In light of the upcoming elections, a Penn student explains why he’s chosen to vote red this cycle.
Photo Credit: Reagan Reese
By Nicola Ilario
Editor’s Note: The Pennsylvania Post is an independent publication and does not endorse any candidates. For more details on the candidates and the upcoming presidential election, please consult your state’s official voting information website or visit Penn Leads the Vote.
I like Biden. I even respect him as a person. He is committed to his wife and children, and demonstrates sincere love to those close to him. Although I see him as a career politician, he has at least been consistent about his beliefs for the past 20-30 years. If his tenure as president was 20 years ago, I think he would have been a passionate and effective executive. Unfortunately, that is not the case and a person’s likability does not make them a good president.
The country has experienced a sharp downturn since the election of the Biden-Harris administration. Rather than deliver on any of their campaign promises, the Democratic Party has failed, first and foremost, the people who elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They have not earned my vote to return to the White House, and they shouldn’t receive yours either. By contrast, a second Trump presidency offers a much stronger vision on the three policy issues that matter to me, and most Americans: the economy, immigration, and foreign policy.
Economy
Biden began with a vision for the country that resembled, what many historians often consider, the great democratic presidencies of the 20th century. The “Build Back Better” program attempted to emulate Johnson’s Great Society and FDR’s New Deal. The large legislative agenda would have seen several bills passed by Congress to invest in social, infrastructural, and environmental programs. While an admirable goal, these pieces of legislation turned out to be a mistake.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread unemployment led Congress to issue stimulus checks, and despite economic reopening under Biden, Democrats pushed for further public support. Their policy of economic negligence began in March of 2021 with the passing of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. This 1.9 trillion dollar economic stimulus bill was then signed into law by President Biden, and closely followed by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This enacted another 1.2 trillion dollars of spending by the federal government on infrastructure and other government projects. These large economic stimulus bills pushed by Democrat lawmakers, however, would do only harm to the American economy.
Large increases in government spending are inflationary, and push prices up by increasing demand. In an economic downturn, this can sometimes be necessary to ensure that consumer spending does not completely fall off. However, these economic stimulus bills which continued even after the pandemic are a driver of the inflation that has enveloped the American economy in the last 4 years (with a height of 7.2% in June 2022). While the inflation has subsided in the last year, it is still not down to pre-covid levels and prices will continue to remain high as employers slowly increase wages for struggling Americans.
This has led me to decide to vote against another Democratic administration; their economic policy was admirably visionary, but contributed to a wave of inflation. This only decreased because of increased interest rates by the Federal Reserve and not because of spending bills aimed at “reducing inflation.”
On the other hand, under the Trump administration the American economy experienced sustainable inflation. The cost of living was far more affordable—not just including grocery store products, but also essential commodities such as housing. Trump’s administration further saw a large increase in manufacturing jobs as well. Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic turmoil, the Trump administration passed effective measures and prevented what could’ve been an unsalvageable downfall. For example, when the economy was shut down, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, took actions to provide economic stimulus to the American people. It panned out to be an important measure that stopped the economy from going into total free fall.
The Harris campaign has failed to demonstrate a coherent economic policy. They have said that they will build the economy from the middle out by enacting a tax cut for the middle class, but the Republican Congress in 2017, under the guidance of Trump, already did something similar, and plan on renewing it. What I particularly dislike about Kamala’s economic plan is not just her previous administration’s record, but also her price gouging plan. She is proposing a national ban on price gouging, particularly for grocery stores. In the past, she has proposed that a 10% increase in prices in the wake of a disaster is considered “price gouging.” However, “price gouging” isn’t actually a real issue in economics. It is usually consumers misunderstanding the consequences of a supply or demand shock and believing that a firm is just being greedy. From an economic perspective, it is simply just a natural increase of prices. Price gouging laws, as she is proposing, are really just price controls (which result in economic inefficiency like supply shortages).
Immigration
In addition to the economy, the Biden administration has faltered in many other key aspects of governance, particularly immigration and the southern border. Initially, Biden softened many of the Trump administration’s reforms. For example, during his first days in office, he implemented more restraints on ICE, hoping to see fewer arrests and deportations. During his term, between 2021 and the fall of 2024, there were 8 million migrant encounters nationwide with 6.7 million of them occurring at the southern border. More importantly, 1.7 million of these encounters resulted in “gotaways,” meaning 1.7 million illegal immigrants had gotten around border patrol and entered the United States without proper documentation.
An open border threatens the safety of American citizens. It has resulted in an immense increase in human trafficking, and an increase in the fentanyl trade, contributing to the opioid crisis and its resulting countless deaths. The mismanaged border also has national security implications, with Russian foreign agents utilizing Mexico and the border as a possible staging ground to conduct espionage. On top of that, the more expensive housing market is likely a negative consequence of large-scale illegal immigration seen in the last 4 years. Due to these mistakes, the Biden administration slowly backtracked on their policies, eventually implementing stricter laws due to mounting public pressure and an upcoming election. Biden’s immigration policy was a general failure thanks to Kamala Harris, as she was supposedly one of Biden’s top handlers on the issue of immigration from the southern border.
I find it hard for myself to vote for Harris, as she was directly involved in an administration that failed to properly manage the border, and instead let in over a million undocumented illegal immigrants into the country. Kamala further shows no intent to deport these illegal immigrants from the United States, despite the links to increased human trafficking, drug trafficking, and other violent crimes.
Consequences for illegal immigration need to begin somewhere. I believe that if borders aren’t enforced, then what happened in the past will likely continue to happen. Trump, on the other hand, had far fewer illegal crossings and carried out necessary deportations. I am also a fan of Trump’s proposal to make pathways to citizenship for international students who graduate from American universities more accessible. Legal residents who have been abiding by our laws for many years deserve an opportunity to become Americans. It’s important that our immigration system deemphasizes immigration solely as a source of cheap labor; this policy focus exclusively benefits corporations at the expense of safe labor practices.
