I’m watching the fierce South Carolina primary contest among the six remaining candidates for POTUS and a few things strike me as astounding. The first is that all the seasoned politicians on stage––Governors Bush and Kasich, Senators Cruz and Rubio––have been relegated to straggler status by the non-politician in the race, billionaire businessman Donald Trump. (Dr. Ben Carson, the other non-politician, is hanging in there but not lighting any fires).

Second is that only Mr. Trump is raising the biggest issues facing our country, among them:

• Closing our borders, which are being flooded with un-vetted illegal aliens who number, by now, into the millions
• Bringing both corporations and jobs back to America
• Fixing our Mt. Kilimanjaro of debt and Mt. Everest of unemployment
• Strengthening our military

Third is that he is challenging our longtime and ridiculous policy of military intervention for the purpose of nation-building in exchange for…nothing! Why haven’t we taken our enemy’s oil or exacted other prices for the blood we’ve spilled and the honor we’ve spent?

Fourth is that he is saying out loud what most Americans have been thinking and feeling for almost eight years, specifically that as a result of our thunderously ineffective “leadership,” we have utterly failed to destroy ISIS and the other Islamic terrorists who spend every waking hour figuring out how to obliterate America, which they call “the great Satan,” and our staunchest ally, Israel, “the little Satan.”

ISIS has about 50,000 adherents, maybe even 75,000. In one week, the American military could obliterate this murderous sect from the face of the earth. But Barack Obama seems to have a peculiar aversion to fighting the enemies of America, hence the rise of this homicidal cult and the escalating threat it poses to our country.

And fifth is the degree to which Mr. Trump is already negotiating with both domestic and foreign leaders. He is letting American politicians know that deals can and will be made but that all of them must benefit America! And he is telling the entire world that the vacation that overseas leaders have had from true American leadership will be over the very second he enters the Oval Office.

All the while, Mr. Trump’s competitors and critics carp and whine about his “bluster,” “naiveté,” and “crudeness.” Wasn’t President Teddy Roosevelt accused of bluster? Wasn’t President Ronald Reagan accused of being naive? Wasn’t the liberals’ hero LBJ accused of crudeness? These are trifling criticisms, as are the accusations that Mr. Trump is “not a true conservative” and that in the past he was, gasp, a liberal. Well, we’ve given the self-described conservatives the entire House and Senate and they’ve failed us, so it’s time to give a born-again conservative a chance!

Once in office, I have full confidence, Mr. Trump would glassify ISIS into oblivion, take the oil they’ve stolen and give it to the families who have been destroyed by these psychotics. He would overturn and replace Obamacare in record time, build an impenetrable wall in record time to keep out the swarms of illegals who, again, Mr. Obama seems fatally attracted to. He would get rid of a half-dozen or more bloated government departments, reduce the tax code to less than 25 pages, and overturn all the Executive Orders Mr. Obama has inflicted on the nation in his eagerness to bypass the U.S. Congress and spit on the U.S. Constitution. Most important, Mr. Trump would immediately build up our military and promptly reverse the preposterous, Obama-dictated Rules of Engagement (i.e., don’t shoot unless the other guy shoots first).

How do I know this? Because I come from a business background where people actually get things done! Where executive decisions are made decisively, political correctness is considered the silly indulgence of people with too much time on their hands, accountability is the order of the day, and outcomes are regularly measured to gauge success––all of which is the polar opposite of how our government works, which is why both Mr. Trump and the American people hold our government and its current leadership in such contempt.

Those who point to Mr. Trump’s business failures purposely fail to mention the personal courage and financial risks it takes to pursue new, bold, entrepreneurial ventures, or the resilience it takes to weather failure, to rebound, and to go on to even greater heights. They also forget that a man who heads an incredibly successful organization with over 20,000 employees, who surrounds himself with talented experts, and who does business in dozens of countries (including Mexico, Canada, Mumbai, Philippines, Dubai, Turkey, Panama, et al) knows better than any of his rivals––in fact, better than any politician––how to run a complex bureaucracy, and a tight ship!

