Commentary
Rumors are percolating—no real surprise—that Donald Trump is already considering another run for the presidency and may even have decided to go forward.
He is decamping Mar-a-Lago, which closes for the Summer, in a month or so for his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It’s unclear whether this is permanent.
Some speculate that if he were to run again, this move would prepare the way for Gov. Ron DeSantis as his running mate—it being better to have one candidate on the ticket from New Jersey and the other from Florida than have two from the Sunshine State.
No question DeSantis would be a good choice, prepared to take over the helm at a moment’s notice as a vice-president should be. At present he stands head and shoulders over any other possibility and gave Trump himself a run for his money in the CPAC straw poll.
Another view is that the former president—if he’s not in reality the present one, we may find out as audits continue to heat up—wants to be near the big donors in New York to bankroll what promises to be a long campaign.
It could be a combination of these things, but whatever the case, and although I happen to be one of those who believes he won in 2020, I have a recommendation to make:
At least to some degree, Donald Trump must reinvent himself for the 2024 presidential election.
Of course Donald will always be Donald but something new is always advisable and one situation in our country is in such crisis, worse even than the border, that it is crying out for him to address it.
This situation is so alarming, in fact, that if it continues in the direction it is going we might as well elect Xi Jinping president and start brushing up our “social credit scores.” The USA is over.
And that is—as I am sure you know— education. From pre-K to PhD, the vast majority of our educational institutions have curricula that seem as if they were written by Trotsky between Politburo meetings.
Well, not quite, because Trotsky was not obsessed with skin color and might have thought critical race theory as berserk as it is, so pick your Marxist. Maybe Antonio Gramsci or supposed “Woke”-founder Michel Foucault, who has been raising some eyebrows lately.
That’s how far it’s come.
Now I realize we’ve already had a self-described “Education President”—George W. Bush. But he wasn’t very good at it. “Common core” was a bureaucratic Washington-centric mess that never improved anything, actually made things worse and left us with the propagandistic nightmare we have now.
Incongruous as it may seem—and it’s really not—Trump should assume that mantle and make it the number one issue of his campaign to recapture the presidency.
He should start now, very publicly, because, as I noted, we are in crisis, destroying more of our youth by the minute and with them America’s future.
In so doing, Trump would be expanding his base. Conservative activists are far from the only people who are appalled by what is going on in our schools. Parents and indeed grandparents across the country—who have seen it all on Zoom now— are worried stiff about what is happening to their children though many are too fearful of the repercussions to speak up.
They would welcome Trump taking this on, even if they didn’t admit it at first.
This would be especially true of two key parts of the electorate where he did not fare particularly well—suburban women and blacks (where he did better than most Republicans but not yet good enough).
The suburban women will need some wooing (they’ve been propagandized endlessly against him), but many blacks already see school choice as the civil rights movement of our time. (Teaching young black kids that it’s okay not to learn basic math is about as condescending… and racist… as you can get.)
When I say Trump is the man to do this—to take these issues and run—it is because he has already made several early and meaningful steps in that direction. In a sense he has already begun.
Near the end of his presidency he took on phony “diversity” training, critical race theory, and the fundamentally dishonest 1619 Project that even the New York Times, where it first appeared, walked back. Instead, he initiated the 1776 Commission that Biden, of course, killed.
He did make one error, I regret to say, choosing Betsy DeVos for secretary of education. Still tethered to the Bush approach, she didn’t have the courage or the moxie to carry through the necessary reforms and right the ship.
Trump should build his own ex-officio education commission now, actually continue building what he started while in office, and publicize their ideas and initiatives as only he can.
I will be so bold as to nominate the person I think should head that up and be the secretary of education in waiting — Larry P. Arn, president of Hillsdale College.
Since taking over that college in 2000, Dr. Arn has turned Hillsdale into one of the few institutions of higher learning in the country where they teach you how to think, not what to think.
They’re also experimenting with that “radical” idea in lower grades. The burgeoning home school movement is of course part of it too.
You can hear Dr. Arn’s thoughts on education and the politics of freedom here.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on Parler as @rogerlsimon.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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