Trump's latest tasteless troll is indefensible. You know what else is indefensible? A Harris/Walz administration.

Give us better choices, get better results.

Screenshot from @realDonaldTrump. I think we’ve finally answered, “How low can you go?”

Note to readers. I apologize for the length of time between this essay and the last. The flu ran through everyone here at Chez Hackworth—a particularly evil strain that sucked you into believing that the worst was past before doubling back with a vengeance. We’re all on the mend now, but we needed a biohazard sign on the front door for a few days.

Next week we are taking a trip to Disneyland for the Grom’s winter break. At the beginning of the school year, I challenged each of them to earn a top scholar award at their academically excellent charter school, with the promise of a vacation anywhere they wanted if all four of them came across with the goods. It was a high bar that they actually exceeded: four Scholar of the Month awards, two Scholar of the Week awards, and one in the top 1% of a nationwide math exam. That’s good stuff.

I’ve never been happier to have to sell a kidney in my life. Disneyland is the greatest financial instrument for the willing transfer of wealth from parents to corporate greedmeisters ever conceived. I’ll be cranking out essays here until I’m 120 to make up for it. But it’s sure going to be fun.

Trump's latest tasteless, juvenile, and probably racist troll is, indeed, indefensible. I’m not even going to try. Most of you already know how I feel about Trump. For those of you who don’t, Trump is a horse's ass who has, despite this, accomplished a lot of which I approve. This just isn’t among those accomplishments.

But you know what else is indefensible? A Harris/Walz administration. Imagine an unlikely alternate timeline where Harris actually won the last election. In that reality, a ditzy word salad in an empty suit and a scandal-plagued doofus would be standing between us, our geopolitical adversaries and our travails.

The mind reels. In such a timeline, men would still be beating the crap out of women in Olympic boxing events, the southern border would still be wide open to hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings each month, Nicolás Maduro would still be in power in Venezuela, and drugs would be flowing into this country with little meaningful intervention.

The government and higher education would still be in the unchallenged grip of wokeness, blue cities would have “autonomous” zones, and I doubt very seriously that the DJIA would currently be sitting at 50,163.56.

These were the very issues that got Trump re-elected. Give us better choices, get better results. In the meantime, instead of yelling at me for standing up for Trump when I think that he’s right, go soak your head.

Yep, it’s sure enough crazy right now. I feel you. But I think that it’s useful to revisit the various concerns of voters that got Trump re-elected just to remind us of how we got here. I like to do this in the same manner as we map out decisions here at Chez Hackworth, i.e., make a list of pros and cons that will steer our decision-making. In this instance, I propose using the following symbols as a visual guide for whether an issue of concern with voters is a wash, favors the left, or favors the right.

Center, Left or Right

Let’s go down the list.

Woke/DEI

Harris, Walz, and an increasing number of establishment Democrats are acolytes of Marxist-inspired, postmodern woke nonsense that the left has pursued for over a decade with religious zeal—attacking merit, effort, competence, and many other Western values to pander to an astonishingly small audience of elites.

The Biden/Harris administration actually turned Title IX, an early civil rights milestone, on its ear to appease—without a shred of hard evidence to suggest that they should—transgender activists at the expense of women, parents, and pretty much everyone else who’s not crazy.

Trump, on the other hand, is the DEI antichrist. The right has, to be sure, its brand of woke, but the advantage here last November was clearly with Team R. It still is.

Antisemitism

In a world where it’s getting way more difficult than it used to be to find bona fide racists, it’s become distressingly easy to find bona fide antisemites, many of whom happen to be progressive academics who would rather eschew vegan beer for good than be in the same time zone as a Klan member’s gravesite. Antisemitism spans the political spectrum, but its rapid growth on the left under the aegis of the poisonous, woke oppressor/oppressed paradigm is stunning.

When Governor Josh Shapiro, who is a Jew, was being vetted as a potential VP on the Harris ticket, he was actually asked by Harris’ staff, “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?” followed by, “Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?”

This is where even the Democratic establishment is right now. The “oppressed” uber alles!

Trump, on the other hand, has appropriately supported Israel in their ongoing battle with Hamas over Gaza and absolutely laid the wood to academic institutions that have allowed antisemitism to flourish. Trump’s attacks on the academy over this (and wokeness) are a lot like his attacks on the media—they raise many legitimate questions concerning rectitude, but it’s difficult to argue that it couldn’t be happening to a more deserving lot.

