#The GOP can win without Trump and other commentary

From the right: GOP Can Win Without Trump

Republicans have “a real chance to take back power in the House, Senate and White House,” but they must divorce the “toxic” President Trump to do it, argues Joe Concha at The Hill. “If you’re the kind of fence-sitter voter who decides elections in swing states, when you think Trump, you think Capitol Hill riots.” The “rampage” is “just too ugly and unbelievable to erase.” But “while things look dark for the party now,” remember that America is “a center-right country, no matter how much many in traditional media try to portray it otherwise.” And the center and right “will have plenty to get fired up about without Trump leading the charge” — ­not least “abolishing ICE, reallocation of police funds, the continued ­expansion of Chinese dominance [and] Big Tech censorship.”

Conservative: Trump 2024 Isn’t Impossible

After the Capitol siege, “a pundit-class consensus says” President Trump “cannot possibly win again. But the pundit class is usually wrong,” notes Daniel McCarthy at Spectator USA. “If Trump wants the Republican nomination in 2024, who or what, exactly, will stop him?” He remains “the leader of a powerful movement” that still controls the party. Despite his “considerable baggage,” amid “a global pandemic and the worst economy since the Great Depression,” he “received more votes than any ­Republican in history, including gains among blacks and Latinos.” Democrats want “him behind bars,” but “that risks making” him a martyr — and Eugene Debs showed you can “run for president from a prison cell.” GOP “ideological blocs that doubted Trump in 2016 have no doubts now” after “the tax cuts and regulatory relief” and “Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court,” and he could sink the GOP “by running as a third-party candidate.” Remember: “Trump is not a man who accepts oblivion.”

Tech beat: Silicon Valley Swallowed Democracy

“The actions of Twitter, Facebook and [other tech giants] represent more than the woke colonization of Big Tech,” warns First Things’ R.R. Reno. “They represent the tech giants’ assumption of one of the essential functions of a liberal democratic political order: determining the proper balance between individual freedom and collective well-being” — that is, a core job of government was privatized. It’s part of a wider, long-term trend of growing “private power”: “Technically, Twitter and Facebook break no laws when censoring content. . . . Our law treats these entities as private enterprises, free to associate and contract with whomever they wish.” Yet “in a real sense, they are legislating for the entire country, even though they are technically acting privately.”

Hill watch: Schumer’s Senate Wish List

Chuck Schumer wrote a recent letter citing “this month’s violence at the US Capitol” and then proposing “a lengthy Democratic policy wish list” — an unabashed abuse of “the rioters’ criminal behavior,” the editors of the Washington examiner sigh, to “justify stretching his tenuous Senate majority further than it could ever go otherwise.” Among other steps, Schumer suggests abolishing state right-to-work laws, raising taxes on the middle class and dismantling “the nation’s profitable, self-sustaining and world-leading fossil-fuel-production industry.” But Schumer shouldn’t be riling up the Democratic base “with hopes of such transformative measures,” and “the new Republican Senate minority must hold firm.” With the election’s split results, voters clearly want some “stability” over the next few years, so “to respect their will, the political opposition must do what it was elected to do: oppose such nonsense. And the new president needs to resist the worst ­impulses of his party’s left wing.”

Pandemic journal: There Was a Better Way

With Britain plunged in a strict lockdown, Spiked Online’s Fraser Myers grimly concludes: “The extraordinary sacrifices to health, wealth and education made in the name of fighting COVID have not paid off. Many of the countries which have endured the worst death tolls have also enacted some of the longest and most severe lockdowns.” Yet still governments refuse to “rational” alternative: protecting the “vulnerable” and letting the rest get on with life. 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board