Editor’s note: Big Tent Ideas always aims to provide balancing perspectives on the hottest issues of the day. Below is a column arguing that Donald Trump’s America First agenda is precisely what America needs to defeat Democrats in 2024, citing the recent defeat of Liz Cheney. A counterpoint can be found here, where author Scott Johnston opines that the Republican Party has a way better choice than Trump. 

You would have thought Liz Cheney‘s ignominious defeat in conservative Wyoming would seal the deal. But then again the gist of gaslighting is to repeat the lie ad infinitum. So no sooner did Harriet Hageman prevail in a 37-point squeaker than we were told by the vanquished Cheney (shouldn’t the media be interviewing the victor?) that Donald Trump is still the problem.

The veritable poster child of neoconservatism was only the latest of pro-impeachment Republicans to be ousted by an America First agenda. Only two of ten have survived. Which makes it clear that the former president doesn’t need to “move on” because the Republican Party already has.

Yet the “never-Trumpers” keep looking for something, anything, that will finish him off. There were two failed impeachment trials, Potemkin congressional hearings over Jan. 6th, and ongoing efforts by partisan state officials to go after Trump’s financial records. Now comes an unprecedented “raid” on his personal residence, apparently unlimited in scope and based on the shakiest of legal grounds.

What politician could possibly survive this? Well, Donald Trump I guess.

In fact, the weaponization of the “deep-state” has only strengthened Trump’s hold on the GOP. More important, it has revealed the depths to which a dangerous cabal of anti-Trump forces will go to thwart the will of the people. That is the essence of the “swamp” I saw in Washington when a corrupt Department of Justice, along with the Clinton campaign and the media, used the pretext of manufactured evidence in an attempt to unseat a duly elected president.

All the while covering for the Biden family’s alleged “pay-to-play” schemes.

It is transparent that the obsession over Trump is so disturbingly disproportionate that it must be hiding ulterior motives. And indeed it is. No one since Ronald Reagan has threatened the status quo like Trump. People forget, but the establishment was firmly lined up against the Gipper in early 1980, even calling the former actor self-absorbed and too old to be President.

Now Trump is called “narcissistic” by people who think Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were humble.

And after four years of a senile President Joe Biden it might be a little hard to make the age issue stick. Besides, if elected in 2024 he’d have one term only to let ‘er rip’ and its highly doubtful Trump would allow himself to be surrounded with the likes of Anthony Fauci this time around. Add it up, and it’s precisely what the country needs.

Never before have our institutions been so completely subsumed by big-government sycophants than now. Parents are smeared by the press as “domestic terrorists” for opposing race-based classifications in schools. A cowardly corporate America has eagerly bowed to “woke” ideology just as long as they can continue to outsource manufacturing and get cheap labor from an open border.

Finally, a bipartisan zeal for regime change abroad has not only stretched our men and woman in uniform to the breaking point, but the “blowback” from these seemingly endless interventions have been so cataclysmic that the only person who should “never get anywhere near” the Oval Office again is a Bush or a Cheney.

Different times call for different leaders — and it appears that’s exactly what a growing number of Americans are starting to realize.

Former Congressman Jason Lewis was Minnesota’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in 2020 and is the author of “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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