As the first Republican debate approaches, I have an urgent appeal to the candidates: Please adopt the good things Donald Trump did and skip the catastrophic parts (i.e., everything after the campaign ended on Nov. 8, 2016).

     Although he presided over the most wasted presidency in history, the 2016 Trump campaign was magnificent, without peer, perfect in every respect. I described the many useful innovations of that campaign in my book “In Trump We Trust.” Please start there, Republicans.

President Trump may have been a pathetic crybaby too scared to fire his own attorney general — much less ask Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for wall funding — but in 2016, it was all image, and candidate Trump came across as strong.

Don’t fall into these consultant-created traps of presenting yourself as a weakling, candidates. Remember that you’re running to be leader of the free world. Cat ladies aren’t voting for you. Republicans are.

1) Stop using the royal “we,” e.g., “We testified before the grand jury …,” “We did our duty …,” “We decided to run ….” Committees did not do these things. You did. Be a man and say so.

2) Do not tell us about the time you were discriminated against — and yes, I’m looking at you Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Nikki Haley. We’ve all had obstacles and don’t need to hear about yours, least of all that time in grade school when someone was mean to you.

3) Do not say “When I am president ….” This is a flashing neon sign announcing that you have zero chance of ever being within a thousand feet of the Oval Office.

4) Finally, for the love of God, please stop telling us about your families. We don’t care about your spouse, your parents or your kids. In fact, we’d prefer a first lady who doesn’t speak English.

Quiz: Who is the greatest president of the last century?

Answer: Ronald Reagan.

You think he won because he had the nicest family? He wouldn’t have been elected dogcatcher with that bunch. Yet somehow, Reagan won a 44-state landslide in 1980 and a 49-state landslide in 1984.

His wife, Nancy, badgered him throughout his presidency to be pro-choice. Note that the crucial word in the previous sentence isn’t “pro-choice”; it’s “wife.” Nancy hadn’t been elected to anything. He ignored her — and went on to ignite an economic boom that lasted 30 years, defeat the Evil Empire and restore a nation in decline to its superpower status.

But every four years, campaign consultants convince the candidates that voters are dying to hear about their families. Two for the price of one!, to borrow an embarrassing slogan of the Clintons’.

Let’s review some of the horrors from 2016:

In addition to Sen. Marco Rubio’s strange idea that having a bartender father was a crucial qualification for president, his typical opening statement went something like this:

“My name is Marco Rubio. I’m from Florida. My wife, Jeanette, and I are the proud — we’ve been married 17 years, and we’re the proud parents of four children, two of whom were able to join us here this evening.” (The other two were in bartender school.)

Compare that to Trump’s opening statement: “I’m Donald Trump. … I’ve made billions and billions of dollars dealing with people all over the world, and I want to put whatever that talent is to work for this country so we have great trade deals, we make our country rich again, we make it great again.”

Gov. John Kasich introduced himself at the first GOP debate, saying, “Hello, I’m John Kasich, the governor of Ohio. Emma and Reese, my children, and Karen — love ya, girls. Thanks for watching tonight.” Asked why he should be president of the United States, he said: “Just last week, a friend asked one of my daughters …” Asked how he would take on Hillary Clinton, Kasich said, “Let’s start off with my father being a mailman.” Again, at the same debate, he reminded the audience, “my father was a mailman.”

And that’s why we look back at Dwight Eisenhower and say, You know what made him great? His father was a mailman. No, I’m sorry — his father was an engineer.

In explaining why he didn’t trust Trump with a nuclear arsenal, Sen. Ted Cruz began, “You know, my daughters, Caroline and Catherine, came tonight. They’re 7 and 5.”

Answering a question about women in combat, Gov. Chris Christie said, “Can I be really clear on this? Because I am the father of two daughters. One of them is here tonight. What my wife and I have taught our daughters …”

(Just curious, but don’t any of them have sons?)

Jimmy Carter’s invocation of his daughter at the 1980 presidential debate was widely regarded as the reason he lost. Asked about nuclear treaties at the debate, Carter said: “I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day before I came here to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms.” (Her second-most important issue? Why Wendy Smith at school was so stuck up.)

One week later, The New York Times began an article on Carter’s sweeping defeat with this: “Jimmy Carter almost had Leslie Fleisher’s vote … until she saw his debate with Ronald Reagan last Tuesday and heard Mr. Carter mention that his 13-year-old daughter, Amy, regarded nuclear weaponry as the most important issue. Then she decided to stay home.”

Attentive readers will recall Christie’s utter disaster of a convention speech in 2012, which consisted of a full recitation of his autobiography for the hapless audience: “In the automobile of life, Dad was just a passenger. Mom was the driver …” It went on in that vein for another six hours.

Despite gruesome reviews, Christie must have thought the problem was he hadn’t bored us with enough minutia about his family and returned to finish the job in his 2016 presidential run. His closing statement at the first debate began: “Listen, I was born into a middle-class family in New Jersey. My dad came home …”

This humble pie crap began with Bill Clinton, who specifically requested that speakers at the 1992 Democratic National Convention tell stories of childhood deprivation (as documented by Ron Fournier, then of the Associated Press).

