A conservative's remorse: Voting for Trump in 2024

We must heed the lessons of history

This is not a re-post of anyone else's thoughts. They are mine. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016. I didn't think he was a serious candidate and thought he had no chance of winning. I certainly wasn't going to vote for Hillary, so I threw my vote away on the third-party candidate. Trump's first term was entertaining, and he didn't blow up the world or the economy. He did give us the Warp-Speed Project that produced an effective COVID vaccine in record time, but strangely his most ardent supporters today hate it. I did vote for him in 2020 when he LOST to Biden and in 2024 when, to my dismay, he was the only alternative to an untested far-left Kamala Harris. On election night, I enjoyed watching the board turn red and seeing the election called for him.

What went wrong? Why am I so remorseful less than a hundred days into Trump 2.0? The short answer is Project 2025, 887 pages designed to reshape the federal government and consolidate executive power, written largely by former Trump aides and paid for by the Heritage Foundation. Harris tried to tie Trump to these draconian plans, but he simply lied, saying outright that he knew nothing about Project 2025...and I believed him. Silly me. I didn't realize how much he learned during his first term. I assumed he would be the same blowhard, promising all kinds of things he couldn't deliver because he would be a lame duck from day one. Silly me. Beginning on the day he took office, he unleashed a veritable blitzkrieg of Executive Orders, 26 on the first day alone and 130 in the first 90 days. In the process he eliminated the opposition before the battles even started. He started by firing at least 17 Inspectors General from various Cabinet departments and agencies. He filled his cabinet and those agencies with an assortment of characters quite unlike most of those in his first administration. The criterion for selection was not professional competency, it was unwavering loyalty to Trump. As part of the blitzkrieg, he created the quasi-official and deceptively named "Department of Government Efficiency" and allowed it to run roughshod through various agencies. He promoted the fiction that they were discovering vast numbers of examples of fraud and were correcting them on the spot. Elon Musk was hailed as an organizational genius "donating" his time to the government. Most of the savings claimed have been debunked, and Musk has watched his Tesla company implode as public sentiment has turned against him. He is wearing out his welcome in the Oval Office. One of the little noticed coups has been the elevation of Russell Vought, a self-proclaimed "Christian Nationalist" to head the Office of Management and Budget, a position he held briefly in Trump's previous administration. He is being given extraordinary power and influence over all federal employees. Agencies and offices are being disbanded or gutted based on...what? From Trump's assault on the Constitution and the Judicial Branch to his retaliatory attacks on anyone who he perceives as unloyal in any way, it is evident that he has broken his oath of office where he swore to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution of the United States. He does none of the three.

I understand why Trump won in 2024. What I don't understand is why so many good, intelligent, moral people now refuse to acknowledge that we are not getting what we voted for. I am not a violent person, but I would like to punch in the face, everyone who suggests that I and millions of other conservatives voted for a vengeful tyrant, a dictator, and a would-be king who sees himself as above the law. Liberals need to get off their holier-than-thou horses, stop whining "I told you so", and get to work with reasonable conservatives to pump the brakes on the Trump administration.