Why I'm Voting For Donald Trump In 2024 | Clay Travis

I voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. 

Now I'm going to tell you why. 

Not because I believe anyone should vote the same simply because I did so -- I think political endorsements, especially from public figures like me in sports, media and entertainment are mostly worthless -- but I try to be as honest with all of you as I can be about my own positions and beliefs.

Not because I expect all of you to agree with me on everything, but just because I think you should be able to consider all of my opinions with everything in the public arena for all of you to assess. 

I do this because I believe in the marketplace of ideas, I think as many people as possible should lay out their reasoning on every issue under the sun and let everyone consider it, pro or con, as part of the larger national discourse. 

Before I explain why I'm voting Trump, let me share my past voting history in presidential elections with all of you. I cast my first vote for president in 2000 for Al Gore, not only did I vote for Gore, I volunteered on his 2000 presidential campaign. (I also volunteered and worked on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign as a high school senior in Nashville, Tennessee in 1996). In 2004 I voted for John Kerry and donated to his campaign and in 2008 I voted and donated to Barack Obama's campaign. In 2012, I voted Obama again. In 2016, I voted for Gary Johnson, unhappy with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the two nominees. In 2020, after having seen how Donald Trump executed his presidency, I voted for Trump and now in 2024 I will be voting for Trump again. 

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during Turning Point's United for Change rally at the Thomas & Mack Center on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

So, as you can see, every single person reading this column right now has reason to love and hate my past voting history. 

Significantly, as I laid out in my most recent book, I don't actually believe my own opinions have changed very much over the past 24 years, back in 2000, I was considered left of center, 24 years later I'm now considered far right. 

Everyone has a variety of reasons for their own voting choice, but there are seven primary issues that I care about the most and Trump is the right choice for all seven. 

That's why I'm voting for him. 

Those seven issues are free speech, lawfare and democracy, the economy and the tax code, crime and the border, identity politics, foreign policy, and men in women's sports.  

I am now going to lay out each of these seven issues and why I believe Trump is the right choice. (I will also discuss abortion and why I think focusing on it is misguided.)

1. The single most important issue to me is which candidate will support free speech the most. 

Many of you may have first heard of me when I went on CNN and said the only two things I believed in completely were the first amendment and boobs. 

If you haven't seen that clip before, here it is. 

I have been banned from CNN for this for the past seven years. 

It's a funny viral clip that continues to echo on the Internet to this day. 

But it gets at the heart of the issue most important to me -- without complete and uninhibited free speech in this country we have no other rights. 

Donald Trump is the candidate who will most protect free speech in this country. 

There are many awful things said to me and about me online every day. Our politics have become so toxic that after mailed death threats arrived at my home we have spent much of the fall with armed security protecting my family and my home. Just this past week, we threw our yearly Halloween costume party. This year, for the first time ever, we had armed security guards outside our home before people could come inside. 

That's because, and my mom still can't believe it because she thinks I'm the absolute best, many people in the country don't like what I write and say. In fact, some of those people might even be willing to kill me because of what I write and say.

That's the price of being completely honest in America today. 

Yes, death threats and violent acts should be prosecuted, but the solution to speech you don't like isn't less speech, as most Democrats have come to believe, it's more speech. 

For the rest of my life, I will vote for the candidate for president who embraces free speech the most. 

One reason I'm loathe to even consider myself a member of any political party is because I've now lived long enough to see Democrats, who I voted for in the past, reject robust and uninhibited free speech in favor of speech policing and speech codes designed to restrict what people can say. 

I would rather stand on principle than party. 

And I'll be doing that for the rest of my life.  

Kamala has advocated Trump's banning from all social media and if she wins this election, there will be more restrictions on speech across the board. Indeed, upon taking office Joe Biden and Kamala Harris engaged in the most censorious administration in my life, using pressure on big technology companies to have them restrict what we could all say. If she wins, that will occur even more often.  

