The presidency

There were different problems for the establishment. Although it had prepared the Steele Dossier as what Peter Strzok would call an “insurance policy” against Trump’s possible win, it was caught flat-footed. The security state had been on top for too long; they had gotten a bit soft and complacent, and given Trump was seen as such a clown figure who was so far behind in the polls they didn’t prepare more for his possible win. There were certain macro plans concealed from the managerial overclass in D.C. that voted overwhelmingly Democrat (90.86% for Hillary and 4.09% for Trump) pertaining to Agenda 2030 and beyond to dramatically lower the quality of life for those living in the West – how would these plans be affected by a bombastic populist in the White House? What if Trump was effective in pursuing his agenda?

Worse than stymying the globalist proactive agenda, though, there were very significant defensive concerns as well: the FBI had been spying on Trump’s entire campaign using the NSA search databases, and before that the spying apparatus had been weaponized by Obama and Eric Holder after Obama’s 2012 election win. The intensity and depth of the spying made Watergate look like a walk in the park. If Trump’s administration somehow managed to prove criminality on this front, it could not only set back the globalist plan but ran an unknown risk of dismantling it entirely. On top of that, as an outsider without blackmail hanging over his head like for every officially approved politician Trump threatened the sinecures of the Washington establishment; the unelected civil service sucked down massive taxpayer funds and benefits while doing very little actually work, and if he managed to figure out the labyrinth D.C. system it could be a threat to their livelihoods.

It was unacceptable. Trump had to be stopped; his agenda, his personnel, his vision. Eradicated. Smart, ambitious people had to become fearful that if they worked with Trump the media would brand them the Devil, their careers would be destroyed and they would run the risk of imprisonment. David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, summed up the sentiment: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.” “His kind” meant non-controlled populists from outside the system. They would do whatever it took: twist and break any law, turn the media’s hysteria up to maximum for years to rile up the general population, especially women and non-whites, and engage in lawfare practices and smears. As political theorist Carl Schmitt famously said, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” A lot of exceptions were about to be made – but, as we will see, at a significant cost (whether intentional or unintentional).

The basics should be mentioned. There are three branches of government which are meant to serve as checks and balances on each other: the Executive branch headed by the President (in charge of the Department of Justice, the FBI and other government departments, along with serving as the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces), the Legislative branch (Senate and House), and the Judicial branch. Both the Legislative and Judicial branches were utterly hostile to Trump, and as we will see he was unable to gain control over the Executive branch which initiated a slow-moving coup attempt against him through the DOJ and FBI.

There are three intertwined topics discussed herein: (1) the establishment’s attempts to stymie Trump from accomplishing anything (via the counter-intelligence operation, lawfare, and extreme media hysteria); (2) Trump’s attempts at effectuating policy changes, both via executive action and in his interactions with the House and Senate; and (3) Trump’s personnel choices. I considered offering a simple chronological timeline herein, but because of the complexities of the issues separating it by category makes for a better read.

Let’s continue.

The Counter-intelligence operation

The Washington establishment attempted to paralyze the Trump administration from the get-go using a counter-intelligence investigation into Trump himself. These attempts would lead to the appointment of a Special Counsel who would prevent Trump from uncovering prior wrongdoing under the shield of “active investigations” (because if Trump declassified information subject to that investigation it would be branded as obstruction of justice and result in impeachment and criminal charges) and to put him on the defensive so he would waste time and energy, also hurting his ability to fire unelected civil service enemies or to advance his agenda.

The counter-intelligence operation was officially opened on July 31, 2016. The FBI used the Clinton-funded Steele Dossier (through Fusion GPS intermediary, working ironically with Russians like Igor Danchenko) as a significant part of its basis for opening its counter-intelligence operation against Carter Page, a low level Trump staffer and FBI informant (“operational contact”) in order to “legally” spy on the Trump campaign. Why did it matter that the FBI spied on Page? Because the FBI could legally spy on anyone within two-steps of a counter-intelligence target, i.e. any of Carter Page’s contacts and any of the contacts of his contacts. That meant anyone in the campaign. The Nunes memo in 2018 corroborated these allegations.

