Justice Department Lies About Absent Prosecutor

Just like everything out of Garland’s department, the notion that Jack Smith is in charge and his staff is “independent” is a total fabrication.

by Julie Kelly for American Greatness

To hear the media tell it, Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Donald Trump’s alleged theft of classified documents and any illegal interference in the certification of the 2020 election results, is feverishly working away.

Smith, according to a recent story in Yahoo News, issued subpoenas seeking more information related to Trump’s attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election. The subpoenas target “election officials in seven battleground states that were key to former President Trump and his allies after the 2020 election,” Brad Dress reported on December 14.

“These grand jury subpoenas make clear that Special Counsel Jack Smith is aggressively pursuing the January 6th investigation, including the ‘fake electors’ scheme,’” legal analyst Renato Mariotti swooned on Twitter.

Smith has “[hit] the ground running,” the Washington Examiner claimed on December 12. 

Except there’s a tiny problem—it’s unlikely Smith can hit any  ground running. According to CNN, Smith is still on the mend after undergoing knee surgery last month. And not only is Smith not in Washington, D.C., to manage the investigation that bears his name, but he also isn’t even in the country.

“Though he remains in Europe recovering from a biking accident, Smith has made a series of high-profile moves since he was put in charge last month, including asking a federal judge to hold Trump in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena ordering him to turn over records marked classified,” CNN reported on December 11.

But Smith isn’t making any “moves” in court. His condition also explains why Smith was not in attendance during Garland’s press conference on November 18 announcing his appointment. Garland insisted he had no choice but to name a special counsel after Trump announced his intention to run for president again in 2024. 

“The Department of Justice has long recognized that in certain extraordinary cases, it is in the public interest to appoint a special prosecutor to independently manage an investigation and prosecution,” Garland said. “Such an appointment underscores the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters.”

The stunt was intended to convince the public that Garland, a political appointee of Joe Biden, and his top aides—including Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and another Biden appointee, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves—would take a hands-off approach into the criminal probe of Trump and Republican officials who aided post-election efforts to salvage his presidency. (Monaco and Graves, the prosecutor currently handling more than 900 January 6 cases, stood next to Garland at the announcement.)

The basis for a special counsel is to avoid any “conflict of interest” between the Justice Department and political targets of an investigation, according to the law’s language. A special counsel, both by design and Garland’s own explanation, is meant to ensure the “independence” of an investigation. So prosecutors and investigators who take the reins should be unaffiliated with the “conflicted” Justice Department officials.

Except that isn’t the case with an absentee Smith. “A team of 20 prosecutors investigating January 6 and the effort to overturn the 2020 election are in the process of moving to work under Smith,” CNN continued. “Smith will also take on national security investigators already working the probe into the potential mishandling of federal records taken to Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House.”

In other words, Smith, or someone pulling the strings, is simply transferring people from existing investigations to his team.

And that’s not all. Thomas Windom, a close advisor to Garland, also will move to Smith’s office. Windom has been working on a vast investigation into Trump and several associates, including Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and John Eastman, since last year. “Windom has been involved in almost all the department’s other key decisions regarding the wide-ranging inquiry into Mr. Trump’s multilayered effort to remain in office,” the New York Times reported in June 2022.

This includes organizers of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on January 6 and Republican lawmakers who planned to legally object to the certification of some electoral votes that day. Windom has issued a flurry of subpoenas “seeking information on any members of the executive or legislative branch who helped to plan or execute the rally, or who tried to obstruct the certification of the election that was taking place inside the Capitol that day—a broad net that could include top Trump aides and the former president’s allies in Congress,” according to the Times.

This is the exact opposite of an “independent” investigation. Garland, with help from the media, is intentionally misleading the public into believing his staff, including those already deeply involved in an obvious political prosecution, have been removed from the matter.

Further, does anyone for a moment believe that Monaco, a longtime Obama loyalist and an architect of the Russia collusion hoax, will really step away from investigating the man she’s tried to destroy for the better part of six years? Or will Graves, a Biden campaign advisor married to the head of a radical left-wing nonprofit in D.C. who considers white women “racist” for voting for Trump? At least two other prosecutors working for Graves in D.C. will simply walk a few blocks over to the special counsel’s office.

