<....But while people get into often-incomprehensible arguments over the finer points of defining "genocide" and "free speech," what is getting lost is the most important issue: Republicans are a bunch of lying hypocrites. It's this message the Satanic Temple is trying to remind us all of with their holiday display. The MAGA right has been wailing for years about the alleged threats to free speech from hazily defined social pressures like "wokeness" and "cancel culture," but when it comes to opinions they don't like, they don't hesitate to call for the blunt force of censorship.

As many people pointed out, Republicans have defended genocidal and violent rhetoric for years now under the guise of "free speech." Trump's unsubtle calls for violence against his perceived enemies have led to an attempted murder of the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, R.-Calif., threats against government employees and even private citizens, and, of course, the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Dehumanizing rhetoric against Black Lives Matter protesters and "great replacement" theory have led to mass murder, shootings, and conservatives crashing cars into protests. But when liberals call for social media companies to curb the ugly rhetoric using their legal powers to self-regulate, a chorus of right wing whining about "cancel culture" erupts. We do not need to litigate how real the threat of campus anti-semitism is, in order to see how Republians [sic] use tensions over hate speech and the First Amendment to advance their "free speech for me, but not for thee" agenda

The Satanic altar at Iowa's state capitol showcases the same GOP bad faith, but at least with some levity. As atheists and other religious minorities have long argued, the reason Republicans want nativity scenes and other such religious symbols up on government grounds is obvious: To signal that the U.S. is a Christian nation, not a secular one. But Republicans can't admit that out loud, so instead they play word games with concepts like "free speech" and "freedom of religion."

The reaction to the Satanic altar in Iowa shows the emptiness of GOP rhetoric about "free speech." State Rep. Brad Sherman is on the warpath, insisting it's "a tortured and twisted interpretation of law that affords Satan, who is universally understood to be the enemy of God, religious expression equal to God in an institution of government that depends upon God for continued blessings."

To be fair, other Republican leaders in the state understand the law and that if they want to keep using government property for Christian proselytizing, they have to tolerate the presence of other religious expression, including that which is Satanic. But their MAGA-drunk constituents clearly do not agree. When state Rep. Jon Dunwell released a statement explaining that the state must "either allow all displays or none," and advising the "primary response required is prayer" instead of censorship, he was raked over the coals by his fellow Republicans in mentions.

"To give quarter to the enemies of God is pathetic and contemptible," complained one woman. "God placed you in a position of authority for such a time as this," griped a man. Others quoted Bible verses at him that appear to call for literal murder of unbelievers or insisted that a true Christian believes the Bible trumps the constitution. Same thing happened across social media. Wherever the story about the Satanic altar appeared, the comments are completely dominated by Republican voters wailing about how the government needs to censor this, that the purpose of government is to uphold Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers supposedly agreed with them.

Some are explicitly using this to call for Christian nationalism:

This kind of thing is why it's so gross to see Republicans cynically exploit fears of anti-semitism to promote their culture war narratives about "campus leftism" and "political correctness." The Satanic Temple's trolling exposes the bare truth, which is the GOP is rapidly becoming a Christian nationalist party full of people who want to find a way to use government power to marginalize and silence non-Christians, or who are even those who are just critical of conservative Christianity. Right now, feigned concern for Jewish people gives cover to this "free speech for me, censorship for thee" mentality. But, one would be a fool to see all this outrage over the Satanic Temple's little joke and not conclude that these folks aren't going to be satisfied with only kicking out Satanists. This is about limiting who gets rights to free speech and religious liberty to conservative Christians.>

<[Event "57th New England Open"] [Site "USA"]
[Date "1997.??.??"]
[EventDate "1997"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Leahy, Kerry"]
[Black "Sharp, Dale Eugene"]
[ECO "B38"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "Middletown Championship"] [Site "Middletown Conn"]
[Date "1999.04.17"]
[EventDate "1999"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Leahy, Kerry"]
[Black "Garcia, Martin"]
[ECO "E91"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "57th New England Open"] [Site "?"]
[Date "1997.??.??"]
[EventDate "1997"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Yedidia, Jonathan"]
[Black "Leahy, Kerry"]
[ECO "D48"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<Why hasn't this foul attack been removed?

Why are editors allowed to treat members this way?>

Kenneth Rogoff

<Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf recently took to X to mourn the “catastrophic” decline in U.S. life expectancy.

But his post, which hit on smoking, diet, chronic illness and health care, ignored the obvious: People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent.

Life insurers have been consistently sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, “excess,” deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019. That exceeds America’s combined losses from every war since Vietnam. Congress should urgently work with insurance experts to investigate this troubling trend.

With the worst of COVID behind us, annual deaths for all causes should be back to pre-pandemic levels — or even lower because of the loss of so many sick and infirm Americans. Instead, the death toll remains “alarming,” “disturbing,” and deserving of “urgent attention,” according to insurance industry articles.

Actuarial reports — used by insurers to inform decisions — show deaths occurring disproportionately among young working-age people. Nonetheless, America’s chief health manager, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opted in September to archive its excess deaths webpage with a note stating, “these datasets will no longer be updated.”

Money, of course, is a motivating issue for insurers. In 2020, death claims took their biggest one-year leap since the 1918 influenza scourge, jumping 15.4 percent to $90 billion in payouts. After hitting $100 billion in 2021, claims slowed in 2022, but are still above 2019. Indemnity experts are urging the adoption of an early-warning program to detect looming health problems among people with life insurance and keep them alive.

Unlike in the pandemic’s early phase, these deaths are not primarily among the old. For people 65 and over, deaths in the second quarter of 2023 were 6 percent below the pre-pandemic norm, according to a new report from the Society of Actuaries. Mortality was 26 percent higher among insured 35-to-44-year-olds, and 19 percent higher for 25-to-34-year-olds, continuing a death spike that peaked in the third quarter of 2021 at a staggering 101 percent and 79 percent above normal, respectively....>

<....“COVID-19 claims do not fully explain the increase in incurred claim incidence,” the Society said. COVID-19 deaths dropped 84 percent from the first three quarters of 2021 to the same period in 2023.

To some extent, we know what is killing the young, with an actuarial analysis of government data showing mortality increases in liver, kidney and cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes. Drug overdoses also soared nationwide, but not primarily in the young working class. Therein lies the most pressing question for insurers, epidemiologists and health agency officials. Why is the traditionally healthiest sector of our society — young, employed, insured workers — dying at such rates? Public health officials aggressively oversaw the pandemic response, for better or worse. Why aren’t they looking into this?

In the United Kingdom, where post-pandemic excess deaths in similar demographics also persist, a government-funded independent inquiry is underway. “With each passing week of the COVID inquiry,” the BBC reported recently, “it is clear there were deep flaws in the way decisions were made and information provided during the pandemic.”

The United States needs such an examination of the measures taken to fight the pandemic. This probe — by a high-level, unbiased commission — should focus on what worked and what did not.

Lockdowns limited access to education, social interaction and healthcare with documented harm to childhood development, mental health and the economy. Treatment protocols dictated how doctors should deliver COVID care — primarily in hospitals and with expensive medicines — and limited early access to generic drugs that might have helped.

