Tomorrow is Election Day in the US. I realize that I have to speak out about a decision to which I had painfully and laboriously come: publicly to endorse President Donald Trump.

Never in a million years did I think that this day would come.

There are some triggers that led me to face the fact that I had to go public with my endorsement.

I will never forget being present at Steve Bannon’s press conference recently — held in the Regency Hotel, an elegant hotel in midtown Manhattan, on the very day that Bannon had been released. He’d been given his freedom at 3 am that morning.

I had expecting to sit at the back, with other journalists, recording; so I was surprised and honored to find myself swept up with Bannon’s friends and allies, to stand at the back of the room on a dais behind him.

Bannon faced about fifty representatives of the most powerful legacy media in the US, in that crowded conference room. I recognized some faces from my previous life: there was a journalist with whom I used to sit in Washington Square Park playground, when our kids were toddlers; there was Mark Halperin, formerly of ABC, NBC and Bloomberg Politics, whose home I had visited, and whose brother is a close friend from college.

The questioning from the other journalists began, and, with the exception of sincere questions from foreign reporters, the legacy media journalists who spoke were almost universally hostile. They were practically growling; the tones of their voices seemed extraordinarily unprofessional to me — hissing with aggression and disdain.

I stood quietly behind the speaking Bannon, among his supporters; Tony Lyons, our publisher; Grace Chong, his CEO; Capt. Maureen Bannon, his daughter, a leader on his WarRoom team, who introduced him; Elaine Lafferty, his imprint’s editor; Raheem Kassam, the activist and former editor of Breitbart; and other Conservative or MAGA luminaries. Lyons publishes voices that would otherwise be silenced, including RFK Jr’s. Captain Bannon and Grace Chong, with their colleagues, kept the WarRoom ship sailing steadily while its host was in prison — as a political prisoner; no one had been incarcerated in Danbury before for a misdemeanor, was my understanding.

I don’t agree with many of these people on all of their policy issues; but I was in awe of their steadfast patriotism and their willingness to fight for our nation, our Constitution.

I remember thinking: I am surrounded by Americans; I mean Americans in the sense of spirit, not just in the sense of nationality. The compeers of the founding generation.

Bannon was wiry, and tough, and seemed more unmovable than ever; his face was tanned, presumably from months exercising outdoors in a prison yard.

He spoke forcefully; he sought movingly to describe to the reporters the lives of black and brown men with whom he had been imprisoned, prisoners in what he called “a broken system”. He faced in response to this no questions at all. Rather he was presented with trick question after trick question, seeking to entrap him into saying that he or President Trump would stage “another insurrection’“ or would somehow upend the election results.

He stayed calm and stressed that they had no broken him. He answer his questions.

As always when the subject of challenging the vote comes up these days, I am astonished. All the argument and legal contestation and jousting up to the level of the Supreme Court, the counting of every single vote, the identifying of the meaning of numberless “hanging chads”, that characterized the contested 2000 Gore/Bush election in which I had been a Gore advisor — all of that lawful due process, all of those steps that are our Constitutional duty to take, in counting every vote and verifying elections beyond the shadow of a doubt, have been cynically criminalized in the 24 years that have intervened. The media too had been weaponized to make normal contestation of every vote, into a criminal offense.

Journalism itself has changed utterly in the intervening years: my former colleagues who were almost unrecognizable with the bias that distorted their approach to covering their subject.

The sadness of that spectacle — the fact that the United States of America had taken upon itself the historic stain of incarcerating someone who was obviously a political prisoner, so that his voice would be silent for four critical months of the campaign — the nastiness and one-sidedness of the press — the horror of a situation in which lawful contestation of bad votes is being criminalized — all led me to feel that I had to come forward and endorse President Trump even more visibly, and explain, furthermore, especially to liberals and independents, in time for their consideration at the voting booth, my reasons. (Here is the video in which I confirm to Bannon that I endorsed Trump: https://x.com/Bannons_WarRoom/status/1851410357752848539).

*****

1/ You should vote for President Trump because Vice President Harris failed at her only job. Her ONLY JOB. It is incredible that the legacy media has managed to erase our 8th grade civics lessons from our brains, but recall that the only reason to have a Vice President in our system is as a backup plan in case the President dies or becomes impaired. A VP is not like the Thanksgiving turkey pardon at the White House, or the Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn. It is not window dressing.

