Bestoink Jack😏

A few days have passed, and the whole “Iran war caused GOP losses” explanation is still being peddled as unquestionable gospel. Of course the war played a role. But pinning everything on it, however politically convenient that may be for various people, is going to do a lot more damage because it allows Republicans to ignore far more fundamental problems. And the biggest of those problems is the Republican Party itself. I mean, my goodness. Donald Trump pulled off the greatest comeback of all time. He nearly got killed in the process. He came back from what everyone said was an impossible position and handed the GOP the White House. And how did these feckless ingrates repay him? They immediately set about sabotaging his agenda, obstructing his appointments, and undermining everything he had fought so hard to achieve. It started with the Department of Justice, which, after everything that happened during Trump’s first term, everyone knew was the single most important place to get right. Matt Gaetz, whatever one thinks of his positions on this or that, would have been an absolute burn-it-all-down warrior at DOJ. So, naturally, the Republicans made sure that couldn't happen. Instead, we got Pam Bondi, who was hopelessly out of her depth, and a crucial year in which so much desperately needed to be done was lost. Or look at Ed Martin. I've never met a happier warrior than Ed, someone with the energy, determination, and understanding of what needed to be done. So, of course, they had to destroy his appointment as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the most important U.S. attorney position in the entire country. Can't have people like that in positions of power, apparently. Same story at the CDC, where Republicans derailed David Weldon's nomination because they didn't like what he was saying about vaccines. The list goes on and on. And that's just the personnel. There's also the SAVE Act, the blue slip rule, the filibuster, and countless other examples of Republicans standing in the way of their own president and his agenda. And as for the filibuster, does anyone seriously believe Democrats will now show the same reverence for it? Of course they won't. They'll demolish it without a second thought, while Republicans will congratulate themselves on having preserved some imaginary principle of Senate tradition. And that, right there, is the rotten core of the problem. Donald Trump did the impossible. He handed Republicans a historic opportunity, and starting the morning after his victory, they set about squandering it, sabotaging his agenda, and undermining all the people who might have made his second term a success. There are always many reasons why elections go the way they do, and I'm sure the Iran war was one of them. But if Republicans spend the next two years blaming the war while refusing to confront their own catastrophic failures, they will have learned absolutely nothing.

One of the things I find myself wondering about from time to time is why people who have access to President Trump don't make better use of it to tell him things he needs to hear, and what exactly happens when they do. Over the years, there have been several instances where I knew there was something Trump needed to be told. Then I'd see that someone who knew about the issue had met with him, and I'd expect something to happen. But nothing did. I've asked around about this, and from what I've heard, there are basically two ways it plays out. The first is that people simply don't raise the issue. I'm not entirely sure why, since you'd think Trump would be quite receptive to hearing these things. Which brings me to the second explanation. Sometimes people do tell him, and he is indeed very receptive, but what happens next depends entirely on who gets tasked with following up. There might be twenty different people who could be given the job, but only a handful who will actually see it through. If it lands with the wrong person, well, then nothing happens. Now, these are anecdotes, of course, so take them for what they're worth. But I find the whole dynamic fascinating. It's better, I suppose, than the Biden arrangement, where the president wasn't told much of anything while the autopen did its thing. The good thing is that Stephen Miller is among that small group of people who actually follow through and get things done.

I never believed for a moment that Thom Tillis acted alone in sabotaging Ed Martin. My assumption was always that Tillis was doing the establishment’s bidding because they simply couldn’t stomach the thought of a happy warrior like Ed having his hands on the levers of power. And I suspect the same thing happened to plenty of others who could have accomplished great things, only to be thwarted by their own side. And from what we’ve been hearing over the past few days, along with what Michael says below, the sabotage went well beyond the Republican establishment in Congress.

All this lawfare over the ballroom was only ever about one thing. They simply couldn’t stomach the idea of Trump leaving behind a grand, permanent addition to the White House that would be associated with him. That was all they cared about. Now, of course, a future Democrat president can give the ballroom whatever official name they want, but the real battle is going to be over what people actually call it. And on that front, the lawfare operatives may have spectacularly shot themselves in the foot. Because of their endless efforts to ruin the project, it is basically now known as the Trump Ballroom. Had they simply left the whole thing alone, people might have ended up calling it the New East Wing or something equally forgettable. Instead, thanks to the lawfare saboteurs, it’ll probably be known as the Trump Ballroom for generations to come.

This would be comical if it weren’t so depressing. FBI officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides were caught dead to rights. Anyone with two functioning brain cells who has read the documents can see that they flatly denied to Congress what they were openly discussing in their own emails. The failure to do anything about the completely out-of-control DC courts, or to at least try to start fixing a system that makes it impossible to hold Democrats accountable, will be the most damning legacy of these past two years.

This is something very familiar, yet still infuriating. A bunch of people did all the heavy lifting years ago and exposed Ilhan’s corruption and lies. But then, the media smeared them as conspiracy theorists and the whole thing came to nothing. Now, ten years later, the same media is presenting the whole thing as breaking news, either to throw Ilhan under the bus or to run interference for her, while omitting the fact that they themselves spent the past decade covering it up. It’s the same story over and over. Intrepid people do the hard work and expose the lies, only to get smeared or ignored. Then, when the truth can no longer be contained, the media suddenly discovers it and pretends that nobody could possibly have known any earlier. I lived through this at least twice, first with Russiagate and then with Covid origins. I blew open the Fauci teleconference cover-up in June 2021 and was probably also one of the first to go on the record to explain that Covid 100% came out of a lab and why we knew it. And we all know how this game works. The media can lie endlessly and face no consequences, while if we get even one thing wrong, we’re branded irredeemable conspiracy theorists for eternity. It’s a hugely thankless task, and that is one reason I’ve moved on to founding Counterlawfare.org. We desperately need people fighting in the trenches, but we also need to expose the bigger picture and the machinery behind all of this. The media is a giant scam operation whose ultimate purpose is to push America toward one party rule. The sooner people understand that, the better.

Because nobody was ever held accountable for Russiagate, the original lawfare operation, the whole machinery has only grown more brazen and sophisticated. Marc Elias used the fake Steele dossier to push Russia collusion smears. In Alaska, his firm has taken the same playbook a step further, engineering a dirty trick and then turning to the courts to protect the result of that scheme. Imagine Elias commissioning the Steele dossier and then marching straight into court, waving it around as evidence and demanding that a judge give legal force to the lies he had manufactured (back then, he used the FBI for that purpose, but now he simply cuts out the middleman and does it himself). That's what happens when nobody is ever held accountable. They learn that there is no price to pay, so they keep escalating, growing bolder and more ruthless with every operation. And why wouldn't they? They've been taught that they can get away with anything.