Disgraceful history
President Trump was just impeached for the second time — this time, for inciting an armed insurrection. Sounds like he mustered up his own private militia, and led a charge on the seat of government, the lead of which he still holds. So he must be guilty of trying to overthrow himself.
Absurd? Yes. But no more so than the reality Americans have experienced every day by the left's efforts to sabotage an outsider president. No sane person believes that President Trump intended any harm to people or property following his D.C. rally, or that he had any expectation his supporters would change anything already in progress in Congress.
Thomas P. Smith accounted on AT what it was like being part of the masses in D.C. on Jan. 6. He described an exhilarating experience being among patriots in a historic context. The crowds were well behaved, respectful, and not destructive in any way, according to what he witnessed. He started toward the Capitol before Trump finished speaking and calculated he had gotten within about 300 yards of the Capitol when HE saw and heard the beginnings of what was later called a riot. He remarked there was no way those rioters could have gotten there from the Trump speech before he did. They had to have been stationed there before the rally began. His eyewitness account puts a lie to the impeachment charge by itself; the rioters never heard the words Trump supposedly used to incite his insurrection. The rioters were pre-positioned, WERE uncharacteristic of Trump-supporters, and walked into the Capitol when police opened the doors. And there had been FBI warnings of planned actions.
Nothing excuses the violence that day, but responsibility for that violence rests quite possibly on Antifa, not on Trump or his supporters. There were probably some Trump-supporters who got caught up in the crowd, but the means, the methods, and the opportunity were characteristic of Antifa, and despite the hundreds of allegedly fact-checked denials of Antifa involvement, there is still confirmation of at least one busload of Antifa, according to this report here.
All that is happening now is part of a larger pattern repeated over and over by the Democrats, but they aren't very good at it. It backfires and reveals their true intent, but then the MSM run to the rescue and overwhelm the news cycle with supporting stories to drown out the damaging revelations and put the negative information more pages down the search engine results than most people will ever look.
The Obama administration spied on President Trump's campaign. When that was revealed, the framing of General Michael Flynn occurred to distract from it. But that wasn't enough to keep the FBI from gaining the spotlight from ITS role in the spying, and it started to come apart when the president fired FBI director James Comey. So then a special counsel had to be appointed to move the spotlight off the FBI and back to Trump for "collusion" with the Russians.
The Democrats milked that for three years, never imagining that members of Congress would get some help from some in the press to unveil more and more of the conspiracy behind the spying, to include the FBI texts, the Flynn framing, and the Hillary Clinton free pass.
But they leaked sensational stories to the press and fed lies to Americans through people like the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Adam Schiff. The Mueller investigation was always the means to get rid of Trump either by impeachment or resignation — worst case, to so damage his reputation and presidency that he couldn't be re-elected. But it backfired colossally when Mueller had to testify. His benign report conclusions and his revelation as nothing more than a figurehead for a team of Obama-aligned lawyers was a boon for Trump and enough egg on the face of the Democrats to assure Trump's re-election.
Nancy Pelosi had to regroup. Trump had won at every turn. The plan began to formulate to steal the election following the failure of the Mueller investigation. The Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which I wrote about on AT here, was the formal meeting to start the steal in motion.
Near that same time, Schiff, the sleaziest member of the House, had an idea. He could get a whistleblower to make a complaint against Trump, and they could use it to impeach him. The Senate would never go for it, but it had a chance of reducing Trump's approval ratings and potentially hurting his re-election effort just from the act. It was an insurance policy. They hyped it and carried it through without an ounce of logic. Trump played them by releasing the call transcript, but the pre-determined impeachment happened. It was more a validation of Trump's claims of Democrat witch hunts than Trump wrongdoing.
COVID-19 arrived like a gift to the Democrats and took over all of our lives. It merged perfectly with the plan to steal the election and gave license to a legal strategy to change the laws in the swing states through court cases and increase unaccountable mail-in votes. While Trump's work on the economy was at its most robust, the pandemic started a motion in progress from blue-state governors and others to shut everything down. Millions of Americans lost their jobs when service-, restaurant-, entertainment- and tourism-related industries closed. The Democrats, with help from Democrat mayors and governors and teacher unions, vowed to make the pain last, and they complained about Trump at every opportunity. With the pain at a peak, George Floyd died under a cloud of potential police brutality in Minneapolis, and with the help of those mayors and governors, thus was born the latest chapter in racial strife begun under President Obama: the Defund the Police movement, and our summer of riots, sponsored by the Democrats and their militant arms, BLM and Antifa.
While the president dealt with the tanking economy, the pandemic, and the riots, he performed miracles by starting movement on a vaccine that would be delivered in less than a year to millions. He rallied U.S. government medical and emergency resources to the most afflicted and worst governed states, New York and California, gaining praise rather than ridicule from their Democrat governors at the time. While Democrat governors doubled down on shutdowns, slowly, Republican governors reopened their states, and the economy set new records in gains, showing that only Democrats stood between Americans and Trump levels of prosperity. Trump rallies drew record crowds, while Biden events were near no-shows. Trump was cruising to re-election easily.
Early evening on Election Day, the national polls were shown to have been faked. Trump was winning easily in races polled to be neck-and-neck. But the TIP plan was in place, only not enough. The fabricated ballots were ready, but there weren't enough. Trump was winning in a landslide, so the plan had to be modified. The ballots would have to be run through multiple times. That's why the counting had to stop, and there were huge spikes in Biden votes overnight. By morning, Trump went from landslide victor to loser in every key swing state.
We all know how the courts and swing state elected officials failed. But the truth has kept coming out. The science keeps speaking "fraud." Then Trump planned a rally in D.C. Republican House members and senators were prepared to stand up for Trump and get their protest on the record in trying to get a special election commission a ten-day delay to review the election results before formal Electoral College vote certification. A number of credible observers believe that agents provocateurs led the violent assault on the Capitol, and now it has become the basis for another impeachment. The attention is off the election fraud now, the distraction is in, and it's guaranteed to last past Biden's inauguration.
Mission accomplished. Trump about to be out of office.
Donald N. Finley is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel.
Image credit: Pixabay public domain.