Just like everything out of Garland’s department, the notion that Jack Smith is in charge and his staff is “independent” is a flagrant lie. That’s why Smith is in no hurry to get back to the United States—Garland and his gang still have everything under control.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- December 17

 

1 week until Christmas Eve. And I want a Christmas miracle. Here's tonight's news:

Celebrate Elon Musk, but Don’t Lose Sight of Big Tech’s Structural Problem

Truth is, as great as Musk has been not merely for Twitter but for the health of America's digital town square in general, concerted public policy and legal changes are still needed.

by Josh Hammer for American Greatness

The story of Elon Musk’s acquisition, transformation and public rehabilitation of Twitter is nothing short of remarkable. Here is that rarest of confluences: A right-leaning (or at least right-sympathetic) mega-billionaire privately acquires a disproportionately influential public company out of genuine public-spiritedness, perhaps even a hint of noblesse oblige, and an earnest commitment to preserving open discourse in our modern digital public square; exposes grievous previous company wrongs for the whole world to see in a dramatic unveiling of the eponymous “Twitter Files”; and makes decisive personnel decisions to toss out core leaders of the wretched and corrupt old regime, and begins to chart a promising new path forward.

There has been no equivalent story in my adult lifetime, and there is unlikely to be a similar story again any time soon. This is not the type of corporate development one typically reads about in The Wall Street Journal or sees discussed on CNBC. The story is a unicorn.

The remarkable nature of the Elon Musk/Twitter saga, and the specific revelations about Twitter’s blacklisting of the infamous 2020 campaign-era Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship/shadow-banning of myriad other right-leaning content creators, has led many on the Right to fete Musk with praise — at times, even fawning adoration. To be sure, that praise is wholly warranted: Musk has thus far proven wrong the skeptics who were unsure just how big an impact he might be able to make at Twitter, answering the call of his civic duty as the world’s wealthiest man. Indeed, he has gone above and beyond his civic duty.

But as transformative as Musk has been in the nascent stages of his Twitter ownership, it is crucial to not forget the bigger picture.

Twitter, though the preferred communicative organ of the American political class and the broader commentariat, pales in comparison to most other Big Tech platforms in terms of its reach. In terms of pure social media platforms alone, Facebook is orders of magnitude more popular than Twitter globally, and is over four times as popular just in the U.S. based on number of users. Facebook’s fellow Meta subsidiary, Instagram, is also roughly three times as popular as Twitter based on volume of American users.

Outside of pure social media, Google and Amazon — the monopolistic internet gateways to information and commerce, respectively — are likely the two most powerful of all the Big Tech oligarchs and have both been exposed in the past for manipulating their internal algorithms to redound to parochial commercial interests. Furthermore, Apple and Google, which combined have a duopoly on smartphone app access, could, in the absence of additional legislation, easily collude — just as they did with respect to Parler after the Jan. 6 jamboree at the U.S. Capitol — to nuke users’ access to the Twitter app, thus severely diminishing, if not outright undoing, all of Musk’s salutary changes to the platform.

Nor is this a pure thought exercise. Just on the narrow topic of the “Twitter Files” revelations pertaining to the October 2020 chicanery about the Hunter Biden laptop story, it is important not to forget that Facebook is just as much to blame as Twitter. Recall how just in August, Mark Zuckerberg straightforwardly admitted to popular podcaster Joe Rogan that Facebook suppressed circulation of the New York Post’s Hunter laptop expose, on the precipice of the 2020 presidential election, after an FBI warning about the dissemination of possible “Russian disinformation.” Let’s be clear: Musk acquiring, transforming and rehabilitating Twitter has no bearing whatsoever on preventing future malfeasance at Facebook.

Truth is, as great as Musk has been not merely for Twitter but for the health of America’s digital town square in general, concerted public policy and legal changes are still needed to wrest control away from powerful Silicon Valley bureaucrats and to restore that control to its rightful place: with the American people.

