The effort to stop President Trump is growing comical.
One always expects the media surprise leak of a purported hidden scandal as a presidential campaign winds down. Remember the last-minute “discovery” of George W. Bush’s undisclosed 24-year-old DUI arrest in 2000? Or the October 7, 2016 effort of the Washington Post to publish the hoarded 11-year-old “Access Hollywood” tape, just two days before Donald Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton?
We should expect lots of these “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” pseudo derailments. Except Trump has been the most widely investigated, probed, attacked, and smeared president in history. And so the scandal-field has pretty well been picked over, as those fired like Omarosa Manigault Newman, Anthony Scaramucci, John Bolton, and others have long ago more or less lectured us that Trump is nuts, crazy, dangerous, stupid, ignorant, and so forth.
In terms of bombshells, what does the Left do after the 2016 suit to decertify voting machines, the FISA court abuse, the effort to sabotage electors’ votes, the first impeachment drive, the Logan Act gambits, the Emoluments Clause joke, the 25th Amendment ruse, the Russian collusion hoax, the 22-month-asleep-at-the-wheel Mueller and his “all-stars,” Ukraine! Ukraine!, the second impeachment drive, and the 2020 trifecta of Trump as Typhoid Mary, Bull Connor, and Herbert Hoover?
The point is, in Jussie Smollett fashion, the demand for scandals is outrunning the supply and time grows short.
It’s no wonder that one of Joe Biden’s largest campaign contributors, billionaire Laurene Jobs of the Apple fortune, who owns most of The Atlantic, had the former Obama Administration megaphone Jeffrey Goldberg exhume a two-year-old and long-ago-refuted charge that President Trump did not wish to visit a U.S. military cemetery in France because he variously was afraid of the rain, that he would get his hair wet, and that he did not wish to celebrate “losers” and “suckers.” All this was from a left-wing media that not long ago damned a “militaristic” Trump for being infatuated with generals, and putting far too many in his White House, while needlessly spending billions on manpower and equipment to repair a military hollowed out by the Obama Administration.
The resuscitated scandal hit-piece was primed for all the left-wing cable news shows and supposedly would dominate the otherwise quiet Labor Day weekend news.
The problem was that the charge was calcified—and for a reason. Security memos long ago had shown that the weather, not Trump, had deterred low-flying presidential helicopters. Goldberg’s “sources” remain anonymous. Supposedly they were afraid of Twitter reprisals (when has fear of a left-wing Twitter ever scared off a left-wing scandal-monger?), and thus could not be found or checked to determine whether they stood by their hearsay charges.
The presidential entourage of that day all denied Goldberg’s accusations, including Trumphobe and former White House insider and National Security Advisor John Bolton, coming off a tell-all book attacking the president as a nincompoop and a dangerous nut.
Goldberg’s work, then, is symptomatic not just of the growing desperation of the Left to blow up Trump’s current polling trajectory, but the poverty of the muck material still left to work with. Expect more October “smoking gun” surprises surrounding Trump’s stale tax returns, a casino bankruptcy or two, a Mooch tidbit, a Michael Avenatti crumb, a retired general’s sudden memory recovery, or perhaps even an old undiscovered Stormy tweet.
“Summers of Love”
The “summer of love” and “largely peaceful” tropes of late spring and early summer are now belied by the flames, firebombs, and looting that often offer on-scene backdrops for fake news accounts, as journalists seem about to ignite as they assure us of calm.
Recently, there was another riot in Rochester, New York in which Black Lives Matter sought to destroy restaurants and attack diners as they ate—as a prelude to entering the suburbs, climbing roofs, and waking the supposedly largely complacent white “racist” populace up to their culpability for the rioters’ unhappiness.
Their delayed anger grew over a just-released video of the death, six months ago, of an arrested African-American youth, while in Rochester police custody. That tragedy supposedly justified manhandling strangers with warnings of “give us our shit” and “do not record crimes” with cell phones.
