Did Trump Learn Anything From the Mistakes That Cost Him the White House?

Based on his new online interview with Megyn Kelly, it’s clear to me now that when it comes to COVID-19, Donald Trump is our Bourbon former president. As Tallyrand is supposed to have said about France’s once and future royal family, he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

When the Bourbons were restored to France after a quarter-century of failed republican revolution, nationalist war, and Bonapartism, they “returned to their country with exactly the same mentality they had left with 25 years earlier.” You know, the attitude that helped lead Louis XVI to the guillotine.

I’m not excusing the murderous Jacobins here any more than I’ll forgive the Deep State goons who helped scuttle Trump’s presidency during the pandemic. But if Trump wants to beat the Jacobins — er, the Democrats — the second time around, he has to learn from the mistakes of 2020.

Everything he said to Kelly on COVID shows that he has not learned. And these lessons are important, vitally so, because he reacted to the pandemic by doing exactly what the Washington establishment wanted him to do, allowing the Democrats to steal the White House.

THE ETERNAL CAVEAT: Since there are still a few readers with hair-trigger trigger reactions to anything that isn’t 24/7/365 110% Pro-Trump, let me assure you for the umpteenth time that, in the likely event Trump is the nominee, I will enthusiastically vote for him in the general election and wish him (and us!) four more years like his first three. But if he gets drowned in the Swamp a second time, I will point back at today’s column and scowl very crossly.

PJ Media’s own managing editor, Paula Bolyard, has the skinny on the COVID back-and-forth between Kelly and the former president on her SiriusXM show. Most of the interview was pretty great — Trump is in much better form at age 77 today than Presidentish Joe Biden was at the same age three years ago. But when it came to COVID, the bottom line is that Trump denied his role in weaponizing celebrity medical spokesmodel Anthony “Doctor” Fauci against the nation and continues to lie about the efficacy of the Warp Speed vaccines, all while hypocritically trying to label Florida Gov. (and presidential rival) Ron DeSantis as the real Fauci/Vaccine/Lockdown fetishist.

It’s unfair to judge Trump for the initial response to a virus nobody understood. But by May, when a few better-run states began reopening, it was clear that COVID was not the end of the world.

THE OTHER CAVEAT: DeSantis hasn’t earned my primary vote, either. His presidential campaign has been low energy and shows he hasn’t learned — at least not yet — how to run an effective national campaign. So far, Trump and DeSantis are the only two candidates I might support in the primary but, as things stand now, I won’t bother to vote for either one until November.

Please click on the link above for the details, but not before I share Paula’s conclusion:

Given his lack of repentance — or lack of awareness about the damage caused by mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccines, it seems that we could very well see a repeat of Fauciism, with another “expert” bureaucrat telling us how to run our lives and raise our children. That’s rather troubling, to be honest.

I’m not asking for much, certainly not from the man who gave us three excellent years of policy and SCOTUS appointments. But Trump’s response to the COVID pandemic began a yearlong process of unwinding almost everything he’d accomplished.

This is what I would have loved to have heard him say to Megyn Kelly.

“I supported the lockdowns based on the best possible advice I received at the time. But in hindsight, it’s clear that the lockdowns caused far more harm than they helped. It’s also clear the advice given to me was from swamp creatures who didn’t have the country’s best interest in mind. I should have fired them all, and on Day One of my second term, I’m going to do just that.”

“I’m joking here, of course, and people are going to take this all out of context, but if I could go back, I’d probably strangle little Fauci with that medal I put around his neck.”

“I should have spent my last day in office pardoning the January 6 protestors. Some of those fine people are still languishing in jail today. No speedy trial. Terrible conditions. Political prisoners of the corrupt Biden family. I will pardon every last one of them on my first day back in office. And I will find and prosecute the FBI agents who instigated the violence.”

That’s a guy I would crawl over broken glass to vote for in the primary.