They sabotaged Trump from the start and bragged about it openly
[NOTE: I wrote a post in September of 2019 about how people in the self-styled heroic “Resistance” against Trump planned it out before he’d done anything as president, and bragged openly about that fact. I’ve decided to repeat the post now, just as a reminder of that brazen boldness and that lack of fear of consequences. One thing you can say about the left is that they know how to plan ahead and to coordinate and execute those plans.]
Right after the 2016 election, I read some articles describing people in government who had decided to stay put and secretly sabotage Trump. These articles weren’t exposes written by the right; they were proud confessions from the left, part of the righteous Resistance.
We are seeing the fruit of that today.
I hadn’t noted the links to any of those articles at the time, so recently I got curious to see whether I could find one. Here’s an excerpt from one typical article of the type, published in Vanity Fair on February 1, 2017, twelve days after Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:
Others, however, view resistance as a part of the job. “Policy dissent is in our culture,” one diplomat in Africa, who signed the letter circulating among foreign diplomats, told The New York Times. “We even have awards for it,” this person added, in reference to the State Department’s “Constructive Dissent” award. One Justice Department employee told the Post, “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.
Let me emphasize that again: whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complains.
And then we have this, from the same article [emphasis added]:
When asked how the opposition emerging at this stage compares to past administrations, Tom Malinowski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, sarcastically told the Post, “Is it unusual? There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”
The “nothing unusual” part was sarcasm, of course. But the rest was deadly serious. The plan was in place from the start, and it’s not some wild conspiracy-mongering to say so. This is a clandestine conspiracy, but not a completely secret one in the sense that we were told about its general thrust in advance by the proud perpetrators themselves. An interesting detail from those quotes is that “Obama officials” were apparently in charge of orchestrating this.
Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist also noticed the trend back in the beginning. She wrote the following in an article from January 17, 2017. That’s a few days before the inauguration:
Dwight Eisenhower warned that if we didn’t stay vigilant, the military-industrial complex would start creeping into politics with pernicious motives all its own. The intelligence community’s war of leaks against Trump before he’s even taken office is just the latest questionably politicized action in the decades since Eisenhower’s farewell address. And it’s safe to say that the intelligence community pushing unproven and absurd allegations about a president-elect’s sexual perversions is probably way worse than anything Ike imagined.
In order to understand how we got to this perilous place and get a handle on what’s going on, it’s worth taking a closer look at the motives and allegations of political operatives in intelligence agencies, as well as the basic timeline of allegations of Russian electoral interference in the last few months. Far from discrediting Trump, it paints a worrisome portrait of the deep state gone rogue, desperate to stop a man who, whatever his considerable flaws, is an outsider to Washington.
She then goes into a series of warnings issued to Trump to beware of ruffling the feathers of the intelligence community. The most famous one, with which you might be familiar, was issued by Chuck Schumer:
…President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Remember, this was before Trump was inaugurated.
More:
Presidential historian Timothy Naftali said on a CNN panel that Trump should stay “silent” lest harmful information be released against him.
NeverTrumper David Frum wrote a tweet that said, “CIA message to Trump: you mess with us, get ready for a leakstorm of Biblical proportions.”
The rest of Hemingway’s article is well worth reading, despite its age. Or maybe because of its age. It’s a reminder of how many things happened very early in the game that are congruent with and basically telegraphed what would happen with Russiagate and now Whistleblowergate.
[ADDENDUM: Not to mention the MAL documents case.]
They wanted to do the same thing to Reagan that they had done to Nixon. There were only two problems: Reagan was popular in a way Nixon wasn’t, and as if that wasn’t bad enough he got shot and lived, which sent his approval ratings into the stratosphere. Game over.
It was a Coup D’etat from the beginning, most should still be on the hook someday for the crime of treason.
I’d like to think we will have a Republican Congress which will have the stones to do what needs to be done: institutional death for the FBI and the CIA, and debarring their management level employees from the federal workforce. Not holding my breath.
Any Republican who, through some miracle, is able to get through the fortified Electoral College, be elected President, and tries to put through any real reforms, is going to have the exact same thing happen as did with Trump.
Popularity won’t mean anything. The people who work for the Federal Government are not elected by anyone. When their guy doesn’t win they drag their feet on all initiatives and leak to the press, when their guy wins it’s full speed ahead. Doesn’t matter how popular the President is. He is only one guy and he cannot execute anything without the help of underlings. Trump had hardly anyone of his own. A state governor like DeSantis has many more people to call on, but what can he do with the people who are already in place? He could bring every state employee in Florida with him, about 100,000 people, and they wouldn’t make a dent. 2.1 million people work for the Federal government (excluding the military). If they were a state they’d be 39th in population.
