RICARDO DONATO
FOR PRESIDENT
2028
The man. The myth. The legend. The witness
About Ricardo
Candidate
Ricardo Donato for President 2028.
Overseas
A moment from deployment life overseas.
Infantry
Army infantry service as an 11C indirect fire infantryman.
Ricardo Donato was born in Manhattan and raised in Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York. He attended Good Shepherd Catholic School in Marine Park and graduated in 2005, then graduated from Xaverian High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in 2009. Ricardo's greatest strengths have always been his courage, integrity, and selfless service.
Ricardo briefly attended Kingsborough Community College before leaving to join the Army. During this time before the Army, he worked as a busboy at Nora's Park Bench in Marine Park, Brooklyn. At 18, he made the decision to serve his country. He enlisted in the United States Army Infantry (11C — Indirect Fire Infantryman) and completed basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia in 2010. He served 9 years of honorable service from 2010 to 2019, eventually achieving the rank of Sergeant (E-5).
In 2011, Ricardo was stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, then deployed to Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012 as a mortarman, serving as assistant gunner and then gunner on the 60 mm and 120 mm mortar systems. While deployed to Afghanistan, Ricardo earned the Combat Infantryman's Badge. As a Global War on Terrorism veteran, Ricardo knows firsthand the sacrifice that comes with serving this nation.
“Between the IEDs and the newports ill take the newports”
After Afghanistan, Ricardo returned to Fort Wainwright, then PCSd to Fort Polk, Louisiana, where he earned the rank of Sergeant and served as a squad leader in a mortar section. He later served at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in the 101st Airborne, working as a mortarman squad leader and FDC check.
After his military service, Ricardo pursued education with the same determination he brought to the battlefield. He attended Nashville Community College and then Austin Peay State University, where he earned his Bachelor of Psychological Science.
Ricardo then dedicated himself to serving those in crisis. He worked during COVID from 2021 to 2023 as a Psychiatric Technician and then Lead Psychiatric Technician at Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute (Tennessee's biggest mental health institution), serving in the Forensic Services Program, Acute Treatment Programs, and Extended Treatment Program. He worked with some of the most vulnerable Americans — people the system had forgotten.
In 2022, Ricardo bought a house in Tennessee. From 2023 to 2024, he went on to work at Elevance Health as a Crisis and Resource Specialist, helping those experiencing mental health crisis connect with the resources and support they needed.
In 2025, Ricardo attempted a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail — a 2,190-mile journey from Georgia to Maine. He plans to finish what he started. That same determination drives his campaign: he doesn't quit.
Ricardo Donato is not a career politician. He's a combat veteran, a mental health professional, and an American who has seen both the beauty and the brokenness of this country. He's running for President because he believes it's time to Take America Back — from the corruption, the lies, and the people who have sold this country out.
Life & Service Timeline
Good Shepherd Graduation
Graduated from Good Shepherd Catholic School in Marine Park, Brooklyn.
Xaverian High School
Graduated from Xaverian High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Kingsborough & Nora's Park Bench
Briefly attended Kingsborough Community College before leaving to join the Army. During that same time, worked as a busboy at Nora's Park Bench in Marine Park, Brooklyn.
Army Basic — Fort Benning, Georgia
Completed Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, beginning his service as an 11C Indirect Fire Infantryman.
Army Service
Ricardo in uniform during his years of Army service.
Fort Wainwright, Alaska
Stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska before deploying overseas.
Afghanistan Deployment
Deployed to Afghanistan for one year as a mortarman, serving as assistant gunner and then gunner on the 60 mm and 120 mm mortar systems. In Afghanistan, his nicknames included "Dirty D" and "the steely eyed killer."
Deployment
Deployed service in Afghanistan as a mortarman.
Return to Fort Wainwright
Returned to Fort Wainwright, Alaska after deployment.
Sergeant & Mortar Squad Leader
PCSd to Fort Polk, Louisiana, earned the rank of Sergeant, and served as a squad leader in a mortar section.
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Served at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in the 101st Airborne as a mortarman squad leader and FDC check.
Honorable Discharge — Sergeant E-5
Completed 9 years of honorable service and transitioned to civilian life with the same discipline and mission focus.
Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute
Worked during COVID as a Psychiatric Technician and then Lead Psychiatric Technician, serving in a major Tennessee mental health institution.
Mental Health
Frontline mental-health work serving people in crisis.
Tennessee Home
Bought a house in Tennessee.
Elevance Health
Worked as a Crisis and Resource Specialist, helping people experiencing mental health crises connect with support and resources.
Appalachian Trail Attempt
Attempted a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,190-mile journey from Georgia to Maine.
President of the United States
President of the United States 2028.
Where I Stand
The Platform
Nine policy planks. No talking points. No donor-written language. Click any plank to read the full plan.
"The Epstein class" is a system of elite impunity in which wealthy and connected people use secrecy, influence, institutional protection, and two-tier justice to escape accountability. My administration will protect victims, release lawfully available records, investigate corruption, and prosecute crimes without fear or favoritism. No person will be declared guilty through rumor, but no powerful person will be protected from evidence.