Additionally intelligent agent Stefan Halper was used to claim on September 19, 2016 that another very low level Trump staffer George Papadopoulos was a Russian spy, enabling the first FISA FBI warrant. James Comey did not inform congressional oversight (the “Gang of Eight”) of this counter-intelligence operation against Trump despite being legally required to do so because of its inherently fraudulent, criminal nature and when called out on it in March 2017 by Elise Stefanik he blamed one of his subordinates, Bill Priestap. You can see how flat footed he is caught with the line of questioning in the first three minutes of this video:

To be clear, this wasn’t the start of FBI spying on Trump or his campaign, which started as soon as he began running. Spying in this context means use of the NSA search databases which suck up all electronic data and which has everyone’s phone, internet, and email records, along with access to your various cameras and microphones via Total Information Awareness. The FBI had access to this database which they routinely abuse, and they even installed a terminal within the D.C. office of Perkins Coie, the law firm Hillary used, to make the process even easier and to create a legal privilege shield. A declassified FISA report stated that the FBI ran 3.1 million illegal FISA searches on American citizens in 2017 alone, compared to 7,500 combined searches by the NSA and CIA in the same year. In 2023 the DOJ Inspector General revealed that more than 10,000 federal employees have access to the NSA database for surveillance inquiries, more than 3.4 million search queries were ran between 12/1/2020 and 11/30/2021, and approximately 30% were outside the rules and regulations that govern warrantless search, showing the pattern of illegal governmental behavior had only expanded – but keep in mind that the epicenter of the criminal activity is the National Security Division within the DOJ and it is exempt from any Inspector General oversight.  Anyway, the FBI can as of 2020 look at your web browsing history, emails, anything you have ever typed on your phone or computer and any audio you have made in the vicinity of your digital devices legally without a warrant.  Then they use parallel construction to prosecute, i.e. constructing a legal basis not based upon the spying, a strategy used for a long time now.  See also the Room 641A controversy, a telecom interception facility operated by AT&T for the NSA as part of its warrantless surveillance program as far back as 2003 and a facility that is likely copied throughout the country. This setup, i.e. legalized ubiquitous spying by the intelligence apparatus combined with woke AI and CBDCs, will eventually form the basis of assigning Chinese-style social credit scores to everyone in the country, cutting out dissidents from the system entirely and stealing their wealth.

Anyway the head of the NSA, Michael Rogers, was aware of the spying on the Trump transition team and went to go meet with them without approval from higher ups on November 17, 2016. He was not part of the Obama-team criminal enterprise and because of this the criminals wanted him removed from his post as reported by the Washington Post the very next day (falsely claiming it was a recommendation from October). It’s likely he informed the transition team that there was an improper FISA warrant focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks (and which found nothing, but the spying continued), and as a result of informing them the transition team immediately switched out of Trump Tower.

The goal of the FBI running this operation, later dubbed “Spygate”, was to initiate what became the Trump-Russian collusion scam. By claiming Trump was an agent of or working in direct collusion with Russia he would not be able to implement his agenda with that cloud hanging over him, while giving Republican “decepticons” in Congress, led by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, an excuse not to cooperate with him on his agenda.

The leaked texts by FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page showed the typical elite perspective: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy [McCabe]’s office that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40” and, in one particular message when Page asked if Trump would ever become president, Strzok reportedly replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” Strzok was the #2 counter-intelligence officer and he stated “The [Obama] White House is running this”. There was a cover story that Strzok and Page were having an affair to explain their 50,000 text messages over the course of a year – most of which have not been released and were permanently wiped, and most of the limited released texts were redacted – but that was likely a lie and their communications were simply about undermining and overthrowing Trump. Both Strzok and Page were married and remained married despite the alleged “cheating”. Lying constantly to the public for ulterior motives was and remains par for the course; why would it be any different here? Strzok and Page were later fired after these text messages came out and Strzok gave incredibly smug and strange Congressional testimony. Look at his movements and physiognomy to get an understanding of this kind of individual:

Trump fired FBI head James Comey, who gave critical support for this operation, on May 9, 2017 acting on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for a series of insubordinate actions. This wasn’t really a problem for the team acting under Comey as acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe was fully onboard with the agenda of Spygate. Indeed, in some ways it was a good thing as it could be used as the predicate to paralyze Trump’s administration through the appointment of a Special Counsel; with National Security Advisor Mike Flynn out of the way and globalists who replaced him installed in the NSC (discussed in the personnel section below) there were no expected problems from that angle. A Special Counsel had to be appointed by the head of the Department of Justice, though, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions was perceived as a Trump loyalist (52-47 Senate confirmation vote, showing he wasn’t very well liked by the establishment despite decades as a Senator), while his deputy Rod Rosenstein would do what he was told (sworn in on a 94-6 Senate vote, showing his globalist loyalties). It’s curious why Sessions picked Rosenstein as his deputy; perhaps he had to in order to get Senate approval.

Department of Justice officials came to Sessions and told him that he had a conflict of interest as an early Trump supporter and because of two incidental, forgettable interactions with the Ambassador from Russia which he had forgotten about when asked about it at his confirmation hearing. He was advised to recuse himself from any investigation into Trump by the Department of Justice. Meanwhile another point of leverage was pursued: in March 2017, Senators asked the FBI to conduct a criminal perjury investigation into Sessions based on these two brief, forgettable interactions. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe assigned FBI agents to investigate. (McCabe was later fired for lying under oath with a mountain of evidence about leaking spun narratives damaging to Trump. Because of the sympathy in D.C. for his criminal actions, his firing was later reversed and his legal fees paid for by the government.)

Sessions acquiesced to the demands of the DOJ officials and recused himself from their investigation into Trump’s Russia connections. If he hadn’t have done this the perjury investigation would have been used to force him out; one way or another he would have been made to recuse. Trump was furious, rightly considering this an act of deep betrayal by Sessions; he would never have appointed a man as head of the Department of Justice if he had known he would be so willing to roll over for one’s enemies. Sessions would later lose his attempt to run again for Senate because of his lack of support from the Republican base which turned on him due to his betrayal.

On May 17, 2017 Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate links between the Trump administration and Russia. Mueller was just a figurehead, though, and the same operatives in charge of the counter-intelligence operation against Trump continued their work under Mueller. To a significant extent the process was the punishment as the investigation snared a large number of Trump allies who had to spend extreme amounts of time and money trying to defend themselves.

The investigation would go on until March 2019 when newly appointed Attorney General and establishment lackey William Barr would wrap it up, prepared to move on to the next step of the establishment narrative. This will be discussed further in the personnel section, but keep in mind that any cabinet post must be approved by the Senate and roughly a third of the Republican Senate is directly controlled by arch-globalist Mitch McConnell, while most of the others are milquetoast. Therefore the only confirmable personnel would be disloyal globalists. Barr would prevent sunlight from being cast on undesirable establishment activities, fail to prosecute criminal misdeeds and work to undermine Trump at key opportune moments such as his total unwillingness to investigate 2020 election fraud.

Mueller ultimately found no actionable charges against Trump and he came across as a doddering, forgetful fool in his testimony to Congress, but his objective had been accomplished: to paralyze the Trump administration and run out the clock on the 115th heavily Republican majority Congress – the newly installed 116th Congress had a Democrat House and only a razor-thin Republican Senate – and prevent sunlight being shone on the FBI’s extreme criminal activity by hiding it under the guise of an “active investigation.” Later on in 2022 the FBI would raid Mar-a-lago to get back the physical copies of the documents that proved FBI/DOJ criminality from Trump, which he had held on to but was unable to release due to the “active investigation”, a motive that was never explained to the clueless public.