These now nightly recurring riots and violence have a common theme: blue-state governors and blue mayors of the nation’s larger and middle-sized cities have institutionalized police procedures to detain supposedly dangerous or erratic acting suspects, which are either dangerous to the suspect or can easily appear post facto to be so on selectively edited or incompletely aired videos.
Local and municipal Democratic officials apparently have no answers in their cities for endemic African-American disparities, asymmetrical crime rates, and the proper behavior of their worn-out and beleaguered police, who are called by frightened businesses and bystanders to remove often dangerous suspects from their shared communities.
The result is that suspects now routinely resist arrest, confident either sympathetic district attorneys won’t prosecute them, or police themselves will have to choose between losing their lives arresting those not willing to be arrested or losing their careers and livelihood in the effort. We know the consequences: police simply are not responding to calls from crime-infested areas, and those arrested don’t think the police will use force to make arrests stick—and so resist.
Nor do liberal officials know how to tamp down often violent protests over such deaths that often target their own police forces, and sometimes even the homes of the mayors themselves who struggle to show their sympathy with the rioters.
Add it all up and officials either contextualize or condole the ensuing violence sparked by their own actions, or strain to condemn it by blaming Donald Trump, the Emmanuel Goldstein of our age.
Either way, it is not a convincing strategy to reassure torched businesses or innocent diners or demoralized police who are spat upon and made the targets of firebombs, that a more vigorous Joe Biden will tame fellow blue-state America officeholders and quell the violence.
Biden Unbound
As for the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, the mounting anger over the sanctioned violence has not only prompted the media to exhume and enhance old saw Trump stories, refashioned as autumn campaign surprises, but also has forced Joe Biden out of his basement.
But to do what exactly?
The question assumes that there was not a reason why Biden was in his basement in the first place, near-mute for three months. For a time, seclusion was a winning strategy because otherwise to see and listen to Biden is to conclude that he is non compos mentis.
In addition, the media had driven down Trump’s ratings by blaming him for COVID-19, the lockdown, recession, and looting, and was playing out the clock by reframing the election as Trump versus the media and the coronavirus.
But the strategy was not updated to recalibrate changing momentum in response to changing news cycles. And Biden became even rustier by his basement sabbatical. So now he is out and we are immediately reminded of the reasons he hibernated in the first place and should have stayed there.
We now witness surreal Biden press events. Questions are scripted from an “approved” list of reporters who apparently send fuzzy inquiries in advance and, like North Korean journalists, queue up to repeat them in public. Biden then either looks at his notes or a teleprompter for his canned answers, but stumbles through his responses. He often gives the game away by reading out loud his handlers’ prompts such as “end of quote” or “topline message,” while an uneasy rogue reporter occasionally blurts out loud in frustration that she wants to ask a question “not on the paper.”
Sure-Thing Polls?
No one knows the exact state of the presidential race. The polls are all over the place and many are weaponized. Scan Emerson, Rasmussen, Trafalgar, and Zogby polls, and Trump is near dead even or even ahead in some key states. Read the surveys discredited after 2016 like Reuters and Politico, and Biden is winning across the board.
But all pollsters seem to concede something is terribly wrong with this increasingly discredited institution. How can IBD/TPP assure us that in his favorability ratings Trump is down by 16 points even as Emerson shows us he is up by two and Rasmussen by four?
Something is rotten.
Either the pollsters are abjectly incompetent, or deliberately selecting flawed demographics that they know will reflect their own biases, and they do so to add momentum to their preferred candidate.
Or their subordinates who gather the data are massaging the numbers to reflect their own choices.
Or the respondents are deliberately misleading their questioners either out of fear or from spite.
The record of bias and error from 2016 might suggest all three reasons.
60 Days More of Scripts
What then can we expect in the next 60 days from the Biden campaign?
About every week or so there will be a media/Democratic/leftist fusion zombie scandal that suddenly arises from the past but with new unnamed sources and anonymous rumors, and pushed as the long lost magic spike to drive into Count Trump’s heart.
