If Donald Trump really wants to win this year’s presidential election, there’s one thing he needs to do. It goes against his nature. (I know this because, like him, I hail from Queens, New York, whose unofficial motto is “Never Apologize, Never Explain.” Another popular phrase: “Whadda I care what people think? Do they pay my rent? DO. THEY. PAY. MY. RENT?”)

Showing weakness among guys from Queens is an invitation to getting bullied, harassed, and despised. And no, you never grow out of it, as I can testify with my 60^th birthday coming into  sight. (Maybe that confession will make you think less of me. Do you pay my rent?)

But back to my point: Donald Trump needs to admit that he was wrong. That he made a mistake, that he got played, that he was lied to and believed it, that he took catastrophic advice. He doesn’t like doing that. It’s hard to get him to admit that he screwed up picking people who’d go on to stab him in the back, from Mike Pence to Nikki Haley, or that it was a mistake to let those backstabbers knife his real allies, like Gen. Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon.

But if Trump wants to energize his base, steal at least half of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s voters in nail-biter swing states, and put himself on the right side of history, he needs to swallow hard and say it: “I was wrong about the COVID vaccine. I got lied to. We all got lied to, by sneaky little frauds like Anthony Fauci.”

Trump’s Grassroots Army Wants Him to Repudiate Fauci’s Medical Fascism

The most enthusiastic Trump supporters also happen to be those of us who resisted the vaccine mandates — who rejected a rushed, untested, abortion-based gene therapy forced on billions while it was still labeled “experimental.” The same people who won’t buy the media gaslighting that Trump is a legitimately “convicted felon” are the ones who risked their jobs, defied their pastors, and in some cases, lost their pensions rather than serve as lab rats in a global game of medical Russian Roulette. The most fervent defenders of Trump, from Steve Bannon to Eric Metaxas, are vocal critics of the Dead Baby Vaccine for a wide array of reasons — both medical and moral.

So far, Trump has doubled down on the vaccine issue, foolishly boasting how quickly he was able to get that dangerous concoction past the safety protocols which should have red-flagged it and gotten it shelved. As Newsweek reported just three months ago:

In one post, Trump quoted Biden on the COVID-19 vaccine and then took credit for accelerating the vaccine’s introduction amid the pandemic.

“‘The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The Vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat Cancer – Turning setback into comeback!’ YOU’RE WELCOME, JOE, NINE MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU!” the former president wrote.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Mr. Trump. Please keep rubbing that in our faces, why don’t you?

Who exactly is he trying to impress with this? Is there a large constituency of voters who are clueless enough to think the COVID vaccine saved millions of lives, but sufficiently skeptical and hard-headed to see through all the other lies from our state-controlled media — for instance, the claim that he’s a Russian asset who tried to execute an unarmed coup on January 6, 2021? How many such people exist in America, and how many are undecided voters who might be swayed to vote for Trump because he was quicker to implement Fauci’s policies than Biden might have been?

Trump Has the Pretext to Flip: Cascading Reports of Vax Injuries

Meanwhile, the bad news about the lockdowns and the vaccine keeps coming out every week. As The Stream reported yesterday:

On June 3, the British Medical Journal Public Health published the most definitive study yet conducted on the COVID-19 pandemic, concluding that flawed measures like vaccines and lockdowns resulted in 3,098,456 “excess deaths” — those not caused by the virus itself — between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2022, in 47 Western countries.

“This is unprecedented and raises serious concerns,” the authors observed, explaining how the “phase III randomized clinical trials of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines showed that the Pfizer trial had a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group.”

The “serious adverse events,” as defined by the study, either lead to death, are life-threatening, require prolonged inpatient hospitalization, cause persistent/significant disability/incapacity, concern a congenital anomaly/ birth defect, or include a medically important event.

We also reported that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave legal credence to the claim (which is provably true) that the COVID jab does almost nothing to prevent transmission of the virus, and therefore should never be imposed on anyone.

The H.M.S. COVID Panic has already hit the iceberg, and this kind of truth will just keep on leaking into its broken hull. The credibility of our pro-trans, pro-abortion, politically captured and Big Pharma-dominated medical institutions is sinking slowly beneath the waterline. Does Trump really want to lash himself to the wheel and go down with the ship?

What Would Reagan Do?

Or does he want to act like Ronald Reagan, who signed a bill legalizing abortion while he was serving as governor of California, then later admitted he was wrong — going so far as to address the March for Life, publish a pro-life manifesto while in office, and try his best (despite his lying advisors’ efforts) to pick pro-life judicial candidates? Did that admission make Reagan weaker or stronger?

Trump is a political genius, with flaws like everyone else. If Reagan could cop to his mistakes, then Trump needs to realize sometimes it’s not just right but smart to do the same.

Taking the stance that you refuse to learn from experience is not a sign of strength. It’s what doomed the Bourbon dynasty in France, who earned the reputation that they learned nothing, and forgot nothing.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. With Jason Jones, he also is coauthor of God, Guns, & the Government.