Before Trump, There Was Tom Tancredo

Old Joe Biden has done appalling damage to America, but he didn’t come out of nowhere: if you’ve ever wondered how things got so bad so quickly, the short answer is that they didn’t. The chaos, anti-Americanism, and authoritarianism of the Biden administration are the result of years of self-serving politicians of both parties looking to their own narrow interests rather than those of the American people....

... During ten tumultuous years in Congress, a presidential campaign, and two campaigns for governor of Colorado, Tom Tancredo stood indefatigably for America-First principles before virtually anyone else dared to do so. The title of his new memoir, I Was Trump Before Trump was Cool, is as whimsical as it is accurate....

Tancredo’s reminiscences evoke a vanished America: he tells of his grandfather, nine years old and unable to speak English, arriving in the United States with a note pinned to his shirt: “Please send me to Iowa,” to the home of his aunt. It took the boy two and a half years to travel from New York out West, and when he did, he overshot Iowa and ended up in Colorado, where he settled and where Tom Tancredo was born.

Tancredo’s start in politics was just as improbable: he was teaching high school civics (this was before high schoolers learned only that the Founding Fathers were racist slave owners and America was to be despised) when he dared all his students to get involved somehow in politics. He stipulated, of course, in this pre-woke era, that they were free to support any candidate or cause, so long as they did something. They responded by challenging him: “What are you doing?”...

He ended up being elected to the State House, then to the U.S. Congress, and ultimately made a run for the presidency in 2008, solely in order to try to force John McCain, Mitt Romney, and the other Republicans in the race to do something about the Southern border....