2020 has certainly proved one of the most challenging, damaging, unusual, and influential years in our lifetime. On this special two-hour episode of Viewpoint, Michael Johns joins Malcolm in a very thorough assessment of the year. They begin with a review of the Ukraine-related impeachment attempt against President Trump, which proved a groundless and partisan undertaking based on no identifiable underlying high crime or misdemeanor that warranted it nor any clear evidence of unwarranted dealings with Ukraine. The impeachment proceeding, which concluded with the president's exoneration by the U.S. Senate on January 31, also proved hugely distracting at a moment when Washington policymakers should have been dealing with the real crisis on the horizon, the emerging global pandemic in Wuhan, China. President Trump acted on this promptly in early January, attempting to get U.S. public health experts into China and then later implementing a travel ban against China, limiting Americans' exposure to the pandemic. It was one of several examples throughout the year of Congress' obsession with pulling down President Trump even while President Trump refused to be similarly distracted and executed on campaign promises.

Viewpoint This Sunday reports on the stories with the goal of offering a unique perspective that challenges conventional thinking. Welcome to the Premier News Magazine as we celebrate our 4 Year Anniversary here at America Out Loud. Join WE THE PEOPLE and fight back against fake news. Rate the show, leave a quick review, and subscribe to Viewpoint on Apple Podcasts by clicking here. Your voice for the fight forward – Malcolm.

One of those promises, implemented on July 1, was President Trump's notable accomplishment in restructuring the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as he promised to do in his 2016 campaign for the presidency. In the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement, which replaced NAFTA, President Trump and his administration brought together an impressive tripartite agreement that required legislative ratification not just in Congress but also in Ottawa and Mexico City. President Trump also made preliminary progress in 2020 with trade negotiations with China, which was the first substantial effort to tackle this challenge in decades. While China ultimately failed to live up to its preliminary obligations and the world was quickly overtaken by the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump did succeed in educating the American people, Congress, and the world on China's unfair and sometimes illegal trading practices, which has included intellectual property theft, manipulation of its currency, forced technology transfers, excessive tariffs, and other practices designed by China to unfairly and sometimes illegally advance its own economy and America's expense.

On the global pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China, President Trump acted early in enacting a travel ban against China, which Democrats opposed, in mobilizing health resources nationally, negotiating much-needed economic relief packages, and ultimately delivering on his promise of an expeditious development of a Covid-19 vaccine, which began to be available at year's end.

Despite all these accomplishments, the pandemic loomed large in voters' minds. It also led many states to permit mail-in ballots, which have been historically prone to voter and election fraud and which experts have warned are the most fraud-prone means of voting. That proved the case in the November 3, 2020 election, which at year's end remained both undecided and headed for scrutiny in state legislatures and possibly in Congress on January 6, where both bodies of Congress appear poised to raise objections to wide-ranging voter fraud and irregularities, ballot mishandling, contestable process fouls, equal protection clause violations, voting machine irregularities, and statistical anomalies (including voter turnout exceeding voter regis...