Why Polish-Americans should vote for President Donald Trump

By Dr. Lucja Swiatkowski Cannon, Co-Chair Polish-Americans for Trump Advisory Board

During his four years in office, President Donald Trump has been a strong and effective leader both in domestic and international politics.  He fulfilled the promises of his 2016 presidential campaign in reordering American policies to benefit to a greater extent American citizens and their key concerns.

For Polish Americans, President Trump carried out his promises to establish a strong security relationship with Poland within NATO, based on a 200 year friendship between the two countries.  President Trump signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with the Polish government, which provides for the transfer of the US Army Command Headquarters to Poland to defend the eastern flank of NATO from Russian aggression and to establish a legal basis for the presence of US troops in Poland.  He fundamentally shifted NATO emphasis to its eastern flank where threats are greatest instead of maintaining a status quo of the traditional Washington elite.

He supports energy independence for Central and Eastern Europe  through his endorsement of the Three Seas Initiative, a one billion dollar investment in the independent pipeline system,  the sale of US shale gas LNG, and sanctions on the German-Russian pipeline Nordstream 2.  Poland also signed a new agreement with the United States on nuclear energy cooperation.

President Trump included Poland in the Visa Waiver program, which many US presidents promised but none delivered.  This was important for Polish Americans for both symbolic and practical reasons.

Under President Trump, Poland has a strong, special relationship with the United States. We can look forward to its further growth in areas of national security, energy, economics, business and scientific cooperation.

Joe Biden wants to seriously downgrade the US relationship with Poland to what it was under President Obama, put emphasis on relations with Germany and Brussels, and end fracking in the United States, which will strongly impact US-Poland energy cooperation. Obama’s policies toward Poland were regarded as a disaster and we cannot return to them.

Joe Biden exhibits the same patronizing attitude toward Poland and Polish Americans as President Obama.  He said in a New York Times interview that he and the Democratic Party stopped going to the Polish American clubs, and started building a new coalition of “really smart people” made up of college graduates and the New York Times.  Thus, the Democratic Party left the Polish Americans and other middle class voters behind to embrace fashionable progressive orthodoxy.

These progressive attitudes and policies apply to Poland just as they did during the Obama years, which consisted of constant lecturing and accusations.   Just as now when Joe Biden categorizes Poland, a member of NATO and the European Union, to be in the same category as Byelorussia, an authoritarian country largely under the control of Russia, and other totalitarian states.  Since Poland does not endorse progressive values, it can expect constant grilling from the Biden administration in alliance with progressives from the European Union.

In the United States, President Trump’s policies constitute a defense of the middle class to which Polish Americans belong.  He pursued economic growth policies, created millions of jobs, lowered taxes, supported US energy independence and limited illegal immigration, which is a great burden on US citizens from many points of view.

President Trump has strong relations with Polish Americans and with Poland.  Poland became a strategic partner of the United States in assuring security of the Western alliance.  This development also creates beneficial conditions for future cooperation.

Polish-Americans contributed greatly to this strategic understanding by our strong support of President Donald Trump and his policies and we want a further development of this special relationship. President Trump fulfilled important promises to the Polish-American community and we are working to assure his reelection and to build on these successes during the next four years.