If I was having a chat with President Trump right now it would go something like this:
You have been campaigning the last sixty days or so as if it was September and October. That’s OK but there is still four months to go and the same tune is getting old and tiresome. We have all heard the generalizations, “the border is a mess”, “inflation is the worst ever’, “Biden is the worst president in history”, etc. etc. While those are all true can there be a new and different way to get the points across?
Another thing that is disadvantageous about selling generalizations is that they can come across as opinions and not facts and the opposition then calls them lies because they have a different opinion. Biden and most of the main-stream media frequently refer to you as “a liar.” And they say it so loud and often that more and more people will begin to think, “if everyone says so, maybe it’s true.”
There is a way out of this but it is going to take some work and the new concept may shock a few folks. That’s OK too. There is truth in the old saying, “If we always do what we’ve always done, we will always get what we always got.” Which may not be the best case.
Thesis: Don’t continue telling the voters this is the worst administration ever and hope they believe you. Hope is not a process! Do this by giving them enough irrefutable facts and information that will cause each individual to come to the conclusion that it is in FACT the worst administration and the worst led presidency in history and therefore the democrats must be defeated in 2024.
Additionally, don’t spend all your time on just “Biden.” Spread your message of failure to the “democrat party.” This could convince more voters to also support their Representative and Senate republican candidates.
CONCEPT OF OPERATIONS: Here is a starter list of issues for you to consider.
Announce your Vice President NOW. Why now? Another appropriate quote, “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Brutus
FACT: The democrat party has never been this disarrayed, dismayed, divided, damaged or disgusted. They have no leader. CNN pole early July, “Three-quarters of US voters say the Democratic Party would have a better shot at holding the presidency in 2024 with someone other than Joe Biden at the top of the ticket”
While the democrats don’t even know who their candidate is going to be and the Democrat Convention is only a few weeks away, now is the perfect time for the Trump campaign to strike with some big, positive news; the Vice President selection. The media will be all over it while the democrats can’t find their collective ass with both hands.
Be different. Be decisive. Make new news.
The second part of the concept is to lay out a very specific, itemized close-hold plan for issues to be discussed every week after the close of the Republican Convention until the first of November. Close the convention speech with a tease, telling the media and voters to “tune in” every Monday morning at 10 a.m. Here is an example of the first week’s campaign speeches.
Monday 22 July, 10 a.m.: Bidenomics and the Middle Class Melt Down.
Biden was, for months, talking about the glorious Bidenomics every time he got behind a teleprompter. That has ended because his handlers probably concluded that most of the public has figured out what a disaster it is for them, especially the middle class.
Every day that week have a new speech FILLED with irrefutable convincing facts and let the voters draw their own conclusions about this administration’s handling of the economy. For example, discuss:
Trump Inflation numbers from Jan 2017 to Jan 2021.
What causes inflation? Too much money chasing too few goods. Too few goods because of world-wide Covid shutdowns. Too much money because the democrats, to show off their spending skills and to buy votes, unnecessarily passed out $1.9 trillion in the American Rescue Plan, 11 March, 2021.
Explain in detail how the economy was already rebounding by March 2021 and the democrats Rescue Plan was ill planned, unnecessary. and was in fact foolish because there had already been two timely previous Covid relief payouts.
Detail the price rise for fuel from $2 a gallon to $5 or $6 that drove a price rise for every product because of the number of times everything we purchase is in a truck going somewhere before you buy it.
Give a detailed history lesson on inflation in America and that this was the worst in 40 years.
What was the price rise for basic necessities for a middle-class family of four.
Wages did not keep up with inflation. Detail how many thousands of dollars of buying power have been lost.
Compare everything to what it was January 2021 and what it still is today compared to your last year in office.
Another example:
Monday, 29 July, 10 a.m.: Our nation is no longer secure.
The first responsibility of a president is the safety and security of American citizens.
The Border Patrol estimates 1.8 million “gotaways” entered the U.S. illegally during the past 3 ½ democrat-led years.
What is a “gotaway”? They are illegal immigrants who are detected by cameras and other means but successfully evade apprehension.
Why do they evade contact with the Border Patrol? The straight answer is they evade because they have a criminal record or they are gang members, Cartel operatives, drug dealers, human traffickers and terrorists.
In FY 2020 there were 136,808 gotaways and by FY 2023 that had increased to 670,674; and increase of 390% under the Biden administration.
1.8 million gotaways is more national security deviants than the combined populations of Montana and North Dakota.
1.8 million democrat policy-aided gotaways is more than the 1.4 million recorded in the entire decade from 2010 to 2020.