The political criticisms Mr. Trump has been receiving from the establishment wonks at National Review, Rupert-Murdoch’s puppets at Fox News, the hysterical and frenzied Republican National Committee, and leftists all over the place, are from people who operate in the rarefied and self-congratulatory realms of academia, the media, and of course Washington, D.C.–– including the politicians who go out for drinks every night with the lobbyists they depend on to support their reelection campaigns and pay them enough to live quite richly in retirement. In common parlance, they’re known as whores!

That same American public, through their earnest efforts, managed to elect a Republican-controlled Senate and House in the 2014 midterms, only to realize that the people they elected have caved in to every Marxist initiative of the Saul-Alinsky-driven regime in power. We’ll never know to what degree threats, intimidation, and bribes played in this craven capitulation, but Americans finally understand they’ve been betrayed––hence the overwhelming support for a candidate who is absolutely impervious to bribes, threats, and intimidation.

Trump TRAITS

There are certain qualities I’m looking for in the next president of the United States, which I can sum up in the acronym TRAITS.

Track Record

Donald Trump

I want the next POTUS to have an impressive track record of accomplishment, not simply a laundry list of rosy promises. Now that Mr. Trump has effectively quashed the rest of the competition and is ahead by double digits in the South Carolina primary contest to be held on Saturday, February 20th, he may just run the table. Unlike everyone else in the race, he has run a gigantic corporation with immense success, a business that has required him to deal with titanic problems.

As Steve Cuozzo has written in the New York Post, long before The Donald considered running for president, he had already helped save New York City by being “New York’s most important and bravest real-estate developer.”

And Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka remarked recently to Breitbart, “From day one, my father set the agenda for what the whole party is talking about.”

That is called Leadership!

I trust that Mr. Trump will come into office on Day One with the world’s biggest broom!

Appearance

I remember watching the JFK-Nixon debates in the presidential contest of 1960. It was the first presidential debate of the fledgling TV era and it had a profound effect on the entire country.

Previous televised hearings about organized crime were held by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) in 1950 (the year my family actually bought our first TV), and about the infiltration of Communists into our government and military (sound familiar?) held by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) in 1954.

JFK was a dashing and articulate Harvard graduate, and Nixon a sort of awkward, looking-for-the-right-word graduate of Whittier College, whose wife Pat was slim, blond and beautiful, as were his two young daughters. But who on earth could compete with Jackie, the breathy, willowy, gorgeous 30-year-old who had graduated from the tony Miss Porter’s School, Vassar College, and the Sorbonne, and had two adorable babies?

All the glamour of the Kennedys was featured in print by besotted newspaper editors across the country, and blared on TV by leftist anchors at the three networks that existed at the time: CBS, NBC, ABC. All of them, of course objectively, touted the always-intriguing ingredients of youth, glamour, sexiness, romance, scandal, and wealth of the “Camelot” couple. And guess who won the presidency?

However, it turned out that Kennedy, who had been in the Senate for seven years––longer than Obama, Cruz, or Rubio––was not as equipped as his rival Nixon would have been to deal with the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961, which strengthened the position of the Communist Fidel Castro’s leadership and his relationship with USSR, and the disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which was the closest the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.

In that era, Kennedy’s appearance proved to be just that, appearance.

Appearances still matter and certainly Mr. Trump and his family are amazingly glamorous, appealing, photogenic and wealthy. And his worldly business experience supersedes and eclipses that of his rivals by light years. Also, the billionaire mogul looks presidential! He’s big, like America. He’s bold, like our Founders. And he’s masculine, not one of the sissified, metro-sexual men of today who have been cowed into tiptoeing through the tulips of political correctness, too afraid to say what they think for fear of offending the perpetually aggrieved, oh-so-sensitive, hothouse-flower special-interest groups among us.

Who can forget when right out of the gate, Mr. Trump said he would close the borders and ship all the illegal aliens back to where they came from, including anchor babies? When a self-important reporter told him that the “anchor baby” term was offensive, Mr. Trump said, “That’s what I say, anchor babies.” Slam dunk.

That is called Leadership!

Ideas

Barack Obama came into office intent on turning our country into his childlike utopian version of social-justice paradise, the better to cut down to size what he and his far-left cronies believe is the big, bad colonialist power known as the United States of America.