Vaccines were given to more than 270 million people, among them babies, pregnant women and workers under employer mandates. The therapeutic’s “warp speed,” emergency use authorization must be part of any post-pandemic analysis, in light of more than 1 million reports of possible harm to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System and a new Yale University study validating a chronic post-vaccination syndrome.

Finally, government officials who sanctioned unprecedented censorship of dissent — enforcing pandemic measures through media pressure — must be called to account.

Actuaries and industry analysts predict excess deaths will continue among people with life insurance through 2030 and are “anticipated to be highest at younger ages.” This prediction defies normal expectations of mortality for a robust population of people with life insurance. Now consider how other disability-afflicted, poorly insured Americans may fare.

To ensure future generations are protected and to be ready for the possibility of another pandemic, Congress needs to assess what worked and what did not.>

<When the full history of the Trump era is written, one of the defining themes will be the erosion of respect for the rule of law. Faced with the continued domination of their party by a man who at the very least flouts the law and attributes any legal scrutiny of himself to nefarious actors, Republicans have gradually embraced a strategy of backstopping his claims. That most often involves baseless and speculative conspiracy theories about the political “weaponization” of the government and legal system.

Republicans who initially balked at Donald Trump’s claims that the Russia investigation was a “witch hunt” have now fed the idea that Trump’s indictments are indeed part of one. They’ve gone from repudiating Jan. 6 rioters to promoting the idea that they were legitimate protesters and even being politically targeted by the Justice Department. They’ve gone after virtually every major law enforcement figure — even Republican ones such as Robert S. Mueller III, the last two FBI directors and U.S. Attorney David Weiss — who act in ways that could be politically adverse.

But rarely has this contagious disrespect for the rule of law been as conspicuous as it is right now with Rudy Giuliani.

Judge chides Giuliani for potentially defaming Ga. poll workers — again

The former New York mayor and Trump lawyer appears to be facing financial ruin thanks to his false claims that a pair of Georgia election workers helped rig the 2020 election. Giuliani has already been found liable in civil court for defaming the women, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, with a trial beginning this week to determine how much he will be forced to pay them.

As the matter was progressing toward trial, Giuliani appeared resigned to his fate. In an effort to beg off his obligations to provide evidence in the case, he signed a statement indicating he would no longer contest that his statements were false and defamatory.

The judge later ruled that they were false and defamatory. But now Giuliani is pulling a remarkable public about-face. In an interview outside the courthouse on Monday night, Giuliani claimed that “everything I said about them” — the two women — “is true.”

“Of course I don’t regret it,” Giuliani said. “I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes.”

When it was pointed out that there remains no proof of that, Giuliani responded, “You’re damn right there is. Stay tuned.”

The time for making this argument, of course, passed long ago. That Giuliani’s statements were false and defamatory has been decided. Giuliani proactively declined to try to argue that in court.

The judge in the case issued a swift rebuke on Tuesday morning, saying Giuliani’s statement’s might support a new defamation claim and questioning whether Giuliani would follow court orders when testifying. Giuliani’s lawyer struggled to account for his client’s actions, suggesting his advanced age was a factor....>

<....Whatever the case, it’s clear Giuliani would very much like the public to believe that he was actually right without going to the trouble of actually proving it. A man who rose to political prominence as a swashbuckling prosecutor is brazenly flouting the legal process.

This is very much the story of the “big lie.” Its promoters, including Trump and Giuliani, routinely presented wild stolen-election claims that were often instantly debunked, as was the case with the claims about Georgia election workers. Then, when faced with legal scrutiny of those claims, they have often backed off them rather than present any real evidence. This includes many Trump lawyers — not just Giuliani, but also Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis.

But regularly, they’ve pitched this not as recognition that their claims were false, but rather a necessary response to legal pressure. Ellis cut a deal in Colorado to avoid disbarment in which she admitted to 10 specific misrepresentations, but she quickly blamed “political lawfare to intimidate lawyers.” Powell declined to back up her claims in her own legal proceedings and even pleaded guilty in the Georgia election-subversion case in which Trump and Giuliani are also indicted. But she has continued to promote stolen-election claims, and her organization’s newsletter has fed the idea that her guilty plea was “extorted.”

The sum total of all of it is that people who are inclined to subscribe to the “big lie” that the election was stolen are being invited to believe that the utter legal repudiation of that argument is immaterial. That these people haven’t proved their false and baseless claims three years later and are paying the price is not due to those claims’ falsity and baselessness, but rather it’s a result of the nefarious actors targeting those who would dare to question their efforts to overturn the election.

It should be no surprise, then, that so many Americans continue to falsely believe the election was stolen — as many as 7 in 10 Republicans and 4 in 10 Americans overall. As many as half of them concede there’s no solid evidence of this, but they’ve gone on believing it all the same.

Nor should it be any surprise that 84 percent of Trump supporters say they would still vote for him even as a felon.

The legal remedies against an ugly effort to thwart American democracy have been exercised in significant ways. But they’ve done little to reduce the fever. That’s not just thanks to those who remain truly committed to the political advantages of the “big lie” like Giuliani and Trump, but also to those who have created the permission structure for their supporters to believe it’s all part of a grand legal conspiracy.

It looks increasingly as though the casualties of the “big lie” could include not just those who bet their careers and livelihoods on it, but also regard for the rule of law holding them to account.>

<With the Supreme Court poised to decide whether former President Donald Trump has presidential immunity from being prosecuted in the 2020 election interference case, calls are growing for Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was involved in the plot to overturn the election in the first place, to recuse himself from the case.

But don't hold your breath on that, legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC's Joy Reid on Tuesday.

"Let's talk about this Supreme Court case," said Reid. "Which is going to be in some ways hell for these justices because it puts them right back in the center of politics. Either way, there's going to be a lot of people mad about what they decide. Seven Democrats are now saying that Clarence Thomas specifically ought to recuse himself. That seems logical given his wife was one of the insurrectionists that was part of the plot. Chances he does it?"

"No. Absolutely no," said Rubin. "Clarence Thomas is unrepentant about his own ethical issues and problems."

"I don't believe that Clarence Thomas believes he has any trouble with respect to his wife," Rubin continued. "They believe that they have some separation here that the rest of us can't see."

"Yeah, they definitely believe they're above to law, but he's not above taking a few pricey gifts," interjected Reid. "He loves that.">

Such tenacity of purpose deserves a better fate.

<The headline in the Washington Post said what many critics of Donald Trump are warning us about: “Take Trump at his word when he threatens to punish his enemies.”

What followed was a laundry list of all the scary, authoritarian things Trump said he would do if he is elected next year. Things like promising to sic the FBI and the rest of the Justice Department on his political rivals — retaliation for their supposed persecution of him.

So let’s see if we have this right. Ever since he rode down that escalator to announce his candidacy for president, Democrats, including many of their allies in the so-called mainstream media, have been telling us that we can’t believe anything he says; that he’s a liar; that we know he’s lying because his lips are moving.

But now that the polls are indicating that he just might win next year, we’re told that we should “take Trump at his word,” that all of a sudden Pinocchio has turned into the second coming of Honest Abe.

Which is it? Is he a compulsive liar or a man who should be taken at his word?