Or we will have more rioting, spreading to smaller cities in the manner of Kenosha and Rochester, all well-organized and aimed at suburban and largely middle-class whites, to terrify them that no one is safe thinking they at least do not live in Portland or Chicago.
These riots will be contextualized by Biden with the now-familiar damnation of Trump and police excess, albeit with a nugget thrown in about the need for peaceful change. And then we will see a campaign stop, press conference, or interview in which Biden will have the scripted questions, scripted answers, and inadvertently either read off his handlers’ prompts or go blank or confused for about a five-second mind-out.
The interviewers will try to carry Biden across the finish line by finishing his half-completed sentences, rewording and translating his garble, or abruptly changing the subject when Biden goes into screensaver mode.
What can we conclude of these desperate efforts to derail Donald Trump?
One, Biden really should have stayed permanently in the basement but now cannot.
Two, internal pollsters have frightened Democrats not so much because they believe Biden is behind, but because they advise Biden not to trust the media’s smiley polls, and don’t offer any strategy of how to stop Trump’s insidious trajectory.
Three, the issues of May and June have evaporated and now bleed Biden more than they do Trump. The virus itself slowly wanes. Better treatment ameliorates its effects. And the vaccine looms larger. The lockdown was more or less discredited by the exemption given thousands of violent protesters and the issue is now recalibrated as keeping 50 million children out of school. The economy did not go into depression but seems to be climbing out of recession. And George Floyd’s death increasingly has nothing to do with nightly looting and arson, as the rioters turn unapologetically Marxist, nihilist—and increasingly venomously racist.
Given all that, and given the dearth of fresh scandal material, expect more ossified scandals, Kindergarten interviews, improving favorability ratings for the president, and desperate efforts to prove COVID-19 is resurging, quarantines must be extended, rioting and burning are acts of love, and we are in a Great Depression. And the more this does not work, the more vehemently it will be repeated.
People near us are getting fed up with the Dem. COVID over-reaction, with the ENDLESS (nightly for 3-1/2 months now) riots in Portland, supported by our dimwit governess, and by the endless stream of lies by the media. It seems that the Dems have long ago given up on winning the election, and are focusing on black-shirt tactics, mail fraud and legal shenanigans to effect a coup.
PS the burning of Bibles and US flags, and continual attacks on the police, are not winning the Dems any friends, nor their insults against just about every American hero.
Maybe the Democrats efforts to derail Trump are not all that comical. This article is from the American Mind web site, and was written by Michael Anton, a former official on the Trump White House’s national security staff:
“The Coming Coup?
Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.
As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.
It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”
All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.
One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.
The leaked report from the exercise darkly concluded that “technocratic solutions, courts, and reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here,” promising that what would follow the November election would be “a street fight, not a legal battle.”
Two more data points (among several that could be provided). Over the summer, two former Army officers, both prominent in the Democrat-aligned “national security” think tank world, wrote an open letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in which they urged him to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division to drag President Trump from the Oval Office at precisely 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021.
About a month later, Hillary Clinton declared publicly that Joe Biden should not concede the election “under any circumstances.” The old English major in me interprets the word “any” to mean “no,” “none,” “nada,” “niente,” “zero,” “zilch” “bupkis”…you get the idea.
This doesn’t sound like the rhetoric of a political party confident it will win an upcoming election.
The Cover-Up in Plain Sight
These items are, to repeat, merely a short but representative list of what Byron York recently labeled “coup porn.” York seems to think this is just harmless fantasizing on the part of the ruling class and its Democratic servants. For some of them, no doubt that’s true. But for all of them? I’m not so sure.
In his famously exhaustive discussion of conspiracies, Machiavelli goes out of his way to emphasize the indispensability of “operational security”—i.e., silence—to success. The first rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy. The second rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy.
So why are the Democrats—publicly—talking about the conspiracy?