Note that more than two dozen phones belonging to members of Mueller’s team were wiped clean of data before the Justice Department’s inspector general could review them. Andrew Weismann, a hateful and deranged top prosecutor on Mueller’s team, “accidentally wiped” his cell phone, causing the data to be lost. The cell phone of FBI lawyer Lisa Page was misplaced by the special counsel’s office. When it was eventually obtained by the DOJ inspector general the phone had been restored to its factory settings, wiped of all data. The phone of FBI agent Peter Strzok was also obtained by the inspector general’s office which found “no substantive texts, notes or reminders” on it. The DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz would go on to whitewash the illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation by claiming that their actions were negligent and not based on “political bias or improper motivation influenced”.

The Democrat-controlled House in 2019 ensured that Trump would not be able to pass meaningful legislation and hobbled him with two House initiated impeachment votes. The first one was for looking to investigate Biden’s publicly stated corruption within Ukraine: he bragged about forcing Ukraine to fire its anti-corruption prosecutor or lose $1 billion dollars of aid (“If the prosecutor’s not fired you’re not getting the money [$1 billion]. Well son of a bitch, he got fired, and they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”) Here’s the video:

An investigation into establishment corruption could have put a major dent in their longer-term plans for Ukraine. The country had undergone a color revolution by the CIA in 2014 and the establishment was preparing for a transition away from the 20-year Afghanistan war, which nimbly transitioned into the endless Ukraine/Russia war where many tens or hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being funneled through Ukraine back into the hands of the transnational security elite. It would have been wholly inappropriate in their eyes to let Trump spoil the upcoming party or to reveal their activities. Many establishment Republicans were in on the charade including Mitt Romney. One may note with curiosity that liberal operative Norm Eisen drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever called the Ukraine President in 2018 and who personally served as special counsel litigating the Ukraine impeachment.

The second impeachment was for January 6, launched one week before his term expired and which will be discussed further in Part 3.

Utilizing the House and Senate to undermine the populist agenda

As mentioned in Part 1, the expected outcome of the 2016 elections was that the Republicans would control the House and Senate by a decent margin and Hillary would win the presidency. This gridlock would ensure business-as-usual for the uniparty and both the Republicans and Democrats could use the gridlock as an excuse for why they were unable to fulfill their respective agendas. While not a top priority, the establishment preferred to maintain the illusion of a two-party system when doing so would not conflict with larger goals.

Trump’s highly unexpected victory threw a wrench into these plans. The Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, so they would have no excuse for not passing their stated agenda. This was a problem because they really did not want to pass any portion of Trump’s agenda to re-negotiate trade deals, to close the southern border, to get rid of DACA or to overturn Obamacare. McConnell had played a major role in destroying the Tea Party movement by behind-the-scenes maneuvers such as backing establishment candidates and withholding funds from populist candidates, and there was no way he was going to let populists fulfill their agenda here. He controlled roughly 1/3 of the Republican senators and he would strongly prefer to work with Democrats to undermine Trump. This post analyzed the voting record of the Republican senators and which concluded they were almost universally establishment-oriented and weak. On the House side Paul Ryan despised Trump although he was willing to work with him on certain issues like tax cuts for the ultra rich (Trump endorsed Paul Ryan to try to get into his good graces; Ryan would repay him by doing everything he could to impeach him).

McConnell prevented Trump from making any recess appointments, a highly unusual move showing beyond doubt how much he despised Republican populism. Also see here for more information.

McConnell also refused to change the legislative filibuster requirements to a simple majority instead of requiring 60 votes to overcome it, ignoring Trump’s request here and here to change the rules because otherwise Congress would remain paralyzed. This specific filibuster still stands today – and gridlock is not necessarily a bad thing, requiring a significant majority for major legislation can be good, but anyone with a brain knows it will be removed by Democrats as soon as it is politically expedient. Liberals play for keeps; decepticon Republicans fiddle weakly while Rome burns.

