RUSH: We have two pieces today, one by Victor Davis Hanson, the other by Michael Walsh, both of which confirm and agree with my contention that there is a shadow government made up of many different types of people in different places in the government that are actually trying to sabotage the Trump presidency and get rid of him. Now, both these guys document this. Victor Davis Hanson goes further and explains why he thinks it’s happening. And it is interesting to me because I have said something similar.
Now, don’t misunderstand. I’m not bragging. I just love finding out that things that I think are shared or being thought of in the same way by other people I have profound respect for. And Victor is certainly one of those, as is Walsh. Let’s do Walsh’s piece first. Walsh is writing in PJ Media. I’m just gonna give you excerpts of these. Victor’s piece is long. Victor’s piece, without the editing that I did, would print out to like eight pages. So I can’t, obviously, share all of it with you. Folks, hang on here just a second. (silence) I had to turn on the cough switch there.
The title of Michael Walsh’s piece at PJ Media — and his stuff as appeared at National Review; it’s appeared at the New York Post, any number of places — is “Enough with This ‘Spy Game‘” And his thrust here is on the intel community and who, what, where, why regarding Trump. “With the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in the face of a howling media mob, the knives are now out not only for other administration officials, but for President Trump himself. Make no mistake about what’s happening here.”
His piece is headlined, by the way, “The Empire Strikes Back.” That’s the actual title of his piece. “Make no mistake about what’s happening here: This is a rolling coup attempt, organized by elements of the intelligence community, particularly CIA and NSA, abetted by Obama-era holdovers in the understaffed Justice Department (Sally Yates, take a bow) and the lickspittles of the leftist media, all of whom have signed on with the ‘Resistance’ in order to overturn the results of the November election.” Walsh, I think, is a spook, former spook, in addition to everything else he is.
So right up front he’s admitting that this is “a rolling coup” made up of various players here in order to overturn the results of the November election. He goes on to talk about Mike Flynn as “a good man who saw the enemy clearly, and had the courage to name it, saw Russia not as an enemy but a geopolitical adversary with whom we could make common cause against Islam…” That upsets the apple cart in the intelligence community who want Russia designated as an enemy with whom we have nothing in common.
“As for the media, having previously failed to take down Trump aides Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Flynn was the next best thing; their joy today is unbounded” at getting his scalp. “Is this what you thought you voted for in November? Is this how you thought American democracy worked? Is this the country you want to live in? Welcome to the Deep State, the democracy-sapping embeds at the heart of our democracy who have not taken the expulsion of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party lightly.”
That is a key point.
He’s asserting here that what really exists in Washington is an establishment made up of people who say they’re Republicans and say they’re Democrats, but they’re actually one party, a fusion of all the other political parties, both parties and stragglers who have a singular purpose, which is self-preservation and the growth of the establishment. “They realize that the Trump administration poses a mortal threat … and so have enlisted an army of Democrats, some Republicans, the ‘neverTrumpumpkin’ conservative die-hards, leftist thugs, Black Lives Matter and anybody else they can blackmail, browbeat or enlist. They mean business.
“We’ve come to a pretty pass when Wikileaks now makes more sense than the New York Times, the Washington Post and other Democrat mouthpieces and house organs. Or when fugitive Julian Assange, holed up in London … appears to have more insight, integrity and curiosity than the entire Beltway media. … We are in the midst,” writes Michael Walsh, “of a rapidly moving spy game here, adrift in the famous Wilderness of Mirrors, and with the major players switching — or appearing to switch — sides in a flash.” Now, get this next line.
Look at me here. “The CIA has never forgiven Ronald Reagan for taking down the Soviets and spoiling its extremely cozy relationship with the KGB.” Now, before you huff and puff and say, “Wuh? W-w-w-what was that all about? What was that?” Remember that it wasn’t just CIA… When was the first time you learned that the State Department was not the patriotic bunch of people you thought? I can tell you where I was when I figured it out, that the State Department really — in terms of solving problems of the world — felt, no, we’d rather have the problem so we have a reason to exist.