Over 13,000 “criminal noncitizens” have attempted to enter the U.S. and have been already apprehended by Border Patrol agents in Fiscal Year 2024; a rise from 4,269 in FY 2019
Terrorists. FBI’s Terrorist Watchlist is a federal database of people who are either known or suspected terrorists.
Terrorist Watchlist apprehensions (north and south borders) for FY 2020 was 299. The FY 2023 total was 736. The questions these facts raise are: How many terrorists on the FBI Watchlist have arrived undetected? How many terrorists have arrived who are not even on the Watchlist? Where are they now? Have they populated existing and new terrorist cells all over the country? Are they training? Are they waiting for guidance from home base to attack? How vulnerable is our national security to terrorists’ attacks resulting from this administration’s open border policies?
Gangs: Altogether within the U.S., the FBI reports that some 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs are criminally active with about 1.4 million members. Transnational gang members are included in the gotaway crowd. Transitional gangs move us forward from the urban neighborhood street gang that controls a few city blocks and pushes a little dope, to something larger, more violent, and linked and aligned to more advanced and sophisticated crime organizations in Latin America.
MS13 is the current leading transnational gang example. It is the largest street gang in Latin America and one of the world’s largest and most violent gangs. They are part of the gotaways plus those who are not detected. American gangs are responsible for 48.9% of violent crimes, 42.9% of property crime, 39.9% of drug sales and 13% of all homicides.
Cartels in the U.S.: There are at least 13 U.S. cities that are used as distribution hubs by the Mexican drug cartels. These cartels primarily employ Mexican nationals to oversee their distribution operations in the U.S. Cartel operatives are part of the 1.8 million gotaways.
Drugs: It’s encouraging to hear the main-stream media and the Biden administration crow about U.S. authorities intercepting hundreds or even thousands of pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border. That is, until the Border Patrol authorities tell us they estimate the recovery is only about 5% of what gets successfully into the U.S. and distributed throughout the country. On average in 2023, 307 young Americans died EVERY DAY from drug overdose, the majority from fentanyl. There is blood on the hands of the democrats in general and Biden and Harris for facilitating the drug trafficking via an open border.
The border was not yet completely secure under President Trump but there was an all-out effort to get to that point. The first afternoon of his presidency, Biden began cancelling the Trump administration’s efforts to close the border.
BOTTOM LINE: In the history of our once-great nation, there has never been a political party, an administration or a president/vice president who have used policy to open the border and thereby facilitate the degradation of our national security and do so simply to create a democrat-friendly identity group who will vote to continue this open border nonsense. And, by the way, the open border is costing the American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
Another example:
Monday, 5 August: Voting and voter fraud.
Our ability to legally vote and ensure that our vote is properly counted is one of the underpinnings of a successful democracy, right up there with freedom of speech.
Voter registration rolls are notoriously inaccurate and out of date, containing the names of millions of voters who are deceased, have moved, or otherwise have become ineligible.
Having thousands of ballots arriving in the mail for individuals who no longer reside at a registered address risks those ballots being used as fraudulent votes.
Covid changed voting habits. In 2020, 69.4% of voters cast ballots by a nontraditional method, mostly mail-in ballots. That was up from 23% in the 2016 election. That volume overwhelmed ballot counting facilities across the country to the extent that there simply was not enough time to verify voter signatures and addresses. Some examples:
North Carolina: In 2018 the 9th Congressional District race was overturned because of illegal vote harvesting that included altering and forging absentee ballots.
Oregon: A survey of one county found that five percent of registered voters admitted that other people marked their ballots, and 2.4% said someone else signed their ballots. It is suspected the actual number was much higher, given that most people would not want to admit being a party to a crime. Likely tens of thousands of mail-in ballots are being cast in Oregon by individuals other than the registered voter.
New Jersey: A candidate bribed voters with $50 payments for mail-in ballots.
The Election Assistance Commission found that 28.3 million ballots in federal elections between 2012 and 2018 were lost or disappeared in the mail.
Virginia: An investigation found 592 examples where registrants were simultaneously registered in another state. There are about 11,600 dead people on Virginia’s voter rolls, all of whom would receive mail-in ballots if an election were held by mail.
New Mexico: The Public Interest Legal Foundation found more than 3,000 individuals registered multiple times; 1,700 registrants who are dead; 1,500 voters aged 100 or above, 64 of whom are over 120 years old. All of these supposed voters would receive mail-in ballots.
Here is how bad the voter rolls are across the country. Judicial Watch conducted a study of voter rolls in 37 of the 50 states. The results revealed that 353 U.S. counties in 29 states had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters, some as high as 130%. Those facts alone define the potential for fraudulent vote counting in one of every four counties in America.
Ballot harvesting is another problem because it relinquishes control of ballots into the hands of individuals who are not legal officials in the voting process; a broken chain of custody issue.