I've seen the impact of these restrictions on my own media business and have testified in Congress about it. You can read that testimony here. For me, free speech is the most important issue in every election. 

Our most fundamental right, the right to speak freely, must be protected. 

Trump will do a better job of that than Kamala. 

2. Democrats broke 250 years of American precedent by trying to put their chief political rival in prison for the rest of his life. 

They raided his home, put his political allies in prison, and rained down holy hell on many people connected to Donald Trump. 

They changed statutes of limitation, strained the criminal code past the breaking point, and engaged in nefarious behavior beyond the rule of law to attempt to bankrupt and imprison Trump. 

That's wrong. 

The charges brought against Donald Trump in New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and south Florida are a gross perversion of our justice system and our rule of law. 

The department of justice is broken. If you're a Democrat in good standing with the administration in power, you can get away with anything, if you're a Republican, the justice system will be used to bankrupt and imprison you.

If Kamala wins, all of this lawfare will be seen as appropriate. What's more Democrats will see the election result as evidence that what they did was endorsed by the public. 

Worse, the precedent will be set that it's standard operating procedure. This is how our republic dies, how we become a banana republic.

A word on Trump as Hitler and a direct threat to democracy, which is a part of this argument as well. 

First, if Trump were Hitler, Covid gave him the greatest opportunity to seize power than any event since 9/11. Do you know what Trump did instead? He deferred to local and state governments, permitting them to implement their own policies. 

Democrats broke 250 years of American precedent by trying to put their chief political rival in prison for the rest of his life. That's wrong. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Second, I have interviewed Donald Trump 10 times now, both in person and on radio, both solo and with Buck Sexton. 

As anyone who has ever spent time with Trump will tell you, he's a gregarious, highly likable guy with a great sense of humor. That's clearly evinced recently by his stint as a McDonald's fry cook and a garbage truck driver. 

Trump is not Hitler, not even close to Hitler. 

In fact, if you want to compare someone to Hitler, it would be the party trying to imprison and bankrupt their chief political rival while elevating as their nominee for president a person who has never received a single vote to be president in her entire political career. 

If, like me, you are a student of history, then comparing Trump to Hitler is such an indefensible historical allusion and lie that taken alone it should encourage you to vote the opposite way. But for anyone out there who makes this argument, the ultimate Trump card, if Israelis could vote in our presidential race, they would support Trump 2 to 1 over Kamala. 

That is, the actual Jews in Israel, many of whom resettled in the holy land after the Holocaust, would vote for Trump over Kamala. 

Unless you think the Jewish people would vote for HItler in an election, this is among the most grotesque and unfair allegations in American political history. 

Anyone who makes this argument can't be trusted to be in power.  

3. Trump will be better for the economy and our tax code. 

I don't believe Kamala Harris has a basic understanding of economics. 

In this, sadly, she is like many members of the modern day Democrat party. 

Her explanations that she would fight inflation by cracking down on price gouging in grocery stores was so incomprehensibly dumb it boggles my brain a major political party candidate could even make this argument. Her lack of economic comprehension is, sadly, reflected in her results in office. 

When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came into office inflation was 1.4%, mortgages were 2.5% and real wages were growing. 

Four years later, we've seen inflation surge to 9.4%, mortgage rates have gone over 8% for many would be home buyers, and the overall cost of goods is up a staggering 20+% while most people's real wages have failed to keep pace. 

Put plainly, everything costs way more than it should. 

And arguing that because inflation is back to "normal" doesn't erase its impact. Those price increases are embedded forever now. You wouldn't be able to claim you'd lost weight if you gained 20 pounds, 10 pounds, and then only five pounds in year three. You'd still be up 35 pounds. You'd be getting fat slower, but your waist wouldn't be any smaller. 

That's where we are as a country. 

We've all lost money during Kamala's four years in office because our wage growth hasn't kept up with her price hikes.