The most fundamental questions of all, when it comes to the Big Tech debate, pertain to sovereignty: Who will write the rules that govern our digital town square and our digital marketplace? Who will secure equal access to those digital institutions — woke, unaccountable and nerdy computer science Ph.D.s, or the American people? The beneficence of one serendipitously right-leaning (or right-curious) plutocrat does not in any way change how our legal and political processes should resolve these thorny questions. And specifically, it is crucial that all of the rethinking conservatives have done the past few years on Big Tech, when it comes to Section 230, antitrust and common carrier regulation, not be rendered moot now that Musk runs the big blue bird.

The problems with Big Tech are structural and sprawling; they are not idiosyncratic to Twitter, which has among the smallest user bases of any of the internet platforms typically included when politicians and commentators speak of “Big Tech.” When a new Congress is sworn in in January, it is imperative not to forget this.

Tucker Carlson Asks: Knowing What You Know Now – Do You Think the CIA Killed President Kennedy?

Knowing what we know now about how the U.S. intelligence community operates to control just about everything, we are more awake than ever before.

Tucker Carlson takes the context of the current revelations about the U.S. intelligence community and reopens the discussion about the CIA involvement in the assassination of President John F Kennedy.  {Direct Rumble Link} – WATCH:

The Anti-Fascist Fraud

posted by Nancy Andersen at American Thinker

Anti-fascists love to intimidate others by claiming a moral high ground, even if that high ground is below sea-level.  Anti-fascists promoted the destruction of minority-owned small businesses in the summer of 2020 in the name of fighting systemic racism, anti-fascists trampled the Bill of Rights during COVID lockdowns for the sake of public health, and anti-fascists hate Elon Musk’s desire to promote “Free Speech” on Twitter because speech (like silence, oddly enough) is violence.

One hotly contested battle between current anti-fascism and common sense is K-12 education.  Anti-fascists paint parents and teachers concerned about pornographic books in school libraries as “literal Nazis.”  Books like Gender Queer contain graphic pictures of sexual acts; however, according to the Left this book should remain in school libraries to champion Diversity and Inclusion.  If a parent holds the opinion that the sexualized material might be too graphic for minors, that parent is a fascist on par with Mussolini.

But what happens when the anti-fascists want to ban books?  Do they become fascist-anti-fascists or anti-anti-fascists?

Last week, the anti-fascist Twitter account “Silent Sam I Am” (named after Silent Sam, the confederate statue violently toppled at UNC-Chapel Hill) tweeted the following:

Anti-fascists want the book Johnny the Walrus by Matt Walsh removed from libraries.  The story centers on a little boy, Johnny, who pretends to be a walrus.  Johnny’s mother is bombarded with text messages that Johnny is not just pretending; he is a real walrus and denying his identity is “phobic.”  She takes Johnny to a doctor who affirms Johnny is the tusked marine mammal.  Johnny’s mother subsequently believes her child is a walrus until she takes him to a zoo, and a zookeeper points out that Johnny is just a boy with wooden spoons as tusks.  Mom takes Johnny home, while Johnny pretends to be a bird.

Top Articles By American Thinker

Read More

A Look at America’s Crossroads Moment

Johnny the Walrus contains no graphic nudity, nor any description of sexual acts.  Yet the anti-fascists want it banned not just from school libraries, but public community libraries.  The book is certainly political satire, and not necessarily something I would read to my own children.  But the book is no more political than Gender Queer or Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag -- books marketed towards minors that (graphically) address sexual politics.  Walsh’s book is visibly less political as it speaks through allegory, rather than the literal “diverse” books like This Day in June, a book depicting gay pride parades with detailed descriptions of “dykes on bikes.”

Silent Sam I Am tweeted a follow-up message explaining that the walrus book’s removal is not hypocritical because… well… Silent Sam I Am says it isn’t.  The anti-fascist account describes the walrus allegory as dehumanizing.