Literally the only job of the VP is to step in when the President is dead or impaired. The fact that we knew since mid-2021 that President Biden had dementia (two doctors I interviewed said that the signs of Parkinson’s were visible since 2020; I can’t confirm that, but dementia was clear to lay people by 2021) means that it is Vice President Harris’ job — not Nancy Pelosi’s, not President Biden’s Chief of Staff, not Congress’ — to alert the nation and the administration, get the impaired President evaluated, and “Article 25” him, to become President in his stead.

“The 25th Amendment, proposed by Congress and ratified by the states in the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, provides the procedures for replacing the president or vice president in the event of death, removal, resignation, or incapacitation. The Watergate scandal of the 1970s saw the application of these procedures, first when Gerald Ford replaced Spiro Agnew as vice president, then when he replaced Richard Nixon as president, and then when Nelson Rockefeller filled the resulting vacancy to become the vice president.”

“25th Amendment

The 25th Amendment, proposed by Congress and ratified by the states in the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, provides the procedures for replacing the president or vice president in the event of death, removal, resignation, or incapacitation. The Watergate scandal of the 1970s saw the application of these procedures, first when Gerald Ford replaced Spiro Agnew as vice president, then when he replaced Richard Nixon as president, and then when Nelson Rockefeller filled the resulting vacancy to become the vice president.

“Amendment XXV

Section 1.

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Section 2.

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Section 3.

Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

Section 4.

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

The fact that VP Harris did not do this — that she covered up and disavowed President Biden’s dementia for two additional years — means that she failed at her only job.

If we could see our President’s impairment, you can be sure our enemies could too; think of the national security risks to which VP Harris has exposed us in this way. This is why Saudi Arabia is aligning with China and Russia; why Hamas succeeded in staging a bloody attack against Israel last October 7 and why Israel is flattening Gaza, killing numberless civilians, with no effective diplomatic intervention from the US; this is why China built without pushback from the Biden regime a spy base on Cuba.

Who is running the United States at this very moment? Is it Secretary of State Anthony Blinken? Is it Biden’s Chief of Staff Jeff Zientz, about whom you know nothing? Is it a shadow cabinet? Do you know?

The fact that no one can answer this is the fault of no one but Vice President Harris, who should — if the rules of our system and her own job description had been followed — become President, like her or not, starting in mid-2021.

The coverup of a demented President is treason. Treason is “giving aid and comfort” to our enemies, and betraying our country. How is what VP Harris did, and does to this day, not that? Making sure this state of exposure and impairment never happens to the country is no one’s job but the Vice President’s; and treason can be a capital offense.

2/ You should vote for President Trump because it is not true that there will be no abortion in America if he gets in. This is the only card that the Democrats have left, and to be fair, many Democrats and independents, especially women, are single-issue voters around abortion rights. We do (I still consider myself a pro-choice liberal) believe that without access to any safe, legal abortions, women will die in back alleys and become second class citizens.

Well, as the Trump campaign is pointing out, it is not correct to state, as the Harris campaign is doing, that President Trump will call for a Federal ban on abortion rights. Fear of losing Roe v Wade used to be the argument that trounced all arguments, on the left. Well, we lost Roe; it is gone. Yet we live in an America in which you can still secure a safe, legal abortion. You may have to travel, but given how serious a decision it is to terminate a pregnancy, I do not feel that this is an undue burden.

The fact is that there is no right to abortion enshrined in the Constitution. I searched, and it just is not there. Roe was always in my view wrongly decided. Now the worst has happened – abortion rights went back to the states —- and literally nothing has changed in New York, where I live, for women, in terms of reproductive rights.

Women are the majority of voters in every state. If women in Massachusetts want more pro-choice legislation, they can pass it. If women in Alabama want more pro-life legislation, they can pass it. The DNC-threatened monolithic outlawing of abortion by President Trump just won’t happen. It did not happen in 2016-2020.

President Trump has signaled and stated that he supports abortion access in the first trimester. Abortion access in the first trimester, with restrictions, reflects the position of the majority of Americans, who want some access to abotion but not abortion through the third trimester, let alone bills that permit the neglect to death of babies after birth, which an insane DNC now champions.

Most Americans also don’t support policies of no access to abortion at all.