The only three possible outcomes I see from the 2024 Presidential election are
a) a Democrat (98%)
b) a Republican reformer whose administration actively works against him and so reforms nothing (1%)
c) a Republican Swamp Thing who reforms nothing and sees to it that the government checks go to the right people, as they have for time out of mind (1%)
b) and c) seem so unlikely to me that I’m not sure how to rate which is more probable. Trump is in b) of course, and I’d like to believe DeSantis is.
Republicans in the Senate and House who helped sabotage Trump ARE elected and COULD be held accountable, but that’s not going to happen either as long as so many people who vote Republican think that party affiliation is more important than what the individual politician actually stands for.
Reagan was popular in a way Nixon wasn’t,
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There wasn’t much difference between Nixon’s peak approval ratings and Reagan’s. Among self-identified Republicans, their approval ratings at the end of their 3d year in office were nearly identical. Reagan arguably had a more enthusiastic core. Note also that a number of consequential figures in the Reagan Administration had worked for Nixon or for Gerald Ford, among them George Schulz, Casper Weinberger, and James Baker. How they differed was that Reagan was a much better administrator (due to natural talent and experience) and the subordinates he picked had the sense to avoid hiring characters like Tom Charles Huston, Gordon Liddy, John Dean, and Charles Colson.
The people who work for the Federal Government are not elected by anyone. When their guy doesn’t win they drag their feet on all initiatives and leak to the press, when their guy wins it’s full speed ahead.
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The vast majority of people who work for the federal government are like my brother, not in positions where they have much influence on policy. The most troublesome agencies do not need to be cajoled into co-operating. They need to be dissolved and their employees dismissed. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education are obvious examples. The impediment to excising these pustules is Congress.
@Art Deco:The vast majority of people who work for the federal government are like my brother, not in positions where they have much influence on policy.
They don’t really need to have influence on policy to be an impediment in carrying out policy. Everyone at every level of the hierarchy has the ability to drag out things they don’t agree with and leak to the press about anything that annoys them…. I saw plenty of that in my time working for and with big organizations.
Suppose your brother, who I don’t doubt is a conscientious person acting from good motives, wanted to do whatever it is in his job that would help a new President’s policy get carried out. Well, his manager would have to agree with that and set his work priorities accordingly. And that manager’s manager would have to agree, and also set work priorities accordingly. And so on. If anyone in that chain doesn’t care to go along, and the people above that person don’t trouble themselves to fire that person over the lack of action, then nothing much will happen.
[NOTE: I wrote a post in September of 2019 about how people in the self-styled heroic “Resistance” against Trump planned it out before he’d done anything as president, and bragged openly about that fact.
The first time I recall people in Congress and elsewhere boasting about “resisting” a presidency at its beginning was when Obama came into the White House. Mind you, I was onboard with that. But even at the time I thought, “Oh no. It’s one thing to whisper about this in the cloak room, but please don’t broadcast it in public fora.”
But they did, and since Trump the left feels a bit more liberated to turn the table. And of course, take the tactics much much further than those on the right ever imagined.
I still believe when Obama gave his “fundamental transformation” speech he was talking about transforming the US national security apparatus. I also thought it was a grave mistake for Trump to throw Mike Flynn under the bus, he should have told his critics to pound sand, once they smelled blood they’d never let up. And the release of the transcripts of private conversations Trump had with the Mexican & Australian leaders was unprecedented & dispicable.
Patrick Byrne claims the Deep State objective is to hold power over the president no matter who or what party. He claims he personally assisted a state operation against Hillary Clinton that made her liable for bribery charges. He also claims he was involved in 2015 in the setup to tag the GOP candidate with Russian collusion. His conclusion is the USA has already experienced a coup.
Patrick Byrne has quite a fascinating life story. Sort of a real, living Forrest Gump.
https://patrickbyrne.locals.com/upost/4217811/dhs-domestic-extremist-1-patrick-byrne-comes-clean
well the flynn takedown was nebulous even six years later pompeo and pence are still repeating the narrative, byrne is an interesting character, he got in trouble years ago, because of some deep research he had tied from certain players to a certain pakistani banker in canada, it’s like the real life version of Alias, SD 6,
They don’t really need to have influence on policy to be an impediment in carrying out policy.
