I’m re-posting Donald Trump’s Final Grade (it appeared here nearly three years ago) for four important reasons:

1) Odds are high that Trump will again be the Republican candidate for our presidency.

2) If he does become a candidate, he will face a cacophony of denunciation from the mainstream media.

3) The flood of denunciation will almost certainly effect his ability to perform well (see below for explanation of this).

4) For comparison, I plan to write soon about Joe Biden’s less-than-stellar performance to date.

Here is my original post:

A number of articles I’ve seen, along with opinions from certain syndicated columnists, make the case that the Covid-19 pandemic defeated Donald Trump. I have trouble swallowing that. The virus clearly shifted some votes, but I would argue that Donald Trump knocked himself right out of the Oval Office.

The reason seems obvious. Trump never learned to be presidential. He spent his four years in office squabbling. He flooded his nights with ridiculous tweets, and in daylight threw his abrasive jabs and roundhouse rants at practically everyone. In the end, enough of those blows turned around and smacked him solidly on the jaw, putting him down for the count.

I suppose one might argue that his bluster was caused by the press, the majority of which pummeled him at every turn, putting him on the defensive, but I don’t buy that either. He had shown plenty of nastiness even as a candidate while skirmishing with others for the Republican nomination.

I think he won the first time because he was the outsider itching to drain the Washington swamp and yank some federal tentacles off our backs. That sounded good to me, as it apparently still does to most citizens. As I wrote in my Washington’s Swamp post, in December only 15% of us approved of the work of our Washington legislators.

Not that it matters to anyone else, but I give Trump a D- for his term. In my system, he avoided a flat out failing grade because he accomplished some things I believe have been good for our country. But he sits tightly wedged near the bottom of the presidential barrel because he was often an embarrassment while in office.

URGENT NOTE: If you’re among the 85% of us disappointed with our congressional crowd, and if you know anyone capable of draining gigantic swamps, someone reasonably stable and fortified with stamina galore, give that person a nudge toward greatness.

End of original post. Now some updated thoughts:

It is now clear that Trump’s presidency was thrown violently off course by the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative. If you don’t know the origin of the narrative, it was funded by the Clinton campaign and it was trumpeted loudly by the New York Times, the Washington Post, many other left-leaning big city newspapers. Ironically, the Times and the Post even won Pulitzer Prizes for their stories touting the fake Steele dossier that ignited the fuss. The collusion narrative was also frequently highlighted on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and MSNBC. But emerging facts, especially those in the Durham report (See here) turned that narrative around.

Here are a summary of the factual story, as revealed by a few paragraphs taken from a more reliable CNN report (The Steele dossier: A reckoning, written in November 2021). Read it carefully. There are some bombshells in it.

When it came to light in January 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office, the so-called Steele dossier landed like a bombshell and sent shockwaves around the world with its salacious allegations about Trump and his supposed ties to Russia.

But five years later, the credibility of the dossier has significantly diminished.

A series of investigations and lawsuits have discredited many of its central allegations and exposed the unreliability of Steele’s sources. They also raise serious questions about the political underpinnings of some key explosive claims about Trump by shedding new light on the involvement of some well-connected Democrats in the dossier, and separate efforts to prod the FBI to investigate ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Two special counsel investigations, multiple congressional inquiries, civil lawsuits in the US and the United Kingdom, and an internal Justice Department review have now fully unspooled the behind-the-scenes role that some Democrats played in this saga. They paid for the research, funneled information to Steele’s sources, and then urged the FBI to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

Nearly a year passed before the full truth came out about the financing: The money flowed from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to law firm Perkins Coie, to the research company Fusion GPS, and then ultimately to Steele, who got $168,000.

But Democratic involvement in Steele’s work was much deeper than previously known. Court filings from the Durham inquiry recently revealed that some information in the dossier originated from Charles Dolan, 71, a public relations executive with expertise in Russian affairs who had a decades-long political relationship with the Clinton family. He has not been accused of any crimes.

But that isn’t the end of the story. Obama and Biden knew the truth, as did the Deep State

“In July 2016, CIA Director John Brennan rushed to the White House to brief then-President Barack Obama and Joe Biden, our current president, about alarming new evidence uncovered by American intelligence. The agency had obtained reliable information that “Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians.” (page 81 of the Durham report).

But not only did Obama and Biden know about Hillary’s treachery, so did other top officials who were also secretly briefed. These officials included Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey. This is made clear from some of Brennan’s handwritten notes. Yet, for the next three years all of these high-ranking officials remained silent about the CIA’s findings. How deep can the Washington Swamp (see here) get?

Final questions:

Do you think it possible that the same forces described above would surge again against Donald Trump if he were elected president for a second term? Do you think that Trump would be both vengeful and vindictive during his term? Do you think such a scenario would be good for our country? Are these important questions?

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Stay tuned. I’ll get to Biden next.