Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Don’t worry, America.

Big Media will never let Joe Biden get away with illegally taking classified documents from the White House in 2016 and stashing them at his office and in his garage next to his Corvette.

The ace reporters at liberal places like the New York Times, CNN and NBC are already digging deep into the facts of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

Soon the Big Media will be telling us exactly what classified documents Biden illegally took home, where he’s been keeping them for more than six years, what he used them for and if it is true that he did not really know he had them.

And it won’t be long until we’ll know the truth about why the batch of unsecured classified documents that was discovered by the White House at the Penn Biden Center think-tank before the midterms were not revealed to the public until this week.

Of course, in the real world, we know none of this good journalism by the Big Media will happen.

Not in 2023 America, anyway, where the liberal mainstream media’s most reliable standard is the double one.

Biden will never get the same rough treatment the liberal media gave ex-President Trump when it was learned Trump had been keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

The liberal media’s star reporters and pundits still don’t know squat about the Biden case – let’s call it “Garage-gate.”

But already they are trying to say that Biden’s possession of unspecified classified material pertaining to Ukraine, Iran and the UK is not as serious or sleazy or scary as what Trump had.

Parroting the Democrats, the liberal media argue that Trump had many more documents – as if it’s the number that counts.

And they claim Trump deserved to have his home invaded and searched by the FBI because he and his lawyers were not cooperating with the archivists who wanted the classified stuff returned.

The fact that an ex-president has the right to keep classified material and an ex-vice president does not, and that Mar-a-Lago was protected by the Secret Service and Biden’s think-tank office was not, doesn’t enter into the liberal media’s lopsided equation.

Neither does the fact that Trump had his documents for less than two years and Biden had his for seven.

On Thursday Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel to handle the Biden case, just as he had named one for the Trump case. Garland did the right thing – only because he was forced to do unto Biden what he had done unto Trump.

But it’s a good bet Garland won’t be ordering any SWAT teams to make a pre-dawn visit to one of the Biden Family mansions.

As for Big Media, there are a million questions they should immediately start demanding answers to from the Biden White House.

For starters, it might be good to know where the classified documents Biden swiped from the White House have been for the last seven years.

Were they on the passenger seat of his 1972 Corvette? In the trunk? Since 2016?

Who had access to the documents that were kept at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in DC funded by more than $50 million of money from foreign countries, including $14.5 million from China.

Do the classified documents Biden had relating to Ukraine have any connection to his son’s slippery business dealings there? (Just asking for a country.)

If liberal reporters have any trouble getting fired up to start their digging into this juicy story, they could simply imagine that Joe Biden is Donald Trump.

For example, they could ask themselves how they’d react if Trump told them he had been keeping all his classified documents in a box in a locked garage next to his favorite golf cart.

Would they just say, “Oh, OK, Mr. President, that’s no problem. We understand your golf cart is very important to you”?.

Or would they call for a SWAT team?

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

It’s been a political clown show.

It’s been a variation of the old truth that you shouldn’t watch sausage or legislation being made.

It’s been a rare primetime glimpse into the minds of politicians who’d rather break up into factions and fight with their own party members than find common ground and fight against their natural political foes.

I’m referring, of course, to this week’s prolonged soap opera in the House of Representatives, where the Republican Party is now narrowly in control, 222-213, yet appears to be unable to elect a speaker.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy was always the favorite to replace the dethroned wicked queen, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But he needs 218 votes from his fellow Republicans to win the job and after 11 votes in the House, as of Thursday evening about 20 hardline conservatives were still refusing to vote for him.

The conservatives don’t have a guy of their own for speaker. They also don’t have a plan for what they want the House to do or focus on. They just don’t want McCarthy.

Whether McCarthy or someone else is ultimately elected, the prolonged fight over who gets to be House Speaker is a bad omen for Republicans.

After the midterms, they were all fired up to stop the Biden administration’s madness at home and abroad and maybe even do some good things to reverse some of it.

But if they can’t even agree on electing a speaker, and if individual House members get the power they want to hold up any bill whenever they want, what’s going to happen when Republicans have to address something big, like the debt ceiling?

