Did you notice how the once-dreaded Ukrainian influence scheme is now “the impeachment that shall not be named”?
I mean, what about that? When the U.S. Senate acquitted President Trump on both articles of impeachment on Feb. 5 of this year, Speaker Nancy Pelosi assured the nation, “He’s impeached forever.” But actually, he was impeached for about the length of a television news cycle — one day, maybe two, then on to bigger and better Fake News.
Forget about the fact that Trump is also acquitted forever. That’s not even relevant. In the mind of the average voter, it’s as if he were never impeached at all. You would think Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at least would want to remind folks that his opponent was accused of abuse of power, but that would mean reminding voters that Biden was accused of corruption and, oh yeah, abuse of power for using federal funds to bribe a Ukrainian official into halting an investigation of the company that employed Biden’s ne’er-do-well son, Hunter.
So here we are seven months later, and the president who was deemed a threat to national security by the House (Lack of) Intelligence Committee led by Rep. Adam Schiff (remember him?) is now nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, he’s been nominated twice — once by a member of the Norwegian parliament for his administration’s successful brokering of a historic peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and then two days later by a Swedish legislator for bringing Kosovo and Serbia together to create an economic cooperation agreement between two nations that 12 years ago were in a state of virtual war.
Maybe none of that seems important to the average voter right now. After all, millions of Americans are still out of work as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown, millions are living in fear as a result of the anti-establishment riots and shootings in cities across the country, and millions more worry about racial tensions, oppression of free speech, and the coronavirus itself.
Nonetheless, as we get ever closer to the Nov. 3 election, it is important to keep at least one eye turned toward national security issues, and increasingly those issues accrue to the president’s benefit.
Democrats have spent the last four years painting Trump as a man who can’t be trusted with the safety of the nation. Of course, we now know that the Russian collusion narrative, the idea that Trump was “Putin’s puppet,” was a partisan invention. But that has been supplanted by other false narratives painting the president as a narcissist who craves the attention of despots and who has pursued policy goals that are “inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency,” as Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman infamously put it during the aforesaid impeachment hearings.
No surprise that Vindman, who was fired by Trump months after the impeachment, has now come out as a Never Trumper. If you talk to proponents of “the interagency consensus,” you will find out that they don’t like presidents who disregard the interagency consensus, which means they don’t like Donald Trump. It is so obvious it should go without saying, but for Washington Post editor emeritus Bob Woodward it was big breaking news, which is why he sucked up the nasty vignettes of betrayal provided by fired and failed Cabinet officials like James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, while writing a book called “Rage” to highlight the hatred directed at Trump by the powers that used to be.
Those blowhards were convinced they knew more than the non-politician president, but when we look at issue after issue, and decision after decision, Trump has been proven right to follow his own agenda and to distrust both the “consensus views of the interagency” and the bureaucrats and elites who formulated them. His decisive leadership in tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, wiping out the ISIS caliphate, ending the life of the Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani, demanding equity in NATO dues and responsibilities, talking directly to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, reducing fighting forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ending flights from China during the advent of the coronavirus all show that he was willing to act in the interest of the American people rather than the interest of the interagency, whatever that is.
No wonder the Washington ruling class hates him. But Woodward did the president an unintentional favor when he got Mattis, Tillerson, and former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to go on the record attacking the president. Why? Because now Trump’s decision to fire those disloyal know-it-alls is vindicated.
Thanks to Woodward, we now know that Mattis told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.” In other words, we know that Mattis failed to respect the chain of command, contemplated a putsch, and that he was probably supported in that “dangerous” fantasy by Coats.
On another occasion, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which Coats replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
Woodward echoes this conclusion and actually went so far as to suggest Trump suffers from a psychotic disorder, telling Anderson Cooper on CNN, “I don’t know, to be honest, whether he’s got it straight in his head what is real and what is unreal.”
That’s more apt to be a description of voters, who want to trust the pronouncements of media savants like Woodward, but increasingly have no reason to. After all, as Woodward himself confesses, his opinion of Trump is steeped in the murky swamp water that comes from having “discussions with … people in the White House, people in the CIA, people in the Pentagon, people in the State Department, trying to get the whole picture of what this administration is.”
Those are the people who have been proven, time and again, to be wrong about matters of state and matters of policy. They are also the people who want you to elect Joe Biden president, but the more that the mainstream press tries to shove their bureaucratic pronouncements down our throats, the less we trust either the media or the meddling minions whose leaks and lies are their mother’s milk.
Given that distrust of reporters and their elevation of generals like Mattis and John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, as the self-appointed protectors of the people, it was instructive that last week a collection of 235 general officers signed a letter imploring the American people to follow the president into battle “to defend the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Do you think Woodward will interview any of these decorated soldiers and sailors? Do you think anyone in the Washington press corps will give them the same attention they gave to the self-adulating memoirs of John Bolton, Jim Comey, Vindman, or master of the FBI universe Peter Strzok? Hell no, so I will at least share the view of these sober men of the military — the ones who get the job done — about their commander-in-chief:
“At present, our country is now confronted with enemies here and abroad, as well as a once in a century pandemic. As retired military officers, we believe that Donald J. Trump has been tested as few other presidents have and is the proven leader to confront these dangers. It can be argued that this is the most important election since our country was founded. With the Democratic Party welcoming to socialists and Marxists, our historic way of life is at stake. … For these reasons, we support Donald Trump’s re-election. We believe that President Donald Trump is committed to a strong America. As president, he will continue to secure our borders, defeat our adversaries, and restore law and order domestically.”
Hooyah!