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What’s my brother and his tech going to do, slow-walk the interviews they have with clients?
so from colonel lufts tape he had met with geoff berman, the us atty for the southern district some 4 years before, when he revealed the CFC’s payoffs to Big Guy, through Biden,
two years before berman, had recused himself, and had allowed khuzaimi (formerly of deutch bank) to persecute trump allies,
Quite parallel to the sabotage of Trump is the treatment of Netanyahu in Israel’s courts. Neo has written about this but she hasn’t mentioned the June 30 article by Caroline Glick, “The Scorched-Earth Prosecutors” https://carolineglick.com/the-scorched-earth-prosecutors/ .
There’s nothing really surprising in Glick’s article, once one has fully grasped the complete indecency of the Left, which describes its character internationally. I’ll quote two of Glick’s most potent paragraphs:
To compel Netanyahu’s closest associates to incriminate him, the prosecution and police extorted, tortured and humiliated them. Two of Netanyahu’s chiefs of staff, David Sharan and Ari Harow, former director general of the Ministry of Communications Shlomo Filber and Netanyahu’s former spokesman Nir Hefetz were subjected to physical and psychological torture and extortion at the hands of police investigators closely guided by prosecutors. They were locked up and denied food and medical treatment. The police ruined Hefetz and Harow’s marriages. Police carted Sharan’s elderly mother into an investigation cell in front of him to break him.
And:
To “get their man,” the coalition of prosecutors, police investigators and journalists have torn Israeli society apart for the past seven years. They demonized not only Netanyahu but his voters. Through the timing and framing of their actions against Netanyahu just before elections, Mandelblit and his many associates decisively influenced the outcome of repeated elections. Their incrimination of Netanyahu compelled all center-left parties who might otherwise have joined a Netanyahu government to boycott Netanyahu and his Likud Party, denying Netanyahu the ability to form governing coalitions.
Chapter 61 of Netanyahu’s autobiography gives Netanyahu’s own take on this ordeal, as of mid-2022. That chapter’s title is “Bring Us Bibi’s Head” 2009 – 2022.
I think ultimately these currently-cold civil wars — here and there — are going to be settled in blood. And not to the Left’s advantage (but they may be bringing everything down).
they did a similar thing to joe farah, by mueller’s staff,( they drove him to a stroke,
(I only know of this because of paul sperry) there was less severe things done to teddy malloch, but there was no respecting property or person
If Trump were to win again, the left’s strategy will be to make the country ungovernable.
Paul Nachman:
Actually, I wrote a post on that Glick article on July 3, 2023 . Here it is.
Expenditure statements released Friday show Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) spending at least $9,228,579 dollars in the multiple prosecutions against former President Donald J. Trump, specifically in the two investigations being pursued by the foreign-dwelling Jack Smith, who is married to Michelle Obama’s documentarian.
https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/07/07/bidens-doj-has-already-spent-10m-pursuing-trump/
If you want to review an early practice of the left’s well-organized agility at attacking any plan that differs from theirs on any subject take a look at their response to President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program. Less than three weeks after it was presented to America the women’s leadership of Seattle were attacking the plan. They finally had so muddied the plan with false allegations and watered it down in every possible way that it was never possible to have a successful run. Review your old Seattle Times and Seattle PI newspapers in the weeks following the announcement–they were practicing communist-styled sabotage even then!
This brings to mind the popular definition of insanity – doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result.
https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1677374443172298752
I know the hacks like weissman elias figluizzi are never punished and giving more credibility for their malfeasance, whereas guiliani and co, are proscribed for telling the truth,
Just exactly what was “The Resistance” resisting? Trump, obviously. Mean tweets? Trump’s vulgarity? I don’t think we ever got a serious answer to the question. State and CIA were primed and ready to leak, disobey orders, and sabotage Trump even before he took office. It seems like wounded vanity was at work there.
It also seems excessively self-dramatizing, as one would expect from State and CIA. We all knew that, for example, there wasn’t going to be an across the board Muslim ban on entry into the US, but if you’re used to playing spy all the time, you hype the usual bureaucratic foot-dragging and resistance and portray it in exaggeratedly heroic terms.
any reordering of the apple cart, general flynn could easily discern between genuine intelligence and shinola (to paraphrase remarks) so it was necessary to dispatch him quickly, general mcmaster filled in, (I had gained respect for him, back when lara logan had profiled him in tell a far at the start of the war) but he served as a dutiful deep state soldier,
six years later, they are still at it
https://nypost.com/2023/06/30/ex-coast-guard-boss-trump-adviser-never-pushed-migrant-drone-strikes/
Trump has been attained.
All conservatives will be attained.
This means you.