For anti-fascists, allowing books like Johnny the Walrus in libraries suggests more than one opinion on sexual politics exists.  Multiple opinions are not allowed:

This hypocritical nature of the “tolerant” Left is no surprise.  The Left manipulates words and bans ideas that do not suit its purpose.  Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a local North Carolina school board meeting, at which a teacher discussed banning a classic children’s novel (The Indian in the Cupboard) from her school because of perceived negative Native American stereotypes.  The teacher avoided the word “ban,” instead referring to the book as having been “weeded.”  Later in that meeting, the district Equity Officer discussed a “culturally relevant” audit of the school libraries.  An audit of materials -- determining which books stay and which must go -- is different from banning books apparently.  If one suggests that the two concepts might be similar, the Left will scream, “But we must have Equity!”

The American Library Association (ALA) also has a history of marketing itself as a protector of books, while remaining silent behind the scenes when clear ideological censorship occurs.  The ALA has a “Report Censorship Toolkit” on its website.  It published a Bill of Rights for Schools and Minors that states, “Library policies and procedures that effectively deny minors equal and equitable access to all library resources available to other users violate the Library Bill of Rights.”  In 2006, however, when Cuba jailed 65 librarians who provided books not approved by the Cuban government, the ALA refused to publicly condemn the action despite several other countries doing so.  The ALA values communism.  This year the ALA elected self-proclaimed Marxist, Emily Drabinski, as its president.

In his book Lenin, Viktor Sebestyen describes Vladimir Lenin’s public comments regarding censorship shortly before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 Russia:

…Lenin called censorship ‘feudal… Asiatic’ and praised free press ‘as much more democratic in principle than any alternative’.  He promised ‘incomparably more press freedom’ if the Bolsheviks had their way.

Following his ascent to power and contrary to his public proclamations, Lenin sought to suppress ideas counter to his Bolshevik thinking:

Lenin did not hide his ambitions to close down the opposition press.  A few weeks after the coup, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, he complained about press criticism and a Menshevik stood up and heckled to loud applause: ‘What do you mean, criticism.  Which papers?  Where?  You’ve closed them all.’

‘No not yet,’ Lenin replied. ‘But we soon will.’

Just like the Bolshevik leaders in 1917 Russia, current anti-fascists and their allies will promote themselves as tolerant while simultaneously calling upon the censorship of any criticism or differing ideas.  The blatant hypocrisy is profound to the point of absurdity.  Silent Sam I Am’s thread represents the social media phenomenon of the “self-own.”  As much as we want to discount them, we cannot ignore these trivial minds.  History has taught us where shameless hypocrisy can lead.  As Elon Musk says, “The woke mind is either defeated or nothing else matters.”  

This Right Here Is Exactly Why 'ESG' and 'Sustainability' Are Absolute Nonsense

Joe Cunningham reporting for RedState 

You’ve probably heard a lot about Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards and how a lot of Republican states are dropping investment firms that comply with them. ESG is a “set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments,” according to Investopedia. Those standards are, in turn, used to rule which publicly-traded companies follow progressive guidelines on environmentalism, social justice, etc.

There are a lot of companies that make the list, but plenty of them are omitted because the woke crowd is attempting to hurt them with these new standards. It is weaponized woke-ism in the private sector.

It’s also incredibly foolish. For example, Tesla was dropped by the S&P 500, despite the fact that it makes electric cars, something the entire environmentalist left pushes for us all to own. But, Elon Musk isn’t a woke progressive, so he violates some other ESG standards.

Then, there’s this: A Canadian railroad company that services oil fields in Canada is somehow an ESG-compliant company.

The Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index (DSJI) named CSX (NASDAQ: CSX), Canadian Pacific (NYSE: CP) and CN (NYSE: CNI) to its annual list of companies to achieve high scores on S&P Global’s Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA).

More than 10,000 publicly traded companies are invited to participate in the assessment, which evaluates how companies address sustainability through economic performance, environmental stewardship, social responsibility and corporate governance.

The North American index represents 20% of the largest 600 North American companies in the S&P Global Broad Market Index, according to CN.