And, unfortunately, things will get even worse if she gets four more years.  

With the Trump tax cuts set to expire, a new tax policy will need to be crafted by the incoming administration. Kamala's answer? Increased personal income tax rates for the people ACTUALLY paying taxes and increased tax rates for corporations too. Even worse than that, she wants to implement a brand new "unrealized capital gains tax." I understand this is complicated for many, but essentially for the first time in history the government wants to tax you on money you haven't actually made, aka realized. 

A simple illustration: if you bought a stock for $10 and it goes to $20 you'd have a capital gain of $10. When you sell that stock you would have to pay taxes on the money you make, $10 in this scenario. But until you sell it, that stock is only a paper profit, that is, you haven't realized it. Kamala wants to set the precedent that your unrealized capital gains are taxable, that is that you should pay tax on that $10 whether you sell it or not. 

But what happens if the stock price goes back to $5 the next year? Your paper profit would now be a loss of 50%. 

So does the government give you a refund?

It's completely nonsensical policy. 

Look, our tax code is completely broken and most people already have no idea how it works. 

But here are a couple of facts for you: did you know that if you paid a single dollar in federal income taxes, that puts you in the top half of tax payers? Because, crazily, the bottom half of the tax bracket doesn't pay a single dollar in federal income taxes.

Not one dollar! 

On the flip side, over the past several years, I have paid well over $10 million in federal income taxes. That puts me in the 99.9th percentile on taxes paid. Now Kamala wants to take more of my money? And she wants to employ an entire army of IRS agents to do it. 

I've paid over $10 million in federal income taxes the past few years. 

Do you know that I got a bill for not paying enough recently?

That bill? $39.75 underpayment. 

Thirty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents! 

Now I'd never gotten audited before I took over the Rush Limbaugh show, but leaving that aside, do you want to empower even more federal government employees to take even more of your and mine's money? I do not. 

If Kamala's elected, the tax code will become even more inefficient and our economy will grow even slower. 

Finally, the way Kamala talks about small businesses and the tax code makes it clear to me she has never, ever had to pay employees or balance a business budget. Her big plan to get our economy growing again? A $50,000 small business tax deduction. 

But this "plan" makes no sense, at least the way she's described it. 

All business losses are already tax deductible. And most start up businesses lose money their first year. I haven't heard her pressed on it at all, but in the absolute best case scenario that I can think of, for the relatively tiny number of first year businesses that make money, she would let you keep a tiny amount more of that money, maybe $8k in avoided taxes.

Good luck with that policy.  

There are people who understand the tax code way better than me -- my comparative army of accountants, business advisors, and more, for instance -- but Kamala's lack of understanding of basic economics and our nation's tax code, and her inability to intelligently discuss or explain either, makes her unqualified to manage this country's economy.

Trump understands business, economics, and the tax code far better than she does and he will get our economy growing much faster, just as he did in his last term in office before Covid hit.  

4. Kamala and Biden have been a disaster on crime and the border. 

I'm connecting these two issues because failure to enforce our laws at the border also connects to failing to enforce our own laws at the Southern border. 

Kamala advocated defunding the police and raised money to bail out rioters in Minneapolis. 

The Tweets are still up.

Recent FBI violent crime revisions have proven that violent crime has increased substantially under Biden and Kamala. You all see and feel it in your everyday lives. We have to get back to locking up bad guys and throwing away the key. Ironically enough the one vote Joe Biden got right was the 1994 crime law, now he claims it's racist.

At least 10 million people have illegally entered our country since Biden and Kamala took office. 

The number is likely far higher. 

Essentially, we have no border security at all. 

And we know tens of thousands of violent criminals have entered our country, raping, killing and assaulting untold thousands of innocent American citizens. 