The CIA, the KGB “had long since worked out a modus vivendi, under which rules they both did their best to keep the Berlin Wall standing, Eastern Europe locked away, and the postwar status quo in operation; it was only when one side or the other broke protocol that civilians ever heard” of a problem. “So let’s cut to Main Narrative, as retailed by the MSM, with timely encouragement from the CIA and Democrat operatives masquerading as journalists: Trump is unfit to be president.
“Plus, Hillary is unbeatable, so give up already.” This is the timeline. This is the mindset. This is what was planned. “Oops — Trump wins. The Russians stole the election. Trump is too cozy with the Russians. Trump’s people are too cozy with the Russians. No wonder the Russians stole the election for Trump. Flynn called the Russian ambassador — and lied about it! The coverup is always worse than the crime! Flynn must go! Flynn’s gone — but here comes the ghost of Howard Baker — ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’
“Trump is doomed.” That’s the thinking in the deep state. That’s how they’re looking at this, and all of this is upsetting their applecart. “Enter now the usual sycophants [men such as] John McCain, his lovely sidekick Lindsey Graham and various other useful idiots, adding their capon voices to the leftist choir: let freedom ring! “So what must Trump do now” in response to this rolling coup? “First, complete his cabinet. Second, fire every fireable federal employee in the leak-prone agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Third, start taking operational security seriously.
“Fourth, assume everything you say will leak to the media and be spun as malevolently as possible. Fifth, trust nobody. Finally, fight back, with all the powers of the presidency. And take every friend you can get … Because, if you don’t, you’re going to get a lot more of this,” and there’s a picture of rioters and protests and so forth. That’s just an edited version, but the point of his piece is that there is an absolute provable rolling coup made up of spooks, intel people, Republicans and Democrats, inside this one organism called the establishment — “Fusion Party,” if you will — and their entire world has been turned upside down by Trump winning.
And they’re not comfortable with it, they don’t want to get behind it, they stand too much to lose because Trump said what he was gonna do and it’s nothing they want done and so they’re taking it upon themselves to sabotage him and undermine him.
Now to Victor Davis Hanson. And I’m picking this up at the conclusion where he details current circumstances and the reasons why all this is happening. Under the subhead: “What has the often boisterous Trump done in his first month to earn calls for his death, forced removal, or resignation?”
And, by the way, on the reference here to his death, Mr. Hanson cites the three or four published articles on how to assassinate Trump, the beauty of assassinating Trump, the necessity to assassinate Trump, and the morality of doing it. Documents it. Quotes the people saying so. Quotes others with their own ideas for forced removal or making Trump resign. So after documenting all of what Walsh has just pointed out here, what’s Trump done to earn all this?
Well, first let’s look at current circumstances. “The stock market is reaching all-time highs. Polls show business optimism rising. The Rasmussen poll puts Trump’s approval rating at 55 percent. Compared with Obama in 2009, at the same point in his young administration, Trump has issued about the same number of executive orders.
“For all his war on the press, Trump has so far not ordered wiretaps on any reporter on the grounds that he is a criminal co-conspirator,” as he did James Rosen at Fox News, “nor has he gone after the phone records of the Associated Press,” as Obama’s Justice Department did. To little notice, people in the media. They didn’t care that James Rosen was wiretapped; he’s at Fox. And gone after the phone records of the AP, the AP said, “Well, he must need ’em, he’s Obama.”
“Trump’s edicts are mostly common-sense and non-controversial: green-lighting the Keystone and Dakota pipelines, freezing federal hiring, resuming work on a previously approved wall along the Mexican border, prohibiting retiring federal officials from lobbying activity for five years, and pruning away regulations.” All these things he said he was gonna do.
“His promises to deport illegal aliens with past records of criminal activity or gang affiliation have, by design, sidestepped so-called DREAMers and the illegal aliens who are currently working, without criminal backgrounds.” He’s not deporting everybody, is the point.