Using the Cloward-Piven strategy, outlined in 1966, to bankrupt the country through gargantuan expenditures, Obama increased welfare costs (through the importation of millions of illegal aliens), increased our debt to $19-going-on-$20-trillion, and financed a great number of phony-baloney schemes like Solyndra, which received a $536 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee in 2009 and then went broke in 2011. Ever wonder into whose now-bulging pockets all those millions went?

In contrast, Mr. Trump came on the scene and immediately said he would stop the tsunami of illegal aliens crossing our border by building a fence that Mexico would pay for! He then cited the Muslim jihadists and their carnage in San Bernardino and said he would immediately suspend all Muslims coming into this country until the U.S. Congress figured out what was going on.

That is called Leadership!

True Patriot

A Gallup poll of February 7th indicates quite persuasively that America is overwhelmingly conservative. The poll, wrote Bruce Walker in the American Thinker, reported that the number of states “in which conservatives outnumber liberals has been as low as 47 states and as high as 50 states. This ought to be a very big story, but Gallup, like nearly every other polling organization, tilts left ideologically.”

That’s exactly what people and pundits say about Mr. Trump, that he tilts left ideologically. So how can a rock-ribbed conservative like me possibly support him?

Simple! I gave birth to my first child when I was 18. Right there and then, practically when I was still lying on the delivery room table, I knew what my job was. It was not to give my beautiful little boy the most nutritious meals or the best education or a fancy home or the shiniest tricycle. It was to keep him safe! Without safety, everything else is moot. In fact, more than moot, non-existent! If you’re not safe, nothing else matters.

And here comes Mr. Trump, a non-politician, who gets it, who deeply understands that if we don’t close our borders and continue to let un-vetted aliens into our country, we are de facto not safe!

And how is the safety of our country secured? Only through the overwhelming strength of our military and local and national law enforcement agencies, which the current occupant of the Oval Office has systematically tried to decimate, right up to this month, when he issued an order––in keeping with his fetish about the hoax of global warming––that no military action can be taken without first assuring that no harm comes to the environment. Hard to believe, but true.

To compound the stupidity of this policy, consider that former CIA director, Michael Morrell recently admitted that concerns about contaminating the environment have prevented the White House from bombing oil wells that finance the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which Barack Obama calls ISIL, the “L” standing for Levant, an area that includes Israel. Translated: Obama––as we know by now–– considers Israel the enemy!

Can you imagine a President Trump not bombing our enemies because of a few trees? As my fellow New Yorkers would say, gimme a break!

Strength

Before he formally announced his candidacy in June 2015, Mr. Trump attended the Iowa Freedom Summit the previous January, where he received a standing ovation when he said that he could “make this country great again.”

He said he believed that “any credible American foreign policy doctrine should be defined by at least seven core principles”:

1. American interests come first. Always. No apologies.
2. Maximum firepower and military preparedness.
3. Only go to war to win.
4. Stay loyal to your friends and suspicious of your enemies.
5. Keep the technological sword razor sharp.
6. See the unseen. Prepare for threats before they materialize.
7. Respect and support our present and past warriors.

That is strength…that is Leadership!

Don Fredrick, the creator of The Complete Obama Timeline, says that “the establishment is frightened to death that Trump will win…you can be certain that if an establishment candidate wins in November 2016, America loses.”

Former Navy SEAL and writer Jim O’Neill says that “Trump is a true-blue patriot…” He cites Harlem Pastor James Manning who says that Trump speaks truth to power.  Trump “knows full well that Big Business, Big Media, Big Banking, and Big Government are all in bed together,” O’Neill adds, “and like no other major political figure that I can recall from my lifetime, he calls them on it. His love for the United States is obvious, deep-seated, and true.”

As for me, I’m as conservative as it gets, but Conservatives have failed me and our country. I’m counting on Mr. Trump to fix what’s been broken, to keep our country safe and employed and on the road back to a spectacular recovery!

Joan Swirsky is a New York based author and journalist. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com. Check out her latest book, The Caregiver’s Survival Guide.