This memo is exclusively devoted to op ed's from the Jan.19. WSJ because they, collectively, frame some key issues and perspectives I believe are worthwhile remembering and taking to heart assuming you can bring yourself to being receptive.

Passions are high regarding Trump because Democrats want them to be.  They believe they have momentum on their side and are compelled to make sure they make his life miserable after his presidency, as they did during his presidency, because his election threatened them and their greedy need for power. They chose to put unbridled hatred above country.

That Trump accomplished a great deal, was faithful to his campaign commitments is buried underneath his post 2020 election behaviour for which Democrats impeached him a second time without regard to basic rights any accused are guaranteed.

This will be the Pelosi Democrats stained legacy as surely as Trump will have his own.

In time, assuming cooler and more objective heads reign, Trump will come out fine if judged by his accomplishments rather than his persona. However,  an asterisk will always be there as his own "scarlet letter."

He earned it and deserves it but brandishing him with a hot iron, as if he were  cattle, is a perfidious act and says more about Democrat hatred than Trump's misdeeds.

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Harvard Accuses Elise Stefanik

A dean declares a congresswoman unfit to serve as an adviser at her alma mater.

By William McGurn

Elise Stefanik grew up in a working-class family in upstate New York, where her father and mother ran a small plywood distribution business. After getting accepted to Harvard, she became not only the first Ivy Leaguer in her family but also the first to graduate from college.

“I’ll never forget what my dad told me the summer before my freshman year,” she tells me. “He said, ‘Elise, I can’t tell you what to expect or what’s going to happen because I never had this experience. I know you will do well and we will be proud of you. All I ask is that you remember where you came from.’ ”

He was right: His daughter would make him proud. Two days before she graduated from Harvard in 2006, she received a job offer from the George W. Bush White House (where I was a colleague). Afterward she helped on various Republican campaigns before returning home for a stint with the family business.

Then, in 2014, she ran for Congress—and won—in New York’s 21st, a mostly rural, upstate district between Albany and Canada. At the time she was 30, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

But now she’s not good enough for Harvard.

On Jan. 12, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School booted her off its senior advisory committee after first trying to get her to go quietly. Dean Doug Elmendorf put it this way: “In my assessment, Elise has made public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.” It came days after a petition had demanded her removal for “enabling violence at our Capitol” and undermining both democracy and the Constitution.

It’s an extraordinary sanction for an institution dedicated to free and open inquiry, one that doesn’t seem to be used against Harvard liberals. Now there’s a new, student-driven petition demanding Harvard “take a stand for representative democracy and against violent white supremacy” by stripping Ms. Stefanik of her Harvard degree—along with other Republican alumni, including the Kennedy School’s Rep. Dan Crenshaw (class of 2017), and the Harvard Law School’s Sen. Ted Cruz (1995) and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany (2016).

These moves at Harvard are all the more extraordinary because, unlike Mr. Trump, Ms. Stefanik has not used language about a “rigged” or “stolen” election. Though she has spoken about voting irregularities, it’s been in the context of constitutional issues such as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s overriding powers reserved for the state Legislature to extend the voting deadline.

In a floor statement delivered the day the Capitol was stormed, Ms. Stefanik decried the violence as “un-American” and demanded those responsible be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” But she defended her objection to certifying electors, saying it reflected the concerns “tens of millions of Americans” had about “unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws. We can and we should peacefully and respectfully discuss these concerns.”

As a private institution Harvard has the right to decide who serves on its advisory committees. But shouldn’t an institution whose motto is “Veritas” at least have the decency to back up its accusations by listing the specific offenses that rendered Ms. Stefanik unfit for Harvard life?

Alas, Harvard’s truth squads target only Republicans. Rep. Adam Schiff, for example, is a graduate of Harvard Law School. As the top Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Schiff falsely insisted for years that he had “more than circumstantial evidence” of Mr. Trump’s collusion with Russia.

Laurence Tribe is a Harvard law professor whose Twitter feed during the Trump years suggested a man unhinged. Even BuzzFeed noticed: “Why Is A Top Harvard Law Professor Sharing Anti-Trump Conspiracy Theories?” it asked.

As for confirming presidential electors, in January 2001 then- Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. objected to the formal recording of the Electoral College votes that gave George W. Bush his victory. Mr. Jackson was then an adviser on the same Harvard board as Ms. Stefanik.