Donald Trump is a liar when calling him a liar helps Democrats and he’s a truth-teller when calling him that helps the Democrats. It’s not about honesty or dishonesty. It’s about politics.

As Lindsey Graham, the GOP senator from South Carolina put it, “The bottom line is this narrative that ‘You vote for Trump, you vote for a dictator’ is the only thing left because their policies are not working. They can’t say ‘Vote for Biden.’ It’s impossible to sell the Biden agenda so they’re trying to sell fear-mongering against Trump.”

For the record, I’m no fan of Donald Trump. I don’t think he has the kind of character we want in a president. I think he might like to do all the nasty things liberals say he wants to do. But while calling him a would-be dictator may be good, albeit smarmy, politics — the kind of thing that scares voters — it’s not going to happen, not with all the checks and balances the American system has in place.

If a President Trump tries to trash the Constitution, even the three justices he nominated to the Supreme Court wouldn’t go along. They’d almost certainly tell him that there are limits to his power, that he can’t do anything he wants just because he thinks he can. They’d remind him that he’s president of the United States, not some unelected oligarch who runs a corrupt republic.

Besides, as the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes at Unherd.com: “Relax. Trump is too old, too isolated, and too ADD to have a shot at dictatorship — and if he tried, the result would be comedy rather than tyranny.”

But you know who’s not laughing — the folks who want Joe Biden reelected next year. So Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager, tried to warn us, after a Fox town hall, that “Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s reelected and tonight said he will be a dictator on Day 1?” Then, the mandatory punchline: “Americans should believe him.”

Yes, the Biden campaign is telling us that “Americans should believe him” even though the Washington Post “Fact Checker” reports that “By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.” That’s something Democrats told us about over and over again — when it was convenient for them.

But no matter how many times Trump egged on his supporters to “lock her up,” as president he never put Hillary Clinton behind bars. No matter how many times he yelled fake news and wanted to throw journalists into jail, he didn’t do it. No matter how tight they say he was with a dictator like Vladimir Putin, those collusion stories Democrats, along with their media friends, peddled really were fake news....>

<....So now we have a theory that Democrats are calling Trump a dictator because — wait for it — they’re the real dictators. That’s the compelling case Allysia Finley makes in the Wall Street Journal: “President Biden and his supporters project their own authoritarian impulses onto Mr. Trump because they don’t want to come to terms with their own illiberalism. The examples in the Biden presidency are rife.”

She goes on to remind us that President Biden tried, with the stroke of a pen and not a single vote in Congress, to cancel half-a-trillion dollars in student debt. That his administration failed to enforce our immigration laws. That Biden’s people threatened social media companies with punishment, including antitrust lawsuits, if they didn’t censor speech that progressive Democrats didn’t like.

There’s more. A lot more. “Abuse executive power. Ignore the law,” Finley writes. “Run roughshod over individual liberties. Retaliate against political opponents. Mr. Biden and his allies have done exactly what they warn Mr. Trump will do if he returns to the White House. Unlike Mr. Biden, however, Mr. Trump would have to contend with a hostile media and federal bureaucracy that would be throwing pots, pans and candlesticks at him at every step.”

So she concludes, “What Mr. Trump and his opponents have most in common is their determination to blame others for their own failings.”

A final word: Donald Trump may talk about how he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascist and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” — but he won’t. Not in this country.

I wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump even if he ran unopposed. But the United States has survived a Great Depression, two World Wars, 9/11 — and we’ll survive four more years of Donald Trump if he’s reelected.

But if he’s wearing an orange jumpsuit and sitting in a prison cell, all bets are off.>

<Elise Stefanik has been accused by Kathy Manning of plagiarizing her letter condemning university presidents about their response to antisemitism on college campuses.

Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill all gave testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses last week following reported incidences of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate alike that have increased since the October 7 attack by Hamas against Israel. They were criticized for their response and Magill eventually resigned as president over accusations she appeared to evade a question on campus antisemitism.

Following their testimony, Manning, a North Carolina Democrat, originally worked with New York Republican Stefanik on a joint message denouncing the presidents, they both confirmed on X, formerly Twitter.

But Stefanik wanted to call for the presidents to resign and Manning disagreed, they said. Despite the disagreement, Manning published her letter before Stefanik published a letter using the same language as Manning's letter in the first few paragraphs, but ending with a call for the presidents to resign.

This sparked plagiarism accusations, with Manning writing on X: "Can anyone spot the difference between the first 3 paragraphs of these two letters...? One is my letter, and one is @RepStefanik plagiarizing my letter to try and get her 15 minutes of fame. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself."

Newsweek has contacted representatives for Stefanik and Manning by email to comment on this story.

Manning added she led the letter and shared it with Stefanik to make a "bipartisan effort" but said Stefanik's edits made it clear "she didn't care about protecting Jewish students."

"All she cared about was calling for the resignation of university presidents to score political points," she added.

The letters both begin: "On October 7th we witnessed Hamas terrorists perpetrate the deadliest attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. In the weeks since, there has been an explosion of antisemitic incidents in the United States and around the world. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has recorded 1,481 antisemitic incidents—292 of which occurred on college and university campuses—a nearly 300 percent increase relative to the same period last year."

Manning drew support from Democratic colleagues, with Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin accusing Stefanik of "shocking intellectual dishonesty and narcissistic preening."

But in response to Manning's tweet, Stefanik called the criticism "desperate and deranged" and accused Manning of attacking her because she "got much less support for her weaker letter."

She said she edited the letter "to strengthen the language" and Manning's office "went radio silent."

"Our offices then decided to go in different directions with two separate versions of the letter when Rep. Manning did not want to call for the firing of the presidents among other significant edits she refused to accept," she said. "This is something that happens everyday [sic] on Capitol Hill.">

<I voted for Donald Trump twice. I published several op-ed pieces defending him and his policies. I spoke in support of Trump on podcasts and before live audiences. I do not regret those decisions and I remain convinced that, given the alternatives (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden), supporting Trump in 2016 and 2020 was the right choice.

What Trump Did Right

I also think that Trump accomplished a remarkable number of good things for America. He placed three outstanding justices on the Supreme Court. He slashed taxes and cancelled thousands of government-imposed regulations, and these two actions spurred vigorous economic growth while bringing inflation down to just over 2% per year. He reduced the flow of illegal immigrants from 297,898 to 143.099 per year. (By way of comparison, under Biden the numbers are 2.76 million for 2022 and 3.2 million so far for 2023.) Trump built over 200 miles of effective border walls and would have built many more miles if construction had not been blocked repeatedly by liberal judges and by a Democratic Congress that refused to appropriate money for a wall.

In addition, President Trump negotiated the Abraham Accords, which established normal diplomatic relationships between Israel and four neighboring Arab countries and gave hope for continuing peace in the Middle East. And he moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I also note that Russia did not invade Ukraine and Hamas did not invade Israel while Trump was president – they were afraid of how he might respond.

With regard to energy policy, Trump gave approval to the Keystone pipeline, the Dakota access pipeline, and oil production from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, a region which could produce up to 20 percent of our petroleum needs. His administration also granted significantly more permits for mining of oil, gas, and coal from federal lands. The result was lower energy prices, a benefit to everyone. (The average price of gas in the United States was $2.42 per gallon in January, 2021, Trump's last month in office, compared to $3.74 today – a 54% increase under Biden.) At the end of Trump's term, the US was energy-independent and was on its way to becoming the world's leading exporter rather than a net importer of energy.