Because they know that, for it to succeed, it must not look like a conspiracy. They need to plant the idea in the public mind, now, that their unlawful and illegitimate removal of President Trump from office will somehow be his fault.
Never mind the pesky detail that the president would refuse to leave only if he were convinced he legitimately won. Remember: Biden should not concede under any circumstances.
The second part of the plan is either to produce enough harvested ballots—lawfully or not—to tip close states, or else dispute the results in close states and insist, no matter what the tally says, that Biden won them. The worst-case scenario (for the country, but not for the ruling class) would be results in a handful of states that are so ambiguous and hotly disputed that no one can rightly say who won. Of course, that will not stop the Democrats from insisting that they won.
The public preparation for that has also already begun: streams of stories and social media posts “explaining” how, while on election night it might look as if Trump won, close states will tip to Biden as all the mail-in ballots are “counted.”
The third piece is to get the vast and loud Dem-Left propaganda machine ready for war. That leaked report exhorted Democrats to identify “key influencers in the media and among local activists who can affect political perceptions and mobilize political action…[who could] establish pre-commitments to playing a constructive role in event of a contested election.” I.e., in blaring from every rooftop that “Trump lost.”
At this point, it’s safe to assume that unless Trump wins in a blowout that can’t be overcome by cheating and/or denied via the ruling class’s massive propaganda operation, that’s exactly what every Democratic politician and media organ will shout.
Stop the Presses
What then? The Podesta assumption is that the military will side with the Dems. There are reasons to fear they might. The Obama administration spent a great deal of political capital purging the officer corps of anyone not down with the program and promoting only those who are.
Still and all, determining the outcome of an election would be the most open political interference possible from our allegedly apolitical military, and it’s plausible that the brass won’t want to make its quiet support of the ruling class agenda that overt. The aforementioned Chairman has already stated that the military will play “no role” in the outcome of the election. That’s probably not a feint, but one wonders if it will hold given the obvious attempt to influence military thinking by people like Jeffrey Goldberg in his recent Atlantic essay.
Can the Dems rely on the Secret Service to drag Trump out? I have my doubts on this one. I’ve seen the Service up close; it really is (or strongly appears to be) apolitical. It has a job to do: protect the president, whoever that is. Officers take that job very seriously. If they don’t believe Trump lost, I don’t think they can be counted on to oust him. On the other hand, were they to believe he did lose and was refusing to leave—a scenario I find impossible to imagine but the Democrats insist is just around the corner—it’s possible the Service might act.
Barring all that, what’s left? Remember that phrase from the Dem war game: “street fight.” In other words, a repeat of this summer, only much, much bigger. Crank the propaganda to ear-drum shattering decibels and fill the streets of every major city with “protesters.” Shut down the country and allow only one message to be heard: “Trump must go.”
I.e., what’s come to be known as a “color revolution,” the exact same playbook the American deep state runs in other countries whose leadership they don’t like and is currently running in Belarus. Oust a leader—even an elected one—through agitation and call it “democracy.”
The events of the last few months may be interpreted as an attempted color revolution that failed to gain enough steam, or as a trial run for the fall. Is the Trump Administration prepared?
Here’s one thing they could do: play their own “war game” scenario so as to game out possibilities and minimize surprises. They should also be talking to people inside and outside of government whom they absolutely trust to get a clearer sense of who on the inside won’t go along with a coup and who might.
They also need to set up or shore up—now—communication channels that don’t rely on the media or Big Tech. Once the ruling class gives word that the narrative is “Trump lost,” all the president’s social media accounts will be suspended. The T.V. channels, with the likely exception of Fox News, will refuse to cover anything he says. Count on it. He’s going to need a way to talk to the American people and he has to find the means, now.
For the rest of us, the most important thing we can do is raise awareness. If there is a conspiracy to remove President Trump from office even if he wins, they’re telling you about it precisely to get you ready for it, so that when it happens you won’t think it was a conspiracy; you’ll blame the president.
Don’t be fooled.”