So President Trump signaled, by sending out his wife Melania, to state that she is pro-choice, just as the moderate George Bush Jr did with Mrs Bush, that he is moderate on abortion. Indeed he stated that he does not support a national abortion ban.

This took some courage, as his pro-life base understandably won’t like this position.

If you are a worried liberal, you are not going to see the end of all abortion access in America in a Trump presidency. The fearmongering from the Harris campaign is a canard. Rather, you will see policies that reflect the views of the majority of Americans on this difficult, painful issue.

3/ There will be a strong environmentalist in the White House. A second issue on which liberal and left-wing voters live and die, is the environment, and especially climate change. In the past, President Trump’s dismissal of this issue as “a hoax” made him sound dangerously ignorant to us left-leaning folks.

Well, RFK Jr’s alignment with the Trump campaign is an absolute gamechanger on this issue. While most recently known for his criticism of Pharma hegemonies, most of RFK Jr’s career has been spent achieving environmental victories. He cleaned up the Hudson River via his organization Riverkeepers so effectively that a formerly near-dead river is now brimming with fish, a setting for kayakers, and is even swimmable. You may not get the DNC version of an environmental slate of policies under a Trump administration, but RFK Jr is connected to thoughtful environmental activists and policymakers who can craft a conservative version of a robust environmental agenda, including best practices for farms and agriculture; and President Trump added “clean air and clean water” to his stump speeches and platform. There will be green in this White House.

4/ The Trump campaign and MAGA have become the movement of racial and ethnic unity.

Legacy media has effectively caricatured President Trump and his allies as vicious racists. But paradoxically, it is the recent perversion of race relations championed by the left, by DEI, and by the Harris campaign, that has divided this country along racial lines in new ways. Americans long for the pre-DEI nation in which, while we certainly had racial historical wounds and present injustices, the ideal was a unity of fellow citizens whose belonging to a common nation transcended the differences we have in skin color, ethnicity or religion.

President Trump has done well reaching out to African American and Latino voters, and addressing their concerns in ways that go beyond the simplistic racialist toadying on the left. The recent endorsements of President Trump by Muslims in Michigan and even by the Somali community, are profound. Americans want to be unified again, and ironically, the MAGA/MAHA movement has become the big tent of inclusion and unity, even as the Harris campaign presents a vision of a more and more racially fractured America.

5/ Who really supports women and children ?

Paradoxically, women are better off under the policies for which President Trump is advocating, than they will be under a Harris regime or than they have been under a Biden/Harris regime. The border is open: it is women and children — especially low income women and children — who suffer most from escalating crime. 320,000 children have been lost by Biden-Harris. When cities “Defund the Police”, a DNC push, it is women and children who suffer.

Then there is the economy: inflation in groceries, housing and transportation hit women, who make 30 per cent less than do men, harder. How is this all good for women?

And lastly, what did the “Your body, your choice” team do when it came to “lockdowns” and vaccine mandates, all committed under Harris’ watch? They stripped women of choice about what to take into their bodies. Biden-Harris censored me in my seeking to warn women about menstrual damage from the mRNA injections in June of 2021, and now American women suffer a 13-20 per cent drop in live births, along with agonizing damage to the menses of millions.

Who did that to America’s women? The first female Vice President, who seeks to become the first female President.

Lastly, there is no deniability for Harris about bad decisions and policies committed by the Biden Presidency. I advised a sitting Vice President who was running for President, Al Gore, in 2000. This is exactly VP Harris’ situation.

While I signed an NDA so can’t tell you what I said or did in 2000, I can tell you that there is zero deniability for Harris as VP when it comes to the Biden regime’s actions. The Chiefs of Staff of the President and the Vice President communicate all day long. Events are proposed and vetted by both. Policies are run by both. Personnel are discussed by both. Both deliberate over crises and work out strategies. Speeches are run by both teams. While some VPs have more access and some less, it is simply not the case that a Vice President can be siloed. Everything bad that happened on President Biden’s watch, must be laid at Vice President Harris’ feet as well.

*****

So — there it is. My brief for you, dear fellow liberal or questioning leftist or disaffected independent — for you to cross that Rubicon, come over to the Unity Party; to Make America Great Again (and Make America Healthy Again); and — yes, believe it or not — to come on over and Vote for Trump.