No GOP speaker is ever going to have “Pelosi Power.” No Republican House will ever become a speaker’s rubber stamp like Pelosi’s. Republicans are notoriously hard to keep together – they’re like herding cats. Feral cats.

That means some Republicans are going to want the House to spend the next two years holding hearings to investigate Hunter Biden, his family and father.

Others will want to investigate Anthony Fauci and the CDC, or find out who screwed up in Afghanistan. Others will want to focus first on the southern border, inflation or Ukraine.

In the case of going hard after Hunter Biden, it would be a complete waste of the Republican Party’s time and political capital.

We already know Hunter’s a criminal. We know he’s been selling access to his father to foreign governments and companies for decades.

But does anyone seriously think that the Biden Department of Justice is going to take down Hunter or investigate “the Big Guy”? Or that the mainstream media will cover it properly? No.

The Democrats, as bad as they are, are not dysfunctional as a party. The Republicans, as good as they might be, are absolutely dysfunctional – and this week they’ve proved it.

The party needs a strong leader to stand up in the House and be allowed to lead. You can’t lead with a small caucus of hardline conservatives that can change week to week.

If you ask me, I’d pick Steve Scalise. He’s an real GOP hero. And no Republican is going to vote against someone who took a bullet for the party.

In any case, unless the anti-McCarthy forces in the House can come up with their own leader, they need to just shut up and get back to work.

The most important thing for Republicans to do now is to unite and begin working to prevent Bidenism from wrecking any more of the country.

If Republicans don’t get their act together soon and start doing the business of the people who elected them, it’s a cinch they won’t be in control of the House after the 2024 elections.

If that happens, we might be better off with the Democrats running the House forever, because it seems Republicans are much better at leading from behind than the front.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He will return with a new column on Friday, Jan. 6.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

We don’t fight our wars to win anymore. We fight them to get to a stalemate.

We’ve risked untold lives and wasted trillions of dollars to poorly fight wars for decades in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietnam.

Then we negotiate and leave.

And then the countries where we had been at war quickly revert to the way they were before our soldiers and weapons showed up.

Afghanistan is the latest example of our stalemate wars that date back to WWII, and arguably the worst.

We spent 20 years and about $2.3 trillion there and what did we get in return, besides the 2,500 dead U.S. soldiers and 3,800 dead U.S. contractors?

Nothing.

Afghanistan already has returned to the year 2000. The Taliban is back in charge and this week they announced a total ban on the education of all girls and women.

Now it’s Ukraine’s turn to be the next place where the United States is fighting for a stalemate.

Everyone knows we’re generously helping Ukraine defend itself from the Russian invasion that Vladimir Putin launched about 300 days ago.

We’ve already given Ukraine about $50 billion in humanitarian aid and military weapons, including an advanced Patriot anti-missile battery that will soon be on its way.

And by the time you read this, Congress will have passed a gigantic, largely unread, $1.7 trillion omnibus funding bill for next year that includes another $45 billion for Ukraine.

That Christmas present from U.S. taxpayers was added to the 4,100-page budget bill so that members of Congress who might otherwise not support its absurd spending spree would have to vote for it.

That’s why the heroic Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was brought in this week to give his speech to Congress.

That’s how hardball politics works in Washington – and why Washington so often doesn’t work well.

The money for Ukraine – which should have been carved off into a separate bill and voted on by itself – will win political brownie points for many members of Congress.

But like giving Ukraine a Patriot anti-missile battery ten months after the Russians invaded, the $45 billion gift is further proof that what we are doing over there is fighting for a stalemate, not a victory.

We are still piecemealing out the money and the advanced weapons that Zelensky needed to defend his country long ago.

The argument the administration’s defenders make is that by slow walking what Ukraine needs we won’t anger Putin or cause him to misinterpret what we’re doing.

But it’s too late to worry about that. Putin knows exactly what we’re doing – fighting not for victory, but for a negotiated stalemate.

Putin would never have ordered his tanks to cross Ukraine’s border if we had not talked Zelensky’s country into giving up its arsenal of old Soviet nukes in 1994.

