PURELY POLITICAL Friends

If you can tell a man's character by the company he keeps, you should be pleased with Donald Trump's new pals.

President Trump’s New Friends

I finally put a Trump/Vance bumper sticker on my car. We on the conservative side (other than a brave friend of mine [Mike] who boldly wears his red MAGA hat when we play golf and, frankly, wears it everywhere else) often don’t publicly proclaim our affection for the former president for many reasons; one of those being fear of left-wing whackos keying our car or puncturing its tires.

Or worse.

But that did get me thinking about the bravery of this election’s most prominent players, including the former president.

This latent fear of abuse also made me realize that one needn’t get into an argument with a friend or acquaintance about one’s chosen candidate on policies. I know virtually every Trump policy is and will be better for the country than any of the Democrat candidate’s policy proposals, whatever they may be.

By simply delineating your candidate’s inner circle and newfound “friends” (politicians don’t have realfriends but do have supporters) you can explain in simple terms the reasons you’re supporting whoever you’re voting for.

In Donald Trump’s case, I am particularly fond of his three most recent and most unlikely “partners” if that’s what we can call them: Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard. These are three of the most… dare I say?... honorable people in America. And, if they can loudly proclaim their fealty to the Donald, who am I to worry?

I’m hoping the three short bios that follow may persuade you to add your name to those who admire and support the former and future president.

Elon Musk

Fifty-three-year-old South African native Elon Reeve Musk moved to Canada in 1988 and attended Queen’s University there before uprooting himself to the U.S. in 1992, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and another in physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He also attended Wharton School. Musk then moved to California and spent all of two days at Stanford in search of a Ph.D in energy physics, before dropping out and joining his brother Kimbal; together they founded Zip2, an online city guide.

Elon’s IQ is a reported 160 – according to Google’s search engine (and Forbes attests to it) – and he’s currently worth about 264 billion U.S. dollars give or take (which is more than a quarter of a trillion U.S. dollars, but who’s counting?).

This multi-billionaire owns and/or founded several successful companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), the Boring Company (which “bores” tunnels underground), Neuralink, and xAI.

Elon Musk has seen the future, and he knows that he’ll own a good part of it. After a few meetings with Donald Trump, Musk signed on to support Trump’s effort at re-election and has also agreed to become part of Trump’s administration, though the details are murky.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

He’s now the bete noire or certainly the mouton noir (black sheep) of the longtime Democrat Kennedy family, having turned his back on Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the rest of the Democrats currently running the country. Kennedy is an environmental activist, is 70 years old (he’ll be 71 in January) and, after the Democrat Party did everything it could to prevent his name from appearing on state ballots as a Democrat challenger for the presidential nomination in the 2024 election, he threw in the towel and declared he was no longer a member of the Democrat Party. He has gone from running as an independent to having endorsed the Republican candidate for President (Donald J. Trump). Kennedy has also agreed to work with Trump’s administration should he win the presidency.

Kennedy gave a well-received-and-delivered speech explaining why he made his decision to back Trump, and, most interestingly, declared that he and Trump would work together on subjects they agreed upon, and would continue to disagree – publicly– on other subjects, but that those disagreements would not interfere with their attempts to find common ground.

Robert F. Kennedy is one of 11 children of Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy, brother and close confidant of President John F. Kennedy.

I’ve been in their home, dubbed “Hickory Hill” in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. and can say without a doubt that this branch of the Kennedy family tree is (or at least was, as my visit there took place in the late 1960s) the closest thing to a close tight-knit group of adults and children that I’ve ever witnessed.

Tulsi Gabbard

Ms. Gabbard was born in American Samoa (a U.S. Pacific Territory), lived in Hawaii, and served as a U.S. Representative of her district on Oahu from 2013 to 2021 as a Democrat. Before that (2010 – 2012), she served as a member of the Honolulu City Council. She was also a Major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, where she served from 2003 until recently, and received a Meritorious Service Medal for her time in a field medical unit during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004-05. She was later stationed in Kuwait (2008-09) and served as an MP platoon leader there. Tulsi now serves as a Lieutenant-Colonel in a U.S. Army Reserve unit in Mountain View, California, where she resides.

After running for president as a Democrat in 2020, she opted not to run for re-election in Hawaii for her seat in the U.S. Congress, moved to California, and later switched designations from Democrat to “Independent.”

Tulsi Gabbard and President Trump have agreed to work together, and she too has joined his re-election effort.

When I think about the kind of people around Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, especially when contrasted with the three aforementioned Trump supporters, it makes me cringe. Musk, Kennedy, and Gabbard are independent minds who have achieved success on their own terms. The former president has given each an enormous amount of room in which to sound off against policies that any one of them could or would disagree with going forward.

In any case, I am among the legions of Americans who want no more of the dysfunctional Biden/Harris Administration (full disclosure: I never wanted any of it!) and am pleased that Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, have wholeheartedly offered their support and energy to President Trump in his quest to steady the faltering ship called the United States of America.

Here’s hoping you’ll join them too.