“In his executive order to temporarily suspend immigration from seven war-torn Middle East states, Trump channeled Barack Obama’s prior targeting of immigration trouble spots.” Same states, same countries that Obama targeted. Nobody had a cow over it.
“On more substantive reforms, such as repealing Obamacare, reforming the tax code, and rebuilding infrastructure, Trump awaits proposed legislation from the Republican congressional majority. By all accounts, Trump’s initial meetings or phone calls with British, Israeli, Japanese, and Russian heads of states have gone well.”
But many of those phone calls have been illegally leaked and lied about. Every phone call, the Japanese phone call, the Australian phone call, every one of these phone calls, the people in the deep state reported that people hung up on Trump, that Trump was this or that. None of it was true! And the media didn’t even care. The media didn’t check whether it was. They just eagerly reported these things.
“Trump has had fewer Cabinet appointees bow out than did Barack Obama. Most believe that the vast majority of his selections are inspired.” Conservatives who will be honest with you will tell you that they can’t believe how good Trump’s nominees are.
“Clearly in empirical terms, nothing that Trump in his first month in office has done seems to have justified calls for violence against his person or his removal from office. What then accounts for the unprecedented venom?”
Victor Davis Hanson identifies four things.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, I mentioned that Victor Davis Hanson has four reasons to explain this unhinged effort to take down Trump. And, folks, you know, we’re having a mixed program today — some of it jocular and lighthearted — but I opened with a serious assertion. There is a serious effort to get Donald Trump out of office. As Michael Walsh calls it, “a rolling coup.” You are familiar with how it’s happening because you see the media reporting. It’s all about Russia and how Russia hacked the election and Trump and these people were talking to the Russians during the campaign.
And all of this is to undermine legitimacy of Trump and at best get him out of office, and at worse, stymie and stall his agenda. Victor Davis Hanson documents all of these things and sources them and then offers four reasons why. Reason number one: “Trump’s unconventional bluster … fuels the animosity of elites who seek to delegitimize him and fear that their reputations and careers can be rendered irrelevant by” Trump’s success. “He also has reminded the country that some of the mainstream media and Washington-New York elite are often mediocre and boring.”
Now, this business about them “fear[ing] their reputations and careers could be rendered irrelevant,” I’ve made that point from the get-go, and a lot of people have pooh-poohed it, and a lot of people have been offended by it. The way I’ve put it, these people derive a very good standard of living as members of good standing in the establishment. They have permanent employment. They make much, much more than most people. Their kids go to great schools. They are close to power. The whole networking thing.
It’s a position for life.
You’re there because it really isn’t determined by party. The hierarchy is, but membership isn’t. The establishment, this group has Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of people in it. And their agenda is not what the agenda of the people in this country is. These people have gotten fat, dumb, and happy in the last 15 years while most people’s incomes have stagnated, while a lot of towns have been overrun with illegal immigrants, while the federal government’s gotten bloated with more and more handouts to people who aren’t working in hopes they’ll become Democrat voters.
We have situations where the health care system’s in an absolute mess. But none of that’s true for any of these people. Their health care is provided for them. With they don’t live where illegal immigrants are running roughshod. They don’t have any of the concerns. And therefore, as far as they’re concerned, they’re happy and everything’s fine. And Trump, with his nationalism and populism, threatens them. If he comes in and succeeds, guess what replaces the establishment? Trump does! And they’re out. And it really is no more complicated than that. It certainly…
Look, it’s not just this. Some of these people are very concerned about policy and ideology, but a lot of it is personal. A lot of it is just selfish personal. They live off donors. They live off lobbying. They live off all of these things where the money is flowing and all you gotta do is grab your share of it now and then. And if that money flow is cut off, if the ability to grab that money is prevented, well, it’s panic time! And that is clearly a large part of the threat Trump poses, and I’ve always thought that.