And the list goes on. Trump built a stronger US military, expanded educational freedom, defended freedom of conscience for artistic professionals, defeated ISIS, persuaded several European nations to increase their NATO funding, protected freedom of speech on college campuses, and instructed the Department of Education to protect boys' and girls' bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams.

Speaking as a professor who has taught theology and ethics for 46 years, I can say that all of these actions seem to me to be consistent with a Judeo-Christian world view as found in the Bible as a whole. And, as an evangelical Christian, I appreciate that Trump welcomed several evangelicals into cabinet posts and other positions of high influence in his administration. (Biden has none in his cabinet so far as I know.)

Democrats Oppose Trump's Accomplishments

<.....Why Trump should drop out now

Why then should Trump drop out of the current presidential race? Because he is a weaker candidate than in 2016. In fact, Republican pollster Frank Luntz recently called Trump the "weakest" Republican candidate for the general election. While Trump remains popular among conservative Republicans (and thus he is favored to win the GOP nomination), his support among independent voters is abysmal, and independents will decide the general election.

The latest Gallup poll showed a remarkable decline in party loyalty for both parties. 28% of Americans now consider themselves Republicans, 24% now consider themselves Democrats, and a whopping 46% say they are "Independents." A candidate will have to win a majority of Independents in order to win the election. And that is where Trump comes up short.

A New York Times/ Siena College poll of over 3,600 registered voters in six battleground states in October, 2023, found that 57% of respondents had an unfavorable view of President Biden, a highly unpopular president (41% were favorable). But 56%, almost an identical number, had an unfavorable view of Trump (42% were favorable). Voters don't like either of these candidates. And among voters who are "undecided and persuadable," only 20% think it would be good for the country if Trump became president again. And 54% believe that Trump has committed serious federal crimes. If those numbers are anywhere near the actual situation, it will be impossible for Trump to win the general election.

Therefore if Trump collects a majority of delegates in the early Republican primaries and thereby secures the GOP nomination, Republicans would be facing a huge risk that Democrats will find some way to dump Biden and then quickly select a fresh, younger candidate (like California governor Gavin Newsom) and win the general election in a landslide.

Seven negative factors that diminish Trump's support

Here are seven factors that have driven away large numbers of independent voters since the 2020 election:

(1) Refusing to admit that he lost the 2020 election. I realize that many Trump supporters will object, "But the Democrats cheated!" Okay, I have read enough reports about people inserting fraudulent ballots into the voting process that I will agree that some Democrats in some precincts somehow produced a dishonestly high vote count for Joe Biden. But there are more than 174,000 voting precincts in the United States, and there is now no way to know how many illegitimate votes Biden accumulated. There is also no way to prove that Democrats in any single state fabricated anywhere near enough votes to swing that state's electoral votes to Biden instead of Trump.

After the 2020 election, Republican lawyers filed more than 60 lawsuits attempting to prove that the electoral votes in some states where Biden won by a narrow margin should instead be awarded to Trump. But in every case, judges ruled that the Republican lawyers had not produced enough evidence even to bring the case to trial, which means there was nowhere near enough evidence to overturn the election in any single state.

The overall popular vote was Biden 81,268,773 and Trump 74,216,728. Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million. Biden had 51.3% of the popular vote and Trump had 46.8%. So, in terms of the popular vote, the election was not even close. Are we to believe that Democrats cast 7,000,000 illegitimate votes without getting caught? (Yes, I realize that electoral votes decide the presidency, not the overall popular vote, but the popular vote is still a general perspective on the mood of the nation. In fact, Biden won 57% of the electoral votes, with 306 against 232 for Trump.)

Many faithful Trump supporters will still believe that the election was "stolen," and they are entitled to their own beliefs. But I'm concerned that endlessly repeating this claim quickly turns off many independent voters. What they see is a sore loser who refused even to attend President Biden's inauguration, a long tradition that has served as a model for the rest of the world of the peaceful transfer of power within the world's most powerful nation.....>

<.....(2) Recklessly refusing to call off the protesters when the demonstration turned violent on January 6: A strong rebuke from Trump in public and on Twitter, warning the protesters against forcefully entering the capitol, would have avoided the horrible spectacle of American citizens joining an unruly mob that was trying to stop Congress from functioning according to the law and certifying the results of the election.

Here is the relevant timeline: Some protesters pushed aside fencing and overwhelmed police in one section of the capital perimeter at 12:53 PM, another barricade was breached by a large group at 12:57 PM, and other protesters overran three layers of barricades and forced some capitol police to retreat to the capitol steps at 1:03 PM. At 1:50 PM, DC Metropolitan police Cmdr. Robert Glover declared a riot. The first protesters entered into the capitol building at 2:12 PM. Trump should have called off what was becoming an unruly mob at 12:53 PM, but it was not until 2:38 PM that Trump finally Tweeted, "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" Even then he did not ask them to leave the building.

Trump was at that time still president of the United States (Biden's inauguration was not until January 20), and the center of American government was under attack by an unruly mob, and the capitol police were being overwhelmed, and the President of the United States, who could have stopped it, did nothing for more than 1 ½ hours. Many independents will ask, shall we elect this man president again?

(3) Losing Republican control of the U.S. Senate by making rash endorsements of weak Republican candidates in several states: Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania all had incumbent Democrat senators who could have been soundly defeated by a reasonably competent Republican candidate in 2022, but Trump foolishly endorsed Blake Masters in Arizona (who had never held any elective office), Herschel Walker in Georgia (whose credibility was repeatedly challenged), and political newcomer Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.

All three states had stronger candidates who would have won the election and would have given Republicans a 53-47 majority in the Senate, but Trump failed to endorse the strong candidates, choosing instead people who agreed with his claim that the election was stolen. This is another reason why there would not be much enthusiasm for Trump candidacy among conservative-leaning independents (and also among many lifelong Republicans).

(4) Legal problems: The multiple active lawsuits against President Trump (91 felony counts) constitute a huge risk, because they could essentially keep him from actively campaigning during the entire election season of 2024. In addition, the legal discovery process holds the potential of some insiders anonymously leaking a drip-drip-drip of embarrassing and damaging new information about Trump after he wins the Republican nomination and it is too late for Republicans to replace him with a non-scandal plagued candidate. The Democrats could win in a landslide.

Or what if Trump wins the nomination and then is convicted of a felony before the November general election? Fiercely loyal Republicans would still back him but for a large number of moderate voters this would be the final straw, and they would not vote for Trump.

My own view (others may differ) is that the legal charges against Trump do not stem from impartial attempts to pursue equal justice under the law but instead stem from the horrible misuse of prosecutorial authority by Trump-haters who first selected their victim (Donald Trump) and then searched high and low for some crime they could charge him with committing. I think that the charges against Trump are a malicious misuse of the courts as weapons against political opponents. But the trials will go on, and they must be taken into account.

