By Alexis Deacon-
From the time I was young, I admired Donald Trump as a business person. The Art of the Deal was one of my favorite books the year it came out. I get a kick out of his crass cocky attitude because people who have optimism and a winner’s spirit, such as he has, are my favorite kind of people. His speech today gave me goose bumps because it’s rare and refreshing to hear someone who is positive and enthusiastic about America. It was like common sense made a comeback today after being lost for many years. What a showman!I’ll never forget how I felt in the time leading up to the 2008 election. I was terrified of an Obama presidency because it was more than obvious Obama was a Marxist of the highest order. Unabashed socialist, Frank Marshall Davis, was like a stepfather to him. He supported Israel hater, Rashid Ismail Khalidi, and was friends with domestic terrorist, Bill Ayres. Obama was a community organizer who had studied under the hand of the evil master of deception, Saul Alinsky. Every conservative in America at this point was scared to death of a radical like Obama becoming president and the damage it would do to our republic. I never campaigned so hard for a candidate I didn’t like as I did for McCain. Conservatives gave their blood, sweat and tears that election in an attempt to keep Obama out of office. In the days leading up to the election, I was watching Fox News and Donald Trump was a guest one day. The election was close and we could use a celebrity endorsement for McCain. Trump sat there on Fox News that day and talked about Obama as if he were the most delightful man. I don’t know if he wanted to impress his Hollywood friends but he went on TV with his head in the clouds like a clueless Liberal praising Obama. My heart sunk. It was such a blow to the morale of so many at a time when it really mattered. It sure sounded like Trump was going to be voting for Obama that day. At one of the most dangerous points in the history of our nation, Trump dropped the ball.
Of course Trump is far superior to the GOP establishment types like Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham. That is a given. Donald Trump has so much to offer this country with his business expertise and I hope we get a conservative president who will utilize Trump in some manner in his administration but I’m not convinced that Trump should be president just because he delivered a dynamic speech. I’m going to try to stay open minded but I know in my heart Trump is not a true blue conservative even though he is marketing to the Tea Party crowd. I am attaching an article by Michelle Malkin from 2011 which goes into more detail about Trump’s true ideology. If you go to her site and search “Trump,” there are other useful articles there as well. Trump and Malkin have had many public arguments but there is a reason for this. She is one of the few conservatives who doesn’t get star struck. She goes the extra mile to expose the truth. I hope my fellow conservatives will diligently do their homework. We may not get a second chance to turn America around. The next few years will be critical and we can’t afford another mistake.
Donald Trump’s eminent domain empire- by Michelle Malkin
Don’t be fooled by The Donald. Take it from one who knows: I’m a South Jersey gal who was raised on the outskirts of Atlantic City in the looming shadow of Trump’s towers. All through my childhood, casino developers and government bureaucrats joined hands, raised taxes and made dazzling promises of urban renewal. Then we wised up to the eminent-domain thievery championed by our hometown faux free-marketeers.America, it’s time you wised up to Donald Trump’s property redistribution racket, too.
Trump has been wooing conservative activists for months and flirting with a GOP presidential run — first at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and most recently at a tea party event in South Florida. He touts his business experience, “high aptitude” and “bragadocious” deal-making abilities. But he’s no more a standard-bearer of conservative values, limited government and constitutional principles than the cast of “Jersey Shore.”
Too many mega-developers like Trump have achieved success by using and abusing the government’s ability to commandeer private property for purported “public use.” Invoking the Fifth Amendment takings clause, real estate moguls, parking garage builders, mall developers and sports palace architects have colluded with elected officials to pull off legalized theft in the name of reducing “blight.” Under eminent domain, the definition of “public purpose” has been stretched like Silly Putty to cover everything from roads and bridges to high-end retail stores, baseball stadiums and casinos.
While casting himself as America’s new constitutional savior, Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private property rights. In the 1990s, he waged a notorious war on elderly homeowner Vera Coking, who owned a little home in Atlantic City that stood in the way of Trump’s manifest land development. The real estate mogul was determined to expand his Trump Plaza and build a limo parking lot — Coking’s private property be damned. The nonprofit Institute for Justice, which successfully saved Coking’s home, explained the confiscatory scheme:
“Unlike most developers, Donald Trump doesn’t have to negotiate with a private owner when he wants to buy a piece of property, because a governmental agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority or CRDA — will get it for him at a fraction of the market value, even if the current owner refuses to sell. Here is how the process works.
“After a developer identifies the parcels of land he wants to acquire and a city planning board approves a casino project, CRDA attempts to confiscate these properties using a process called ’eminent domain,’ which allows the government to condemn properties ‘for public use.’ Increasingly, though, CRDA and other government entities exercise the power of eminent domain to take property from one private person and give it to another. At the same time, governments give less and less consideration to the necessity of taking property and also ignore the personal loss to the individuals being evicted.”
Trump has attempted to use the same tactics in Connecticut and has championed the reviled Kelo vs. City of New London Supreme Court ruling upholding expansive use of eminent domain. He told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto that he agreed with the ruling “100 percent” and defended the chilling power of government to kick people out of their homes and businesses based on arbitrary determinations:
“The fact is, if you have a person living in an area that’s not even necessarily a good area, and government, whether it’s local or whatever, government wants to build a tremendous economic development, where a lot of people are going to be put to work and make (an) area that’s not good into a good area, and move the person that’s living there into a better place — now, I know it might not be their choice — but move the person to a better place and yet create thousands upon thousands of jobs and beautification and lots of other things, I think it happens to be good.”
Like most statist promises of bountiful job creation, government-engineered redevelopment math rarely adds up. Trump’s corporations have backed casino industry bailouts and wealth-redistributing “tax-increment financing” schemes — the very kind of taxpayer-subsidized interventions we’ve seen on a grand scale under the Obama administration.
Championing liberty begins at the local level. There is nothing more fundamental than the principle that a man’s home is his castle. Donald Trump’s career-long willingness to trample this right tells you everything you need to know about his bogus tea party sideshow.
