Stellar political advice, coming from … Roger Stone? Methinks this won’t pass Mar-a-Lago muster, but Stone’s assessment is brutally valid, even if his rationalization for it is a pander of sorts to the “stop the steal” effort. The only way to defeat the winners of the 2020 election cycle, Stone advises, is to defeat them on the issues that matter now.

The Epoch Times‘ Beau Davidson gets this juicy and counterintuitive take:

Mediaite picked up on it as well:

Stone was known to be entrenched in the #StopTheSteal movement to keep Trump in power after his election defeat, and the Republican political operative has been under scrutiny for his connections to the events of January 6. However, in an interview with the Epoch Times, Stone recommended that Trump’s supporters move on from the ex-president’s loss in 2020.

“I know this upsets a lot of Trump supporters, but the 2020 election is not going to be rewound. It’s not going to be addressed,” Stone said. “People who have power never relinquish power. I would be more concerned with the integrity of the next election.”

Stone punctuated his point by saying if Republicans sweep the midterms and take control of Congress, they would be able to investigate Hunter Biden, the FBI’s search at Mar-a-Lago, and “Russian collusion can be revisited.”

The truth is that the 2020 election was never going to be “rewound” in the first place. There is no mechanism for rewinding a presidential election. Once states certify their election results, the only way to reverse it is through election challenges before the Electoral College meets. Trump’s campaign tried to challenge results but lost every time. Once the Electoral College reports its votes to Congress and Congress counts them, that’s it.

Put that point aside, however, and consider what Stone’s advice means. He’s not saying to admit defeat, of course, but Stone is saying that focusing backward is a losing political strategy. And he’s right; voters care about the present and immediate future, not the past. In this political environment especially, they want to see political candidates focused on fixing a broken economy, crime waves in cities, and other issues that impact their lives now and on an every-day basis.

Stone seems to think so as well, even while spending a more significant time with Davidson on the topic of politicization and “weaponization” of the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. That may be a reaction to recent events suggesting that the red wave may be receding a bit in the midterms, perhaps the result of either a loss of focus on the core issues or a sapping of enthusiasm among the MAGA wing. Stone could well be doing some resetting of expectations in hope of reminding voters that elections still matter, and especially the winning of them.

So which 2024 candidates will be looking forward? And which one will be very inclined to make his campaign about the 2020 election almost exclusively? That’s why this statement will likely annoy Trump HQ, unless Trump himself plans to stop talking about 2020 and pivot to current issues exclusively. That certainly would be healthier for Trump and for his followers, but we haven’t seen a lot of evidence of a pivot so far.

Or perhaps there’s another possibility, given Stone’s position in the MAGAverse. Does he know something the rest of us have yet to discover? Stay tuned.