Already 49% of Americans believe Trump has done something illegal and an additional 26% believe he has done something unethical but not illegal (according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll). That makes 55% of voters who have a reason (in their own minds) to vote against Trump because of his legal problems alone.

(5) Age: Trump was born on June 14, 1946, which makes him 77 years old. When compared to President Biden, who at age 81 is obviously frail and out of touch, Trump seems healthy and strong. But compared to other possible Democrat candidates such as Gavin Newsom (age 56), Michelle Obama (age 59), or Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (age 50), Trump's age becomes a significant risk factor. Trump is now eight years older than when he began his successful campaign in 2015 and at age 77 there is always the risk of an unexpected health problem in the middle of a demanding campaign.....>

<.....(6) Concerns about Trump's character: Especially among voters with a strong religious commitment (such as hundreds of my friends who are evangelical Christians), there remains a cloud of concern about Trump's deepest moral convictions, especially about relationships with women (people remember the Access Hollywood tapes), and also about insufficient care for factual accuracy in what he says, and about his practice of insulting former political allies who now disagree with him. This concern about character gave rise to many thousands of never-Trump Republicans who did not vote for either Trump or Clinton/ Biden in 2016 or 2020.

This constitutes a serious problem for Trump, because in order to win the general election in such an evenly divided nation, Trump would need to pick up the votes of thousands of these never-Trump conservatives. But that is just not happening. Not one of my never-Trump friends has said to me, "At last I see the light – I've decided to vote for Trump this time." Moreover, I see no evidence of that happening anywhere in the nation.

(7) Trump fatigue: Here I speak personally as a lifelong Republican, one who will support any Republican candidate because the policies supported by Republicans are more consistent with the overall teachings of the Bible regarding governments and laws than the policies of the Democrats, in my opinion.

Quite honestly, the thought of having to defend Trump again and again for another year produces in me a great feeling of weariness. Judging from numerous personal conversations, I think millions of other Republicans feel the same way. We would vote for Trump, but the needed enthusiasm and willingness to spend volunteer hours and to contribute money are simply not there.

But what about recent polls?

What about the polls that show Trump ahead of Biden? To me, they mean nothing because I don't believe for a minute that the leadership of the Democrat Party will allow such an unpopular president as Biden to be their 2024 presidential candidate. I think the Democratic leaders are wrong about many policy convictions, but I don't think they are politically stupid. They are politically shrewd, and their eventual candidate will be much younger and much more popular.

The mainstream liberal press continues to run stories about Trump's huge lead among Republican voters and about polls showing that Trump could beat Biden, but I think that is because they recognize Trump's weakness among the general public. Therefore they want Trump as the Republican candidate, knowing that he would lose the general election. They will mostly hold off on running negative stories about Trump until after he wins the GOP nomination, and then the avalanche will start.

No successful sports team continues to talk about how they can beat their weakest rival, but that is similar to what Republicans are doing if they continue to emphasize Trump's lead over Biden in recent polls. It means nothing against stronger Democrat opponents.

Will the election be about Trump or about issues and policies?

If Donald Trump becomes the Republican candidate, the election will focus more on Trump than on the policies of the two parties. We will have endless media coverage of Trump's trial, Trump's lawyers, Trump's friends and enemies, Trump's health, Trump's conduct on January 6 -- and endless media delight in asking speculative questions such as: Could Trump actually go to jail? How could the Secret Service protect Trump in jail? How could Trump meet foreign leaders in his jail cell? Could Trump pardon himself? and so forth. Because he is such a forceful personality, and because he is so controversial, and because any story about him attracts viewers and readers, all of the 2024 election season will be Trump, Trump, Trump stories all year long. Is this really what we want as a nation?

But if Trump drops out and another Republican is nominated, the election will be much more about big issues facing the nation. The election will focus on inflation, taxes, securing the border, crime, support for police, school choice, Israel, Ukraine, our military preparedness, race relations, abortion, climate change, the role of judges, the Supreme Court, the national debt, etc.

And if the campaign is about issues, Republicans will likely win the presidency because the mood of the nation has shifted to much stronger support for Republican policies (for example, smaller government, lower taxes, a secure border, a stronger military, more availability of school choice, judges who interpret but do not create laws, etc.) than for the policies of the Democrats....>

<.....Trump's legacy: Plan A or Plan B?

Donald Trump now faces a difficult choice.

Plan A is that Trump stays in the race and wins the Republican nomination but loses the general election. His legacy then will be that he made a good start in 2017-2021, but after that he and the candidates he supported led the Republicans to defeat in 2020, 2022, and 2024, and all his reforms were lost.

Plan B is that Trump drops out of the race and a younger Republican wins the nomination and the general election. This new president will support policies similar to those that President Trump so effectively advocated. Therefore, Trump's legacy will be secured. He will be remembered as a remarkable change agent who began to free us from the domination of a federal government that had become far too big and far too powerful.

If Trump follows Plan B, he will still be remembered as a president who brought millions of working class Americans into the Republican fold, including millions of Black and Hispanic voters. He will also be remembered as a president who rebuilt our military, restored the dominance of originalism in our courts, cut taxes, strengthened the economy, showed us how to effectively secure the border, brought new hope for genuine peace in the Middle East, made us the dominant source of world energy, deterred aggression by Rusia and China, defeated ISIS, and did many other good things.

And if he drops out now, Trump will also be remembered as the ex-president who with commendable humility put the good of the country ahead of his own personal ambition and withdrew from the race so that a more electable Republican could become president and could spend the next eight years solidifying the policies that Trump began in 2017-2021.

Yes, dropping out would require a dose of humility, a quality not common among politicians. But humility is frequently recommended in the Bible: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6; also1 Peter 5:5).

A pardon for Trump

Finally, I hope that the new Republican president on January 20, 2025, will issue a wide-ranging pardon to Trump, thus rebuking the Democrats' shameful attempts to use the Department of Justice as a political weapon to persecute members of the other party. This is a practice followed in corrupt third world nations, but it is a practice unworthy of this great nation, and no honorable president or political party should tolerate its existence in the United States of America.>

<Over the past 24 hours, with a vote to formalize the impeachment investigation into President Biden looming in the House, Republican lawmakers have been pressed to identify what, exactly, they think Biden did. After all, a lot of Republicans — including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) — have publicly rejected the idea that evidence implicating Biden in wrongdoing exists.

So what is their much-hyped evidence pointing at? Asked that question, lawmakers’ answers varied dramatically, which is what happens when you ask a novice fisherman what he hopes to catch.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), for example, told CNN that “there’s plenty of proof” of Biden wrongdoing, presumably involving the crimes Donalds identified during a speech from the House floor: “bribery, co-conspirator to [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violations — and we can go on and on.” He did not go on and on. Asked by Fox News’s Sean Hannity whether Republicans were looking at the investigation as “a bribery scandal, a money laundering scandal and an influence-peddling scandal” involving the president, the three Republicans running the impeachment inquiry offered different answers. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.) said it could be “a multitude of numerous items.” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said “bribery,” “abuse of power” and “obstruction of justice” were what they were looking at.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) offered Hannity a briefer answer: Yes, that’s what they were investigating. All of that. At once. In obvious hopes that something incriminating might shake loose.