- Order a government-wide inventory of records involving trafficking, institutional abuse, public corruption, unlawful surveillance, and obstruction of justice.
- Create an independent Public Integrity and Disclosure Board composed of inspectors general, career investigators, victim advocates, civil-liberties experts, and records specialists.
- Publish every releasable record and a searchable index explaining the legal reason for every redaction or withholding.
- Direct the Department of Justice to prioritize trafficking, evidence destruction, witness intimidation, public corruption, and institutional cover-ups.
- Petition courts to unseal relevant records when legally justified while protecting victims, witnesses, minors, and uninvolved private citizens.
- Ask Congress to strengthen whistleblower protections, trafficking laws, classification reform, and penalties for official obstruction.
- Publish a public scorecard showing records reviewed, documents released, cases referred, prosecutions completed, and unresolved withholdings.
A full-time job should provide enough income to afford housing, food, healthcare, transportation, and family life. My administration will confront monopoly power, price-fixing, junk fees, wage theft, predatory lending, and corporate practices that enrich insiders while ordinary Americans fall behind.
- Direct federal competition agencies to prioritize monopoly abuse, price-fixing, deceptive fees, and anti-competitive mergers.
- Strengthen enforcement against wage theft, worker misclassification, union-busting, and exploitation by federal contractors.
- Require companies receiving major federal contracts or subsidies to meet standards for American employment, lawful labor practices, and domestic investment.
- Release unused federal property suitable for responsible housing development and reward communities that increase housing supply.
- Propose tax relief for working- and middle-class families, financed by closing special-interest loopholes and increasing enforcement against sophisticated tax evasion.
- Support American manufacturing, family farms, apprenticeships, skilled trades, and critical domestic supply chains.
- Ask Congress to protect collective bargaining, provide paid family leave, expand affordable childcare, and increase construction of starter homes and affordable rental housing.
Healthcare is a human necessity, not a privilege reserved for people with the right job, income, or insurance company. I have cared directly for people experiencing severe psychiatric crises and helped families navigate complicated healthcare systems.
- Send Congress a universal Medicare plan covering medical care, mental health, addiction treatment, maternity care, prescriptions, dental care, vision care, disability services, and long-term care.
- Establish a transition that protects patients, healthcare workers, rural hospitals, and continuity of care.
- Enforce mental-health and substance-use parity requirements so insurers cannot discriminate against behavioral healthcare.
- Expand community mental-health centers, mobile crisis teams, psychiatric stabilization services, supportive housing, and long-term follow-up care.
- Build a national workforce pipeline for nurses, psychiatric technicians, therapists, social workers, counselors, physicians, and other caregivers.
- Negotiate lower prescription prices, challenge anti-competitive healthcare practices, and require clear pricing and coverage information.
- Make veteran suicide prevention, same-day crisis access, addiction treatment, and transition support national priorities.
- Measure success through insurance coverage, medical debt, treatment wait times, crisis-response times, rural access, medication costs, and preventable deaths.
A sovereign nation has the right and responsibility to control its borders. It also has a duty to respect human dignity, lawful asylum procedures, and constitutional due process.
- Deploy personnel, surveillance technology, inspection equipment, and infrastructure to high-traffic crossings and ports of entry.
- Create joint federal task forces targeting cartels, human traffickers, smugglers, money laundering, weapons trafficking, and corrupt facilitators.
- Accelerate immigration decisions by increasing judges, asylum officers, interpreters, investigators, and support personnel.
- End the routine release of people whose cases can be resolved promptly while maintaining humane detention standards and lawful alternatives where appropriate.
- Negotiate effective return, repatriation, and anti-trafficking agreements with foreign governments.
- Enforce labor laws against employers that knowingly exploit unauthorized workers and use unlawful labor to undercut American wages.
- Ask Congress to modernize asylum law, strengthen border resources, require reliable employment verification, and create orderly legal immigration pathways based on legitimate national needs.
- Prohibit cruelty, collective punishment, and unnecessary family separation as tools of enforcement.
I served 9 years in the United States Army Infantry as an 11C Indirect Fire Infantryman, deploying to Afghanistan where I earned the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. I know military force is not an abstraction. War is paid for with lives, families, trauma, and years that can never be returned. American foreign policy must defend the American people, protect legitimate national interests, preserve human life, and pursue peace.
- Review weapons transfers and military assistance for compliance with American law, treaty obligations, and civilian-protection standards.
- Suspend discretionary transfers when credible legal concerns remain unresolved.
- Submit a budget ending unconditional military assistance to Israel and every other government that violates American law or uses American weapons unlawfully.
- Ask Congress to rescind or discontinue assistance that the executive branch cannot legally terminate alone.
- Require public reporting on weapons transfers, civilian harm, end-use monitoring, and violations involving American equipment.
- Repeal outdated authorizations for military force and require meaningful congressional approval for sustained hostilities.
- Make diplomacy, ceasefire negotiations, humanitarian access, and conflict prevention the first instruments of American power.
