From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is All Things with Kim Strassel, a Potomac Watch podcast.

Welcome to All Things with Kim Strassel, a Wall Street Journal opinion podcast, and I am joined this week with former CIA officer and current talented radio and television host, Buck Sexton.

Buck, thank you so much for joining us this week.

Kim, honored to be with you. Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be fun.

Normally, I have a theme for these, but as you are a man able to talk about anything and everything,

and as we have just about closed out, 2024, hallelujah, I thought we'd use this show to talk

about some of the highlights and low lights of the past year and maybe even make a few

observations about the coming near future. So I'm going to start and put you on the spot.

Winners and losers of the year. If you had to choose a couple of winners for this

year politically, who would they be? I mean, the obvious answer is the answer that everyone would

have to give. I mean, Donald Trump had the most amazing comeback in certainly my lifetime in politics,

and in many ways, I think the most sweeping win a Republican has had

in my adult lifetime. I may be younger than a few of your audience listeners, but I mean,

it was incredible for Donald Trump to do what he did, to be indicted four times with felonies,

two state cases, two federal cases, to survive two assassination attempts, one with a bullet to the ear,

to be called by most of the Democrat media, some version of Hitler, a fascist, and a threat to democracy,

all of the above, and to win and to win so convincingly that the Democrats have just gone off onto the side and been whimpering

ever since the election. I mean, that's absolutely remarkable. I think you have to throw J.D. Vance

in there as well to go from a first-term senator to being the vice president on this ticket is

pretty amazing. I was an advocate for J.D. very early on in this regard. I said, I think about six

months before on my radio show, I said, I think it's going to be JD Vance. So very happy with that.

So you wanted winners. I mean, those are the biggest, clearest winners out there. There's

...