Now Kamala claims she'll fix border security and even, amazingly, build a wall! Come on, if that's true, why did it take 3.5 years to do so? And why did they open the border completely the minute they came into office? Democrats believe in open borders. Most Americans don't. If Democrats would just publicly acknowledge this today, as Kamala did in her 2020 presidential campaign, the country would be far better off and we could have a real debate on if that's a good or bad idea. 

But they try and pretend this isn't the case, even when it plainly is. 

Kamala is wrong on crime and the border. If she wins the country will be a more dangerous, less safe place.   

5. Identity politics is the toxic, foundational cancer of our country.

And Kamala is the ultimate identity politics candidate.

Look, I believe that America can't rise to its next level of greatness until the idea that your race, gender or sexuality fundamentally defines what you believe is utterly destroyed.

Donald Trump is poised to bring in record numbers of minority voters. They realize that white, black, Asian, and Hispanic we all have more to us than the choices we didn't make about our race or our genders. 

Wokeness, to me, is defined as choosing who you believe based on their identity. 

If Kamala wins, DEI will become even more ingrained in American life and our country will continue to revert to identity politics dominating all decisions in life.  

6. Men shouldn't ever play women's sports. 

Period. 

This is a foundational issue that goes to the lies Democrats tell their base. If they can get you to lie about what gender someone is, they can get you to tell any lies. 

Men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women. This is a biological reality. Allowing men who identify as women to win women's championships and women's Olympic medal events is simply unacceptable. 

Read: Brooke Slusser Reacts To SJSU Coach Suspension: 'They Took Away Our Only Safe Space'

This isn't anti-trans, it's pro-women. 

At some point inclusion turns into exclusion and women are now being excluded from their own sports and even their own locker rooms. 

Astoundingly, neither Kamala nor Biden has ever been asked by any "journalist" whether they support men identifying as women being able to play women's sports.

Any party that refuses to condemn this reality, can't be trusted to speak truth to the American people.  

7. Trump is going to be better on foreign policy. 

Our primary foreign adversaries -- Russia, China, North Korea and Iran -- believe Biden and Kamala are weak. When dictators see weakness, they take advantage of it. 

Vladimir Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine with Trump in office and I don't believe Hamas would have attacked Israel with Trump in office either. 

Trump is imperfect, as all of us are, but our foreign adversaries fear him. 

EAGLE PASS, TEXAS - FEBRUARY 03: An aerial view shows an immigrant group trying to cross the Texan border despite heightened security measures in Eagle Pass, Texas on February 03, 2024. Border Patrol moved migrants away from the Eagle Pass border of US-Mexico as a precautionary measure. (Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images)

If authoritarian bullies don't fear you, they take advantage of you and make all of us less safe. With Kamala in office, all of us and all of our families are much more likely to face global warfare and the rise of terrorist actors. 

Easy question, if Trump's so bad, how come the world was so safe with him in office?

8. Let me briefly address abortion here.   

Many women, maybe even many reading this column, are voting for Kamala because of one issue -- abortion. 

I think this is primarily because Kamala has run an intensely fear-based campaign premised on abortion. Many women truly believe Trump will keep them or their daughters from getting an abortion if they get raped. 

Here's the truth, the number of abortions nationwide has actually INCREASED since Roe v. Wade was overturned, even in states that have restricted access. 

That is, far from abortion becoming impossible, it's actually become more common since individual states have decided their own abortion laws.

If you don't believe me, here's the New York Times article saying so from a couple of weeks ago, go read the data for yourself. Abortions Have Increased, Even for Women in States With Rigid Bans, Study Says - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

The idea that Trump is going to end abortion is frankly 100% incorrect. 

He's said it should be a state, not federal decision. 

So if you care desperately about abortion, you should work to elect state-wide officials who share your abortion beliefs.

And if you're voting in 2024 entirely based on abortion, you're ignoring many other issues that are directly impacted by the federal government

...

There you have it, my entire rationale for why I'm voting the way I am. 

Discuss, debate and share as you see fit. 

But most importantly, go vote.