After the inauguration of President George W. Bush on January 20, 2001, many new White House aides excitedly showed up for work the next day only to find their office spaces vandalized and trashed.  Phone cords were ripped from walls.  Bathrooms were littered and disgusting.  Mirrors were broken.  Chair backs were missing.  Desk drawers were covered in glue.  Desk locks were destroyed.  The “W” keys were removed from computer keyboards.  This was the Democrats’ idea of a “peaceful transfer of power.”  

Oh, President Clinton’s staffers had their reasons.  After Vice President Al Gore decided to renege on his election night concession to President-Elect Bush, he created the conditions for irreparable national division.  Gore sought to litigate the election before sympathetic judges who might allow him to include disputed votes only from Democrat strongholds in the battleground state of Florida.  Eventually, the Supreme Court stepped in and shattered Democrats’ hopes of overturning the 2000 election with selective recounts (a strategy that has subsequently proved more successful).  Ironically, American voters had not been particularly enthusiastic about either Bush or Gore before the election, but the month-long electoral chaos produced rank bitterness that endures to this day.  (A reasonable person might wonder, then, why so little has been done in the following quarter-century to shore up public faith in election outcomes.)

So the outgoing employees of the Clinton-Gore White House were not happy about having tasted judicially delivered victory only to see triumph slip away on December 13.  Because their feelings were hurt, they behaved petulantly.  They recorded obscene voicemails for their Republican replacements, graffitied the West Wing with images of President Bush as a chimpanzee, and filled desk drawers and filing cabinets with vulgar notes — including “GET OUT,” “Hail to the thief,” and “W happens.”  

Apparently, Clinton’s people even stole several antique doorknobs and an official presidential seal.  Perhaps emulating Bill’s treatment of the Oval Office as a whorehouse for chasing interns and Hillary’s treatment of the West Wing as a warehouse for “free” furniture, the Clinton administration relinquished power with all the class of base animals, thieves, and scoundrels.  As former Georgia congressman Bob Barr concluded, Democrats “disgraced not just themselves but the institution and the office of the presidency as well.”  Not surprisingly, there were no prosecutions.

At the time, the behavior of the Clinton-Gore Zoo seemed appalling.  President Bush did his best to ignore it, and Clinton loyalists pretended that nothing untoward had happened.  Up-and-coming New York congressman Anthony Weiner called the widespread reports of vandalism untrue and demanded that the Bush administration apologize to the Clintons.  A man devoid of character, Weiner later went to prison for sending sexual messages to a child.  He lied about that crime, too.  

Perhaps because nobody held the Democrats responsible for undermining the peaceful transfer of power in 2001, Democrats were emboldened to do even worse in 2017.  It was not enough for President Obama, FBI director Comey, and CIA director Brennan to conspire with Hillary Clinton to frame Donald Trump as a Russian agent, so that they could illegally spy on his campaign and deflect from Hillary’s criminal mishandling of top-secret information.  In order to cover up their own crimes, Obama and his subordinates went out of their way to blame Hillary’s loss on Vladimir Putin.  In the space between Trump’s election and his inauguration, the Obama administration accused Russia of election interference, kicked out Russian diplomats, and fueled anonymous reports in the press that President Trump’s assumption of office was illegitimate and that his loyalties to the United States were suspect.  It took most of the next four years — including a two-year special counsel investigation — to clear Trump of wrongdoing and expose the Clinton campaign as the instigator behind the Russia collusion hoax.  The Obama administration knew all along.

If the corporate news media acted as a “free press” instead of as a Democrat-aligned “State press,” the Clinton-Obama–Intelligence Community operation against Donald Trump would have been the biggest American political scandal of the twenty-first century.  The Clinton campaign paid a British spy to create a fraudulent dossier that framed Donald Trump as a Russian asset.  The FBI and CIA knowingly used that fraudulent dossier to justify widespread illegal surveillance of Trump and his closest associates.  Hillary then used the Obama administration’s fraudulently predicated national security (and criminal) investigation into Donald Trump to advance the lie (including during their nationally televised debates) that Trump was Putin’s “puppet.”

Whether or not the Watergate scandal was serious enough to justify the forced resignation of President Nixon (he had just won a landslide re-election, after all), it pales in comparison to what the Obama administration did to Donald Trump.  Most importantly, President Nixon never tried to cover up the Watergate break-in by blaming the Soviet Union.  Not only did the Democrats use America’s intelligence apparatus to spy on Donald Trump in 2016 but also they inflamed tensions with Russia by laying their crimes at Putin’s feet.  On their way out the door, President Obama and his closest advisers essentially accused Russia of stealing the presidential election for Donald Trump — a “crime” that John McCain and many others described as an “act of war.”  Obama and Clinton pushed America closer to war with nuclear Russia — so that Hillary, Obama, and the Democrat party could save face.  So much for the “peaceful transfer of power” in 2017!

Little has changed in eight years.  President Trump ran a campaign calling for secure borders, the deportation of criminal illegal aliens, the downsizing of the federal bureaucracy, and the use of economic leverage to broker peace in Ukraine and the Middle East.  The American people supported this platform and voted overwhelmingly for Trump’s return to the White House.  He has been given an electoral mandate to tackle illegal immigration, “green energy”–induced inflation, violent crime, costly regulation, and endless war.

If President Biden had any interest in a “peaceful transfer of power,” he would have recognized President Trump’s election as a repudiation of his administration’s domestic priorities and foreign policies.  If Joe Biden actually respected the will of voters or the office that Trump will once again lead, he would have refrained from taking actions that hamper or contravene well known Trump initiatives.  Instead, the Biden administration is using its last few weeks looking for ways to undermine President Trump’s campaign promises.

Since the election, President-in-name-only Joe Biden has promoted loyal ideological allies into government positions that protect them from removal.  He has allocated billions of dollars to “climate change” initiatives and policy groups.  His administration is subsidizing sure-to-fail “green energy” companies.  His department heads are funneling unused taxpayer funds into politically aligned non-profits.  Biden is busy awarding illegal aliens with amnesty and health care while giving away unused portions of President Trump’s original border wall.  Biden’s people are openly working to “Trump-proof” the Democrats’ administrative state.

The outgoing president is giving Ukraine more money, additional weapons, and a green light to use drones and missiles deep inside Russia.  The State Department and CIA are actively undermining democratic elections in Georgia and Romania.  After lying to the American people about how many U.S. troops are operating in Syria, the Pentagon now admits that it assisted jihadi efforts to topple the Assad regime (an action that threatens Russian troops in the region).  While President Trump seeks a road to European peace, the Biden administration is doing everything it can to gallop toward WWIII.

Twenty-four years ago, the Clintons left the White House shamefully.  Sixteen years later, Obama framed his successor as a Russian spy and laid the groundwork for a coup d’état.  Now Biden is itching for nuclear war.  Democrats don’t transfer power with any semblance of peace.

Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).