On Tuesday morning, he appeared on Fox Business to speak with Maria Bartiromo, one of the primary boosters of this Republican effort.

“We’ve talked about the potential of money laundering and bribery,” Bartiromo said. “What can you tell us about the evidence?”

Comer’s response was a very useful distillation of the purported evidence — and a good demonstration of why he and his allies are scrambling to figure out how to summarize their argument.

Here’s what he said — and how it is misleading or dishonest.

“We’ve got over $24 million that we know of — we think there’s more — $24 million that the Bidens have taken in.” This is untrue. In August, The Washington Post looked at the payments on which Comer’s committee has focused. (There has been no significant new revelation from Oversight since that point.) We found that, yes, millions of dollars were paid to Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his business partners — but that most of that money went to people other than Hunter Biden, James Biden (the president’s brother) or any other member of the Biden family.

Our assessment “works out to be about $23 million in total payments from foreign sources,” we wrote at the time. “Of that, nearly $7.5 million can be fairly attributed as going to ‘Bidens,’ but virtually all of it went to Hunter Biden.” None of it, we added, had been traced to Joe Biden. Since that point, the Oversight Committee has invested a great deal of energy highlighting payments from James Biden to his brother and from Hunter Biden’s law firm to his father — in both cases, demonstrably in repayment of loans.

Notice, though, how this all nonetheless becomes “the Bidens,” shoving Joe Biden up against his son and brother in hopes that he’ll be stained by implication.

“They’ve run them through a series of LLCs that even the banks said serve no purposes. We call that a shell company. [A] shell company is a company that doesn’t produce a good or service or has any assets or anything like that.” In that August assessment, we also considered this issue of “shell companies,” noting that the term has a gauzy definition. But most of the corporate entities formed by Hunter Biden and his partners did have stated purposes. One, for example, was the aforementioned Biden law firm.

On Thursday morning, the Associated Press reported that Comer himself used a “shell company” for real estate purposes — something that some of the “shell companies” involved in his investigation also did. (Bartiromo asked him about it; Comer claimed that it was an example of the reporter’s “financial illiteracy.”)

“And then they laundered the money down to the Biden family members — 10 Biden family members — and we say ‘launder’ through the Suspicious Activity Reports that were filed with Treasury. Six different banks accused the Bidens of money laundering. That’s a serious crime, Maria.” It is true that money laundering is a serious crime. It is not demonstrably true that six banks accused “the Bidens” of money laundering.....>

<....Comer has for months pointed to Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) centered on “the Biden family,” which here again primarily means Hunter Biden. House Democrats note that many of the SARs include “erroneous or unfounded claims” and none focus on the president.

The Republican uses the word “launder” specifically because it sounds nefarious. “Shell companies laundering money” sounds worse than “Hunter Biden’s law firm paid one of his kids a couple hundred bucks.” Which describes one of those “10 family members”: A source with direct access to the bank records provided to Oversight tells The Post that one of the president’s grandchildren, then under 18, received $200 and $500 (several months apart) from Owasco PC, the LLC that was Hunter Biden’s law firm. In total, Hunter’s child received $9,000 in 10 payments from the firm over two years, according to the available records — most $500 or less. Why isn’t clear, but this does not seem like the traditional understanding of “money laundering.”

Other payments to family members include those loan repayments to Joe Biden and payments to Hallie Biden, Hunter’s former sister-in-law with whom he was “sharing expenses,” according to a statement made to NBC News earlier this year. That is not evidence of a serious crime.

“So we know they got tens of millions of dollars from bad people in bad countries. We don’t know what exactly they did.” Comer uses this argument a lot, too, in part because it differentiates Biden’s work (legal and consulting) from the more tangible work of the Trump family, which involved a lot more LLCs and a lot more foreign money. Devon Archer, once Hunter Biden’s business partner, offered testimony explaining that this is what Hunter Biden provided to clients. But it’s more useful for Comer to imply that it’s vaguer than it is — and that the people with whom Biden worked were uniformly “bad people.”

“We fear Joe Biden is compromised. We fear this is one reason that he’s soft on China. We fear this is one reason that he obviously fired the prosecutor who was investigating Hunter’s corrupt energy company in Ukraine when he was vice president.” We can set aside the “soft on China” thing as subjective. But Comer also makes two objective claims about Biden’s actions, the first of which is the one about Hunter Biden’s work for that energy company, Burisma.

Comer’s presentation is a mixture of falsehood and exaggeration. Joe Biden didn’t fire anybody: He was the face of the Obama administration’s effort to get Ukraine’s prosecutor general fired in 2015, an effort joined by other international actors. There’s no evidence that the prosecutor general was investigating the energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat and plenty of evidence that the prosecutor was, in fact, corrupt.

Archer, whose testimony is so often cited by Comer and his allies because he mentioned that Hunter Biden would at times put incoming calls from his father on speakerphone, testified that he was told that the prosecutor’s firing was bad for Burisma.

“We fear this is why he didn’t put sanctions on the Russian oligarch after she had given his family $3.5 million.” Archer had something to say about this, too.

Comer is referring to the former wife of the mayor of Moscow. In April, The Post looked at the assertion that Hunter Biden had been paid this money (“his family,” in Comer’s presentation) and found no evidence for it. Instead, we reported, it appeared that the money had gone to Archer.

In his testimony, that’s what Archer said.

The payment from Elena Baturina was “a total Rosemont Realty” venture, he said, referring to his own real estate corporation. He said that Hunter Biden met Baturina once, and that he was “on the advisory board for a minute” but that Hunter Biden “was not involved” in the deal. He was asked later whether Hunter Biden had raised any capital from Baturina and replied, “No.”

But here’s James Comer, four months later, suggesting not only that Hunter Biden did receive this money, but that it somehow influenced his father’s policy decisions. Because, at the end of the day, that’s what he and his colleagues want to convey. No evidence about Joe Biden’s unacceptable actions but, instead, that Joe Biden is somehow linked to a seedy universe of criminality — a link and a universe they’re still struggling to manifest.>

'We fear....'

You revel in it! Hahahahaha!

<Former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was back in court on Thursday for his ongoing case U.S. vs. Cohen, in which the ex-fixer argues that his case against former Attorney General Bill Barr, and the Trump government should be able to move forward.

Among the issues cited is that Cohen was told by the Bureau of Prisons that he could only be allowed out on home confinement if he agreed not to speak to the press or write anything about Trump. He refused, and was promptly thrown back into prison and isolated in solitary confinement. When he took the case to court, a judge found that it was against his First Amendment rights and he was released in the middle of the pandemic.

"We are here to vindicate every American’s right to speak freely about their government without fear of imprisonment," Cohen's lawyer Jon-Michael Dougherty said in a statement. "We are here because Donald Trump, with the help of his Attorney General and officials at the Bureau of Prisons, attempted to use the prisons to silence Michael Cohen. They failed, only because the courts stopped the abuse."

An ongoing concern is developing as Trump continues his 2024 election campaign while promising "revenge." In his pledge to punish his foes and use the federal government to go after the media, Cohen's case argues that no president should have the power to use the Justice Department and the prison system to strike out against their critics.

The Washington Post reported in November that "in private, Trump has told advisers and friends... that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations." They also cite FBI and DOJ officials that Trump purportedly wants to target.

