So, President Trump is scheduled to speak tonight, at 9 p.m. EDT. His staff is calling it a campaign event, with an announcement. Most think he’s going to announce his presidential candidacy for 2024. I don’t have any wisdom on what kind of announcement it may be. Could be an exploratory committee. I don’t know. 

Here’s something that I do know: The wave of blaming the former president for disappointing election results is vastly, vastly overrated and oversimplified by a lot of people who really never liked him in the first place. This includes, disappointingly, a lot of conservative editorialists.

Now, I’m laying my cards on the table. As I’ve already said, I would prefer any presidential announcement by Mr. Trump to wait until after the Georgia runoff.

From a power-sharing standpoint, Herschel Walker’s race is very important, and I fear Mr. Trump might be a distraction. 

I don’t know that, though, and neither does anybody else. Mr. Walker himself has invited Mr. Trump to campaign for him, so the “Trump should stay away” mantra may not hold up at all, and may be completely wrong. Who knows? 

Indeed, maybe Mr. Trump would rally people to vote heavily. In fact, I think he ought to tell people to start their mail-in ballots immediately. Don’t stop. Republicans have to learn how to play this game, too. 

There’s an interesting Trump defense, by the by, on this point and others in the American Conservative magazine by J.D. Vance, the senator-elect. He argues that the GOP underperformed for two reasons: not enough money, especially at the grassroots level, and getting outfoxed by Democrats on mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting. 

Republicans desperately need their own mail-in ballot harvesting get-out-the-vote operation. Yet that has very little to do with Mr. Trump. That’s a party machinery issue, state by state. And Mr. Vance says that is not Mr. Trump’s fault.

Now, I don’t happen to agree with my former boss’s contention that the actual vote counting in the 2020 election was massively fraudulent. I don’t agree. 

I do believe, as I have said before, that the 2020 election was heavily influenced by the $450 million “Zuckerbucks” operation, placing Democratic operatives in key polling places in swing states and districts while nobody was looking. That’s where the mischief was, and that’s the argument that Mr. Trump should be making. 

Now, quickly back to Herschel Walker: I think it would be great if Mr. Trump donated at least $20 million from his own PAC to help out Mr. Walker. I think it would be great if he announced that tonight at whatever type of campaign event it’s going to be. 

The idea that Trump-backed candidates — particularly the Senate candidates who were defeated — lost because they were 2020 election deniers just makes no sense to me. On my show, we interviewed all these candidates two and three times: Vance, Oz, Masters, Walker, Bolduc, Smiley, O’Dea, Levy, Johnson, Grassley. Not a single one of them at any point ever mentioned the issue. A 2020 election denial never came up. Inflation, crime, the border, parents’ say in education: Those are the big issues. Not once did I hear anything about a 2020 election denial.

So Mr. Trump’s critics who keep using this election denial argument to blame him for a whole bunch of very close GOP losses — it just makes no sense to me. This subject never came up. 

Now, Mr. Trump occasionally referred to election denial, that’s one thing, but he was not on the ballot. The candidates themselves never mentioned it. So I still don’t see how Mr. Trump gets blamed on that score. There’s a disconnect there. 

What I do want to say is this: Regardless of whether he runs, he has a very impressive list of achievements: tax cuts, deregulation, a terrific economy, energy security and dominance, the Abraham Accords, ringing the bell on China. This is a very impressive list. It’s my great hope that he talks about these policies — which President Biden has reversed in the main — and not about the 2020 election.  

When Mr. Trump focuses on policy, people love it. They know the country right now is not in good shape, nor is the economy, and they believe that Mr. Trump’s remedies would be a very good approach. 

Look, like everybody else, I don’t like the personal insults. Never have. Some of the tweets and the like: It’s not my cup of tea. On policy content, though, there’s nobody better than Mr. Trump. Yes, I worked for him for three years, so I have a certain amount of bias.

We’ll see tonight which Trump emerges and what his announcement actually will be. I hope it’s heavy on policy content and I hope he helps out Herschel Walker with a big chunk of cash. 

I’ll say this: Whatever Mr. Trump decides to do, I wish him luck. Okay? I wish him luck and goodwill. 

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.