by Victor Davis Hanson, Activist Post:
Over the decade of Donald Trump’s political career, the left—as exemplified by Democratic politicos, the media, academics, the Washington military hierarchy, and the permeant bureaucratic state—illustrated a level of furor, venom, and near madness unprecedented in modern American history.
Yet stranger still about such visceral, indeed lunatic hatred, despite Trump’s eccentricities and lack of a traditional political resume, his administration between 2017-21 was successful by traditional economic, military, security, and diplomatic standards. It was certainly not characterized by weaponizing the DOJ, Pentagon, CIA, or FBI, get-even vendettas, the use of lawfare, corruption, optional wars, open borders, hyperinflation, or a war on the environment—as predicted and alleged. Nevertheless, the idea of Trump as president justified to the left the greatest assault on our civil liberties, justice system, and free expression in modern history.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Indeed, at times the frenzy has ranged the gamut of an unprecedented two impeachments, a first Senate impeachment trial of a private citizen ex-president, and a coordinated effort to deplatform the major Republican presidential candidate from state ballots.
But at other times, the efforts were more sinister—and conspiratorial—to the point that the attempt to destroy the purported threat of candidate, president, and two-time candidate Trump apparently justified any means necessary.
In retrospect, what is the legacy of these unmatched efforts? They have established precedents, if ever again followed, will destroy the republic as we have known it.
1. “Russian collusion.” There was never any evidence that a 2016 Trump candidacy sought to “steal” the election through the intervention of the Putin Russian government. But a paranoid Clinton campaign, through the deliberate paywalls and agency of the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS consulting firm, hired a retread ex-British spy, Christopher Steele—who was also FBI Director James Comey’s paid informant—to fabricate a “dossier” of invented scandals and salacious sex detail to smear Trump and ensure his defeat.
That effort required sowing the dossier throughout the government, partnering with traditional and social media, warping the FISA courts, forging an FBI-submitted document, and ambushing and destroying the National Security Advisor designate Gen. Michael Flynn.
Two years later, the self-congratulatory Robert Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-stars” of liberal beltway lawyers evaporated after finding no such Trump-Russian collusion—after a wasted nearly two years and $40 million. Meanwhile, revelations emerged of all sorts of covert FBI skullduggery—from erasing incriminating cell phone records, the revelations of the Strzok-Page text exchanges indicating an apparent FBI “insurance policy” effort to preclude a winning Trump candidacy, to the meltdown of Director Comey himself, who lied to the president that he was not a target of an investigation and then leaked confidential records of a private one-on-one presidential conversation to the media.
2. Indeed, during the Trump administration, we witnessed once more undreamed-of efforts to sabotage a presidency:
a) A former Pentagon lawyer publishing a call for either immediate Trump impeachment, 25th Amendment removal, or a military coup.
b) A planning session of the Deputy Attorney General and Interim FBI Director to discuss stealthily recording the President of the United States in hopes of finding enough off-the-record embarrassing conversations to justify a 25th Amendment removal.
c) A later 2020 campaign effort jumpstarted by the current Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the former interim CIA Director Mike Morrell, with help from former CIA Directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, along with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, to round up 51 “former” (but actually many enjoying then-current CIA contractor status) “intelligence authorities” to publicly mislead the public by signing a letter that the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop (then in the hands of and authenticated as genuine by the FBI) was once again a Russian effort to throw the election to Trump. It was an obvious scripted lie, but timely scheduled before the last debate to arm Biden with plausible denials and thus to help swing the election to him. And it likely did.
d) There was, in addition, an effort by the heads of the NIH, Francis Collins, and NIAID, Anthony Fauci, deliberately to obfuscate, and allegedly in the case of Fauci, to lie under oath, about the efforts of American health authorities 1) to evade U.S. prohibitions on gain-in-function viral research, by funding the third-party EcoHealth Alliance to facilitate the transference of American money, instrumentation, and consulting to partner with the Chinese communist Wuhan virology lab; 2) to obfuscate the truth that the lab had somehow leaked the lethal, manmade virus—birthed with the help of U.S. expertise—that was killing millions worldwide; 3) to promulgate a false scenario of a bat/pangolin origin; 4) to deny under oath the American government’s role in the birth of the virus; 5) to suppress dissident scientific voices; and 6) to advise radical quarantine policies that would virtually destroy the U.S. economy along with the Trump 2020 reelection effort, and then shift blame from their own culpability to a false narrative that Trump was the chief driver of a disastrous national shutdown that had ruined the economy and yet was supposedly nearly criminally lax in controlling the outbreak.
