DID I CALL THIS? Report: Trump talking privately lately about running in 2024.

Why yes, yes I did:

Trump was big on the national stage long before he was president. Why would he go away after the election is over? He’ll still have tens of millions of (probably angry) followers, deep pockets and a huge megaphone.

There has already been some talk of Trump starting his own television network to rival Fox News, and/or his own social media platform — the latter made more plausible by the heavy censorious hands of those running Twitter and Facebook — and I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me? He’ll probably hold campaign-style rallies around the country starting right after the election.

Heh. Indeed.

ROGER SIMON: A President Biden Could Wreck Trump’s Historic Middle East Peace.

Trump labeled the JPCOA the worst deal ever, and he had a point since it didn’t even allow for inspections at Iranian military sites, the very place nuclear experiments would be conducted. One wonders what it really was intended for.

Trump’s withdrawing from this deal created a realignment of forces. It reassured the Muslim Sunni countries that America had their backs against imperialist Iran and led to rapprochements and mutual recognition between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, the Sudan and, supposedly to come, the big player Saudi Arabia and a host of others.

In other words, Trump, working with Jared Kushner, then-special envoy Jason Greenblatt, Ambassador David Friedman and others, convinced the Arab world—that Sunni part anyway, already frustrated by Palestinian intransigence—that endless opposition to Israel was pointless for all parties and being good neighbors would benefit all in a host of ways from technology to tourism.

They signed on the dotted line.

Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by several people for this. He certainly deserved it, but of course he didn’t win because he was, well, Trump. The global elites would never allow it, even if he resolved every conflict on the planet for the next few centuries.

But that’s of small moment. Prizes are, in the end, mostly irrelevant. What matters is that this most contentious region of the globe, since literally time immemorial, was finally in the process of calming down.

People talk about presidential legacies. Think about that one!

Enter a potential President Joe Biden.

He claims to want to rejoin the JPCOA. If he does on anything even faintly resembling its original terms—and he well could because he always supported it—the peace will unravel, if not in the proverbial “New York minute,” at a somewhat more languid “Arabian Nights” pace, but the results will be the same.

It’s quite obvious why Saudi Arabia and several others were waiting for the election before they hopped on. They watch American politics as closely as we do. It’s a small world, after all.

Ben Rhodes’ “Blob” can’t wait to return to a destabilized Middle East.

THIS IS ALL GOING SWIMMINGLY (CONT’D): Did the Left just get “crushed” in the 2020 elections? “An abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races on Tuesday not only denied them victories in Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that would have positioned them to advance their policy agenda — it also put the party at a disadvantage ahead of the redistricting that will determine the balance of power for the next decade. The results could domino through politics in America, helping the GOP draw favorable congressional and state legislative maps by ensuring Democrats remain the minority party in key state legislatures. Ultimately, it could mean more Republicans in Washington — and in state capitals.”

SEE, YOU, NOT WASHINGTON, ARE THE PROBLEM: This from Politico earlier today: “We have grown so far apart from each other,” said former Trump administration staffer (and no longer “Anonymous”) Miles Taylor. “I mean, Washington, D.C., is not broken — the American people are broken.”

THIS IS ALL GOING SWIMMINGLY: NY Times: Cuban-American editor told readers to ‘get over’ Latinos voting for Trump and she’s being lectured for it.

IT’S INCREASINGLY OBVIOUS THAT THEIR JOBS HAVE NEVER BEEN ABOUT ENSURING THAT CHILDREN LEARN: Bureaucrats Declare War on Learning Pods. They’ll Lose. “Experimentation with such alternatives has been given impetus by government schools’ widespread inability to master online learning even as teachers unions resist efforts to return kids to physical classrooms. Just this week, the union representing public teachers in Washington, D.C. added to families’ uncertainties by torpedoing the district’s plans for reopening schools.”

Plus:

That officials are motivated more by hostility to learning pods than by a bureaucratic notion of helpfulness is apparent from Oregon’s huffing that “these groups also risk leaving out students who are already underserved by our school system.”

Oregon’s phrasing echoes the Denver Board of Education’s complaint that it was “deeply concerned about the pods’ long-term negative implications for public education and social justice” and feared “that further flight will exacerbate academic and opportunity gaps among our children.”

The implication is that families dissatisfied with the floundering government schools and capable of doing better by their children should instead hold the kids back out of concerns for equity. It’s Harrison Bergeron transformed from cautionary tale into policy.

That government school officials face an uphill fight in their efforts to stop the exodus of students to alternatives is obvious from trends and from public opinion.

Good. They’re bad for kids and should be replaced. Or, better still, not replaced.

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THE “PROGRESSIVE COALITION” SEEMS INCREASINGLY COMPOSED OF ANGRY WHITE PEOPLE WITH “STUDIES” DEGREES: Pro-Trump Latinos Now Being Exiled From the Progressive Coalition. Socialism: Not so popular among those who remember it well.

REMINDER: Liberal media, Big Tech and progressives pursue a relentless revolution against free speech. “This past month, America’s ‘progressives’ showed they will do anything to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This includes having social media, along with ‘legacy’ media, spike articles by America’s fourth largest newspaper, The New York Post.”

I predict that they’ll back off on the heavyhanded obvious stuff over the next few years, while working hard on subtler and more effective means of control to deploy next time.

BOB MCMANUS: NYC coddles the privileged, pain-in-ass anarchists who spit on cops.

The woman who spat on the cop: NYC’s “Phlegm fatale.” “Devina Singh, 24, of Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, who hangs at high-end swimming pools in Miami, gets busted at ‘peaceful protests’ in Manhattan and smugly hurls hockers at cops.”

WELL: Wow! Even CNN & MSNBC Admit That Trump Appears to Be on Track to Win Arizona.

THE LINCOLN PROJECT SET OUT TO SEPARATE SUCKERS FROM THEIR MONEY AND GET UNDESERVED MEDIA ATTENTION, SO I’D SAY IT SUCCEEDED ADMIRABLY. Lincoln Project ‘Epically Failed,’ Say Progressives as Trump Wins Bigger Share of Republican Voters Than in 2016: “Turns out there were no ‘Biden Republicans.'”

INDEED: The Fate of #NeverTrump Republicans Provides a Little Bit of Schadenfreude.

SO THIS IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:

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WHEN NARRATIVES FAIL: Trump, the ‘Racist,’ Won More Minority Votes Than Any GOP Candidate Since 1960.

NARRATIVE-BUILDING: Political Elite, Counting States, Twitter And MSM Are Silencing Vote Disputes.

THE MESSAGES ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE GALAXY: Scientists detect strange ‘fast radio burst’ from within our own Milky Way.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: No, Every Vote Does Not Count. “The Orwellian narrative is already being written: To call for the Constitution to be enforced is to ‘steal’ the election.”

ASTEROIDS: An Asteroid Trailing After Mars Could Actually Be The Stolen Twin of Our Moon.

REALITY BEGINS TO PENETRATE: “Could we maybe just accept that identity politics isn’t an effective political strategy? And could Democrats just stop with it, like now?” Remember, the function of identity politics isn’t to win elections, it’s to make white progressives feel good about themselves.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Antifa: Rise of the Black Flags’ Shows the Chaos, Anarchy Hatched by an ‘Idea.’ “Joe Biden may dismiss the Marxist movement, but this doc does no such thing.”