Only One Republican Candidate Gets Results 

Michael Barone / Townhall Tipsheet / Columnist / Opinions

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

The Wollman Rink episode, or, rather, the unduly optimistic conclusion I drew from it, explains a lot about Donald Trump's presidency and why he may not do as well against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) in the contest for the Republican nomination, as current poll numbers suggest.

The story of the ice skating rink repair is now ancient history, a reference even fewer readers will find familiar than when I featured it in a column in December 2016, a month after Trump's surprise election as president.

The Wollman Rink was first opened in 1945, but due to mismanagement by the city government, it deteriorated over the years, and by 1984, when the Trump Tower opened just a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, it wasn't working at all, even after the city government spent $13 million over six years trying to fix it.

Enter Trump, who offered to get the rink working, and did so, as he recounted in his 1987 memoir, "The Art of the Deal," ahead of time and $3 million under budget. Maybe as president, I speculated, he could transform government procedures and eliminate endless environmental reviews and enable the public seriously to build infrastructure again.

We Know Why Trump's Lawyers Wanted to Meet With AG Garland Over Classified Doc Probe

Matt Vespa / Townhall Tipsheet

It’s all political theater. The investigation is a witch hunt. The legal justification for the raid on Mar-a-Lago is arguably illegal and unconstitutional. But there’s another special counsel probe nonetheless that could indict Donald Trump on the classified materials controversy. There were no nuclear secrets on the coffee table. If anything, there were mementos from Trump’s time in the White House, far from the state secrets Joe Biden left all over his Delaware residence and other locations. The former president’s legal recently wanted to meet with Attorney General Merrick Garland about the investigation, which isn’t the best news. Maybe this is why: Trump was caught on tape talking about the materials he left with after his term in office (via CNN):

Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything. Read more here.

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