We and Great Britain promised Ukraine we would defend them from a threat from Russia or anywhere else if they’d give up their nuclear weapons. But we didn’t keep our word – until it was too late.

We should have given Ukraine the money and weaponry it needed to prevent Putin from even thinking about invading years ago.

Now, thanks to our slow walking, we’re looking at the prospects of another Vietnam or Afghanistan.

We’re looking at a never-ending, open-ended, expensive and bloody proxy war against Russia that uses Ukrainian soldiers and civilians to do the dying.

Someone needs to tell me how we plan to succeed in Ukraine when it’s obvious we’re just hoping to negotiate an end to the war, not win it.

Are we going to eventually end up like Korea with a demilitarized zone between Ukraine and Russia?

We created this mess by not keeping our promise to defend Ukraine. Now we have to worry that a madman like Putin will use nukes.

Putin can’t afford to lose his war. It’s interesting, because neither can we. So buckle up.

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

It’s time to play the Big Game again in Washington.

It’s time again for members of Congress to perform one of their most important duties.

But instead of passing a federal budget for the coming year, the senators and House members will take a knee and pass what’s called a “Continuing Resolution.”

A “CR,” as Washington insiders like to call it, is a temporary funding bill that averts a federal government shutdown.

It allows the massive over-spending of the federal government to continue even though the politicians in Congress and the White House have failed to come up with a real budget that will fund the federal government in the next fiscal year.

By law, Congress is supposed to do that basic duty by the end of September.

But Congress, as you have probably sensed, has managed to do that only three times in the last 47 years, most recently in 1997.

That goes a long way toward explaining why the annual federal budget is now in the $6.2 trillion range and our national debt is around $32 trillion.

CRs are more common than Super Bowls. There have been 47 of them just since 2010, some lasting as long as six months.

They are the legislative equivalent of kicking the federal budget can down the road.

CRs allow Washington’s lawmakers to put off any tough decisions about what to spend and what to spend on – you know, whether to build another “Bridge to Nowhere,” throw another $10 billion to process illegal immigrants at the border or rubber stamp another $37 billion military Care Package to Ukraine.

One of the most common dirty tricks in the Big Game playbook is waiting until right before a holiday or summer recess to call for a vote on a Continuing Resolution.

That way, as what is going on now with the CR that expires Dec. 23, members of Congress are forced to pass the CR and keep the government running so they don’t miss Christmas dinner with their families.

If various members of Congress have to be bribed with federal goodies for their districts or states to pass the CR, so be it.

Both parties play their own versions of the Big Game.

They wait until the last minute, pass a gigantic piece of legislation no one reads and then go home for the holidays pretending they’ve done something good for the country.

The Big Game doesn’t just help politicians, though; it hurts America.

It busts the federal budget, adds to the national debt, creates inflation and proves four or five times a year that the people we send to Washington don’t give really a damn about us or the country.

Thanks to the political cowardice, fiscal irresponsibility and moral and ethical failings of our so-called “leaders,” America is not just living beyond its budget, it has no budget.

We’ve been living on CRs forever.

Bill Clinton was the last president to balance the budget – and he wouldn’t have done it if Newt Gingrich and his guys hadn’t taken over the House and made him.

If I was Speaker of the House, I’d tell the president, very simply, “I’m not going to pass a CR or pass a federal budget for 2023 until you close the border.”

The Democrats promised my father in 1986 that they’d close the border if he would grant amnesty to immigrants living here illegally. He’s in the grave and still waiting.

Republicans will take control of the House next month.

We’ll see if they play the Big Game the usual D.C. way or whether they’re going to rise up and fight for conservative principles, instead of participating in get-along games with Democrats.

If Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the you-know-whats to do that, Republicans need to ask Santa Claus to bring them another quarterback or a better game plan – a winning one.

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Too bad Paul Whelan is not Black or gay or someone who openly hates America.

Too bad he’s white, male and a former U.S. Marine.

Otherwise, he would not still be rotting in jail in Russia on trumped-up espionage charges.

Also otherwise, Whelan would have been the American prisoner in Russia who was exchanged this week by the Biden administration for Viktor Bout, aka “The Merchant of Death.”