[…]

CP also said it made both global and North American sustainability indices this year. This is the first year the company made the world index and the third consecutive year for the North American index.

“At CP, we continuously challenge ourselves to innovate across our business and develop meaningful ways to serve our customers, each other and the communities we operate in and through,” CP President and CEO Keith Creel said. “We are proud to be recognized again as a sustainability leader by the DJSI and [remain] committed to delivering on our sustainability journey.”

That’s all well and good. Serve the people. That’s a great company goal. And, rail does have a significantly lower carbon footprint than other forms of travel. That’s one of the reasons why progressives are so eager to push for high-speed rail in the U.S.

I have nothing against Canadian Pacific, nor do I fault them for the business they do, but… they are a major transporter of oil in Canada.

With access to ports and transload facilities across North America and direct service with short line railroads in the ​Alberta Industrial Heartland, ​​CP delivers you right into the energy transportation hub of Alberta.

​If you need to move synthetic crude and other refined products from Alberta to your end markets, trust us to provide efficient transportation. As the only railway serving the Nisku Business Complex, with a set of daily service options into and out of Nisku and transload facilities in South Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan, we’re your ticket to the oil sands production areas and the Alberta Industrial Heartland.​​​

We offer:

• Daily intermodal services in and out of Edmonton
• Daily service to the truck-to-rail transload facilities in the Edmonton area for metals, dry bulk and liquids
• Truck-to-rail transloading of dilbit at Lambton Park
• Service into the new Strathcona Logistics Centre to handle construction materials such as rebar, plate, beams, coil, piling, dry bulk products, liquids and dimensional cargo
• Service along the pipeline injection/terminating points at Hardisty and Edmonton / Fort Saskatchewan
• Transportation solutions for products that aren’t compatible with traditional ​pipelines, such as petroleum coke, sulphur, asphaltine and various hydrocarbon liquids and gasses​

So while some American companies aren’t listed because they aren’t 100 percent compliant with ESG standards, Canadian Pacific is listed despite the fact that it transports oil across Canada.

I really don’t understand how that makes sense, and it’s clear that several politicians in red states seem to agree. They have been fighting for a long time now to drop major investment firms that use ESG standards when they decide how to invest those states’ different monies. BlackRock, the world’s largest firm, lost several states as clients over those standards – Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona among them – and you could see that number continue to grow. It’s a mere drop in the bucket for BlackRock, which controls trillions in assets, but it’s still an important point that those states are making.

But those “sustainability” lists of sufficiently woke corporations are based on a clearly nonsensical slate of standards if companies that do major business in transporting fossil fuels still somehow make the list.

Censorship’s Biggest Cheerleaders Will Always Be Our Corrupt Corporate Media

Musk’s purge is just a Band-Aid on a gaping societal wound: an inherently anti-free-speech corporate media.

Jordan Boyd reporting for The Federalist

Twitter CEO Elon Musk suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen corporate media mouthpieces on Thursday evening for doxxing. But his intervention affecting the press, which has been taken over by the “woke mind virus” Musk has lamented, is only a Band-Aid over a gaping societal wound: an inherently anti-free-speech media establishment.

For years, Big Tech censors did the media’s dirty work without accountability or punishment. When the propaganda press cried wolf over ideologies it disagreed with, Big Tech dredged up new policies to justify nuking anyone who spread them. Together, media and Silicon Valley censors cashed in on the lucrative “fact-checking” machine as an effective way to rid the internet of their political enemies.

It was only when Musk nuked The New York Times’s Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, leftist writer Aaron Rupar, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Keith Olbermann, and other accounts over the very clear issue of doxxing that members of the corporate media finally got a clue.

“You’re not special because you’re a journalist,” Musk told some of the suspended journos during a Twitter Spaces chat on Thursday night.

The purge evoked screeching and gnashing of teeth by leftist hordes of journalists. Suddenly, the talking heads who spent years building under-the-table relationships with tech’s masters of suppression were powerless on their favorite platform.

“It’s highly unusual for journalists at The Washington Post and The New York Times to have their Twitter accounts suspended,” one female journo whined on the Thursday night Twitter Spaces.

