Kirk: How Trump Will Win in 2020

President Trump officially kicked off his 2020 reelection campaign in Orlando Tuesday night. I had the privilege of being in the audience to witness the event live, along with tens of thousands of other enthusiastic supporters.

It was a crowd so energized it made the NCAA Final Four crowd sound like college students studying for finals at the campus library.

I say that I had the privilege, not just because I was fortunate enough to be a guest of the first family, but because in being in the room watching the crowd while listening to the president’s words, I was given a chance to witness something unique in American presidential history .

I watched a sitting president announce that he was running as an outsider for reelection to office.

The mainstream media is positioning the president’s speech as one in which he was living in the past and attacking an old nemesis. NBC’s Today Show on Wednesday created a mashed up clip segment showing the president referring to Hillary Clinton as if he were obsessed with her. The failing New York Times has posted a similar video showing the president mentioning Hillary, Mueller, and collusion.

We are also seeing platforms from Fortune to CNN posting fact checking accounts of the president’s speech that we have never witnessed before against any Democrat.

The MSM wants it to sound as if the president was beating a dead horse. He was beating it because it isn’t even close to dead yet.

It is my contention that the president was not talking in the past tense when he spoke of Clinton, Mueller, the media, and the other usual suspects from his previous speeches. These forces have remained constantly at work against him since before he assumed the Oval Office and they continue working steadfastly against him today.

The same goes for many members of his own party, especially the likes of those currently serving in office like Justin Amash and Mitt Romney. In today’s Republican Party they, and others like them, may or may not be described as “RINO’s,” but they can certainly be labeled as being against the president’s America-first policies.

Despite being the incumbent, the resistance the president has faced over the past two-and-a-half years has truly not allowed his presidency to reach anywhere near its full potential. While it is natural for him to want to point to his accomplishments, his key to success in the 2020 election will more likely come from pointing to his hinderances.

The president needs to keep his base energized. That means, unfortunately, he needs them to remain angry. The president was elected in 2016 because a large group of voters from across the country were tired of watching eight years of Barack Obama and his star chamber of intellectuals attempt to fundamentally transform America from a world leader to a world member. They were concerned about our nation losing its preeminent place among nations, and they voted to reassert American exceptionalism.

The side we defeated did not accept their defeat. The sequel to the Trump election victory, The Democrats Strike Back, went into production right after the election, with the Clinton campaign and its inside-the-swamp supporters making certain the Steele Dossier became public. From that moment forward, every ounce of energy the Democrats, media, and liberal activists possess has been directed at stopping the president and trying to make him the most hated figure in American politics.

As the president put it in his speech, “This election is a verdict on whether we want to live in a country where the people who lose an election refuse to concede and spend the next two years trying to shred our Constitution and rip your country apart.” That is not hyperbole. It is a statement that CNN doesn’t need to bother to fact check, because it is incontrovertibly true.

The president was also spot on in saying, “Instead of bringing us together as one America, Democrats want to splinter us into factions and tribes. They want us divided.” The Democrats have been using the very tactic that our Founding Fathers tried to guard against in creating the architecture of our nation. It’s been working.

You can make the argument that if the president wins in 2020 he will be securing not his second, but his first term in office. A 2020 election after all of the efforts to discredit and destroy him over four tumultuous years would be a clear sign that Americans are rejecting the personal assaults on Trump and reaffirming their support for his agenda. Perhaps he could then get the kind of support from the House and Senate that is needed to implement policy.

The president has been having fun “polling” his audiences and asking them whether or not his 2020 campaign slogan should be to “Make America Great Again,” or “Keep American Great.” It is my strong opinion that the theme has to be “make.” The president needs his base to understand that he understands that nothing is finished, and that the dual battle against traditional Washington politics and emerging calls for socialism are just getting started.

Trump supporters need to be reminded to live in the active and future tense, not the passive and past.