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The fans remember


Many people bet on football games. It enhances their experience to have “skin in the game”. I don’t gamble because I hate to lose, but I understand the allure of sports gambling. Sports are not games of chance. Any team can beat any team on “Any Given Sunday” but in the long run, if you really know who the players are, you can probably beat the odds.

If I was a betting man, and bet on Pro Football, I would focus on the quarterbacks. A good team can be dominant if they have a premier quarterback, but a bad team can’t be saved by one player. However, a mediocre team can perform at a high level when run by a great quarterback. Most players raise their game when they are convinced they have a chance to win. 

The same thing can be said about our country. America dominated world affairs when it enjoyed great leadership. Starting with George Washington, through Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan, our country has boomed when our President led with authority, with enthusiasm and with pride. We thrived, and so did freedom, when our country united behind a great quarterback.

Great leaders use pride to motivate and inspire. They energize their “team” by building camaraderie and a vested interest in a common goal. Citizens turn to each other for support and affirmation, then share that sense of unity to create even more synergism, pushing the “team” beyond their own expectations. 

How else can we explain victories in WWI and WWII? How else do we explain ending slavery, giving women the vote, popularizing electricity or landing a man on the moon? Team America, when it has a great quarterback, is unstoppable.

As I look back at the past four years in America, I appreciate the leadership provided by President Trump. He made all of us better. He led us to the best economy in fifty years. He installed economic policies that raised average incomes across all cultural and economic levels and races. The DOW passed 30K for the first time in history. Household net worth hit an all-time high in 2020. His Opportunity Zones have attracted $75 billion in funds and driven $52 billion of new investment in economically distressed communities. Domestically, the bottom 50% of American households saw a 40% increase in income. Trump made massive improvements in child care programs and services. He initiated many industry reforms that resulted in dramatic drops in prescription drug abuse and patient costs.

He stopped the onslaught of Islamic extremism. His policies effectively freed 8 million captives of ISIS by liberating Mosul, Raqqa and Baghuz. He got four Nobel Peace Prize nominations for bringing warring parties to the negotiating table in the Middle East. He rebuilt our military and rescued a failing Veterans Administration. 

He took action to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response to COVID-19, and lifted restrictions on manufacturers to more quickly produce ventilators and vaccines.

What I am pointing out is that there is a ton of evidence that our country was playing at a very high level during his tenure as our quarterback. Every aspect of how you measure success in political leadership was record breaking. I could go on for pages, but the point is, our country was on a winning streak until the worldwide pandemic came along. 

That’s when the lights went out in the stadium. The fans were sent home. The next morning Big Media reported the game was never played. The virus not only wiped out the game, it erased the whole season. We are told the team never existed and the season of Trump is a figment of our imagination.

Big Media says “go home, forget what you saw, and pick a new team. You are wasting your energy trying to preserve a lie.”  

History may ignore the season they want us to forget, but the fans will always remember…

Rick Elkin is an artist, author and columnist. All of his work including his most recent book, The Illusion of Knowledge: Why So Many Educated Americans Embrace Marxism is available at RickElkin.com.

*Note: Opinions expressed by columnists and letter writers are those of the writers and not necessarily those of the newspaper.

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