should take reasonable precautions, but we cannot keep the country shut down for a virus with an estimated 99.74% survival rate. Schools are one of our most essential businesses. Not only do they educate our children, for many across the United States, but they are also a safe haven from violence, abuse, as well as the primary source of food for thousands of children every day. Further complicating the issue is the amount of screen time, the challenges of online learning, and the total lack of interaction with peers that children are now facing. Requiring children to be at home all day is especially harmful to low income, single-parent households and has led to nearly 1 million women leaving the workforce to be home with their children. It will be years before we can fully realize the damage school closures are doing to our society. These secondary risks are rarely mentioned and are arguably far greater than the risk of COVID to healthy children.
President Trump and Republican leaders throughout the country have insisted on getting our children back in school. President Trump has repeatedly stated, "the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself," and the damage to our children and families is a prime example. Meanwhile, 13 of the country's 15 biggest school districts remain shutdown, some with no end in sight. These districts have two things in common: Democrats run them, and they are backed by large teachers’ unions. Joe Biden has the backing of the largest teachers' union in the country, the NEA, and he has made clear he will bow to their wishes at the expense of this country's children. This includes keeping schools closed indefinitely and denying families and children the right of school choice— a reform desperately needed in our public school system.
Cries from the media and the Left of the Trump administration being anti-woman have become commonplace, despite data showing the opposite. His administration has set records with its number of female appointees. President Trump has elevated hundreds of women to highly esteemed leadership positions, including Kellyanne Conway (the first woman ever to run a successful Presidential campaign), Nikki Haley, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Hope Hicks, Elaine Chao, Kayleigh McEnany, and most recently by nominating the 5th ever woman to the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett. Gina Haspel became the first female Director of the CIA under President Trump, and half of the White House staff is female. Last December, he signed federal employee paid family leave into law and has encouraged Congress to pass budget-neutral legislation for non-federal employees. Under his Presidency, women's unemployment dropped to historic lows, and women's wages rose to historic highs. In his first two years in office, 1.5 million women were lifted out of poverty. You will be hard-pressed to find these numbers reported by the mainstream media, which covers the President with an alarming negative bias and consistently pushes the idea that any criticism of women is rooted in sexism, perpetuating the idea that women need a hand to get ahead. As a woman, I refuse to take on a victim mentality or play with a handicap. I will vote for a leader whose policies elevate women by increasing competition, not by force of the federal government.
President Trump's policies have led to many other victories for the everyday American: tax reform benefitting the middle class, the protection of our suburbs, criminal justice reform, passing the USMCA trade agreement, lowering illegal border crossings, executive orders on police reform, and lowering drug prices, his commitment to protecting pre-existing conditions, and his early action in the face of COVID. He is the first President in 40 years to not start any new wars. Since his first day in office, he has been committed to bringing home our troops and ending our interventionist global policies. He has secured historic peace deals in the Middle East, something leaders on both the left and the right considered impossible. He is standing up to big tech and China, our most significant global threat and the source of our current viral outbreak. He completed all of this in less than four years in office, in the face of a hostile media, a sham impeachment process, and a Democrat orchestrated and false Russia collusion conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has been in politics for 47 years, and his signature accomplishment, The 1994 Crime Bill, has been roundly criticized by many for unjustly locking away young Black men. He has caved to the far left, being touted by Bernie Sanders as the "most progressive Presidential candidate" in decades and continuously flip flops on major issues. His party advocates for defunding the police, packing the Supreme Court, doing away with the Senate filibuster, destroying the electoral college, and curbing economic freedom and prosperity in the name of climate justice. As women, we must evaluate the full breadth of what a Biden presidency would mean for our country. This is not the Democratic Party of JFK; it is not even the Democratic party of Bill or Hillary Clinton. This party has shown its true colors with Trump in office and now openly advocates for dismantling many of our norms and institutions.
President Trump is not perfect. Along with all of our leaders, he requires scrutiny and deserves criticism and critique when it is warranted. But we must take a look at the bigger picture and see that while we may struggle with his rhetoric, his policy platform is what ultimately matters. His policy platform is a win for women and families throughout the United States.
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