Whether it’s lifting millions out of poverty, keeping 20,000 gang members away from our communities, getting other nations to treat us fairly, protecting students’ right to bear witness to their faith on campus, taking care of our vets, or countless other achievements, Donald J. Trump works each day to make America great again.
But he’s also just a really nice guy.
Recently one of my staffers at Priests for Life sent around a link to a video that aired on TV in 2011, showing President Trump learning the duties of a bellman, waiter and housekeeper at one of his hotels. His duties included walking a guest’s dog in the snowy pet run, delivering a room service meal and cleaning a bathroom.
It’s a side of Donald J. Trump that the nation deserves to see right now. Those who know the President understand that whether the cameras are on or not, President Trump is a genuinely nice, down-to-earth guy who enjoys his encounters with us regular folks.
Since I became active in his first campaign in 2016, I have met and spoken with scores of people who know him or have worked for him. Without a single exception, they all say he is a man who is friendly, warm, and attentive to the way people feel. Just recently, a White House staffer told me of how the president stopped in the middle of an Oval Office workday to write, completely at his own initiative, a handwritten letter of good wishes to the staffer’s 98-year-old relative.
In his speech during the Republican National Convention, the retired football legend Herschel Walker said he and the president have been friends for 37 years. He described the president as someone who would interrupt a board meeting to take a phone call from one of his children and one who “treats janitors, security guards and waiters the same way he would treat a VIP… He understands they are the people who make this country run.”
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But beyond his every-day kindness, Donald Trump has shown himself on many occasions to be extraordinarily generous and compassionate.
In 1986, a family in Wayne, Georgia, was in danger of losing their farm. Believing that if he died his insurance policy would give his widow a payout big enough to halt the foreclosure, L.D. Hill III took his life. But Hill had missed a payment on his insurance and the policy lapsed a week before he died. The farm was scheduled for auction.
Trump and a Georgia business owner named Frank Argenbright stepped in and pledged to raise $187,000 to get the farm out of debt. In the end, Trump contributed $39,000 himself, then flew the whole family to Trump Tower in Manhattan to stage a mortgage-burning ceremony.
“I’m just so grateful to these men,” Annabel Hill said at the time. ”It’s really hard with the main person in your family gone. This kind of eases the ache a little bit.”
Andrew Tahmooresi was a former sergeant in the U.S. Marines who, in 2014, drove across the border into Mexico. He was found to have guns in his car, and although he was properly licensed in the U.S., he could not legally have them in Mexico.
Tahmooresi was arrested and held for seven months in a Mexican prison before several high-profile Americans, including Trump, got involved and secured his release. Once Tahmooresi was back home, Trump sent him a check for $25,000.
In 2013, Trump sent a check for $10,000 to a bus driver in Buffalo, N.Y., who talked a suicidal woman down from a bridge. The check was accompanied by this note from Trump: “Although I know to you it was just a warm-hearted first response to a dangerous situation, your quick thinking resulted in a life being saved, and for that you should be rewarded.”
In 1988, an Orthodox rabbi contacted Trump and asked him for the use of Trump’s private jet to get his critically ill 3-year-old son from California to New York for treatment. Commercial airlines were not able to accommodate the boy because he had to travel with a respirator and other medical equipment.
This is what the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported at the time:
“Mr. Trump did not hesitate when we called him up. He said ‘yes, I’ll send my plane out,'” 29-year-old Harold Ten recalled shortly after he landed here Tuesday morning.
Asked why he thought Trump made his private jet available, Ten replied, “Because he is a good man. He has three children of his own and he knows what being a parent is all about.”
Ten said he believes that Trump fulfilled the Talmudic saying that “he who saves one person’s life is as if he saved the entire world.”
I am sure many of you reading this have not heard about these random acts of extraordinary kindness that have been going on for decades. They don’t fit the profile the media has painted for Trump – a brash billionaire who is quick with his Twitter hand and tough on opponents. But his harshness borne of goodness.
The Bible says “By their fruits you will know them.” Whether those fruits are President Trump’s kindness, generosity and compassion, or the exemplary and successful children he has raised, or the historic accomplishments he has achieved for our country (PromisesKept.com), they are things every voter should know before casting their ballots.
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