The absurd and unified reaction from the left’s propaganda arm is more than hypocritical considering the media’s unified treatment of Big Tech’s history of censorship.

While legitimate members of the press such as my colleagues at The Federalist are suspended and shadowbanned for speaking the truth, professional doxxers such as Taylor Lorenz run free. Instead of facing punishment like the New York Post did for allegedly sharing “hacked materials” — a designation the “Twitter Files” recently confirmed was a scapegoat to cover up the exposure of Biden family corruption — journos such as Lorenz, who unethically “exposed” a civilian’s private information, are granted tearful features by their accomplices about online bullying.

The media have not only lived without fear of suppression, but they also leveraged that freedom to call for more censorship by Big Tech. They didn’t just turn a blind eye to the suppression that plagued conservatives for years, they encouraged it. For once, that gross abuse of power was met with swift consequences.

Unfortunately, all good things don’t last forever.

Less than 24 hours after leftist journos received a dose of their own medicine, Musk made plans to restore the offending accounts within the next week.

Will these media hacks’ short-lived online prison sentence evoke a change in heart about the partisan censorship of conservatives and inconvenient counternarratives? Likely not.

It doesn’t take a lot to recognize that corporate media hate you and any speech that contradicts their agenda. The media’s preferred Big Tech censors may have been canned during Musk’s staff sweep, but new censors will inevitably climb their way back to the top of the Big Tech oligarch, especially if some new leftist billionaire comes along and takes over the same way Musk did. As my colleague Samuel Mangold-Lenett noted shortly after Musk acquired Twitter:

The faceless blob composed of the managerial elite, the people who really run the United States — to borrow a phrase from Michael Anton — still have near complete control over every other institution that affects our lives. Sure, they probably can’t ban you on Twitter anymore for saying boys and girls are different, but they will, undoubtedly, find their way into a similar role in some other company that is just as influential.

Regardless of their standing with Big Tech, corporate media will seek to destroy their political enemies. Built into our modern-day media establishment is the belief that it is easier to censor speech you don’t like than to humbly admit a self-inflicted loss of credibility and embrace of radicalism.

The only thing that seems to disrupt this standard operating procedure is when the uncensored, unmanipulated truth about the media’s depravity is exposed. Musk is off to a good start with the “Twitter Files.” But those alone aren’t enough to change the trajectory of the state of our press for good.

If Musk’s Twitter commits to punishing corporate media journos for their many sins, the propaganda press will have fewer resources to program Americans’ thinking. Until then, our corrupt media establishment is destined to continue its war on the same amendment that grants them protection.

Twitter Files Journ-o-Lister Bari Weiss Proclaims Her Tribe Must Be Defended from Horrible Elon and His New Rules

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Before getting to the latest installment of the Twitter Files release by Matt Taibbi, a fellow who does carry a contrarian streak, it must be noted how Twitter File scribe Ms. Bari Weiss, an adept DeSantis stealth, is exposing herself.

In defense of the pearl clutching tribe of narrative engineers, now with sensibilities wounded by their diminishment, notice how Ms. Weiss equates the doxing and swatting efforts of the high-minded to the former ideologically driven censorship efforts.  When people show you who they are, just believe them.

[Source]

The infectious amoeba that eats logical brain matter generally stems from a tribal virus at birth.

Equating doxing/swatting with the prior issue of shutting down speech over political ideology, is a reconciliation logic only made by an unstable person hopelessly infected with a strain of toxic leftism found in the California breeding grounds.

Some have called it cognitive dissonance; others note the viral strain is particularly virulent in clans clustered in two distinct coastal regions.

Regardless of source origination, once infected it’s incurable.

