No, Virginia, Trump Has Not Lost a Step
by Roger L. Simon
Don’t tell the legacy media or the various left-wing politicians, bureaucrats, intelligence agencies, and their minions, paid or unpaid, who wish him ill, but the meme they are seeking to promulgate, overtly and covertly, is dead wrong.
If anything, it’s the reverse. He is sharper than ever.
That’s what experience does.
The attempts to draw an equivalency between the mental fitness of Mr. Trump and President Biden are absurd malicious propaganda.
How do I know this?
I was in the audience of two thousand plus at Nashville’s Opryland on Feb. 22 when Mr. Trump addressed the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) for more than an hour and a half with nary a stumble, consulting a teleprompter or extemporizing as he wished.
He was also wittier than anyone on late night television.
He began this speech some minutes beyond 9:30 p.m. after he had given a previous talk that same evening at a fundraiser in the city.
The man is a force of nature.
This was, roughly, the fifteenth time I had heard 45 speak live, and I had vowed for once not to sit in the press section in the rear.
When Mr. Trump, as he almost always did, called out the “fake news” while pointing at that section, it always seemed he was wagging his finger directly at me.
I wanted to say, “Wait! Wait!” (His real targets were often only a few feet away from me.)
But my effort, this time, to be “among the people” misfired. From the outset, it was clear the event contained more useful information than I would be able to remember, and I retreated to the press area to take notes with my laptop.
Here is what jumped out at me:
I expected the introductory speeches to be boring. They weren’t.
First up was NRB CEO Troy Miller, who began by telling us that all presidential candidates from both parties had been invited to speak, but only one had accepted. He shrugged knowingly after this, generating a good laugh.
More importantly, he spoke forcefully of Christian support for free speech, noting, “The righteous have no need to suppress the truth.” (I scribbled that one down.)
Also on hand was Paul Dans from the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, which seeks to bring conservatives to Washington D. C. to replace the Deep State unelected bureaucracy, thereby diminishing their numbers and ability to shape, even control, policy.
There was also a representative of Salem Media who talked of their company’s fight against “woke” rhetoric before one of Salem’s stars, talk show host Hugh Hewitt, gave the first formal talk.
Mr. Hewitt alerted the audience to the left’s latest propagandist buzzwords, “Christian nationalist.” As he put it, “They are trying to steer Christians into believing we are something we are not. We have no desire to run other people’s lives. Demand they define their terms.”
Then Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, gave an accurate and well-received tour d’horizon of everything conservatives despise about modern liberalism and progressivism and what to do about it.
In urging the election of Donald Trump, he spoke a sentence that provided a pungent introduction to the next speaker (after some delay), the 45th president himself:
First published in the Epoch Times.