Four years later, when Mr. Bush was re-elected, some Democrats objected to counting the results for Ohio, which had tipped the election to Mr. Bush. Mr. Jackson, still on the Institute of Politics committee, was again among the objectors. There doesn’t seem to have been any move by Harvard to give him the heave-ho.

Back then, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi explained the Democrats’ objections this way: “Our very democracy depends again on the confidence of the American people in the integrity of our electoral system. So, my colleagues, please don’t talk about this, about a conspiracy theory. It’s not about that. It’s not about conspiracy. It’s about the Constitution of the United States.”

Fair enough. But when Ms. Stefanik says it, Harvard casts her out. Is there any leader at Harvard willing to protest the embarrassment Dean Elmendorf has inflicted on the entire university by indulging the progressive mob that wants a congresswoman canceled?

How about it, President Lawrence Bacow?

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Blacklists Are the Rage in Publishing

Why the house I run will bring out Josh Hawley’s new book.

By Thomas Spence

I am an independent book publisher, and in recent days I have been taking calls from journalists asking which authors I would refuse to publish. That’s an odd question to ask an American publisher, but suddenly it seems to be on everyone’s mind in our industry. Some 250 self-described “publishing professionals”—mostly junior employees of major houses—have issued a statement titled “No Book Deals for Traitors,” a category in which they include any “participant” in the Trump administration.

Readiness to silence someone because of who he is or whom he associates with is often called the “cancel culture,” but I prefer an older term—blacklisting—whose historical associations expose the ugliness of what is going on. Not so long ago, publishing professionals would have been horrified to be accused of it. Today they compete to see who can proclaim his blacklist with the fiercest invective.

On Jan. 6, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri invoked his legal right to object to Congress’s certification of electoral votes. Reasonable people can disagree whether his act was noble or cynical, courageous or rash, but no one can reasonably argue that he intended to incite that afternoon’s invasion of the Capitol by a lawless mob. He immediately and forcefully condemned the attack. But the next day Simon & Schuster canceled his forthcoming book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” citing the senator’s “role in what became a dangerous threat.”

I started getting calls from reporters in effect daring me not to join the blacklisters and from publishers, editors and agents who wondered when and how the mob would come for them.

The founder of my publishing house, Henry Regnery, proudly called himself a “dissident publisher.” The conservative books to which he devoted his fortune and career were no more in favor in 1951, when he published William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale,” than they have been during my own 25 years in this business. But blacklisting then, though real, was discreet. Everyone knew it was un-American. No one was proud of it.

An independent publisher is vulnerable to today’s Jacobins in many ways, for it relies on large partners to print, distribute and sell its books. Now that dissent from the latest version of progressive orthodoxy is equated with violence and treason, my colleagues and I know we could be next. But we choose to fight back.

We’re proud to publish Mr. Hawley’s book, which his original publisher has made more important than ever. We don’t have to agree with everything—or anything—Mr. Hawley does. We ask only if his book is well-crafted and has something true and worthwhile to say. The answer is yes.

The statement of the 250 “publishing professionals” shows that today’s censors recognize no limits. I appeal to the real professionals of publishing, some of whom may be the bosses and mentors of those who signed that mindless rant: Remember that you are Americans. Americans argue, write, preach, campaign and vote. They don’t blacklist.

Mr. Spence is president and publisher of Regnery Publishing.

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They Did Their Jobs Well

Pence, Kudlow, Rao, Pai and more: Here are the Trump appointees and policies that served the country.

By The Editorial Board

As the Trump Presidency ends in the disgrace of the Capitol riot, an effort is already underway to erase everything in the last four years as disgraceful too. That’s a lie—a Big Lie, to borrow the cliché of the moment. Donald Trump’s profound character flaws need to be separated from what so many people in his Administration accomplished for the country.

These men and women didn’t “enable” Donald Trump. Sixty-three million Americans did that when they elected him in 2016, with a significant assist from the Democrats who nominated Hillary Clinton, perhaps the only candidate who could have lost to Mr. Trump

Mr. Trump appointed people who had the usual varying combinations of conviction and ambition. They served despite the hostility of the bureaucracy and press, and a President who often didn’t appreciate their work. Sometimes—in some cases, often—they protected the country by stopping Mr. Trump from his worst impulses.

