It’s Thursday and we’re in the homestretch to the weekend. In yesterday’s post, I wrote about my support for president Trump.

I was a Never Trump conservative from the 2016 primaries through the national election. Hillary Clinton was a disastrous choice and I thought Trump was even worse. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either of them.

Four years on and I’ve done a one-eighty on president Trump. I fully support a second term for the man who has arguably governed more conservatively and shown his love for this country more than any president since Ronald Reagan. That’s why the 2020 election is, once again, one of the most important in our nation’s history.

I truly despised Donald J. Trump the candidate. I couldn’t stand his ego, his inability to put a full thought together, his seeming lack of any coherent ideology, his nasty treatment of my candidate, Ted Cruz, and his mean-spirited attacks on women like Carly Fiorina or Megyn Kelly. I wrote a Facebook screed against him that got me haters and admirers alike.

And yet.

I had this grudging admiration that he spoke plainly, not in the practiced voice of memorized talking points that had been so thoroughly field tested by political consultants that they upset no one because they didn’t have any substance.

I also admired his courage. He was the only one to raise his hand when moderator Bret Baier asked the presidential contenders during the first GOP debate,

Is there anyone on stage, and can I see hands, who is unwilling tonight, to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party, and pledge not to run an independent campaign against that person? Again, we’re looking for you to raise your hand now if you won’t make that pledge tonight.

Trump put up his hand immediately.

It’s almost like the question was aimed at Trump. There is something so refreshing about a guy who doesn’t follow what is politically correct—of course I’ll be a stand up guy and support the nominee! Not Trump. He stood there, the only one with his hand raised and a crowd yelling and booing at him. And he explained why he wouldn’t make that pledge: “I have to respect the person.”

The guy has stones.

At the time, I couldn’t quite respect his philosophy of vengeance, either: “What happens is they hit me and I hit them back harder and, usually in all cases, they do it first. But they hit me and I hit them back harder and they disappear. That’s what we want to lead the country.”

“‘That’s what we want to lead the country’? That’s actually the last thing Jesus would want to lead the country,” I thought.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that his belligerence was a sign of strength that he would need when he came into office. He’s been attacked for as long as he’s been in office. I won’t reiterate all of the plots to get rid of him—we know what they are. But the fact that he’s still standing reminds me of what Abraham Lincoln said about Union General Ulysses S. Grant:  “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”

We have an active incursion taking place as I write. Its generals have been grooming its troops for the last 50 years or more, and now they’ve been unleashed on the republic in our schools, government, media, businesses and (to our everlasting shame) our churches.

The revolutionaries want to fundamentally transform the United States by turning us into a third world communist country. They’ve captured the high ground of our cultural institutions and now they’re trying to eradicate our history. If we’re going to survive as a country, we need someone who can respond with strength.

We can’t spare Donald J. Trump. He fights.