In the December 2022 Georgia Senate runoff election, Donald Trump caused Republicans to lose their third successive Senate race in Georgia. Trump chose a flawed candidate, Herschel Walker, because he had played for Trump’s United States Football League and was a contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice.”
After the 2020 election, Georgia had its two Senate seats in a runoff election that would decide the balance of power in the US Senate. Trump held rallies in Georgia before the runoff election, attacking the popular Republican governor and secretary of state, who he blamed for his loss, and told his supporters not to vote. Republicans lost both seats. Due to Trump, Georgia now has the two most radically left-wing senators in the entire Senate.
In November 2020, America had a trust-challenged election. There were justified concerns about constitutional violations in changing state voting laws just before Election Day, documented accounts of significant computer glitches, inexplicable late arrivals of ballot stockpiles, systemic efforts to prevent transparency, etc. Democrat activists spent much of 2019 and 2020 seeking to overturn constitutionally mandated voting laws of state legislatures. They succeeded in key states to transform American elections radically, through unsecured early voting and unsolicited mail-in voting with allowances for troves of ballots to arrive well after polls close on Election Day.
Trump wrongly encouraged January 6 demonstrations at the Capitol on his “stolen” election, while missing the essence of the 2020 election that was lost far earlier in the spring, through Democrats’ altering voting laws by means that undermined the constitutional authority of state legislatures.
The Biden family was horrendously crooked; deeply involved in money-making quid pro quo schemes with China and a corrupt Ukrainian government-controlled company. Trump’s Justice Department did not go after then-candidate Biden, much less send troops to raid his home, or otherwise harass a potential rival to his reelection.
Nevertheless, once Trump’s loss was certified, he should have accepted it, instead of demanding that Republican candidates must fixate on his “stolen” election. The 2022 midterm election became the first national election in which a former president attempted to make an election a referendum on his own loss.
In the 2022 midterms, Trump should have stayed out of picking candidates and helped all Republican candidates, including those who opposed him; used his rallies to advance positive “Making America Great Again” solutions, rather than recitations of his own past grievances; and avoided trashing rivals that nonetheless advanced Trumpism. Republicans could have won an overwhelming victory, if they had campaigned on Joseph Biden’s open border and hyperinflation, and the crime wave Biden’s policies unleashed.
President Biden’s two years have been a total disaster.
Crime is out of control. Biden destroyed a secure border and terminated Trump’s energy self-sufficiency. The US is now suffering from inflation rates not seen since Jimmy Carter’s administration in the 1970s.
Shortages of essential consumer items are becoming a part of normal life in America. Prices of commodities, including fertilizers, are skyrocketing; food inflation and food shortages could soon follow.
Within months of President Donald Trump coming into office, he promised complete independence from foreign sources of oil. From 2017 to 2021, the Trump administration pumped lots of oil and sustained America’s energy independence. In November 2019, the US became a net exporter of all oil products, including crude oil, and subsequently became the world’s largest producer of crude oil.. The world price of oil crashed, to the detriment of Russia. And Vladimir Putin did not invade his neighbors.
Whereas, when Biden became President, he immediately started threatening the US oil and gas industry with doom, canceling pipelines, stopping all new federal oil and gas leases, disallowing oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, pressuring lending agencies not to aid frackers, etc. Biden drastically slashed US oil production, and begged Putin to pump more of his “dirty” oil to help America.
Biden promised to unite the country, and then smeared half the voting population as “un-American” and “semi-fascist.”
Trump was prescient in warning about the serial corruption of Joseph Biden’s family syndicate. Hunter Biden’s laptop has been found authentic. The Biden family was horrendously crooked; deeply involved in money-making quid pro quo schemes with China and a corrupt Ukrainian government-controlled company.
Trump’s Justice Department did not go after then-candidate Biden, much less send troops to raid his home, or otherwise harass a potential rival to his reelection.
Trump did not take “nuclear codes” to his mansion. He did not plan on hawking his presidential papers for profit. Moreover, disputed presidential papers does not warrant Biden’s sending armed FBI troops to invade the home of his political opponent. Historically, lawyers handle disputed presidential papers, and not jackbooted troops.
Nevertheless, for the good of the country, Trump should be magnanimous. He should be offering detailed correctives for Biden’s disastrous record.
Trump’s record was exemplary.