We can’t list everyone who contributed, but before the Biden Presidency begins we thought we’d link some of those who did their jobs well with the successful policies they promoted. We’ve already saluted Betsy DeVos at Education and Ajit Pai at the Federal Communications Commission. Here’s a sample of other significant people and policies:

• Larry Kudlow, Kevin Hassett, Casey Mulligan, Gary Cohn, and others on the economic team. The pandemic-lockdown recession has obscured that the pre-Covid U.S. economy was the strongest since the 1990s. Unlike the Obama years, the benefits of growth were widely dispersed, wage gains were strongest for the least skilled, and poverty saw its sharpest decline in decades.

This wasn’t a continuation of the Obama economy, which was losing steam in its final years. Growth accelerated after the GOP-Trump policy mix of tax reform, deregulation and an end to business harassment. Growth reached 3% for a year or so before Mr. Trump’s trade policies added costs and uncertainty. But these advisers also dissuaded Mr. Trump from even more damaging protectionism, such as withdrawing from Nafta.

• Neomi Rao, Mick Mulvaney, Russ Vought, Scott Gottlieb, Elaine Chao and the deregulators. The Trump Administration promoted the most far-reaching deregulation in modern times. They did this in ways large and small—from easing rules across American finance, ending the attempt to put entire industries (for-profit schools, coal, payday lending) out of business, rewriting unachievable vehicle mileage standards, accelerating generic drug approvals, and easing permitting standards for oil and gas development and exports.

The Administration also raised the standards for cost-benefit analysis in issuing new rules, and instituted a regulatory budget. The result was a strong economy, yet no major breakdown in health or safety. Nothing close to the Flint water or Colorado wastewater disasters of the Obama years happened in the last four. They proved emphatically that the administrative state can be reined in with effort and no harm to the public.

• Jay Clayton, Eugene Scalia and investor protection. At the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Clayton focused enforcement on genuine scams rather than political targets. He expanded access for small investors to private capital markets and he took on the proxy adviser racket.

As Labor secretary, Mr. Scalia rewrote an Obama rule so pension funds must focus on returns to investors rather than serving the political demands of environmental, social and corporate governance goals. Both looked out for the little guy, not Wall Street.

• Don McGahn and judicial nominations. Assisted by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Mr. McGahn created a process for vetting, nominating and confirming a record number of judges. This includes three Supreme Court Justices and 54 appellate judges whose influence will be felt for decades. Mr. McGahn and other lawyers also steered Mr. Trump away from blunders like sacking special counsel Robert Mueller or exceeding his executive authority on regulation and other matters.

• Mike Pence, Bill Barr and the rule of law. Few men have been vilified more than the Vice President and former Attorney General, but they deserve better. Mr. Barr refused to endorse Mr. Trump’s claims of election theft when the evidence didn’t exist. He also refused Mr. Trump’s demand for indictments in the FBI Russia collusion probe before the election—per Justice Department standards.

Mr. Pence resisted Mr. Trump’s pressure, private and public, to overturn the state electoral vote count. He followed the Constitution. This may cost him with some Trump voters if he runs for President in 2024, but the country should be grateful he was there when Mr. Trump finally exceeded his constitutional bounds in 2020. The actions of Messrs. Pence and Barr, as well as by conservative judges who rejected fraud claims, reveal the underlying strength of American institutions amid the Trump stress test.

• White House aide Matt Pottinger, Mike Pompeo, H.R. McMaster and the China challenge. These men developed the strategy and tactics for the new U.S. relationship with China. As national security adviser, Mr. McMaster never meshed with Mr. Trump, but his national strategy document redefined the U.S. security challenge in a world of great-power competition.

Messrs. Pottinger and Pompeo, among others, called out China for its aggression abroad (Hong Kong, South China Sea) and abuses at home (Xinjiang labor camps). They offered renewed U.S. support for Taiwan, formed an alliance against Huawei as a security threat, and invigorated the “quad” of Asia-Pacific nations—India, Australia, Japan and the U.S.—as a defense group resisting Chinese expansion.

