Time For ‘Never Trumpers’ to Admit They Were Wrong About Donald Trump

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

In 2016, I was adamantly opposed to President Trump. When he spoke at events I attended, I did not applaud. When others stood in line to take pictures with him, I refused to do the same. I was indignant, self-righteous and smug when I was with peers who supported him.

When a small cadre of Catholic and evangelical “thought leaders” and I were invited to meet with him to present our concerns, I was curt and blunt. When I was asked by Fox News and others in the media whether I would be the next Christian to fall in line and endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy, I said, “Absolutely not.”

In fact, I went further. “I’m a conservative,” I said. “I believe in conserving the dignity of life. I believe in conserving respect for women. I believe in conserving the Constitution. I believe in conserving private property and religious liberty. I believe in morality more than I do in money. I hold to principles more than I yearn for power. I trust my Creator more than I do human character. I’d like to think that all this and more make me an informed and thoughtful citizen and voter. I’ve read, I’ve listened and I’ve studied, and there is nothing in this man’s track record that makes Donald Trump worthy of my support.”

I was wrong.

If Mr. Trump has proved nothing else during his first term and, now, in the first three weeks of his second, he has proved this: He is a defender rather than an enemy of my conservative ideals, principles and values.

In addition to his executive orders that reestablish American energy independence and national sovereignty — orders no thinking human being should disagree with — Mr. Trump has used the executive power of his phone and his pen to prove his commitment to the Constitution and the American people in stunning, unprecedented and bold ways.

Here are just a few examples.

In just the first few hours after taking office, Mr. Trump signed executive orders to end the weaponization of government, restore freedom of speech, “Put People Over Fish,” restore accountability to the executive branch, unleash American energy, rescind the Global Tax Deal, establish the Department of Government Efficiency, and withdraw the United States from the Orwellian and disastrous control of the World Health Organization.

In addition to all this, Mr. Trump immediately rescinded 78 of President Biden’s executive orders, many of which seem to be driven by Mr. Biden’s curious obsession with sexualizing children and his bazaar practice of hiring and promoting people because of their weird sexual peccadillos.

But Mr. Trump was far from done. He immediately declared that our national nightmare of denying biological sex was over. The common sense of only two sexes, male and female, is now the law of the land. And when it comes to the dignity of women, the president has declared and signed into law that the privacy of women in intimate settings such as restrooms, prisons, migrant shelters and rape crisis centers will be honored and enforced.

Mandates that men will never be housed in women’s prisons or detention centers have been issued. Prohibitions of the use of taxpayer money for gender transition purposes have been signed. The promotion of gender ideology in our public schools and government agencies has been stopped. The president has demanded that all federal offices will henceforth protect the rights of all people to express their binary sex in the workplace and that single-sex spaces will be provided and honored.

Mr. Trump has also kept his promise to stop the federal funding of elective abortions. He has issued an executive order reinforcing the requirement that all hospitals in the United States provide medical treatment or an emergency transfer for infants who need emergency medical care, regardless of prematurity or disability. He has overturned the previous administration’s regulation that prohibited states from defunding abortion facilities as part of their family planning programs, and he has stopped the federal funding of fetal tissue research and protected health care entities and individuals’ conscience rights, ensuring that no medical professional is forced to participate in an abortion in violation of their beliefs.

Finally, Mr. Trump has said that his administration will adhere to and enforce the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote the abortion industry. He has reinstated the Mexico City Policy and thereby ended federal funding of abortion overseas. He has also led a coalition of countries to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, declaring that there is no international right to abortion. To put the icing on the cake, the president has also cut all funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports coercive abortion and forced sterilization.

Mr. Trump has proved to be a protector of the right of children to be born, the rights of women to be respected and our right to say what we want in the public square without fear of reprisal. It is high time that I admit I was wrong about him. Perhaps it’s time for all the rest of the “Never Trumpers” to do likewise.

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.