But instead of Whalen, it was Black lesbian WNBA star Brittney Griner who was swapped, one-for-one, for Bout – the notorious international arms dealer who on “60 Minutes” was called one of the most dangerous men on the planet.

Griner was arrested for the low-level crime of carrying vape cartridges with cannabis oil into Russia.

Bout is a world-class bad guy, a certified killer.

He supplied Al Qaeda, the Taliban, rebels in Rwanda and other terrorists around the world with plane loads of AK-47s and other military equipment that have been used to kill Americans and thousands of other people.

Trading Griner for Bout with Whelan left to rot in Moscow? That will surely go down as one of the worst trades in American history.

It’s no surprise that such a lopsided swap was made by the Biden administration, but actually it doesn’t have Joe’s personal fingerprints on it.

Griner-for-Bout is further proof that he is not the one who’s calling the shots in his own administration.

Detaining Griner for almost 300 days and sentencing her to nine years in a penal colony was an injustice that never should have happened. And I’m glad she’s flying home.

But what Team Biden did to spring her was not just dumb, amateurish diplomacy, it was an act of pure leftwing, wokester politics.

It was Biden’s latest bit of pandering to Black and gay communities for their votes and money – which he knows he already has in his pocket.

Politically, giving away a major prisoner like Bout to get a minor leaguer like Griner was a dumb move in the long run.

Biden angered more than half of the country – the red half, which includes many Democrats and independents, who see the obvious injustice of freeing a pot user who wouldn’t stand for the National Anthem but not freeing an America-loving ex-military man who was unjustly accused of espionage.

Whalen has been imprisoned by Putin’s regime for four years and has eight more to go. Biden says he’s praying for Whalen’s release, which is total bull.

His sorry excuse for a press spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Thursday “The president will never stop working to secure Paul Whelan’s release.”

Right.

But then she gave away the thinking of the backstage people who are really in control of the White House when she added, “On a personal note, Brittney is an important role model, an inspiration to millions of Americans particularly the LGBTQI+ Americans and women of color.”

Some in the Whalen family are praising the Biden administration for making the swap, saying it was smart to take the only deal that was possible.

Not slamming Biden is a smart move for them, since it’s only Biden who can bring their son home.

But Whalen himself told CNN he is “greatly disappointed” that more hasn’t been done to secure his release for four years and doesn’t “understand why I’m still sitting here.”

I know it’s complicated.

I know Griner’s plight got constant publicity, sympathy and support from the major media and activist gay groups.

I know that since 2018 there should have been more calls for Whalen’s release from Republicans and conservative media.

But I can’t get it out of my head that the president of the United States – our fake commander in chief — traded a killer for a basketball player and left one of our ex-soldiers behind.

I guess that’s what you’d expect from a president who doesn’t have the military’s back – or America’s.

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Love Trump or hate Trump.

Whatever you think about him, you have to admit that the mainstream liberal news media have been doing a round-the-clock colonoscopy on him since the day he said he was running for presidency.

The New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the East Coast media complex have also done colonoscopies on his children.

But as we know, it’s not just the Trump family that gets special mistreatment from the biased journalists of Big Media.

They have been practicing politically driven colonoscopies on just about every conservative who pops up on the national radar since Sarah Palin was a TV sports reporter.

As Ron DeSantis is sure to find out soon, no tale of misbehavior or alleged act of political incorrectness is ever too outlandish or too flimsy or too long ago for the ideological proctologists of liberal journalism.

We all remember what they did to smear U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

They took a time machine back to his high school days looking for incriminating dirt – and they automatically believed and headlined every rumor, piece of cheap gossip or politically motivated lie they dug up.

Meanwhile, as if we needed any further proof that the liberal media sleep with the Democrat Party, for three years they’ve refused to look into the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Ordinarily, the discovery of Hunter’s laptop would have had journalists drooling over thoughts of Pulitzers and fighting each other to see who’d break the biggest scoop.

Ordinarily, the journalists at the New York Times and “60 Minutes” would have been all over the laptop story.