They accomplished this despite Mr. Trump’s frequent resistance because he thought he could charm President Xi Jinping. We’d add John Bolton to this list for heading off many of Mr. Trump’s other bad ideas, such as meeting with the Taliban at Camp David and pulling U.S. troops from South Korea. Heather Wilson and Robert O’Brien pressed Air Force readiness and Navy modernization, respectively.

***

This is far from an exhaustive list, but these offer a flavor of the people and policies who made a difference for the better. A Presidency is more than one man, as we will soon learn the hard way as progressives populate the Biden Administration. The Trump Administration should be remembered for far more than its terrible final days.

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There’s as Much to Learn From Trump’s Success as His Disgrace

Responsible leaders made his election possible by creating a vacuum that a demagogue could fill.

By Gerard Baker

The best argument for Donald Trump’s presidency was never about the man himself. It was about the people who voted for him.

It wasn’t really about what he would do for taxes, immigration or the federal judiciary. He did many needed things on those fronts for sure, but any clever Republican politician with a good pollster could have come up with that agenda. It wasn’t about his vaunted business experience and how he might inject a little necessary private-sector sense into a stultified bureaucracy. It certainly wasn’t about his penchant for conversation-dominating social-media expostulations—polls have indicated a consistent popular distaste for them.

The best argument for Donald Trump was that he led and gave voice to millions of Americans who had been leaderless and voiceless for decades. The secret people, as a British poet once described his similarly disdained countrymen—smiled at, paid, passed over. The deplorables. The men and women whom the media, entertainment and corporate human resources types never meet in their local Whole Foods but deride as bigots and brutish neanderthals.

People who had voted for Republicans and Democrats and had an increasingly hard time telling the difference. People who had voted for a “compassionate conservative,” who led the nation into a catastrophic and futile war. People who had voted for the nation’s first African-American president, a man promising hope and change but delivering hope mostly for those who had plenty of it already and change for few of those who really needed it.

These were Americans left behind by, or alarmed by, the unforgiving juggernaut of “progress” hailed by our political, business and cultural leaders as the glorious arc of history.

Economic progress that saw the logic of global supply chains and free labor movement render millions of American workers too expensive to employ, condemning their communities to despair. Technological progress that atomized society, turning people into redundant ex-employees, doom-scrolling screen junkies, and datasets for clever algorithms to target. Cultural progress that, in the space of a decade, told people that beliefs they had held dear all their lives were now immoral and needed to be expunged from schools, workplaces, lives.

People who had grown up believing their country, for all its faults, was decent and good and had been a unique force for human freedom were now told that it had always been the nerve center of oppression, fit only for a re-education of reactionary minds.

Donald Trump stood for those people, understood them—and, quite uniquely among politicians, actually liked them. It’s not hard to understand why they liked him. Of course there were those who harbored darker beliefs and more malign intent. But if you think they number more than a small fraction of the 74 million who voted for him a second time last year then perhaps it’s you who needs education about what your country is like.

·         In short, President Trump’s greatest achievement will have been the elevation of the legitimate concerns of perhaps half the U.S. population, an improbable, physics-defying reversal of the political tides that had eroded much American self-confidence in the preceding generation.

But leadership involves more than simply articulating the fears and aspirations of those who need leading. People follow leaders, heed their words, absorb their example. Leaders not only reflect the ideals of the led; they reflect back to them the values by which the country should be governed. By this leadership standard Mr. Trump must be judged too.

The damage his unpardonable behavior—throughout his presidency, but especially since the election—has done to the bonds that hold a fragile nation together is incalculable. His refusal to accept defeat, and the steadily escalating insistence to his followers that they should never accept it, is for many a defining conclusion that bears testimony to his unfit character and invalidates whatever other argument can be made for his presidency.

There is much to this. The loss of civic trust from his promotion of ever-larger falsehoods has widened, rather than helped close, the divide, risking further alienation from constitutional politics of those who voted for him and—not incidentally—paving the way for a potential undoing of much of what he did achieve.

Perhaps Joe Biden will prove a judicious leader. We can hope. Perhaps he will remember to heed the voices of those who voted for Mr. Trump and not dismiss them as domestic enemies, as many of his now ascendant allies are doing. Perhaps he will resist the powerful voices around him who want the last four years to be written off as an aberrant sideways pause in the march of progress.

That would be unwise. Learning from Mr. Trump’s success is as essential as disavowing his misdeeds.

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