FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – I worked for Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign for President when he came agonizingly close to beating Gerald Ford who had never been elected President, for the Republican Presidential Nomination.
With the entire Republican establishment supporting former Republican Minority Leader, Gerald R. Ford, who Nixon had appointed Vice President on his way out the door, we were a hardy band of renegades who recognized that Ford could not beat the then surging in the Democratic Primaries, Jimmy Carter. In fact, Reagan and Carter both shared a carefully constructed “Washington outsider” persona. I was honored to work with Senator Paul Laxalt, Lyn Nofziger, John P. Sears, Ed Meese, Anderson Carter, Frank Whetstone, Lou Kitchen, Kenny Klinge, Paul Russo, Mike Deaver, Peter Hannaford, Dr. Martin Anderson and his wife Annelise Anderson, Jeff Bell, Neal Peden, Rep.Phil Crane, Ernie Angelo, Bob Walker, David Keene, Tommy and Kathleen Anderson, Tommy Thomas, Jim Lake, Ray Barnhart, Carter Wrenn, Ron Dear, Don Devine, Nancy Reynolds, Loren Smith and a small band of original ” Reaganites”.
It was widely assumed that Reagan would be too old to run again in 1980, a view I did not share. The night of the 1976 convention, when narrow-victor Gerald Ford coaxed Reagan to the platform for impromptu remarks, Reagan, working without any script, brought the house down. It was as if you could see a collective light bulb go off over the heads of every Delegate in which they concluded, “good God–we nominated the wrong guy.” Indeed, Ford would rally but he would lose narrowly to Carter after making the fatal mistake of pumping his last resources into suburban Pennsylvania and New York (as his moderate Republican advisors decided, instead of Texas and Missouri where conservative Democrats had figured out that Carter was no conservative).
Ford lost and he was history. But the heart of the Republican Party still belonged to Reagan, who scored approval ratings in the high 80’s—the highest I had seen until President Donald Trump was elected. His approval rating among Republicans today is actually in the ’90s in all reputable polls.
Actually, after his narrow defeat for the 1980 nomination, Reagan cast such a large shadow upon the Republican Party that he would not only be nominated and elected but would move the center of gravity within the GOP to the right while still serving two terms as a ‘Washington outsider.” In fact, he was the only candidate with the star-power, presence, fund-raising and “size” to beat a sitting incumbent, President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
So it is with Trump. As long as Trump remains vigorous, which I have no doubt of, his age will not be an issue. Having attended the wakes and funerals for both his parents who I knew well, I can attest that they lived into their nineties. The President recently lost weight and looks twenty years younger. More importantly, he still most-clearly has the zest for the fight and a much clearer understanding of how deep the swamp really is. I don’t know anyone else who can rally the American people the way he can.
While I may have been uncertain about the potential of a 2024 candidacy by the former President, I now believe that such a candidacy is not only necessary but historic if Trump is to make a Grover Cleveland-like comeback. Trump’s fellow New Yorker, Cleveland, is the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms winning in 1884, being defeated in 1888 and taking the office back in 1892.
A Trump candidacy is also indispensable. He is the leader of a movement far larger than himself. Even with his human flaws, he is the only one with the courage to stand athwart the nation as a colossus and yell “Stop” at the New World Order.
Only Trump can win in 2024 and take the country back from the globalist cabal that framed me in a politically motivated witch-hunt, opened based on fabricated evidence that Mueller’s top Deputy Andrew Weissmann knew from his time at the FBI was paid for by Hillary Clinton and factually questionable. Mueller (Weissmann) used it as the rationale to have Rod Rosenstein appoint Mueller as Special Counsel despite the absence of any crime to investigate.
The President had the wisdom to see that the people who subjected me to a Soviet-style show trial in which my First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights were violated, were the same people who fabricated two impeachments against him and launched an illegal, baseless investigation with the aim of removing him.
Obviously, I love President Trump as he saved my life with clemency and a pardon, but my conclusion is based on my cool-eyed analysis of the political dynamic rather than my affection for and loyalty to the President, and, of course, my gratitude for his act of both justice and mercy in my case.