Mail-in ballots are the tools of choice forelection fraudsters because they can operate outside the supervision of election officials, making it easier to steal, forge, or alter ballots.
The bottom line is that when millions of ballots are being mailed out to addresses of dead or relocated or non-citizens, the door is wide open for fraudulent mail-in ballots. We as a nation are better than this. Governors and State legislators need to look at this problem right now, get proactive and take every possible action to prevent voter fraud in their state.
The bottom line is that every ballot should have a voter ID number on it. That could be a social security number, the number on your Real ID card or a passport number. Is that too much to ask for the privilege of voting? The democrats call voter ID “racist”. How stupid can they get? By federal law May 2025 one must have a “Real ID” just to get on an airplane in the U.S. Is a plane ticket more important than a secret ballot?
Three-quarters of voters, and even two-thirds of democrats, said they would be more confident in election results if every voter was required to show government-issued identification at the polls.
Voting rules are a states’ rights issue which is a good thing but by implication, they also have to operate their system responsibly and legally.
Monday, 12 August: High interest rates are a killer for individuals, families, businesses and economic growth. The current high rates are directly related to Biden’s inflation. Lay that out for voters.
Monday 19 August: The pathetic state of US/Iran relations and the general mess in the Middle East.
The Trump administration renewed UN sanctions on Iran and enforced them. Iran’s foreign currency reserves fell from $128 billion in 2015 to $15 billion in 2019,
During the Trump administration, Iran’s capabilities and options were reduced and the U.S. was gaining ground in Middle East countries’ acceptance of Israel’s right to exist and prosper as a friendly neighbor.
Notwithstanding that for 40 years Iran has been the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and routinely declares “death to America”, the Biden administration has spent three years exercising a policy of appeasement. Biden has rewarded the Ayatollah to the tune of about $100 billion; that is, massive revenue from the non-enforcement of U.S. oil sanctions over three years, a $6 billion ransom payment and a $10 billion sanctions waiver.
Iran has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars towards training and equipping Hamas, and Hizballah terrorist organizations in the past few years. In Yemen, Iran has provided a wide range of weapons, training, advanced equipment such as unmanned aerial systems, and other support to Houthi militants, who engaged in hundreds of attacks against regional targets in Saudi Arabia and are now endangering world shipping in the Red Sea.
When Trump took office, he put the Houthi organization on the world terrorist list. Biden, immediately took them off the terrorist list for no reason other than to undo a Trump initiative.
Monday, 26 August: Why increasing corporate taxes is a bad idea.
Corporations don’t pay taxes, people pay taxes. Every corporation has a “product” and a cost associated with it; raw materials, salaries and wages, paying the light bill, etc. etc. etc. Add up the costs, plug in the desired profit and you have the sales price. Adding a corporate tax is just another item in the cost of production. The tax gets added on and passed on to the buyer of the product. The higher price also reduces our position in the global market.
Raising corporate taxes is just another democrat anti-business move.
Monday, 2 September: Cut spending by reducing the size of the President’s budget submission.
GROUND TRUTH:
A mammoth, sprawling, uncontrollable, federal government currently numbering about 4.3 million plus hundreds of thousands of contract employees was never the vision or intent of the Founding Fathers. Organizations have a propensity to grow to a point of diminishing returns; cease to be efficient, effective, and/or no longer perform the functions for which they were created. At that point, a large organization will tend to look inward and become self-perpetuating rather than value-added for the greater good.
Some or all of that could apply today to the Departments in the Executive Branch of the federal government. This results in two major problems that desperately need to get fixed.
First, a too-large organization is very expensive to maintain. A more effective and efficient Executive Branch will be much smaller and less expensive. Every 1% reduction in end-strength equals about a $1.5 billion saving in annual salaries plus billions of dollars more in long-term retirement pay and benefits.
Second, and more importantly, the annual U.S. budget boils up out of this massive organization. Every government-funded program is maintained and sustained inside these bureaucracies. These programs are this organization’s product. General Motor’s product is vehicles; the Executive Branch’s product is taxpayer-supported programs. The question is, what is the value added of those programs? An in-depth review will undoubtedly find programs that have existed for decades, their original purpose no longer relevant, programs that sounded good at their inception but have failed in execution, programs to solve a problem that should have been the purview of state or local officials, programs initiated to solve a short-term problem but live on forever. The list is long. President Reagan summed up the problem with this statement, “Government is like a baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
A complete and total re-look at the entire Executive Branch will be the number one responsibility of the Vice President for at least the first six months in office.
Monday 16 September: Cut spending by insisting on changes in the way Congress operates.
