ANDREW MALCOLM: Here’s how Trump could pull off another election surprise.

Absent some major news event like, oh, say, a damning special counsel report, what can Trump do in the next 13 weeks to at least mitigate GOP losses? First of all, will Trump’s so-far loyal base show up when his name is absent? Obama’s never did.

Trump is solid with about nine of 10 Republicans. But those 2016 voters who handed him the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, for instance, are not Republicans.

Standard Democrats seem unlikely converts. Which leaves those crucial swing independents.

If you want to make a difference, spend less time on the internet and more time volunteering for a local campaign.

HAM SANDWICH NATION UPDATE: This is a disgrace. Grand jury averaged 39 seconds per case; York County lawyers want 900 indictments tossed.

INSERT JOKE ABOUT ANTIFA AND BRUTALISM: According to the left these days, if you dislike brutalist architecture, you might be a Nazi.

CENSORSHIP BY LIBERALS IS OUT OF CONTROL: Now you can’t wear an NRA shirt to class. But not to worry because Babylon Bee assures us that utopia is just one or two more outrages away!

BRUCE BAWER: Suicide by Condescension? “Posh Brits want to be saved from Islam, but not – horrors – by a working-class yob.”

When classism is more important than national survival, you’ll end up with neither your nation nor your rank.

HAYEK’S REVENGE: Dallas city government imposes draconian fees on bike sharing companies, then is astonished that the companies have pulled out and junked all their bikes. Hint to Dallas: it’s called killing a business model.

As Hayek said, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

RYAN MITCHELL: The Realist Case for a Korean Peace Treaty.

If North Korea’s ruling class can only be convinced of their existential safety by a peace treaty, then that is a precondition for any lasting and verifiable denuclearization process. Given that the regime has quite reasonably cited examples such as the Libyan intervention to explain its reluctance for disarmament, it seems obvious that it will not be convinced to pursue “greatness” via economic development (as Trump has recommended) until its basic safety is guaranteed.

A peace treaty with the United States, already long overdue, would be the basic existential guarantee that North Korea needs in order to begin turning into a “normal country”—i.e. one that is motivated on a day-to-day basis by normal greed and self-aggrandizement, not by a desperate struggle to survive amidst a (perceived) life-or-death state of exception. Much of the bizarre and militaristic character of the regime, though partially attributable to its dynasty of paranoid dictators, can also be ascribed to the threats and isolation that have made invasion and regime change a continuously perceived threat for decades.

How much of the hostility between the United States and North Korea is due solely to the fact that they have no mutually acknowledged, formal legal relationship aside from that of belligerents in what will soon be a seventy-year-long war? Given that the regime has been willing to flout the international “rule of law” as to its nuclear weapons development and other activities (from cyber-attacks to assassinations), can it really put so much faith in the legal protection from invasion that states are afforded by UN Charter Article 2?

The fact that North Korea has for its guarantor a world power we don’t want to go to war with, ought to be all the assurance Pyongyang needs in its continued existence.

Or as I quipped the other day: Know nukes, no peace. No nukes, know peace.

LOYALTY OATHS USED TO BE CONSIDERED A BAD THING, BUT THAT WAS WHEN THEY INVOLVED LOYALTY TO THE UNITED STATES, INSTEAD OF TO LEFTIST IDEOLOGY: California public university latest to require ‘diversity statement’ for employment.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Stealthier Tanks Are On The Way.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A new study reveals that conservative college students cope with left-leaning professors by self-censoring during class discussions and parroting their professors’ political views on homework assignments.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Election Results, Rick Gates, Bruce Ohr and Much, Much More. “Yesterday’s election a complete repudiation of Trump. Just kidding. That’s the spin your are going to hear today and I just want to get you ready for what you will face out there in the political post-election jungle.”

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Democratic Socialist Agenda To Cost $42.5 Trillion In Next Decade, Says … Vox?

Now wait just a minute, some astute readers will protest, that doesn’t sound like the Vox we know. And you’d be right — because to Vox’s credit, they offered some space to analyst Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute. Riedl also previously served as adviser to Senators Rob Portman and Marco Rubio, as well as Mitt Romney, and did a gig as staff director for the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth.

Riedl has extensive experience in estimating legislative proposals and their costs, which comes in handy even when analyzing pie-in-the-sky proposals. Using projections primarily from either liberal or libertarian-leaning resources, Riedl patiently totes up the costs from all of the above to get a final cost for the first decade of Democratic Socialism — $42.5 trillion in new spending.

