Until inaugurated on 20 January 2017, Mr. Trump would be well advised to follow the pre-inaugural behavior of one of his predecessors, a fellow New Yorker named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From November, 1932, until his inaugural on 4 March 1933, FDR refused to make any public statement that would tie him to the floundering policies of Herbert Hoover’s government. Roosevelt was about to undertake the monumental task of trying to get America out of still deepening economic depression and wanted no association with the administration that Americans — rightly or wrongly — perceived as the cause of their economic misery. FDR resisted requests for supportive statements from the Hoover administration and defied the bashing he received from parts of the media for not speaking out on the economy and the worsening banking crisis.

FDR always held his cards close to his vest — earning the nickname “Sphinx” — and Trump should follow his lead. The domestic and overseas ravages caused by eight years of Obama-Clinton policies and unconstitutional actions are coming home to roost and Trump ought to leave them to reap the whirlwind and wither alone. Obama, Clinton, and their party are also behind the violent post-election demonstrations America is now witnessing, and they are hoping that Trump will say something that can be used to blame for the spreading violence.

Mr. Trump has a few election-provided blessings to count, but his biggest task at the moment seems to be to keep silent on a number of domestic and foreign-policy disasters that he had no hand in creating, thereby letting those disasters fall squarely into the laps of Obama and Clinton.

Following are a number of silence-worthy topics, and two blessings to count.

Silence: The unusually fast expressions supporting a “peaceful transfer of power” from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently were meant to impress Americans with their even-handed handling of a stunning and well-merited electoral defeat. Do not be fooled. They knew that street violence was coming because their surrogates, led and paid by Soros-ites, had it prepared just in case the unimaginable happened and the American people prevailed. If Mr. Trump is smart he will say very little — preferably nothing — about the issue and sit back and see where the violence goes. Paid-for violence often takes on a life of its own, and if the anti-Trump violence continues, he should then say — absolutely nothing. If the violence grows and gets out of hand, Mr. Trump should led Obama, Clinton, Podesta, Pelosi, Schumer, et al. stew in their own juices. If Trump says anything at all, the Democrats will blame him for causing the violence and then simply pay for more of it. As did FDR before he was inaugurated, Trump should remain silent and let Obama and Clinton manage the problem they created, either by ignoring it and falsely publicly blaming it on Trump or by cracking down on their own paid goons. Either way, Trump and the republic win, and hopefully a goodly number of the Soros-paid mercenary thugs will get killed.

Blessing: Trump enters the presidency with the unqualified blessing of having seen Senator Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) and Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire) defeated in their bids for reelection. Kirk and Ayotte are both ardent interventionists and even more ardent Israel-Firsters. The loss of two Republican votes in the Senate is more than compensated for by the departure of two war-mongering interventionists who would have been nothing but enemies and underminers of an America First foreign policy.

Silence: Trump and his team ought to silently make plans to close all of the White House space that has been used by journalists, either as work areas or for the daily press briefing. Almost all the U.S.-media worked as an extension of the Democratic Party during the recent election and manufactured coverage of Trump that was 91-percent negative. Trump owes the U.S. media nothing, and certainly not coddling inside the White House. Trump must not ignore the press, however, and so ought to have a covered platform built — with no walls — on the White House grounds where the journalists can gather for the daily press briefing, and from there can ask questions via a skype-like arrangement to the president’s spokesman who will be in his office inside the White House.

Blessing: The reelection of Republican Senator Rand Paul in Kentucky is unalloyed good news for non-interventionists and for Trump’s intent — if it is sincere — to conduct an America First foreign policy. Senator Paul’s victory gives him the chance to clarify and sharpen some of his foreign policy ideas and objectives — which seem to have drifted a bit from non-intervention — and to keep Mr. Trump up to mark on his foreign policy promises. Senator Paul’s presence, moreover, will give Trump a non-interventionist ally in a Republican senate caucus where the majority has never seen a war it did not want to get into, and which long ago hired on as well-paid shills for Israel First.

Silence: Mr. Trump should remain silent on the ideas coming from the media, and even some Republican quarters, that suggest he should “wipe the slate clean” and pardon Hillary Clinton and her coterie of fellow felons if the felon-in-chief Obama does not do so. If the possibility of pardoning Clinton and her gang remains viable at the time of his inauguration, Trump ought to slam the door shut on it on his second day as president. Although Gerald Ford is surely among the most decent men ever to be U.S. president, it was his pardoning of Richard Nixon that cleared the way for the Clintons’ criminal operations. Ford said the pardon of Nixon was meant to end a “long American nightmare,” but it really did nothing but demonstrate to the electorate that the U.S. political elite was above the law. Trump is likely to be faced by the same king of nightmare-ending arguments — as noted, even from Republicans — if he is sworn in with Hillary and her comrades in crime still unpardoned. At that point, the new president ought to appoint Patrick Fitzgerald — the Special Counsel who nailed the Bush administration’s Scooter Libby for leaking a CIA officer’s true name — and let him examine both the use of the unsecured server and the activities of the Clinton Foundation. If he finds no illegality, fine, but if he finds illegality, then indictments and a trial are mandatory to bring the lawless political elite to book. If their are valid legal grounds for indictment, trial, conviction, and incarceration, nothing could do more to help the citizenry to start to believe that the republic is returning to the concept of the equality of all before the law.

Silence: Trump also should remain silent on Iraq. The current siege of Mosul — which Obama timed to help Clinton win the election — is producing increasing numbers of reports that Iraq’s Shia fighters are indiscriminately killing and torturing Sunni civilians in retribution for similar behavior by the Islamic State. With any luck, this will be the proverbial final feather that turns Shia-Sunni violence into a full-blown sectarian war. If that happens, the 5,000-6,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines that Obama has pointlessly put on the ground there may have to fight their way to safety, as the inter-sect warfare expands. If those troops can get safely out of harm’s way, Obama will have to either send them back into the fight, in what would be a suicide mission; massively reinforce them, a move that would produce nothing but dead Americans; or bring them home. Such an all-consuming sectarian war that begins in Iraq has been the end toward which events there have been heading since Obama foolishly re-entered Iraq in August, 2014. Trump should remain silent on the issue, and let Obama reap the disgrace he deserves by repeating George W. Bush’s two-fold madness of (a) sending the U.S. military into Iraq and (b) deploying just enough troops to ensure U.S. defeat.