But the record will show that I began advocating a Trump candidacy as early as 1988. I recognized even then that Donald Trump had the brains, drive, size, courage and stamina to be not only a great presidential candidate but a truly great President.
The hateful left in America is attempting to erase an extraordinary record of economic revival which lifted those at the very bottom of the economic ladder under Donald Trump. Under Trump’s leadership we had record job growth, record wage growth, and the lowest levels of unemployment ever recorded among African Americans, Hispanics, Women and Asians — in fact, all people. He enacted real criminal justice reform, made constitutionalist judicial appointments, took pro-life actions and eased tensions with the North Koreans while holding China to account for its various assaults on America, including the Covid-19 virus which was designed in a Wuhan, China lab, evidently with U.S. taxpayer money supplied by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Remember, I was indicted for “lying to Congress” although no misstatement I made was material or hid any underlying crime. Until a Federal Judge ordered him to do so, Robert Mueller hid through redaction of the long-hidden sections of his final Report regarding me. He couldn’t sugarcoat the fact that he “found no factual evidence” against me regarding “the Russians,” WikiLeaks or John Podesta’s embarrassingly published e-mails. In other words, I had no motive to lie. This was withheld from my defense attorneys at trial.
Dr. Fauci, on the other hand, clearly lied under oath to Congress regarding the “gain of function” funding supplied to the Chinese lab to whip up this deadly bioweapon purposely designed to do maximum damage to humans. So Fauci lied about material matters and lied to cover up the cause of death of thousands of Americans killed by his vaccinations, and the damage and suffering to thousands more. When will 29-heavily armed FBI agents storm his home in the predawn hours and “perp-walk” him outside of his house for the CNN cameras? When will the FBI ransack his home and his office, leaving them a shambles and taking all of his electronic devices and many of his professional records? After all, he lied to Congress. That we have a two-tiered justice system is beyond doubt. The ultimate DC Prosecutor in my case announced – in the morning of the day the jury convicted me – that there would be no prosecution to Andrew McCabe, who admitted to lying to the FBI to mislead them, a more serious crime than “lying to Congress.”
Like Reagan, no one casts a bigger shadow in the GOP than Trump who has fundamentally transformed the GOP from being the party of country club elites to being the party of the working class. Trump was able to reach out and win the votes of blue-collar union members, African-Americans and Hispanics at levels never before reached by a Republican presidential candidate, and did so without ever buying expensive targeted media to reach these voters. Trump ran stronger among these key swing voters than either Romney or McCain, which is why he won Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2016 and most likely won them again in 2020 if one only counts legitimate legal voters in those states.
Trump continues to have a rock-solid base among Evangelical Christians who are still most probably the single strongest constituency within the modern Trump-led Republican Party. Two bogus impeachments, a New York State witch-hunt and the current array of baseless civil lawsuits against him (and me!) are, in fact, part of the continuing effort to smear him because they fear him.
Patriots may want to support me and my wife in the endless war of “lawfare” in which left-wing groups (bitter about my pardon) foster baseless, groundless, unsubstantiated civil suits against me that read more like press releases than legal complaints and have no evidence whatsoever to support their claims. The legal fees to fight these lawsuits are beyond my ability. Patriots who want to help in this epic fight can go to StoneDefenseFund.com.
Additionally, no other Republican has emerged as either a potential challenger to the former President or as an alternative should Trump elect not to run. Trump’s domination of the GOP is so complete that anyone who considers challenging the former President would see it as being futile. My sources tell me that the former President was most displeased when his former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said he would run in 2024 regardless of Trump’s plans.
Only Trump has the profile, stamina, dominance, fundraising capability and the stature to unite the same majority coalition he won with in 2016 and held in 2020. Trump can fulfill his potential to further expand his vote in the African-American and Hispanic communities as well as gaining among Asian-Americans, making him the GOP’s strongest potential candidate in 2024.
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