Immigration

Like most of the country, I’m for orderly, legal immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, and that has contributed a whole lot to making America the wonder that it is. A significant aspect of the American experiment is the notion that assimilation and embracing the American Dream are more important than where you came from. There is no caste system, no official religious order, nor royalty in America to limit what one may become. Anybody can make it here.

I have a lot of sympathy for immigrants who want to come here to better their lives and embrace America. I would gladly trade the whiny nimrods who populate academia, much of the federal bureaucracy, and blue cities for people willing to walk 4000 miles to get here, work hard, respect their neighbors, and assimilate. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yeah, baby!

But orderly and legal are important provisos when it comes to immigration. One shouldn’t be able to game an overburdened system (albeit purposefully overburdened) by breaking the law and then counting on sympathetic progressive NGOs and officials to make the illegal part just go away. There is no fairness in this, and that’s precisely what upsets many Americans (including, notably, a lot of recent legal immigrants) when it comes to the status quo.

The laissez-faire system of control and enforcement preferred by progressives encourages immigrants to break the law—not exactly the first lesson we’d like to put out there for newcomers in a nation supposedly governed by the rule of law.

The open border policy championed by progressives is also completely upside down when it comes to improving America through immigration. It hurts the most vulnerable American workers. Our economy doesn’t need to create 150,000 jobs each month if 100,000 people aren’t walking across the southern border illegally. I’m also betting that you can find people to work at entry-level, low-skilled, and manual labor jobs as long as it’s not for less than half of the minimum wage and no benefits.

Trump is a hawk on immigration, but some of his hawkishness is of the faux variety. Remember the raid at Hyundai’s electric vehicle manufacturing site in Georgia last year, where over 300 workers on invalid or expired visas were detained and deported? Heard about anything similar since? I wonder why not?

We could reduce ICE to a fraction of its current size if we removed the incentives for coming here illegally in the first place. What you should ask is why this isn’t being done. You won’t like the answer.

The Economy

It’s far from perfect, but America’s economy is stronger than it’s been in a while. Trump’s tariffs are dumb and counterproductive, but in other regards, his economic results are generally positive. I’m a little surprised myself.

Again, just consider the alternative. Do you really want to go back to betting our economic future on green initiatives that no one wants and magical thinking about the economic benefits of equity and ESG investments?

One of the things Trump deserves more credit for is blowing up things that aren’t working. A lot of the bureaucrats that Trump goes after aren’t particularly effective—especially financial regulators. If the person pursuing them were anyone other than the bellicose, indelicate, and preening Trump, approval would likely be widespread.

After the 2008 financial crisis, which, of course, absolutely no one saw coming, many of the same individuals who drove the bus off the cliff were put in charge of repairing it after the fact. I can simply never see Trump doing this.

I may not like his style, but it’s difficult, at least at the moment, to argue with the results.

Oversight of federal agencies, federal spending, court appointments, and reining in the bureaucracy

Really? As Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Crime, quality of life, and other domestic issues

Democrats are out of control with their various out-where-the-buses-don’t-run experiments in socialism running amok. Despite Trump's personal corruption, disrespect for accountability, and lack of ethical constraint, he is still more accountable to voters than Harris would have been.

At least with Trump, we are getting a lot of what most Americans voted for. Lower taxes? Check. Border security? Check. Tougher on crime? Check. Invest in American business and resources? Check. Accountability in government institutions (except the White House)? Check.

We’re getting some stupid stuff to go with it, but, again, consider the alternative. Do you prefer stupid or something significantly more stupid?

Standing for American ideals on the international stage

Again, one of the things Trump deserves more credit for than he gets is blowing up things that aren’t working—in this case NATO, the UN and a lot of the international order. I commend his unabashed support of Israel, his condemnation of Iran, and his intervention in Venezuela.

Even Trump’s unproductive bombast over Greenland is not without some basis in things that make sense. The history of Greenland in the 20th century, especially vis-à-vis WWII, is an intriguing read that provides context. My approach would have been to threaten military intervention as well, but just to bribe Denmark with an aircraft carrier full of money.

But given the status of our national debt, this is only a comme ci, comme ça notion as well.

Adhering to the norms and conventions of the Office of the President of the United States

This one goes to Team D. Whether that’s a good thing or not is in the eye of the beholder.

So yeah, the ride with a wildly uneven, petulant, and egomaniacal Trump is burly without a doubt. But I’m still mostly where I was last November. Time will tell if that changes. I’d love to have had a better set of choices, but we did not.

In the meantime, it is what it is.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.