By: Ron Ogden
PINELLAS COUNTY, FL. – Running for office can be nerve-straining and spiritually debilitating—but it’s nothing like running for office and losing. To make the personal commitment that campaigns demand, chase a brutal schedule, read half-baked stories about your personality, family, politics, and history, endlessly beg strangers for money with promises you will play hell keeping, and then to see it all go for naught: it can leave a sour taste.
Amanda Makki remembers how it felt last August when she and two other competitors lost the Republican Congressional primary in Pinellas County to a young newcomer who liked to flash an assault rifle in her advertising.
“Sure, it hurts,” she says. She’s chatting in one of her favorite chain delis in Seminole. “But you’ve gotta dust yourself off. No one likes a quitter.”
So, demonstrating resilience not all can muster, Amanda Makki is back.
The 42-year-old lawyer, one-time Congressional aide, and former lobbyist will file her papers “soon” (probably next month) for the Republican nomination for that same Congressional seat, Florida District 13, the one abandoned by Charlie Crist in his latest political perturbation, a quixotic campaign for Governor—an office he already held once.
Why would someone of Makki’s education and experience submit to the grind of a campaign, even given the likelihood she will win? Winning would mean submitting to the endless and often thankless labor of serving in Congress. And it would halt her fast rise as a conservative writer and TV commentator. You can watch her on Fox, Newsmax, and OANN and read her columns in the Washington Times, Tampa Bay Times, and Washington Examiner.
Further, it would take her out of her role as a trusted party operative. After the election, she worked in Wisconsin overseeing ballot counting. President Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,000 votes. She said there were as many as 200,000 mail ballots there that failed to meet the state’s rules.
“They should not have been counted,” she says, grimly. “They were missing conditions precedent for a mail ballot to be counted. But they were counted.”
Public service is about more than party, says Makki. Harkening to the memory of St. Petersburg’s revered Congressman Bill Young, she expresses her desire for public service in terms of veterans.
“There are 100,000 veterans in the county. We can’t depend on just Rep. Gus Bilirakis, who’s doing a fantastic job but is just one Congressman, to deal with all these issues. They need help,” she declares. Health care is also an important issue with her.
If elected, Makki is prime to fight the socialists and the bigots.
“I will be the Squad’s worst nightmare,” she declares, referring to the six (originally four) Congress members who flaunt progressivism and call themselves “Justice Democrats.” Asked just what that means, she demurs, considering it enough to call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and associates “Radical-minded socialists.”
Despite being a native of Iran (brought here as an infant when her parents fled the Ayatollah), she shakes her fist at anti-Semitism. And she doesn’t much care for the misguided cabal who push Critical Race Theory in our schools. “Blatant racism,” she calls it.
Speaking of Iran, the topic of her heritage has come up. For years, America’s relations with that middle Eastern theocracy are in the ditch. Makki has been an American since infancy, graduated from top American schools and made her career in national politics and government, but some still wonder how she feels about what is, after all, her homeland.
She visited Iran as a young woman. “Sad, very sad” is how she remembers it. She thinks she can be valuable as America works out its relationship with that ancient civilization, one with a modern taste for massive power. “I have the knowledge and the background,” she says.
“Don’t strengthen and bolster the mullahs,” like Biden is, she declares, using the Arabic word for religious leader. She thinks President Trump did the right thing. Among his efforts was to use Twitter to try to reach the people of Iran. “It was the most widely read Tweet in Farsi.”
Last year, Makki’s perspectives and qualifications brought endorsements from Kevin McCarthy, the heir apparent to the Speakership of the House, and Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Congressman who famously survived being shot by a Bernie Sanders-obsessed terrorist while playing baseball four years ago.
The NRA backed her, as well as many other organizations and local leaders.
She notes that she worked for years in Washington as a staff member in the Pentagon and Congress and as a lobbyist.
“Voters want somebody in Congress who can hit the ground running and doesn’t have a steep learning curve. Someone who has the experience and doesn’t need to learn where the lights and the bathrooms are.”
What about President Trump?
Pundits float the idea of his running for Congress in south Florida and, if elected, becoming Speaker of the House—with a gimlet eye on impeaching the man he feels snookered the election. What would she think about that?
“I am open to anything President Trump would like to be part of,” Amanda Makki says firmly.
Support journalism by clicking here to our gofundme or sign up for our free newsletter by clicking here
Android Users, Click Here To Download The Free Press App And Never Miss A Story. It’s Free And Coming To Apple Users Soon.