I’m delighted to admit it: I was wrong. I was one of those Christian conservatives who never came around to trusting Donald Trump. I didn’t endorse him, and almost couldn’t vote for him. At the last moment, as I stared at the ballot, thinking of Clinton’s track record of pro-abortion extremism and reckless disregard for religious minorities in the Middle East, I managed to pull the lever.

How glad I am that I did. As I learn more and more about Neil Gorsuch, I cannot wait for him to fill Justice Scalia’s chair on the U.S. Supreme Court. Tens of millions of pro-life Americans should today offer prayers of thanks, and publicly praise the President for such a solid, courageous choice. We must get on the phones and social media, pressing our senators to confirm Judge Gorsuch.

Iraqis in Refugee Camps Danced for Joy When Trump Took Office

But I’d already seen an excellent reason to be thankful that Donald Trump won. On his inauguration day, I wasn’t in Washington, D.C., but in Iraq — finishing up a tour of refugee camps on the borders of ISIS territory, for a documentary I’m producing.

 

 
If you thought that Republicans in D.C. were celebrating Trump’s entry into office, you should have seen the Iraqis in those camps. Muslims, Christians, and Yezedis alike were cheering and dancing together. (So, as I learned from my friends there, were Christians down in embattled South Sudan.)

If you want a grimly objective measuring stick of the impact Trump’s election had in this war-torn region: The sex slave traders of ISIS are afraid that their supply of Christian and Yezidi women will soon dry up, so the price of a sex-trafficked girl in Iraq shot up from $8,000 to $20,000. So I learned from a Yezidi family that is trying to ransom back a daughter.

I stopped to ask some of the refugees why they were excited about Trump’s victory. One after another answered me: Because he knows how evil ISIS really is, and he really will “eradicate” it.  The Muslims in these camps despised ISIS, which drew support from a fanatical minority and funds from outside the country, then went on to brutalize and destroy their ancestral villages.

“Obama Slit Our Throats with Cotton.”

Obama, by contrast, dismissed ISIS as a “junior varsity” organization. In fact, as every Iraqi whom I spoke with about this told me, it was Obama’s policies that let ISIS become such a monstrous evil. Even those who’d opposed George Bush’s invasion in 2003 — including one of Saddam Hussein’s former generals, whom I interviewed — blamed Obama for making things much, much worse in Iraq by pulling U.S. troops out and leaving a power vacuum, which ISIS filled with blood, tyranny, and terror.

I met with dozens of people, and spoke as the only American at an interreligious conference. From military officers down to ordinary people in the camps, I kept hearing the same conspiracy theory. These people believed that Obama must have somehow wanted ISIS to win. One high-ranking soldier in a Kurdish peshmerga told me how his soldiers saw long lines of ISIS-owned oil tankers streaming into Turkey. They wanted to attack, but the American military advisor whom Obama had sent forbade them — and threatened them with U.S. airstrikes if they disobeyed him. Another officer told me that U.S. advisors had ordered his forces not to defend Mosul from ISIS. The phrase these people kept using, an Iraqi expression, was: “Obama slit our throats — with cotton.”

I pushed the questions further. Weren’t they worried that Trump’s “extreme vetting” of potential refugees from Iraq, Syria, and other troubled countries would keep them out of America? To this they had two answers. First, they simply laughed — and explained that it would be easy to determine which refugees hated ISIS, since all of them did. But more important than that, one after another insisted: “We don’t want to come to America. We want to go home to our towns. We want the U.S. to get ISIS out of the way so we can go back to living our lives, as we were before Obama let ISIS destroy them.”

“We want you to stop blundering in and destroying our countries. Help us stay safe here in the region, and hurry up and defeat the extremists so we can go home.”

“We Don’t Want to be Refugees in America.”

Didn’t it bother them that Donald Trump was suspicious of admitting refugees from countries with large jihadi movements? To that they answered again, “What makes you think that the whole world wants to come live in America? We want you to stop blundering in and destroying our countries. Help us stay safe here in the region, and hurry up and defeat the extremists so we can go home.” They mentioned more than ISIS here, noting that they also hoped that other radical Islamist groups such as al Nusra and al Qaeda could be defeated. And they were confident that Donald Trump would do that.

What made them so hopeful? The fact that Trump speaks in plain, honest language about defending America’s national interests — a natural, human concept that people around the world can understand and appreciate. Instead of the Kantian flim-flam of liberal internationalists, or the empty promises of neocon democracy-mongers, Trump talks about fighting America’s enemies and trying to help its friends. To Iraqis brutalized by high-minded Americans for the past 16 years, Trump’s bluntness has the ring of simple truth.

So let’s recap. We have elected a man who during a presidential debate cut through the euphemisms and graphically described a partial birth abortion. A man who sent his Vice President and campaign chair to address the March for Life, and who has chosen for the Supreme Court a judge who believes that the words of the Constitution mean exactly what they say. Trump also believes that his duty to protect his fellow citizens comes first — and that our extremist enemies who say that they want to destroy us also mean what they say, and that we should act to destroy them first, and keep their infiltrators out of our cities and suburbs.

President Trump’s loudest critics on the left mostly said nothing at all when Barack Obama allowed the Middle East to descend into brutal chaos, when ISIS ramped up its genocide and sex-trafficking enterprise, when millions of religious minorities were ethnically cleansed or killed. These same people helped cover for Planned Parenthood’s human organ trafficking. But now they are treating the president’s simple (if perhaps badly implemented) safety measures on immigration as a crime against humanity.

We should be very, very glad that these people lost the election, and aren’t running our country, picking our judges, or deciding the fate of the helpless in the refugee camps of Iraq.