Cohen has argued that this targeting of foes is illegal and has no business in an American democracy. His case could potentially provide a safeguard ensuring that the courts will shut down such behavior by the executive branch were Trump to try it again in a new administration.

In his statement, Cohen's lawyer pointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which agreed that Cohen's rights were violated and that the conduct was retaliation from the Trump government.

"A different judge of the same court reluctantly dismissed my client’s suit to hold the President and his accomplices accountable, noting the dismissal did 'profound violence' to my client’s rights," Dougherty continued. "We are grateful to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for considering what the District Court urged—that the character of this nation, that the intent of its founders require there be a remedy against a rogue President and his subordinates who would resort to the prisons to silence critics. I thank Mr. Cohen for entrusting me and my colleagues with his cause, to ensure all Americans can say what they want about their government without fear of retribution and to ensure that rogue Presidents know that they are Presidents, and not kings."

Those speaking before the Court were Cohen's lawyers, the Justice Department, and Trump's lawyer Alina Habba. The arguments took less than 30 minutes, ten minutes for each side. But it was significantly less, possibly because Habba's presentation was so short.

While the Justice Department prosecutors experienced tough questions from the appeals panel, it was Habba who sent one judge to simply hold his head in his hands.

"What would deter a president from engaging in behavior like this if we don't use Bibbins?" asked one of the female judges, indistinguishable on audio.

"That's not a part of this," said Habba, citing Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a case in which a civilian analyst with the United States Air Force was fired after testifying before a congressional committee that there were inefficiencies and cost overruns.

"So, you're basically conceding there's no deterrence available? There's nothing to deter?" the judge cut in....>

<....Habba claimed she thinks the "deterrence" was that Cohen was able to be released in spite of Trump's actions when he sought an injunction from a judge.

"What is deterring behavior like this again?" the judge asked.

Habba claimed that the ruling by the judge in Cohen's case is what deters it in the future. She said that the biggest prevention is "separation of powers."

"Ok, so," the judge cut in again, "the allegation, and again, we are at this point where we need to take the allegations, was that someone pulled strings to retaliate against someone related to a personal vendetta. How does that fall within a president's official capacity as an office holder?"

"Well, first of all, before I'm willing to answer that your honor, I have to say that the complaint does not have facts that President Trump did it. It's an allegation based on Mr. Cohen's interpretation of what happened when he was trying to get out on release," claimed Habba. She said that in the Nixon case, there was an actual recording that caught Nixon in the act.

"In this case, he has absolutely no facts," said Habba. "It's a Michael Cohen assumption."

Cohen has worked with at least three members of Congress trying to get such evidence. Until recently, the government claimed there was no evidence. As his persistence continued requesting documents, they revealed that there were now too many documents, over 450,000, which addressed Cohen's queries about his case and the retaliation.

"So, you're saying it's too conclusory for us to credit?" the judge stepped in again.

"Absolutely," Habba agreed.

The judge then asked Habba if she was familiar with Blassingame v. Trump.

"Not off the top of my head, your honor," said Habba.

The case in question was decided last week and found that Trump doesn't have absolute immunity in civil cases. It's the case of the Capitol police who were injured on Jan. 6. They have argued Trump is responsible for actions he took as a candidate and not in his official capacity as president, which was agreed to by the appeals court.

Habba, who has worked as Trump's lawyer for more than a year, said she wasn't aware of the case.

Habba said that if the decision isn't from the Supreme Court then it takes a second seat to Bibbins.

The judge interrupted and explained that Bibbins is an official act case and the one she questioned Habba about was about presidential immunity.

Habba said that in Cohen's filing the case says that the individuals he is targeting acted in their official capacity. Cohen is arguing that Trump used his power of the presidency to target and silence as a perceived foe.

"He admits that the president is working within his job as the president of the United States and his complaint fails under absolute immunity," said Habba. "So, frankly it fails on two levels."

Habba continued to speak using her prepared remarks. She talked for a little less than a minute before the judge stepped in.

"I think, I thank you for your time if my colleagues don't have any questions," the judge said.>

<In late August, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took a break from his typical campaign events to make a pit stop at an unusual venue for mainstream Republicans: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Speaking before a packed house, Ramaswamy was slated to deliver a speech on foreign policy. But his opening remarks served the more provocative purpose of challenging Nixon’s much-maligned status in the annals of conservative history.

“He is by and away the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country — probably in all of American history,” said Ramaswamy, without a hint of irony.

Ramaswamy’s homage to America’s most disgraced ex-president perplexed some liberal commentators, for whom Nixon remains the ultimate symbol of conservative criminality. But Ramaswamy is far from alone in rethinking Nixon’s divisive legacy. Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, “Tricky Dick” is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the “crook” that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history. Across the right-of-center media sphere, examples of Nixonmania abound. Online, popular conservative activists are studying the history of Nixon’s presidency as a “blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. In the pages of small conservative magazines, readers can meet the “New Nixonians” who are studying up on Nixon’s foreign policy prowess. On TikTok, users can scroll through meme-ified homages to Nixon. And in the weirdest (and most irony laden) corners of the internet, Nixon stans are even swooning over the former president's swarthy good looks.

“I’ve always been pretty fascinated with him,” said Curt Mills, a conservative journalist and self-professed Nixon fan. (Mills has contributed to POLITICO Magazine.) “I think the Nixon story is really an American story. He really is this guy who is from nowhere, and he’s just absolutely reviled … [but] I do think he has this charisma that's sort of underrated.”

The Nixon renaissance is being driven in part by young conservatives’ genuine interest in Nixon, whom Mills colorfully described as “our Shakespearean president.” But when pressed about their pro-Nixon views, even his most sincere supporters readily admit that the Nixon-mania isn’t being driven solely — or even primarily — by academic interest in Nixon. Instead, the populist right’s ongoing effort to rehabilitate Nixon, which is unfolding against the backdrop of the 2024 Republican primary, is really about another divisive former Republican president: Donald Trump.

In the topsy-turvy historical tableau of 2023, to defend Nixon is to back Trump — and to rescue the former from historical ignominy is, according to the thinking of some young conservatives, to save the latter from the same fate.

“If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner — or even if we can just create questions in the public discourse about Nixon and about Nixon’s presidency — then I think, by way of analogy, it will provoke similar questions about Donald Trump,” said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who published a lengthy defense of Nixon earlier this year for City Journal. “It will give us the kind of template, it will give us the precedents, it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a conservative president against these kinds of attacks.”

Amid the surge of interest in Nixon, different conservatives are finding different things to admire in his legacy. Some — like Ramaswamy and Mills — have taken a shine to Nixon’s foreign policy realism, which they see as an alternative to the naive idealism that has led Democrats and Republicans alike into ill-fated entanglements abroad. In his speech at the Nixon Library, Ramaswamy identified Nixon as the forebear of his own foreign policy vision, which includes withdrawing from NATO, cutting off U.S. support for Ukraine and adopting a more combative military and economic posture toward China.