He destroyed the 30-year crooked Clinton quid pro quo machine; ending Hillary Clinton’s toxic political career that was characterized by the despicable Uranium One sale, the foreign shake-down contributions to the Clinton Foundation, her destruction of subpoenaed emails and devices, and her flagrant violation of State Department rules of communications.
Hillary Clinton’s collapse in 2016 was so comprehensive that it utterly crushed her—that she funded a foreign ex-spy to destroy her political opponent, she denied the very legitimacy of the election she lost, she joined the Resistance to the lawful government, then she urged Biden not to accept the 2020 verdict should he lose.
Trump demanded toughness with China, attacked illegal immigration, addressed the crisis of the de-industrialized American interior, and embraced Republican policies of low-taxes, small-government, deregulation, traditional values. His appointment of originalist justices has saved the Supreme Court and lower federal courts for a generation. Additionally, he adopted a foreign policy favoring America’s allies.
The Trump administration was the most pro-Israel US administration in history. President Trump repeatedly praised Israel and referred to Israel as America’s greatest ally. He endorsed Israel’s position on defensible borders and stated that he had no objection to construction in the major settlement blocs and in Jerusalem. He called on the Palestinian Arabs to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and stated that the only way to peace is by direct negotiations between both parties. He repudiated Obama’s criticism of Israel for failing to make progress in peace talks, and Obama’s application of moral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. He terminated the Obama-orchestrated Iran nuclear deal, the treaty of catastrophe, for violations by the Iranian terrorist regime.
In 2018, President Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which he described as the “eternal capital of the Jewish people”. In March 2019, he officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
Prior to the Chinese virus, Trump’s term was characterized by robust growth, energy independence, low inflation, low unemployment, historic high labor force participation rates of blacks and Hispanics, a rebuilding of the U.S. military, eventual curbing of illegal immigration, the Abraham Accords, getting NATO to spend far more on defense, etc.
Much of Trump’s crudity has been retaliatory rather than preemptory. In his counter assault against vicious Deep State operatives, corrupt media, and crazed Establishment elites, Trump exposed and discredited them all.
Before Trump established a record to oppose, leading left-wing denialists like Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Jimmy Carter had pronounced the elected president illegitimate. In the first year of his presidency, Democrat House members filed articles of impeachment. His highly partisan impeachments remain a stain on democracy. 11 days after his inauguration, Foreign Policy printed an essay calling for his removal through either impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or a military coup.
Many Democrats were openly wishing for his assassination by explosion, decapitation, stabbing, incineration, hanging, or shooting. Biden on three occasions bragged of his desire to physically beat him up. Trump’s National Security designate, General Michael Flynn, was framed by the efforts of the FBI and remnants of the Obama Justice Department through an ambush interrogation.
The obsessed FBI disgraced itself through falsifying writs, losing subpoenaed records, and leaking to an acolyte press. FBI directors, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, disgraced themselves by either lying under oath or feigning amnesia. Robert Mueller and Christopher Wray, showed Americans that Comey and McCabe were indicative of deeper FBI pathologies. Mueller proved non compos mentis or untruthful in his final testimony before Congress. His lieutenant, Andrew Weissmann, confirmed allegations that he was a partisan out to get Trump.
Trump’s political future now hinges on his ability to forget all that, move ahead, unite his party, win back independents, and advance a concrete agenda for America. Trump should speak of his plans for a second term, contrast his own past record with the Biden catastrophe.
With Trump, voters got real achievement with coarseness; with Biden, utter failure with near senility.
It was unhelpful for Trump to attack the Republican governor of Trump’s own Florida, Ron DeSantis, that he called “DeSanctimonious”.
DeSantis is an effective proponent of Trumpism and has emerged a dominant force in conservative politics. He won Florida in a landslide and helped all down-ticket statewide candidates to win handily, which has turned Florida into a reliably Republican state.
Furthermore, Trump should not have celebrated the loss of Republican candidates, including senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea of Colorado, for spurning Trump’s support.
Trump should now focus on winning back independent, swing voters on assurances that they could get more MAGA successes, but without the insults and petty quarrels. And he should fixate on assuring conservatives that this time around he will fulfill his signature pledge to build the wall on the southern border, and won’t bring into his administration left-wing detractors, including his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, who played no role in getting him elected in 2020 but hampered his administration’s conservative policies.
If he continues to abandon Trumpism, Republicans should bid President Trump farewell.
Dr. Sheyin-Stevens is a Registered Patent Attorney based in Florida, USA. He earned his Doctorate in Law from the University of Miami.