The Trump presidency is over. But whether you loved him, despised him, admired him, or merely tolerated him, there is one thing he did for America that makes him the most important figure in modern American history:
He exposed the farce that America is a healthy, functioning democracy.
Trump has shown Americans, without meaning to, that the institutions that serve as the nuts and bolts of our supposed democracy have all become perversions of the original institutions that made America one of the greatest and most powerful nations on earth. Unfortunately, America has reached its zenith; the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States by those once great institutions is America’s death knell and the beginning of the final assault on a thriving and free society.
The Trump presidency revealed, as no other could have, what a few of our most important institutions have become. It is not pretty.
The mainstream media, which should ideally report the facts in the most neutral manner possible, has now become, with a few exceptions, a political tool of one faction of our broken government. It covered up stories that would have damaged its chosen candidate regardless of the factual content of those stories. And worse, it made zero effort to investigate the truth of the allegations contained in those stories as if it feared turning over a slimy rock because there might be something so ugly underneath it could not be ignored. It stuck its elitist head in the sand like a befuddled ostrich where it saw nothing, heard nothing, and said nothing about any information, whether true or not, that might damage its interests, pet projects, or untouchable personal biases.
The title journalist used to command respect but now has become a brand of bias and unfairness. The ideal image of the hard-working reporter has gone from the old-time stereotype of the gruff, cigar chomping every man interested only in the truth no matter where it took him or who it exposed to a pimped, shallow, animated mannequin. Journalists have become frauds that stupidly spout truisms and insincere platitudes. They spend more time with the hair stylist and makeup artist than they spend developing and investigating a story. The media as real news media is dying, like our democracy, and news programs have been replaced by a collection of partisan sitcoms filled with pretty parrots whose only real interest is appeasing their woke colleagues, dumbed down viewers, and intolerant superiors by filling the airwaves with a blatantly one-sided version of the news
Our vaunted FBI which was created to protect and defend America against rampant crime now finds itself tiptoeing a fine line between protector and perpetrator. It has become just another tool of a political faction and its viewpoint. Not agreeing with the choice America made in the 2016 election, the FBI took it upon itself to correct this ‘’error in judgement’’ by becoming a political action committee bent on destroying the Trump administration and teaching backwoods America a lesson. From the trumped-up Russian collusion investigation to the framing of General Flynn as a Trump surrogate, the FBI has strayed from the side of law and order to the side of skirting the law and disorder. The Hillary email investigation and her mishandling of classified information is a blatant example of the FBI’s new direction. Then Director Comey let her slide as if a premonition told him not to poke at the classified snake in the grass. He then proceeded to act like a spurned teenybopper after his dismissal by taking his turn playing games with classified information in a memo he leaked to teach Trump a lesson. Did the Justice Department do anything about this alleged crime? No, of course it didn’t: President Trump was the target of the leak.
The FBI has gone from being famous for the criminals it caught to being infamous for the criminals it let go. America’s premier law enforcement agency should seriously consider changing its motto from “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity” to “Meddling, Subterfuge, Backstabbing.” The other intelligence agencies are just as suspect of partisan shenanigans and are still likely fuming that Trump wouldn’t listen to all their agenda driven intelligence briefings by refusing to invade a single country during his term of office. He even had the gall to call off an air strike on Iran at the last minute., probably saving the lives of many American servicemen and women. This leads naturally to the question, ‘’Does anyone believe a word that comes out of Washington and its collection of alphabet soup deep state Federal agencies?’’ I think the answer is a resounding no.
Our Congress, which now appears to view itself as an American version of the privileged French nobility, continues to screech about how they were forced headlong into escape tunnels like rats off a sinking ship. They continue to play the innocent victims of a palace revolution who just barely missed a date with the guillotine, all the while whining with a hysteric outrage that would have embarrassed Marie Antoinette. The brave leaders of our democracy were bullied into a shameful retreat by what they swear was an attempt to overthrow the government of the most powerful nation on earth by a ragtag army of Trump zealots armed with fire extinguishers, protest signs, and MAGA baseball caps. They have convinced themselves that a special operations strike team comprised of bartenders, former Olympic athletes, and buffalo-hatted conspiracy theorists drove them from the high seat of congressional power onto the dusty seat of their pants under a desk. They are shocked and surprised that such a thing could happen to our duly elected congressional elite in modern day America. With an approval rating of under 20%, it is only shocking and surprising that the supposed attempted coup took so long to happen.
This is a congress that wasted our time and millions of dollars in a childish I-got-you-last battle with an elected president they never accepted. He was, after all, an outsider. He doesn’t know how we do things around here. He is definitely not one of us. Our congress stinks with a juvenile arrogance epitomized by Nancy Pelosi ripping up her copy of Trump’s State of the Union address in front of millions. Like angry toddlers they launched one phony allegation after another followed by phonier investigations. Instead of focusing on a pandemic that devastated their constituency and crippled the country they were elected to protect, they waged a partisan dogfight against a nemesis that embarrassed them in 2016, a slight they still cannot overlook. This is a congress that bickered about details while sneaking billions of dollars of pork-barrel spending into their delayed pandemic relief bills, all this while America suffered. This is a congress that attempted to cripple the Trump presidency and its legacy, not only during but now seemingly after his term of office, with frivolous impeachment proceedings; a procedure that they have cheapened and degraded for all time to come. “The United States and the United States Congress has faced down much greater threats than the unhinged crowd we saw today,” Mitch McConnell huffed and puffed like a stuffy Mr. Magoo, “We have never been deterred before and will be not deterred today. They tried to disrupt our democracy, they failed.” The First Marquis of Senatorial Bombast, Monsieur Mitch de la McConnell, apparently is clueless as to by far the greatest threat our democracy has ever faced; the incompetent, corrupt, bungling United States Congress of which he is a proud, if not slightly humiliated, member.
Finally, the 2020 election itself was a travesty in that approximately 50% of Americans believe it was fraudulent. There has been so much written about mail-in ballot irregularities, unconstitutional changes to voting procedure, computer vote theft, etc., that it would be pointless to hash it out again here. It is enough to say that any real effort to determine the validity of election fraud claims is non-existent. Any attempt to initiate an investigation has been and continues to be suspiciously blocked by the winners; suspicious because it would seem they would jump at the chance to prove President Biden’s win was legitimate if only to silence the doubters once and for all. It is very odd to say the least that they investigated everything else under the sun but not this. Regardless, very large numbers of Americans have lost faith in the bedrock of American democracy, the election process. When belief in the fairness of our election process dies, democracy dies with it.
The winners of the 2020 election and their doddering stooge Joe Biden will now begin the dismantling and destruction of the Trump Administration’s policies and begin to remake America into their vision of a woke, new-age paradise. It doesn’t matter to them that they will have to drag half of an unwilling America kicking and screaming into paradise with them. They have come to realize without even the tiniest hint of doubt that they know what is best for everyone. They are the best and the brightest. They have the media, the internet, and an overbearing, big-mouthed cancel culture that they believe will help them create a new Reich of righteousness with an ease that Hitler would have envied. They may indeed manage to destroy Trump’s policies and succeed in the remake of America but they have failed in destroying the greatest legacy of the Trump presidency. The unpredictable, uncontrollable, irreverent, loved and hated outsider, Donald J. Trump has shown everyone that the democracy that was once the envy of the world has degenerated into a very subtle but vicious form of fascism; a fascism that now poses the greatest threat of all time to the individual freedom that democracy was created to protect. It is a sad and ominous day for America and, regrettably, the world.
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