“No man is perfect — Richard Nixon definitely wasn’t — but one element of his legacy that I respect is reviving realism in our foreign policy,” said Ramaswamy in an interview from the campaign trail, pointing specifically to Nixon’s successful efforts to reestablish diplomatic relations with China during the 1970s. “Pulling Mao out of the hands of the USSR was one of the great victories that allowed us to come to the end of the Cold War … and it took an independent thinker like Nixon to lead us out of that.”....>

<....Meanwhile, other conservatives are looking to Nixon’s domestic policy as a template for the GOP’s battle against the liberal establishment and its alleged allies in government, academia and the media. In August, Rufo — who is best known for leading the conservative crusade against “critical race theory” — produced a short film called “Nixon Forever,” which identified the former president’s “law and order” policies and his efforts to constrain the power of the federal bureaucracy as “a blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. Rufo has gone so far as to suggest that the next Republican president look to Nixon’s brutal (and occasionally illegal) treatment of leftist groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground as a model for their own war on the “radical left.”

“I think a Nixon-style effort — within the limitations of the law — would be correct,” Rufo told me. “The basic strategy would be to identify violent left-wing networks, to infiltrate them with confidential human sources, undercover agents [and] electronic communications — if that can pass muster with a judge — and then to start just imploding them from within.”

At this point, Rufo admitted, the Nixon revival is limited to a “boutique corner of the American right,” populated primarily by young, Trump-sympathetic conservative activists and online intellectuals. And the relative youthfulness of the pro-Nixon right is hardly incidental to their cause. “I think that [among the generation of] people who grew up with the three channels on the television and Walter Cronkite telling you what happened and how you should interpret it, the reputation of Richard Nixon is sealed,” said Rufo, who is 39 years old. “The kind of establishment conventional wisdom about Nixon is their opinion.”

But the generation of conservatives who were born well after Watergate — and who came of age during Bill Clinton’s impeachment in in 1998 — Nixon’s legacy is still an open question. In fact, said Rufo, many young conservatives are revisiting the legacies of a range of oft-maligned conservative figures, prompted in part by the erosion of trust in the mainstream media’s coverage of Trump.

“Especially [among] the younger members of the right, you’re seeing a reappraisal of figures like Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy in light of what's happened since the rise of Donald Trump,” Rufo said. In his short film on Nixon, for instance, Rufo praised Hoover’s FBI for “successfully dismantl[ing]” leftist groups by putting their leaders “on the run, in prison or in the ground” — even while conceding that some of Hoover’s actions “went beyond the rule of law.”

In the case of Nixon, that historical reevaluation means not only foregrounding his achievements — like his successful effort to reestablish diplomatic relations with China, or the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1972 — but also rethinking his most infamous failure: Watergate.

“I’m comfortable saying that I don’t think it served the United States for Nixon to have resigned or been forced from office over Watergate,” said Mills. “I think that everything that Nixon was accused of doing was basically part and parcel of a pretty wild west political culture at the time … and Nixon became sort of the scapegoat [for] intrenched interests in Washington.”

Rufo, meanwhile, has come to view Watergate — a criminal enterprise and attempted coverup — as a sort of “bureaucratic coup,” in which anti-Nixon factions within the federal bureaucracy rose up to oust a president who threatened their authority — much as conservatives claim the “deep state” rose up in its attempts to oust Trump. He credits the work of conservative political scientist and Claremont Institute senior fellow John Marini with prompting him to reject the “pre-packaged narrative” of Watergate as a cut-and-dried instance of corruption.

“You see very clearly this pattern: that very powerful factions in the bureaucracy, the national security state, the media, the Democratic establishment and the judicial world were, in a sense, setting him up for a bureaucratic coup,” said Rufo. “[They used] his kind of culpability — especially the perception of his culpability — as a lever to take [the question of Nixon’s wrongdoing] out of the democratic process.”

He added: “And I think we’re now seeing this with President Trump.”....>

<....This isn’t the first time that conservatives have flirted with the idea of rehabilitating Nixon. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nixon began to creep back into the public eye, quietly advising the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and traveling around the world to lecture on foreign affairs. The ex-president’s comeback tour reached its zenith in 1986 when Newsweek featured an aging Nixon on its cover under the headline: “He’s Back: The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon.”

Yet the goals of the current Nixon revival are, in some respects, even more ambitious than the goals of the first one. In the 1980s, after a period of public exile following the Watergate scandal, Nixon could somewhat plausibly claim that he had paid the price for Watergate and that his broader political legacy deserved a more comprehensive appraisal. The notion that Nixon did nothing wrong — that his ousting after Watergate was the real crime — was not yet on the table.

The broader remit of the ongoing Nixon renaissance has been made possible not only by the rise of Trump but also by the fall of another Republican icon: the ur-conservative Ronald Reagan. For decades, mainstream conservatives have looked back to the Gipper as their primary ideological idol, name-checking him in their speeches and making semi-annual pilgrimages to his presidential library in Simi Valley, California. But since the Trump years, Reagan has fallen out of fashion with young conservatives, prompted in part by a souring of the relationship between Trump and the custodians of Reagan’s legacy.

And with Reagan’s spot in the pantheon of conservative heroes up for grabs, Nixon revisionists are eager to elevate their man.

“Who is the spiritual father of Trump? Is it more Nixon, or was it more Reagan? I would argue it’s more Nixon,” said Mills. “Nixon — with his swashbuckling opposition to the U.S. ‘deep state,’ his take-on-all-enemies and combative nature, his more realistic gloss on the human condition — [is] more appealing and fits the moment better than Reagan’s Hollywood optimism.”

Of course, Nixon’s historical proximity to Trump is not based exclusively on vibes. It’s also based on personnel: Roger Stone, who remains one of Trump’s most voluble allies, began his career as a trickster for Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. (An association he later memorialized with a tattoo of Nixon on his back.) Similarly, Pat Buchanan — whose “paleoconservatism” is revered by some on the right as an important ideological precursor to Trumpism — got his start in politics as an aide to Nixon, before becoming one of the president’s chief speechwriters and advisers in the White House.

Yet, given Nixon’s less than stellar reputation outside the diehard populist-nationalist right, it’s worth asking: Is the effort to rehabilitate Nixon more ironic than it is sincere? Irony, of course, is not hard to come by when the same people who decry the “weaponization of government” align themselves with the man behind the ITT affair, or when the conservative proponents of “restraint” in foreign policy applaud the administration that authorized the indiscriminate bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

But if these rehabilitation efforts succeed, Rufo says future generations will instead remember Tricky Dick, “as a good, honest man who rose from humble beginnings to the highest office in America, who loved his country, who tried to save the ideals of 1776.” Someone who, per Rufo, “was caught in the web of his own culpability, the tragic nature of politics, and a vicious bureaucratic coup set out to destroy him.”

Amid the overwrought comparisons to the founders, it’s worth asking how much the Nixon renaissance is, at its core, just an elaborate troll, one designed as much to provoke as to educate?

“Yes — yes, it is,” Rufo said, without hesitation, when I posed that question to him. “But,” he added, “it’s not just a troll, because there’s a substantive purpose to it. If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in the public mind, we will have demonstrated a capacity for reshaping how people think about political figures in the past, which gives us a lesson in actively shaping [the perception] in the present of political figures of our current day.” In other words, a blueprint for rehabilitating Trump.>