The I-Feel-Your-Pain routine was a huge hit with urban liberals, but Clinton went on to lose the working-class vote. Not coincidentally, this was the precise moment the Democrats dumped the working class and became the party of Wall Street and welfare bums.

Republican voters want issues, not Oprah.

Candidates, we don’t care if you were born a poor black child (Steve Martin, “The Jerk”) or your wife is hell on wheels. Please just promise to build a wall and execute criminals.

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

   You probably think the job of a reporter is to report news. How old-fashioned, cis-gendered, White supremacist of you! That’s not it at all, certainly not at the august New York Times.

Instead, a reporter’s mission is to find out what kind of story would help the Democrats at any particular moment in time, and then write it, no matter how preposterous. Obviously, skills in sophistry and legerdemain are crucial.

Right now, nothing would help the Democratic Party more than somehow blocking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida from becoming the Republican presidential nominee.

That’s a tall order. DeSantis is not only running 70-30 on popular issues like immigratino, but he’s following through by actually enacting those policies — on everything from immigration to crime, to trans-mania, to anti-White racism. Most spectacularly, he made utter fools of the entire liberal brain trust over COVID.

This cannot stand. There’s a whole world of Times readers waiting for Pravda to land on their doorstep every morning to confirm their prejudices.

So what’s a liberal lackey to do?

I can now reveal the six takedown techniques taught to Times reporters on Day One — before they’re even taught that misgendering someone is a fireable offense — as illustrated by journalists Sharon LaFraniere, Patricia Mazzei and Albert Sun, in a million-word, front-page article on July 23.

1) The Kamikaze Run

Hit a person on his strongest point — he’ll never expect it. If the target’s loyal, call him disloyal; if he’s consistent, call him inconsistent; if he’s honest, call him a liar; if he’s good-looking, call him ugly.

And if he performed brilliantly during a global pandemic when almost all other government officials blundered, write an article saying: HEY, GOV! YOUR COVID RESPONSE SUCKED.

2) The Shocker Headline

Use a scary headline belied by the actual facts presented in your article.

Actual NYT headline: “The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis’s Vaccine Turnabout … a grim chapter he now leaves out of his rosy retelling of his pandemic response.”

3) Hide the Ball

Deep within the story, bury the central fact that blows apart your narrative. Most likely, the reader will never get that far.

NYT, paragraph 6,000: “Overall, [Florida’s] death rate during the pandemic, adjusted for age, ended up better than the national average.”

4) The Ant’s Eye View

Find a brief, aberrational moment during the relevant time period that supports your phony premise.

NYT: “Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave … With less than 7% of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14% of deaths between the start of July [2021] and the end of October.”

That’s four months out of a three-year-long pandemic. During that precious interval, Florida’s death rate was, in fact, higher than the national average — as opposed to across the whole pandemic, when Florida’s death rate was lower than the national average.

5) “Huh. We Forgot That.”

Do not mention other, more likely, explanations for the aberration.

Like all airborne viruses, COVID hit southern states hardest in the summer (when people are crowded inside for the air conditioning) and northern states hardest in the winter (when people are crowded inside for the heat).

If you didn’t already know that, it was being reported everywhere at the time. Here, for example, is NPR in the fall of 2021: “We’re certainly seeing [COVID conditions improve] throughout Florida, South Carolina, southern Texas in particular. … [But as] the surge eases in the South, it could ramp up in the North, like last year.”

Just last week, the Times quoted a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist who noted that: “This is the fourth summer now that we see a [COVID] wave beginning around July, often starting in the South.”

Won’t well-informed Times readers know this? Absolutely not. For Times readers, the world began this morning and ended this morning.

5) The Imaginary Causation

Ignore painfully obvious facts that ruin your bogus theory of causation.

Your thesis: COVID deaths soared in Florida during the Delta wave because Gov. Death-Santis did not encourage young people to get vaccinated.

In fact, it was the Delta variant that couldn’t be stopped by vaccination, finally forcing the CDC to admit that vaccination would not prevent either infection or transmission.

As CNN reported in July 2021: “CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said new data had convinced her the Delta variant was ‘behaving uniquely’ … [and] the evidence indicated that fully vaccinated people who have breakthrough infections involving Delta may be as likely to transmit virus to others as unvaccinated people are.”

6) The “What Isn’t Like the Other” Statistic

Lard your article with statistics made meaningless by combining like and unalike things.

— “Of the 23,000 Floridians who died [during the Delta wave], 9,000 were younger than 65.”

OK, but how many were younger than 60? Is there no difference between a 23-year-old and a 63-year-old? Also, how many were obese? How many had co-morbidities?

— “Despite the governor’s insistence at the time that ‘our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,’ a vast majority of the 23,000 were either unvaccinated or had not yet completed the two-dose regimen.”

“Unvaccinated” is completely different from “got one shot,” i.e., “basically vaccinated.” For all we know, everybody who died from Delta in Florida had had at least one shot, contradicting the whole point of that statistic.

To use a professional journalist’s technique: This Is the Steep Cost of the Times’ Descent Into Mindless Left-Wing Activism … a grim chapter the paper leaves out of its history.

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER