Editor, The Beacon:

Like many people in our country, I find myself voting for who I believe will be a good, hopefully great, president. In the recent election, I voted along the Republican ticket, with the thought and understanding that our country needed a change in leadership.

As we now know, President Trump has taken the position of “weapon-izing” tariffs and reducing government headcount, mainly because these are two presidential powers that give him authority to do so with very limited legislative restrictions (although with some legal court battles). This type of strategy is like the “trench warfare” fought in World War One: You had many battles, but limited ground gained on either side. Each side lost many soldiers, but the leaders stated it was for the benefit of their countries. Unfortunately, as known, the Allied Powers won this war, but in reality no one did (World War Two came 20 years later).

I firmly believe the $37 (and counting) trillion-dollar national debt is our country’s financial cancer. It is silent, deadly and will cause many unhealthy effects to our country, both economically and sociologically in present and future years. Is a tariff war and government personnel reductions a solution? Time will tell, although history has proved it is not.

Advising us to not watch the stock market, take certain “hits” on rising prices and find another job is akin to telling a soldier in the trench to keep his head down or get blown up. Is reducing our government expenditures the right move? Absolutely, however, doing so with a dodgeball, tornado-type process is unwise and politically damaging to the psyche of the country (recent polls have shown this) and can do serious damage to a political party in the midterm elections.

Many top Fortune 500 companies (in addition to Tesla) have gone through costly and upsetting employee labor reductions; shouldn’t our government have followed and implemented some of their best practices?

Our three biggest expenditures are Medicare, Social Security and Defense. Each of these have large but hurtful consequences if reductions and deficit savings are implemented. Nevertheless it can and has to be done. It will take intelligent, thoughtful and time-consuming actions across political party lines to make this happen. The only way that happens is when our country is led by a leader who leads the charge and can win the battles.

As for the tariff war, I hope we win. However, although our president is a fan of President McKinley, history has proved that his tariff war launched in the late 1890s was deemed to be ineffective and very damaging to certain sectors of the economy. Overall, it did not go well.

Might I suggest our president follow more in the lines of Teddy Roosevelt, who is consistently rated by presidential historians as a top-five president. When Roosevelt took office, his biggest battle was taking on the conglomerates that monopolized many of our country’s business sectors. He succeeded.

Like Trump, Roosevelt was a Republican, worked both parties to his way of accomplishing things while making enemies along the way (OK, maybe Trump needs work in the area of working both parties), was injured by an assassin while campaigning, was from a wealthy New York family, never met a group of people without bragging about his skill set, and was a war hero (can end the Russian/Ukraine war?).

The one thing that defined Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency was his favorite slogan, “speak softly and carry a big stick.” With President Trump, we can only hope and pray he mimics this type of presidency.

Chris Ruocco

DeLand