By now they would have sent their reporters all over the planet, tracking down the names and connecting the big dots between the sacks of money Hunter received from his “jobs” in China, Ukraine and Russia and the big guy in the White House.

But until about three weeks ago – Election Day, as a matter of fact – Big Media pretended the laptop was a fake designed by Russians and Republicans.

They ignored the laptop like it didn’t exist while the Biden gang easily got their liberal soulmates at Twitter and Facebook to censor or block the story, claiming it was dangerous Russian disinformation, not news.

But look at what’s just happened.

Now that the midterms are over and Republicans will get control of the House and all its investigating committees next month, the Big Media have all suddenly admitted that Hunter’s laptop was real and newsworthy after all – three years too late.

CBS News ran an embarrassing story a few weeks ago acting as if its journalists had just been the first to prove the laptop was real.

And the liberal Democrats running the Washington Post and the New York Times now admit it’s Hunter’s computer – a fact anyone over ten has known since the FBI got it in 2019.

So now we hear the Big Media saying, “Gee, maybe we made a mistake by not looking at Hunter Biden’s laptop back then. But it was just an innocent mistake. Mea culpa, mea culpa.”

Yeah, it was your fault, all right. But everyone knows there was nothing innocent about it.

Ignoring Hunter’s laptop was a deliberate act by the mainstream liberal news media that was intended to protect Joe Biden and prevent Donald Trump from being re-elected – and it worked.

Is Big Media going to make amends and perform a serious colonoscopy on Hunter? He deserves one, but don’t count on it.

If we’re lucky, the Republicans taking over the House in January will do Big Media’s work for them.

Then we might find out about a lot of sleazy things we should have learned three years ago.

And now that Elon Musk is in charge of Twitter and promising to bring us a new era of free speech, fair play and transparency, we might see Big Media and some other people get the colonoscopy they deserve.

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He will return with a new column on Friday, Dec. 2.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The Republicans won the House.

The Democrats kept the Senate.

Joe Biden is still pretending to be the president.

So how about if we – i.e., the politicians and the news media – dispense with the partisan political junk for a while?

How about if we all sit down and try to fix some of the country’s chronic crises that we hear about every day but that only keep getting worse?

How about if we start with fentanyl?

In the last six months, we have heard hundreds of politicians and media talking heads toss around the fact that fentanyl is killing 100,000 Americans every year.

Everyone with a smartphone knows by now that fentanyl is super powerful and super lethal, that it comes to the U.S. from China via Mexico’s fentanyl mills and that it’s a common and growing problem in every city and state.

The cold statistics are a damning indictment of how little success we’ve had in the fight against fentanyl.

In 2021 nearly 108,000 Americans died from drug overdoses – 71,000 were from fentanyl or fentanyl-related substances.

Of the nearly 900 teenagers who died from drug overdoses, illicit fentanyl accounted for 77%.

Learning that L.A. public schools are now required to keep NARCAN nasal spray on hand to revive a student who has overdosed on opioids is shocking.

But seeing the faces of some middle school and high school kids who recently died after taking a fentanyl pill disguised as a legal drug is heartbreaking.

You can see five of those faces in a Nov. 12 L.A. Times article about how more teenagers than ever are dying from fentanyl poisoning in California and elsewhere.

The L.A. Times article didn’t explain how those fentanyl pills crossed into California or how the state’s voters made it possible.

But a lot of the fentanyl reportedly flows through the marijuana pipeline from Mexico that Californians opened up in 2016 when they voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use and made it legal to commercially grow pot on farms.

When voters passed Proposition 64, they didn’t know it, but they were inviting the violent Mexican drug cartels to come in and set up shop in California.

Prop 64 was sold in the name of personal freedom (and because it was a new source of $5 billion in tax revenue for the state). But it’s been a disaster.

The 8,600 licensed marijuana farmers now in California are not the problem. It’s the tens of thousands of illegal pot farms.

The illegal farms, which far outnumber legal ones, are forcing permitted growers out of business, undercutting their prices and taking over the pot market.

What really is bad is that the illegal pot farms – some of which are sprawling, multi-million operations – have become fertile fields for crime and gang warfare.

