The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas (1844) is the story of a good man of low birth, Edmond Dantès, who, at the hands of some high-born evil men, is sent to the island prison the Chateau d'If to get him out of the way.  He spends thirteen years there before escaping.  During those horrific years of torture and deprivation, he is schooled by another prisoner there, an Italian priest with knowledge of history, science, philosophy, languages, and the location of a vast treasure in gold.  After he escapes, he recovers the gold and then, as a wealthy man, seeks to extract revenge on those who had him sent away to Hell on Earth.

This story comes to mind, given what Trump has endured these past three years when a cabal of noxious people set out to destroy him simply because they loathe the fact that he won the presidency.  Who are these people?  Hillary Clinton and her minions at Fusion GPS, Perkins-Coie, Comey and McCabe, Strzok and Page, et al. at the FBI, Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, and numerous others at the DOJ, John Brennan at the CIA, James Clapper at DIA.  Noxious does not adequately describe how venal this bunch of treasonous people in positions of power truly are; they have destroyed the reputations of the agencies they once headed.  As Dinesh D'Souza tweeted on Thursday, "[t]he left is powerful, dangerous and vicious.  Large elements of it are also evil.  But fortunately for us, it is also colossally stupid.  We're watching the unraveling of one of its most stupid and evil operations right now."

The Mueller report has unequivocally cleared Trump of any collusion with Russia, but Mueller and his team of partisans left obstruction of justice up in the air, no doubt purposefully to keep CNN and MSNBC in business.  The Mueller team obviously set out to create a path for the crazies in Congress to continue the witch hunt — and make no mistake: it was a witch hunt from the beginning.  Trump has escaped the prison of the collusion investigation, but they are still coming after him.  So on Thursday, the usual suspects declared themselves victors, claiming that the report vindicated their three years of reporting lies, rumors, leaks, etc.  They want A.G. Barr to resign, asserting that he is sacrificing the country to be Trump's personal attorney, which is ridiculous on its face.

“Life is a storm, my young friend.  You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next.  What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.  You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome.  Do your worst, for I will do mine!  Then the fates will know you as we know you.” 
―Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

Given the storm that Donald Trump has weathered over the past three years, and the strength with which he has suffered the slings and arrows of so many lesser men, one has to admire and respect his strength of character.  Trump was likely, obviously, raised by a different sort of father from those of any of the political dynasties that have previously been sustained simply by their lofty names.  The typical denizens of the D.C. establishment are an arrogant bunch: privileged, entitled, and self-important.  There is little difference between the long-serving among them, left or right.  Once they get there, most develop an uncanny thirst for power and the determination to keep it, no matter the cost to one's soul.  They are like the prison guards at Chateau d'If.  Once you have to spend most of your time fundraising or torturing prisoners, you are finished as a moral person.

Does Nancy Pelosi represent the residents of California?  Not in the slightest.  She has seen to it that her family has become fabulously wealthy thanks to her position in Congress.  Pelosi could not care less about her constituents.  She cares about one thing, one thing only: the power she has and seeks to retain.  She has many like-minded friends who operate exactly as she does: Schumer, Feinstein, Nadler, Schiff, Swalwell, Cummings, Waters, et al.  It is a long list of traitors to the people who elected them.  Not only are they primarily self-interested, but they are determined to sabotage President Trump despite his remarkable success at rebooting the economy and slashing unemployment for all minority groups.  They simply cannot abide an outsider like Trump succeeding so wildly on all fronts except immigration, the one issue with which they are determined to sabotage him.  They are sabotaging all of us.  They do not care about the rest of us.

So convinced are the Democrats that Trump could not have won legitimately that they unleashed their rage to unseat him.  Yet he prevails, accomplishing more good for the nation than even Reagan did in his first two years.  Tax cuts?  No, they scream.  But Trump's tax cuts have benefited all Americans, even Bernie Sanders.  No to a wall to defend our southern border; that is the dumbest of all their tantrums.  It is a crisis, purposefully devised by the Democrats, who hate Trump more than they love America.  The crisis is exacerbated by the mysteriously funded far-left globalist groups, the drug cartels, and the human-traffickers with whom the Democrats have aligned themselves.

Our Democratic Party no longer has this country's best interests at heart; not even a little bit.  The party is now fully socialist thus anti-capitalist and promotes open borders.  Bernie Sanders and the rest of the Democrat presidential candidates so far mean to destroy the most vital economy in the world and to further destroy what was the best medical care in the world.  They all want to abolish ICE, private insurance, cars, planes, anything fossil-fueled.  Sanders and his pal Ocasio-Cortez, the party's brain trust, and their fans seem to have no grasp of the fact that oil and natural gas not only are the most basic elements of our economy, but have brought millions of people out of poverty and improved the quality of life across the planet.  And we are not running out of it; the U.S. is now energy-independent. 

All the forces of the Left have conspired to destroy a president they abhor.  They loathe him because so many Americans love him.  He has brought change — not the depressing transformational change Obama promised and did bring about.  Trump has revitalized manufacturing, full employment, and pride in America.  That is what infuriates the Left the most: pride in America.  Our left, so wealthy and privileged, hates the nation whose Constitution and capitalism have made its members so rich and powerful, so formidable.  These people mean to hamstring the rest of us while cementing their personal privilege.  They have had nearly fifty years of tenured radicals to indoctrinate university students to their Marxist vision of what the U.S. should be.  They have for as long owned the servile media that do their bidding with a vengeance.  They must be stopped.

Donald Trump, the good guy, like Dumas's Edmond Dantès of The Count of Monte Cristo, has been investigatively shattered on the rocks for almost three years by the thoroughly disingenuous media and a hateful left.  Dumas was on to something about humanity, as was Machiavelli: in politics, good people are the exception, not the rule.  We have known for over two years that people with unelected power set out to undo the 2016 election by illegal and unconstitutional means.  Obama was likely the mastermind of the insidious plot, or at least a partner to it; he had to approve the spying.  The collective Left-media syndicate has conspired against Trump since before the election; just in case, these people developed an "insurance policy": that fake and ridiculous dossier paid for by the Clintons.  Let us hope the truth will all be revealed, the instigators of this plot to unseat a president exposed and indicted for their crimes.

The fictional Edmond Dantès was set up by persons he thought were lifelong friends.  They betrayed him for their own selfish purposes, just as so many on the Left and the right have betrayed Trump.  Just as Dantès's self-aggrandizing, self-appointed superiors felt duty-bound to destroy a fine and brilliant man of "low birth," the NeverTrumps on both sides of the aisle are no better than Mondego and Villefort — amoral scoundrels who, in the book, each do suffer punishments that fit their crimes in the end.

Let us hope that as the truth of what those in the Obama administration who colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to impede a Trump candidacy and then presidency will suffer the well deserved consequences of their craven, blatantly illegal crime spree.  That is what it was: a crime spree.  The shocking thing is that they all believed they would get away with it, just as the villains of Dumas's tale assumed they would escape punishment for their crimes.  They have done their worst!

As Dantès remarks while plotting his revenge, "I'm a count, not a saint."  It is Trump's turn now to settle the score.