What did the Republican-dominated Congress deliver? With Trump’s approval it passed tax cuts for the ultra rich (and refused to remove the hedge fund carried interest tax loophole despite Trump promising to do so) and passed a bipartisan First Step Act to let felons out of prison. They failed to kill the bloated mess of Obamacare which drastically increased medical insurance prices for most citizens. John McCain cast the deciding vote as he was dying of brain cancer:

When McCain died the whole political establishment turned out to his funeral: Bush, Obama, Clinton, Cheney, Gore, the whole gamut. Only Trump was excluded as a political outsider. McCain embodied among the worst of globalist values: an endless appetite for war, corruption, graft, and lies.

Congress also passed cosmetic changes to NAFTA despite Trump’s campaign for radical reform, and Trump attempted a weak bit of a trade war with China with some Congressional support and which failed. The Republican controlled Congress was unwilling to pass funds for border security by building the wall, to deal with illegal aliens, or to pass a infrastructure bill – McConnell hated anything to do with American populism and he would ally with the Democrats to prevent it from happening although, as a very seasoned and skillful politician, he made sure to enact his moves behind closed doors. Maintaining institutional credibility in the eyes of the public for the Uniparty remained a priority – although not a top priority – for McConnell.

One accomplishment was that Trump worked with the Senate to appoint three Supreme Court justices. If Hillary had won the Court could have taken an alarming far-leftist turn. Trump’s justice picks were all varying degrees of bad – Gorsuch was okay to a limited extent while Amy Cohen Barrett is a moderate-leftist except on abortion, while Brett Kavanaugh is a crying feminist type reminiscent of a more liberal Jordan Peterson even though the same liberals almost lynched him. The only two “real conservatives” on the bench are Thomas and Alito.

Trump’s personnel choices

Trump’s personnel choices were widely perceived as one of the weakest points of Trump’s administration. His picks were generally geared toward globalists either out of necessity (there were very few populists with government experience and populists were not going to be confirmed for cabinet posts in the McConnell-dominated Senate, at least not after the earliest 2017 picks when Trump arguably had a bit of a mandate), or because he thought dealing with the administrative state would somehow be like hiring and firing employees in business, or out of listening to the wrong people (such as Jared Kushner), or out of laziness and poor administrative ability. He ended up bitterly fighting with many of his personnel as they actively attempted to undermine his agenda, an extremely poor position to be in given his life-and-death battles against the active FBI and DOJ coup attempts and endless, intense media smears.

Let’s discuss Trump’s transition to the presidency and then highlight some of his especially poor personnel decisions. There will be a focus on the National Security Council position because the NSC did not need Senate confirmation; therefore, who Trump picked for that role was entirely up to him and provides helpful insight into his thought process (or lack of one) without requiring a filter of political consideration. Also note that the NSC was the only institution that could have offered a measure of protection against the FBI coup attempt “counterintelligence operation”, which is why they targeted Mike Flynn as a top priority (to be discussed).

Transition to Presidency

Chris Christie, one of Trump’s primary opponents who later endorsed him, was initially put in charge of Trump’s transition team on May 9, 2016; apparently this was a placeholder as almost no one expected Trump to actually win, although Christie treated the job seriously. By October, it was reported the transition team had grown to more than 100 staff, many of whom were policy experts brought on to compensate for a dearth of policy staff employed by the Trump campaign. The election was held on November 8, 2016 and only three days later on November 11 Christie was removed and Trump’s children along with Jared Kushner were named to the transition executive committee. On the same day, Christie’s close associates Richard Bagger and Bill Palatucci were both removed by Trump from the transition team. Globalist Vice President Mike Pence was nominally put in charge of the transition and eventually the truth came out: it was Jared Kushner who had Christie fired because Christie had prosecuted Kushner’s father more than a decade prior. According to Christie:

“If a guy [Kushner’s father] hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and then videotapes it and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?” Christie said in a recent interview with PBS. “I mean, it’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was US attorney.”