As USA Today reported last year, the area along the California-Oregon border is like war zone with shoot outs, murders and robberies.

Illegal farms are also a serious problem in the deserts of Southern California, where L.A. County alone has 500 illegal pot farms.

A friend of mine who has property in Apple Valley warns the people who work for him not to talk to anyone at the local illegal pot farm and definitely not to take their photos.

Some parents in the area are so worried that they have put trackers on their kids and in their cars in case anything happens to them.

It’s not paranoia. The Mexican drug cartels have moved into California and they play hard and dirty.

Putting NARCAN in our high schools makes sense, given the realities, but it’s nothing more than a Band-aid for the victims of the war on fentanyl.

What we need now, along with much more national media coverage, is for some major politicians of both parties to come up with a plan to defeat the scourge of fentanyl – and have the spines to carry it out.

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

DeSantis, Kemp and Abbott.

Those governors were not just the Republican Party’s brightest stars in this week’s disappointing midterms elections. With their smashing victories Tuesday night, they showed us they’re the future of the GOP – and the party’s best hope for retaking the White House in 2024.

Ron DeSantis in Florida, Brian Kemp in Georgia and Greg Abbott in Texas – each could move into the White House and quickly begin fixing the serious economic, immigration and fiscal fiascos Biden and Democrats have created.

Other Republican governors who could be capable presidents are out there, too. Kristi Noem of South Dakota comes to mind. So does Nikki Haley, the ex-governor of South Carolina.

But what about that other guy? You know, that crazy ex-president reality-TV guy from New York with the red hats and the huge campaign rallies? Trump, I think his name was.

Well, he wasn’t actually running for anything this week – just stirring political things up in his usual divisive and headline-grabbing way.

But as just about every TV pundit, party mouthpiece and political editorial writer in America has been saying with glee since Wednesday morning, Donald Trump was this week’s biggest loser.

And, sadly, they’re right.

The positive and negative results of the midterms prove that Republicans can – and should – move forward without Trump.

Trump’s great work for the party is done.

But despite all his remaining political power and his undiminished appeal to millions of “MAGA” Republicans, our most un-presidential ex-president has become the Democrats’ best political weapon.

This week showed that they can still use Trump as a battering ram and a bogeyman to discredit and defeat top-quality Republican candidates.

In a column in August of 2021, after a Trump-endorsed candidate lost in a special House election, I saw this Trump problem coming.

I wrote that I was worried he had become a problem for a minority political party that always has to capture the votes of independents and moderate Democrats if it hopes to win in the general elections.

“Donald Trump becomes a double-edged sword — you want his endorsement for the Republican primary, but because of him in the general election you’re liable to lose independents, suburban women and moderate Democrats.

I wrote that the loss by a Republican in a House race in Texas that he should have easily won “could be a wake-up call for the GOP’s leaders – a warning that Trump’s power within the Republican Party could hurt their big plans for next fall.”

OK, so sometimes even I can see the future.

But it was pretty obvious then and it’s more obvious now – Trump is a liability for the GOP and it should now look to its younger generation of all-star governors for leadership.

With the Great Red Wave never showing up except in Florida – where it hit like a Category 12 hurricane – the most positive results from Tuesday – other than likely taking back the House from Nancy Pelosi – were the easy wins by those governors.

The blindly loyal Democrat voters of Pennsylvania proved they don’t care how unqualified or unhealthy or leftwing their candidates are by electing poor John Fetterman to the U.S. Senate.

But smarter, less tribal voters in Georgia, New York, Texas and elsewhere showed us on Tuesday they are tired of both political extremes. That’s why the Senate is 50 – 50.

Normal Americans just want the economy fixed, the border fixed and the crime wave fixed so they can live in peace and prosperity.

DeSantis, Kemp, Abbot and other governors like them make the best presidential candidates for Republicans.

They’re the ones who know how to fix things and get things done. Unlike senators, or New York billionaires, as the chief executives of their states they come to Washington with the valuable experience they need to run a government.

If voters don’t put a governor in the Oval Office, you won’t get a competent executive, you’ll get a bumbling sales manager.

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.