Can Trump Win in 2024?

posted by Mark Lewis at Townhall

I recently wrote an article, “Trump Can Win in 2024,” where I played campaign manager and made some suggestions how Donald Trump could regain the White House in 2024. I thought my ideas were prudent:

1. Disappear for awhile to plan an effective campaign;

2. Put 2020 behind you;

3. Quit talking about yourself so much;

4. Quit insulting fellow Republicans (even though some need it. Let the rest of us do it, we aren’t running for office.);

5. Let Congress handle Hunter Biden, Twitter, etc.;

6. Lay out your positive plan to “Make America Great Again”;

7. Point to your administration’s achievements, but don’t dwell on them; and

8. Get out to the minority communities and listen to their grievances, something Democrats never do.

I think the above is a pretty good strategy. I’ll even work for cheap.

However, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the responses readers gave to my article. They amounted to something like this: “Not a snowball’s chance Trump will do that;” “the plan is ok, but Trump’s too full of himself;” “never happen,” etc., etc. My article was not how Trump WOULD win, but how he COULD win. I don’t expect Mr. Trump to do the above, either, for the very reasons most respondents listed.

So, in a quick answer to the title of this article, Trump can win in 2024 but many Republicans think he probably won’t because he seems incapable of making the necessary amendments to his strategy and character. It is understandable in a way. Most 70+ year old people are pretty stuck in their ways, and altering one’s personality, thoughts, and actions at that age is challenging, to say the least. One might say “impossible” for a narcissist like Donald Trump.

I like Trump, I thought he was a great president, and I grieve for America because he isn’t in the White House right now. Having him back there after 1/20/25 would no doubt be a vast improvement over that mentally and morally shriveled, America- and God-hating abomination that dwells there now.

But, as I write this, I’m not optimistic about Mr. Trump’s chances.

Regarding the 2020 election, I make a crucial distinction, which I wish Mr. Trump would make. We cannot change that election or its results. But that doesn’t mean we should forget it or not learn from it. Republicans will never win anything again if they don’t adapt to the new system—mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, early voting, etc. The Democrats created it, now it’s time for Republicans to start using it wisely. Or, better, create a good, legal alternative that Americans will accept. Mr. Trump cannot do anything about this current new system. That is up to the Republican Party leadership, which is definitely a depressing thought given the people who occupy those positions. But that is what needs to be done.

Mr. Trump must quit talking about 2020. His harping on it sounds like sour grapes and makes him look like a whiny, sore loser (in other words, a Democrat). You AREN’T a Democrat, Mr. Trump, you can’t play “victim.” Only they can do that and get away with it, and we conservatives don’t want that kind of wimpy sap running the country anyway (we already have one, and had one before you won in 2016). Let somebody else take care of 2020 and you take care of 2024.

Mr. Trump, please remember that we are all interested in the future because that is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives.

But, I fear 2020 is too deep inside Mr. Trump’s blood. And that is not optimum for winning the next election.

We live in a 40-40-20 country, election-wise. In any presidential election, 40% of the country is automatically going to vote Democrat, and 40% will vote Republican, regardless of who the candidates are. That makes the 20% in the middle the crucial element. Whoever can obtain the majority of those votes will be the victor. Mr. Trump, or Mr. DeSantis, or whoever the Republican nominee is will be wasting his/her time trying to win the 40% of Democrats. They inherently hate any Republican and will not vote for one, even a Bush, Cheney, Romney, Hogan, Christie or any other RINO who tries to suck up to them. Candidates like that will do only one thing: lose the 40% Republican vote. Such voters won’t vote Democrat, they will just stay home and not vote at all.

I do believe Republicans need to make greater efforts to attract minority voters, which is one reason I suggested Trump go to Philadelphia, Harlem, Detroit, etc. and try to woo blacks and other minorities. No Republican is going to get a majority of those voters any time soon, but making inroads could be enough to gain victory, especially if a wise message is presented to the 20% in the middle. Mr. Trump is alienating too many of both of those groups (and not a few Republicans). He has to change that in 2024 to win.

Some recent polls, though not all, indicate Mr. Trump is indeed bleeding support in his own party. He can win those people back, but he must make certain amendments if he wishes to do so, much less win the presidency. The status quo is insufficient, Mr. Trump. Demonstrate to us that you know what year it is.

The question is, can Trump do that? Maybe right after Joe Biden’s IQ hits 10.