Thank You, Mr. President.

Sometimes I think it was all a dream. Other times I am forever reminded that it wasn’t. That it really did happen. I don’t talk about it all that much. I wish I could erase it from my history. I wish I could wake up and find myself in my bed, in my house on Barker Road in Spring Hill TN. But I can’t. It wasn’t a dream. I really was homeless.

I spent six years trying to rebuild my life after the collapse of 2008. Three of those years I slept in a Volvo 850. I am 6’ 4” and yes…it was as difficult and uncomfortable as it sounds. The final three years I slept in a 1996 GMC Yukon. Far more comfortable but still an automobile.

I tried everything I could to find jobs but I couldn’t find anything. I returned to college and got my bachelor’s degree. But still it didn’t help. I felt trapped in that car, like an animal. And what was worse…I felt like the government was doing everything it could to make my life worse, and make my recovery impossible.

I wanted to work. I took any job that came my way, and I do mean any. I refused handouts and government assistance. I wanted to make it myself, with hard work. But seemingly every day, the government, especially president Obama, passed laws, and introduced policies that held me captive. Sometimes I swore Obama knew about my plight and went out of his way to make my life more of a hell than it already was. It sure felt that way.

There were lots of us. 93 Million in fact, who had fallen entirely out of the workplace and could not find a way back in. Obama’s answer was to encourage us to get on Welfare and food stamps. To move into Section 8 housing. To sign up for health care that our hard-working neighbors were paying for…against their own wishes, and sponge off the government, the same Government who is always wonderfully benevolent with money not its own. I didn’t want this. I wanted to work. I wanted an opportunity. I wanted to make it like a real man makes it…through hard work.

But there was none, and all the while, Obama mocked me from outside the windows of that Yukon. I couldn’t see him, but he was there. Mocking those of us who are “old school” and who saw handouts as something bad, and pride and self-sufficiency as something good.

This past year, that has changed. Two years ago, I heard a voice. I wasn’t homeless by this point but I was still stinging smartly from the effects of that homelessness. I was angry, and I felt ignored until this voice began to sound out across the country.

It was the voice of Donald Trump. It was as if I was still in that Yukon, but instead of mocking my kind, like Obama did, I felt like I could hear Trump tapping on the glass, talking to me. “I see you in there. I know you’re desperate. I’m going to help you. Are you okay? Hang on…I’m coming.”

And he came. November 8, 2016 was a monumental day for me. When I fed my ballot into that machine in the Knights of Columbus hall in Forest VA, I felt as if I was striking a blow for people like me who were still trapped in their cars, trapped in desperation. I felt like I was looking Barack Obama in the eyes and saying “You didn’t break me! I survived you. I won!”

This whole year has been a remarkable journey that has taken me just a few steps closer to the America I grew up in. My President loves his country again. My President puts his country first again. My President cares about AMERICANS again.

Today My President pushed out a tax bill that is going to make a real, tangible difference in my life, and in the life of my 19-year-old daughter. I’m a single dad, trying to get by on a very average salary. My daughter depends on me entirely and I will not let her down.

I’m going to see about $100 a month extra from this. That’s $100 a month of MY money that I EARNED, that the government won’t be taking.

Call me crazy, but I can almost feel President Trump’s arm on my shoulder, and hear him telling me; “See…I told you that I saw you in there. I told you that I heard you when you were homeless. I told you I cared about you and everyone like you. I’m on YOUR side…This is only the beginning.”