Foreign Policy
The United States’ era of being the uncontested global hegemon is over. In the last 4 years, we’ve observed a very hectic war with increased tensions between the United States and a developing axis between a rising China, a revanchist Russia, and their anti-western partners. This emerging “multipolar” world has turned out to be a serious geopolitical challenge for the United States and its allies going into the mid-21st century.
These challenges have so far been mismanaged by the Biden administration, causing us to become embroiled in conflicts that threaten to strain its finite resources. Starting off in August of 2021, U.S. forces began their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was a mess. It resulted in the deaths of countless Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members, injuring many others. We left behind an arsenal of equipment to the Taliban that is now finding its way into different conflicts around the globe, facilitating further violence.
Vladimir Putin of Russia saw the United States’ harrowing retreat from Afghanistan and likely believed that he could then invade Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, such an invasion occurred. The Biden-Harris administration did not act initially in an attempt to save Ukraine, but once again retreated in the threat of power. The Biden-Harris administration would then go on to support Ukraine but fail to properly allow Ukraine to defend itself.
Ukraine is now suffering from manpower and logistical deficiencies, and the Biden administration has provided no off-ramp to the war. Currently, Ukraine does not, and likely will not have the ability to reclaim its lost territories and without a proper peace plan Ukraine will continue to bleed. Either we freeze the war and ensure Ukraine’s continued survival through arming it to the teeth or we win the war by going hands off on what Ukraine can and can’t do. Kamala Harris has failed to provide a plan that would amount to either realistic option.
In the Middle East, Hamas launched an indiscriminate attack on October 7 which saw the massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians. The result was a full-scale war between the State of Israel and the Hamas-led Palestinian Gaza Strip—which has expanded into a larger war within the Middle East. The war has led to an emboldened axis of resistance that has launched attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East and has seen the Houthi militants in Yemen begin to harass and threaten global shipping routes.
Biden and Harris’s administration has been weak and ineffective, it has flip-flopped from hardline support of Israel to threatening to pause U.S. weapons sales to the country—yet Harris has no plan to resolve this. This worsened when Harris decided to boycott Netanyahu when he spoke before congress, alienating a strategic ally. I believe that Israel needs to be restrained, and Iran’s proxies need to be crushed, but we need a planned and guided method of doing so.
With all of this, the Chinese continue to commence their rapid military build-up, with Xi Jinping eyeing Taiwan and more recently demanding a change in the way the United States recognizes Taiwan’s sovereignty. However, shipments meant for Taiwan have been rerouted due to strained U.S. resources—the United States is falling behind in its ability to adequately match China’s industrial and shipbuilding capacity. In terms of China, it was during Trump’s presidency that the U.S. began to fully shift its focus on China as its greatest long-term strategic threat. Trump was strategic and engaged in a trade war, applying previously mentioned tariffs to Chinese imports. Trump’s first term saw a hawkish and decisive administration that protected American allies and projected strength. He was not afraid to give orders that many in the Biden-Harris administration would not. This decisive decision making is another crucial reason I am casting my vote for Trump.
Overall the Biden-Harris administration is far too dovish. They have failed to prevent the outbreak of conflict and when push has come to shove they have been unable to take decisive action and have instead been relying on being de-escalatory. Trump, while often labeled as an “isolationist,” was not. Trump ordered the execution of Qasem Soleimani, then leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and was very hard on Iran and its attempts to push its violent influence into the Middle East with its “Axis of Resistance.” Iranian influence has led to the transformation of the Houthis into a threatening military force and further facilitation of Hamas’s October 7 invasion into southern Israel.
Trump further went on to destroy ISIS, a terrorist organization, and took out their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In Syria Trump launched strikes against Assad’s government for its use of nerve gas against its people. Trump was involved with the killing of Wagner Russian mercenaries in Syria after they attempted to attack an American base. In terms of Ukraine, he signed off on sending lethal aid to Ukraine while Obama did not, even after the annexation of Crimea. This further emphasizes my point that Trump was far more bold in taking action towards our adversaries than the Biden-Harris administration. Trump’s “peace through strength” approach worked and stopped new wars from beginning during his presidency. Harris, a member of Biden’s administration, seems to be heading towards a similar path of “descalatory” foreign policy, an approach proven to be far less effective at the face of the threats we have today.
Concluding Thoughts
The United States is not necessarily in a bad position right now, but we are going to continue to face grave challenges ahead, particularly if we don’t change course. As we enter this post-COVID world, we must have an executive that we know, and that will act with energy, as Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 70. For the reasons stated above, I believe that Trump will better fill that role than Kamala. Kamala lacks clear dogmatic beliefs, she has continually flip-flopped on issues and never stood for anything more than whatever was mainstream in the Democratic party at the time. She is simply a face for the Democratic Party, a faceless conglomerate that pressured Biden out of the race and carefully handpicked a successor without a democratic primary process. As a voter I don’t know who she is and I don’t know what she stands for because of her lack of clarity. The President should act as the vanguard of their party, which I believe Trump fills a much better role and has shown in the past.
As I am writing this I believe Kamala will win. I understand why many dislike Trump—he can be rude, obnoxious, a demagogue, and very insensitive. He has caused division in this country and in many political spheres. But I hope you read this and understand that for me, his actions, even if they are not expressed effectively through his own words, were more effective than those of the last 4 years of the Biden-Harris administration and hence give me little hope for Harris.
Nicola Ilario is a freshman in the College studying Economics from Bethesda, MD. Nicola is a guest writer for The Pennsylvania Post. His email is nilario@sas.upenn.edu.
