Trump Loses the Debate

The big winner of Wednesday night’s debate was North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who has no foreign policy experience. He won the debate on Wednesday night with his answer on war and peace: “What we’ve got going on in Ukraine is an example of when deterrence fails. What is an example there of Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fact that he green-lighted Putin moving into Ukraine, and then now they see weakness, and when they see weakness, they make a move.” 

With the observation of Biden greenlighting Putin’s invasion, he got to the heart of the issue. Biden made the invasion possible. He is responsible for Putin’s invasion. He has blood on his hands. On the issue of war and peace, Biden has been a total failure. Now he keeps the no-win war going, costing the lives of many innocent people of Ukraine, and giving former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin the opportunity to contemplate invasions of Poland and other countries in Europe.

When Burgum says Biden “green-lighted” Putin’s invasion, he is saying that Biden, the president of the United States, had encouraged the invasion. He did this when he dismissed the possibility of a Russian “incursion” that might not require a U.S. response. Now, a major war is taking place in Europe and Biden says the U.S. is running low on ammunition. 

While Bergum won the debate with that one observation, billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy lost with his comments on the same subject. He said, “I think that this is disastrous that we’re protecting against an invasion across somebody else’s border when we should use those same military resources to prevent across the invasion of our own southern border here in the United States of America.”

Several participants noted that the U.S. is totally capable of doing both things. America under Reagan used to be the leader of the Free World. 

More than that, however, we need the use of the Defense Production Act to get the nation into a war footing for both Russia and China. We also need to ratchet up our nuclear weapons production to deter a communist first-strike nuclear attack on American soil.

“We’re driving Russia further into China’s hands,” said Ramaswamy, ignorant of the geopolitical reality that Russia and China have always been allies. 

Another loser in the debate was former President Trump, who was not there. He was afraid to take on Fox News and defend his record. His record includes abandoning the presidency when the nation needed him to stay and fight.

I am living near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where a battle took place in the Civil War that took 52,000 lives in just three days. We had a president then who saved and healed the nation. When Trump was faced with a Civil War, he gave up and ran to Mar-a-Lago. Now he’s facing various indictments, which were inevitable when Trump became a private citizen and demonstrated his weakness. 

By contrast, Lincoln used extraordinary means to keep the nation together.

As I wrote in my column, “We Need Another Lincoln,” defenders of the Union held meetings to declare “Death to the Traitors” and identify spies in their midst. Today, traitors are celebrated. Transgender Army traitor Bradley (Chelsea) Manning’s 35-year sentence was commuted by President Barack Hussein Obama. 

In the same vein, Ramaswamy says he would pardon Vladimir Putin’s favorite NSA/CIA analyst, Edward Snowden, who defected to Russia. 

This guy ought to be running as a left-wing candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries. He says he’s not bought and paid for. But he sounds like a Putinista. 

Getting back to Trump, he should have had the guts to go to the debate and ask the Fox anchors why their channel paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million in a defamation settlement. If Trump really thinks he won the 2020 election, let him tell that to the Fox anchors directly. Instead, he ran to “X” with Tucker Carlson. 

The question from co-moderator Martha MacCallum about UFOs was the worst of the night. She thinks audience members are stupid people. 

The only thing worse than that was Tucker Carlson’s former shows on the channel, where he debated the matter of cattle mutilations carried out by outer space aliens. Fox fired him. Now he is functioning as Trump’s unpaid adviser, interviewing the former president on “X.” 

It doesn’t matter who’s up and who’s down, who got views and who didn’t. The issue is war and peace and the survival of the Republic. Trump had his chance to save the Republic and he failed. This former friend of Chris Christie took his advice and nominated Christopher Wray to run the FBI. Enough said.  

America has to get serious about our predicament. When Burgum nailed Biden for starting a war in Europe, he zeroed in on the target. 

Lives hang in the balance. Our nation’s fate hangs in the balance. This is not entertainment. This is a reality show in which real people die.