The second reason it’s happening is because the Democrat Party has bombed out. “The Democratic [P]arty has been absorbed by its left wing and is beginning to resemble the impotent British Labour party. Certainly it no longer is a national party. Mostly it’s a local and municipal coastal force, galvanized to promote a race and gender agenda and opposed to conservatism,” but they have no “vision.” They have nothing that they can win elections on. The establishment is really worried. Their primary vehicle for remaining in power, the Democrat Party, is floundering!
The Democrat Party proved ineffective in stopping Trump.
The Republican Party proved unable to stop Trump.
And so the establishment has to get in gear now that Trump has won and try to get rid of him for the self-preservation of everybody else.
And it’s a key element here that they can’t depend on the Democrats to win elections. I mean, everybody can look out to 2018 and see that the Democrats are gonna lose even more seats in the Senate, particularly if Trump gets a lot of his agenda moving and in action. They’re gonna be in heap big trouble, and there’s panic over that. Reason number three: “Usually conservative pundits and journalists would push back against” these activities from the shadow government and the deep state “to delegitimize a Republican president.” Normally conservative media would be up in arms over what’s happening to Trump.
“But due to a year of Never Trump politicking and opposition, and Trump’s own in-your-face, unorthodox style and grating temperament, hundreds of Republican intellectuals and journalists, former officeholders and current politicians … find themselves without influence in either the White House or indeed in their own party, over 90% of which voted for Trump. In other words, the Right ruling class is still in a civil war of sorts.” This is unmistakably true. This is true from the beginning words of this paragraph: “Usually conservative pundits and journalists would push back against” whatever is happening to Trump because he’s a Republican. But they’re joining in it because those who oppose Trump are “find[ing] themselves without influence.”
They never thought Trump would win, they didn’t want Trump to win, and now Trump won’t hire ’em and they’re fit to be tied. And so now they’re members of a party that won, but they have no place in it. Conservative journalists, conservative pundits, former Republican Party appointees, bureaucrats and so forth. This is right on the money, too. And folks, it all goes back to power and money. The loss of power and the threat to the standard of living. And, man, when you say that, some of them just go batty with anger, which must mean it hit the nail on the head.
And then Victor Davis Hanson writes this. “It is no accident that many of those calling for his resignation or removal are frustrated that, for the first time in a generation, they will have no influence in a Republican administration or indeed among most Republicans.” That’s a pull quote. That’s one to highlight. For some of these wayward Republicans, “the best pathway to redemption is apparently to criticize Trump to such an extent that their prior prophecies of his preordained failure in the election will be partially redeemed by an imploding presidency.”
Meaning, all of these Never Trumpers who lost their minds during the campaign, who have had it jammed down their throats now, their redemption is to join this chorus of criticism of Trump so that their prediction that he would never be elected would actually come to pass in the form of him being ineffective. So these Republicans Victor Davis Hanson’s talking about, in the interests of self-preservation, are oriented to joining the deep state and Trump critics.
They’ve got no place in the Trump administration. The best thing they can do is to help get rid of him so that they can then hearken back to their original prediction and say, “See? We told you the guy was never gonna amount to anything. You should have listened to us all along.”
“In private, they accept that Trump’s actual appointments, executive orders, and announced policies are mostly orthodox conservative — a fact that was supposed to have been impossible.” These Never Trumpers are out there saying, “Trump, he’s not a conservative. You people on the conservative side are falling for this Trump stuff, you’re betraying conservatism, you’re committing a great sin against what you’ve always believed in.” And yet you look at Trump’s appointments, such as Judge Gorsuch and others, and they’re as good, if not better than what any great Republican conservative would have nominated, and these people are beside themselves.
“For now, ending Trump one way or another is apparently the tortured pathway his critics are taking to exit their self-created labyrinth of irrelevance. … Chic Trump hatred and sick talks of coups … hinge on economic growth. If Trump’s agenda hits 3 percent GDP growth or above by 2018, then his critics … will either shift strategies or face prolonged irrelevance.”
So they must do what they can to keep that from happening. This is straight up right on the money. Victor Davis Hanson at National Review.