I’d like to offer some advice to Donald Trump. This offer comes from someone who, in November, talked about following him into a raging inferno and then, in January, questioned whether supporting him was worth the fight.

How does one go from being a rabid fan to sitting on the fence in such a short period of time? Messaging. As I mentioned in January, Trump’s embrace of the grifters running the GOP suggests that he might be taking his eye off the ball. As such, I’d like to offer four bits of unsolicited advice to the former and, I hope, future president.

First, stop focusing on the stolen 2020 election and focus on America today. As important as 2020 was, it’s 2023, and we’re 20 months away from the next election. There simply isn’t time to fix 2020, and any energy spent trying to do is that much less energy going into saving the country in 2024. Given America’s trajectory, if we’re not victorious in 2024, there will likely be no more America as we know it by 2028.

Second, stop taking credit for the vaccine. The more Americans know about vaccines, the less they like them, and many of us hated them from day one. While putting the development in motion was understandable at the time, the fact is that they may have terrible long-term consequences to come. Additionally, even though it was others, not Trump, who used them as a cudgel to control, Trump inevitably associates himself with that coercion. It’s an issue best let go, as his supporters hate it, and his enemies wouldn’t give him credit for it regardless.

Third, stop trying to demonize Ron DeSantis, the most popular Republican in the country not named Trump. Not only is it not working, but once Trump secures the nomination he will need as many allies as he can get, including DeSantis and his supporters.

Image: Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore (edited). CC BY-SA 2.0.

Fourth, and most importantly, focus on issues that affect Americans where the rubber hits the road. Here are seven:

1) Immigration: Guarantee that the first thing he will do in office is to resume building his wall from Brownsville to San Diego. No nation can be a nation if it doesn’t have a border, and the invasion on our southern border is far more of a threat to Americans than anything happening in Ukraine.

Biden has virtually eliminated the border, allowing at least five million illegal aliens to enter unimpeded. Simultaneously, we’ve seen 100,000 deaths a year from Fentanyl overdoses and witnessed cartels bring violence to American streets, mimicking Mexico by bringing their infrastructure here and having comrades take powerful positions in government. Trump should promise that, if Democrats and activist judges throw roadblocks along the way again, he will use the military to patrol the border where no wall exists until the wall is completed.

2) Wokeness in government: Promise to eliminate every element of the racist Critical Race Theory in government along with the DEI “diversity, equity and inclusion” treachery. He should tell America that the government will stop operating programs based on race and setting various groups of Americans against one another in the name of “equity” and victimhood. The government’s police power will no longer favor any group over another, nor will it use demographic data to achieve “diversity” objectives. He should promise that every single element of the federal government will be agnostic as it relates to immutable characteristics.

3) Energy independence: Promise to return the United States to energy independence. This means ending the government’s demonization of fossil fuels. No more having the nation’s economic well-being taken for granted and sacrificed at the altar of the “climate change” hoax. Trump will stop wasting American tax dollars pursuing the fiction of green energy, especially because the environment’s destruction associated with mining and producing materials used in car batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines is far greater than that associated with producing natural gas and oil.

4) Return to gender normalcy: Eliminate every element of the federal government that blurs the lines between men and women. While there may indeed be a tiny number of Americans who suffer from “gender dysphoria,” the reality is men are men and women are women. This has been a fact throughout human history and remains so today for 99.995% of human beings. Our government should no more base public policy on the desires of the minute portion of the population who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria than they should base it on the slightly less frequent existence of Siamese twins. And he should promise to pass a federal law outlawing “gender-affirming poison and operations“ for children under 18.

5) School Choice: Work to give every parent in America school choice. School is often the primary place where children learn about America’s history and the “three Rs.” Increasingly, our schools not only fail to teach students to read, write, and do arithmetic, but they are becoming indoctrination camps for the anti-American, anti-science, racist poison that is undermining the foundations of American liberty, opportunity, and prosperity. Although most education is administered at the state level, the Department of Education plays a significant role, and he should promise to harness DOE’s resources to encourage every state to give parents control over their children’s education.

6) Crime: Use every constitutional resource available to reverse the Democrat’s war on police and the American people in the name of “equity.” Democrat soft-on-crime policies have put citizens’ lives at risk, and cost the lives of thousands of people across the country since the fiction of Michael Brown’s “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in 2014 and the riots in response to “Saint” George Floyd’s death in 2020.

Gone will be the days when the justice system is more interested in criminals’ rights at the expense of the victims’ rights, safety, and lives. If Democrats were really interested in helping minorities and poor Americans, they’d call for more police and longer prison sentences for criminals. But they don’t.

Trump should make it clear he does. He wants to protect night clerks, subway riders, kids walking to school, and all other law-abiding Americans as they simply go through their daily lives. Victims’ lives matter. Certainly, they matter more than those of criminals who prey upon the innocent and the weak.

7) Overhaul the security apparatus: Promise to return the American security agencies to their original mandates, i.e. protecting the lives, property, and rights of the American people and their country. This means cleaning out the activist, partisan leadership in the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and NSA so that the American people can once again have confidence that their government is there to protect them, not act as the enforcement arm of a political party and persecute them for exercising constitutional rights.

Trump should also promise to get passed legislation that explicitly says government agencies cannot work with social media firms to infringe on the First Amendment.

The entire point of this suggestion is for Trump to make it crystal clear that his sole focus is saving the American Republic, securing for all Americans the ability to exercise their God-given rights and the ability to go through their daily lives without fear that the Borg of government or the thugs empowered by it will destroy all that they live for.

If Trump can convince voters his focus is on their future and not his past, the White House is his for the taking.

Follow Vince on Twitter at @ImperfectUSA.