- Redirect lawfully available savings toward veterans, healthcare, mental-health services, education, infrastructure, and deficit reduction.
- Maintain a strong military focused on defending the United States—not policing the world or enriching contractors.
Education should prepare thoughtful, capable, responsible, and free citizens. It should not underpay teachers, abandon students with disabilities, bury young adults in debt, or treat learning as a profit center.
- Propose a federal-state teacher-pay and retention compact focused on shortage areas and underserved communities.
- Create tuition-free community-college, technical-education, and apprenticeship pathways through federal-state partnerships.
- Expand Pell Grants and simplify federal student-aid programs.
- Increase federal support for special education and enforce the rights of students with disabilities.
- Expand school counselors, psychologists, social workers, and evidence-based mental-health services.
- Connect high schools, unions, community colleges, employers, and veterans' programs to paid apprenticeships and skilled careers.
- Require colleges receiving federal funds to clearly disclose total cost, completion rates, student debt, transfer outcomes, and employment results.
- Reduce unnecessary administrative burdens while preserving civil-rights, safety, financial, and academic accountability.
- Give families and local communities a meaningful voice while reserving federal action for constitutional rights, equal opportunity, and national investment.
Artificial intelligence should improve human life—not manipulate people, secretly determine their futures, destroy privacy, or remove human accountability. Technology companies and data centers receiving public support must respect workers, communities, natural resources, national security, and the common good.
- Inventory and independently test high-impact AI systems used by federal agencies.
- Require meaningful human review and an appeals process when government AI affects benefits, employment, healthcare, housing, law enforcement, or individual rights.
- Require federal AI contractors to disclose known risks, testing methods, security failures, data sources, and safeguards.
- Establish national privacy rights allowing Americans to know what personal data is collected, correct inaccurate information, and restrict unauthorized sale or misuse.
- Create protections against deepfake fraud, impersonation, nonconsensual sexual imagery, election deception, and automated scams.
- Require large data centers receiving federal contracts, loans, land, tax benefits, or grants to report water and electricity use.
- Condition federal support on water efficiency, energy reliability, cybersecurity, community consultation, and responsible infrastructure planning.
- Protect workers from abusive electronic surveillance and require advance notice when automated systems determine scheduling, discipline, hiring, or termination.
- Support American innovation while holding companies legally accountable when negligence or deception harms the public.
Intelligence agencies exist to protect the country. They do not exist to experiment on Americans, manipulate domestic opinion, interfere in lawful politics, conceal misconduct, or operate beyond constitutional limits. I will begin dismantling abusive covert power immediately and ask Congress to replace the CIA with narrowly defined, accountable institutions responsible for legitimate foreign intelligence.
- Review active covert-action findings and terminate programs that are unlawful, unnecessary, ineffective, or inconsistent with American values.
- Prohibit intelligence agencies from conducting unauthorized experimentation, detention, propaganda, surveillance, or political activity directed at Americans.
- Strengthen inspectors general, whistleblower channels, congressional notification, judicial oversight, and record-preservation requirements.
- Conduct a lawful declassification review of historical programs involving experimentation, domestic surveillance, political interference, covert war, and institutional misconduct.
- Require intelligence officials to document the legal authority, purpose, cost, risks, and oversight structure of sensitive programs.
- Ask Congress to abolish the CIA in its current form and transfer legitimate foreign-intelligence functions to accountable successor organizations.
- Separate intelligence analysis from covert operations so policymakers receive honest assessments rather than information shaped to justify predetermined actions.
- Establish criminal accountability for unlawful surveillance, experimentation, evidence destruction, perjury, retaliation, and obstruction.
- Preserve necessary foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and threat-warning capabilities under strict constitutional control.
The public should not be required to blindly trust government agencies, contractors, scientific institutions, intelligence services, corporations, political leaders, or me. Major public claims should be supported by evidence that qualified independent experts can examine.
- Order independent audits of major federal scientific programs, contracts, procurement decisions, and research-integrity systems.
- Strengthen inspectors general responsible for investigating fraud, waste, abuse, conflicts of interest, data manipulation, and contractor misconduct.
- Require federally funded research to publish eligible data, methods, source materials, limitations, and financial conflicts of interest.
- Fund independent replication of major findings that influence national policy, public health, public spending, or public understanding.
- Protect scientists, engineers, contractors, service members, and federal employees who lawfully report misconduct or suppressed evidence.
- Require NASA and other science agencies to publish project costs, audit findings, contract performance, mission data, and unresolved technical concerns whenever legally possible.
- Establish a public Antarctic mapping and research initiative using satellite imagery, aircraft, ground teams, ships, sensors, and independent observers.
- Publish expedition routes, raw measurements, imagery, mapping data, methodologies, and findings in an accessible public archive.
- Investigate claims according to the evidence and report clearly what is proven, disproven, unresolved, withheld, or still unknown.
- Protect legitimate national-security information and personal privacy while ending secrecy used primarily to avoid embarrassment, accountability, or public scrutiny.
Full legislative text and executive orders will be published at donato2028.com/platform
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