And that’s before the ripple effects create the need for even more spending, which creates even more ripple effects, etc., until a once-wealthy country is ruined.

Unexpectedly, of course.

A TAX ON REMITTANCES WOULD BE SIMPLER AND MORE EFFECTIVE: Call to tax Mexico $2,000 per illegal immigrant to pay for Trump’s wall.

A border lawmaker has drawn up a plan to pay for the wall in part by fining Mexico and other countries $2,000 for every illegal immigrant caught crossing into the United States.

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, who has made is mark on Washington in just his first term, is pushing a plan that includes the tax on illegals and other ways to pay for the border wall demanded by President Trump.

With up some 400,000 illegal immigrants being apprehended at the border yearly, his tax could raise $800 million a year. Immigration groups claim that an equal amount of illegal immigrants get into the U.S. annually.

Really, I don’t understand why nobody’s talking about the remittance tax. Oklahoma already does this. But apparently, that’s a part of this bill, distinct from the “tax” on foreign aid.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: 670 ballots in a precinct with 276 voters.

MINNESOTA POLITICS: State Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) Swore To Apparent Falsehoods in Court — While Divorcing Her Alleged Brother.

A WIN IS A WIN, BUT YEAH: Ohio Squeaker Shows GOP Has A Lot To Learn About Winning. “Balderson won by huge margins in the district’s other five counties. The problem, however, is that he still ran behind Trump’s share of the vote in all but his home county of Muskingum. Even worse, turnout in each of these counties—which swung to Trump by up to 29 percent in 2016—was much lower compared to 2016 than it was in Delaware and Franklin. Again, some of that is because of Democratic enthusiasm, but some of it is also due to lack of enthusiasm from Obama/Trump backers.”

People who voted for Trump didn’t do so because he was a Republican. Often they did so in spite of it.

CHANGE: John James wins Michigan primary to face Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

Farmington Hills businessman and military veteran John James on Tuesday won the Republican U.S. Senate primary, as President Trump loomed large in the contest to face U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow in the fall.

With 86 percent of precincts reporting, James was ahead with 55 percent of the vote to Grosse Pointe financier Sandy Pensler’s 45 percent. Pensler called James to concede after 10 p.m.

James, 37, faces an uphill battle against Stabenow, the popular 66-year-old incumbent who is seeking a fourth six-year term. She holds a major cash advantage with $6.27 million in the bank as of July 18 after spending $3.2 million to reserve television air time for the last four weeks before Election Day.

James becomes the first black Republican to advance to a high-profile general election contest since William Lucas ran for governor in 1986. If James were to beat Stabenow, he’d be the second black Republican to serve in the Senate, joining Tim Scott, R-South Carolina.

It’s an uphill race against an incumbent, but I think he’s got a shot.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: How can Americans now trust the intelligence agencies shown to be corrupt in the very recent past?

In sum, many within the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, the NSC, and the State Department may have been involved in the greatest scandal in American electoral history, by directing agents, informants, and employees to help one campaign to harm another — and then, even after the election, to work to undermine a sitting president. In addition, these rogue agencies spent two years fighting congressional requests to release incriminating information. And then, when they were forced against their will to cough up some documents, they redacted them so heavily that they’re almost undecipherable.

Former FBI director Comey spent months on a book tour, punctuated by daily back-and-forth feuding with the president of the United States. Former CIA director John Brennan is a current paid CNN analyst who devotes much of his commentary to calling the president treasonous and unfit. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper is a paid MSNBC consultant who has alleged that the president is a Russian intelligence asset.

So let us recontextualize the intelligence agencies’ current dilemmas.

Our current agency directors and cabinet are rightly calling universal attention to the ongoing threat of Russian espionage efforts.

They do so in concert because they are apparently worried, though they cannot say such openly, that President Trump himself and the American public are not yet sufficiently woke to these existential threats from Russia.

Such concern for the national security is fine and necessary.

But somewhere, somehow, someone must also must explain and rectify the past.

A top-to-mid-level-management housecleaning would do wonders, too.

THEY SHALL BE KNOWN AS “THE LUCKIEST GENERATION:” A Generation Grows Up in China Without Google, Facebook or Twitter.

I’D LIKE TO SEE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S ANTITRUST DIVISION LOOK INTO THIS: Students Sacrifice Meals And Trips Home To Pay For Textbooks.

#METOO: Top female executive leaves Amazon after being accused of ‘inappropriate’ comments in meetings and ‘abuse of power’, nine months after getting promoted in sex harassment reshuffle.