In 2020 when the pandemic was beating up every aspect of our society the Congress concocted a 5,593-page-bill monstrosity for Covid-19 relief, The Cares Act. Of course, it passed; nearly everyone could use a little relief from Covid and the taxpayers were stuck with the bill, all $1.8 trillion dollars. But here is the pathetic part; under the guise of helping Americans through the pandemic, members of Congress took the opportunity to pork-up the bill with dozens, if not hundreds, of earmarked funding directives that had absolutely nothing to do with Covid or Covid relief. Here is a sampling:
$10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan,
$300 million for fisheries,
$100 million for NASA,
$300 million to Endowment for the Arts,
$300 million to Endowment for the Humanities,
$300 million to Public Broadcasting,
$500 million for Museums and Libraries,
$720 million to Social Security Administration,
$315 million to the State Department,
$90 million to the Peace Corp,
$492 million to National Railroad Passenger Corp,
$526 million grant to Amtrak.
$4.7 billion in foreign aid to nine countries.
The takeaway from this example is that under different circumstances, each of these expenditures could have/should have seen the light of day in one or more congressional committees where expert witnesses would have testified to the pros and cons of passing the funding.
The second takeaway is that the Covid Relief Act was not a one-off occurrence. Producing multi-thousand-page bills has become the norm. No one who votes for them has actually read them and therefore do not know what they are voting for or against. Should we be borrowing money for earmarks that have never been exposed to public scrutiny? If viewed separately by the American taxpayers, would they all pass the smell test? Absolutely not.
For years politicians have been emphasizing the need for infrastructure spending. So, in 2021 Congress finally passed, in a bipartisan vote, a $1.2 trillion Infrastructure bill which, by the way, is also funding universal pre-K, child care, enhanced child tax credit, earned income tax credit, Affordable Care Act subsidies, Medicaid expansion, medical hearing benefits, affordable housing, Pell grants, children’s nutrition, immigration, state and local tax deductions, etc. etc. etc. Only about 25% of the expenditures actually exist for real infrastructure such as roads, bridges and airports. What happened to the remaining $900 billion?
President Trump should declare that he will not accept and will not sign into law bills that Senators and Representatives have not read, bills that have not had every expenditure vetted and voted on in Committees, bills that go way outside the law’s main subject and intent.
This action, along with a smaller President’s budget, will cut spending by hundreds of billions of dollars annually and put us on a path to balanced budgets.
Other examples for the campaign:
The truth about “tax cuts for the wealthy.”
The pathetic state of education in America.
20% of U.S. students do not graduate high school.
Almost 2,000 high schools across the U.S. graduate less than 60% of their students. Those “dropout factories” account for over 50% of the students who leave school every year. One in six students attend a dropout factory. One in three minority students (32%) attend a dropout factory compared to 8% of white students.
In the U.S., high school dropouts commit about 75% of crimes.
Of those graduating high school, over 20% are unable to pass the test to enter the U.S. military because they are functionally illiterate.
On average, 7,000 students across the country drop out of school every school day thereby creating a linkage to a life of crime and/or welfare. About 70% of prison inmates do not have a high school diploma.
Why do they drop out? The main reason is they got behind in K-5, further behind in Middle School and eventually became frustrated, disenchanted and just gave up
.
Average U.S. annual spending per public school student is over $14,000 in 2023. That is about 34% higher than the average of the other 37 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. Currently our number one “solution” to improving education results in the U.S. is for the feds to throw money at the problem. It’s not working.
The Department of Education’s 2024 budget is $90 billion; a $10.8 billion increase over 2023 and we keep falling further behind in world rankings and become an ever-increasing nation of functional illiterates.
Note to researchers: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, also known as the “nation’s report card” provides proficiency data for elementary, middle and high school students over the past several decades.
Regain energy independence and replenish the oil reserves.
Return the military to its former greatness as a credible deterrent force.
Note to the trump researchers; see article, HOW DID THE U.S. MILITARY FALL OFF THE CLIFF? WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. www.WeThePeopleSpeaking.com
World peace forever.
Note to the Trump research group: there is a complete concept of operations on how to do this in a book, Fix the Systems, Transform America, chapter 8.
Cabinet nominations.
Another beneficial Monday surprise for late August could be to announce the proposed nominees for Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury. Emphasize their background training, intellect and overall qualifications to head these critical positions. Contrast this with the Biden formula for building his Cabinet which was to end up with, “the most diverse in history.” Which has absolutely nothing to do with being the best qualified to serve the American people.
This will give voters an opportunity to get to know the leaders of the next administration and give them more reasons to vote republican.
CONCLUSIONS:
Why not? Why not roll out a fall campaign that is different, more factual, more interesting and that will keep the democrats and liberal media off balance. The public will love it and Monday mornings will certainly be more interesting.
Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of two books, Vision to Execution and Fix the Systems, Transform America as well as the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com