As I have said before, I hope that the new Congress, which begins its session in just a couple of weeks, will continue the work of the January 6 Committee, minus Liz Cheney and the other kangaroos. The New York Times, in its best slant-the-news-while-appearing-magisterial modality, described the Committee’s 100-plus-page “Executive Summary” as a “report into the effort to overturn the 2020 election.” But surely the far greater attempt to impact the 2020 election was the FBI’s infiltration of Twitter and other social media platforms, Mark Zuckerberg’s half a billion dollars distributed like alms to NeverTrump sororities in battleground cities, etc., etc.
All that should be the work of the new Congress. The old Congress wasn’t interested in the truth. They were interested reminding us plebs who is in charge — hint, it is not “We the People” — and, above all, they were committed, as Lonesome Liz Cheney herself put it, to “making sure that Donald Trump never gets near the Oval Office again.”
Someday, when all the smoke clears, future historians will be busy investigating how it was that a flamboyant real estate developer called Donald Trump went from being the most improbable presidential candidate since Andrew Jackson (or, maybe, since the founding of the republic) to being the most investigated and calumniated president in history.
The entire bureaucratic machinery of the state was surreptitiously mobilized against this one individual. It is only gradually that we are learning about this. Remember the Russia Collusion Delusion? The country spent tens of millions of dollars conducting a sham investigation that hobbled Trump during his first term.
The great comedy was that the entire charade was the work of state actors that, in various capacities, had actually fabricated the whole story. Hillary Clinton’s team had the idea, paid for the bogus “research,” while willing stooges in the media and intelligence services eagerly embraced the narrative.
As the investigations went on and one dirty actor after the next was exposed, jettisoned, then rewarded with a position at some left-wing media outlet, we thought we were slowly peeling back the onion and that, eventually, we would get to ground zero, the truth about the greatest assault on what Nancy Pelosi taught us to denominate “our democracy” in history.
But no, there was never going to be a ground zero. The point was not to “achieve closure.” It certainly wasn’t to uncover the truth. The point was the process, and the end of the process was, first of all, to destroy Trump and, beyond that, to reassert the Wizard-of-Oz-like prerogatives of the Deep State.
The January 6 Committee, illegally constituted as it was, was a continuation of that work by other means — more or less in the sense that Carl von Clausewitz had in mind when he said that war was “nichts als die Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit der Einmischung anderer Mittel.” Ever since Donald Trump glided down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency, the leviathan has been out to get him.
At first, it is true, they simply dismissed him because they drastically underestimated his chances of success. Trump was ridiculous, he couldn’t win, we can forget about him. Yes, there were some, like the oleaginous G-Man Peter Strzok who touted his “insurance policy” to his warm bun Lisa Page even as he pretended to investigate Hillary Clinton’s email server.
But at the beginning, the deep-state response to Trump was distracted, firstly because they thought he couldn’t win — and secondly because when he did win, they thought he could be controlled.
Wrong on both counts. Hence everything else: the preposterous impeachments, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and of course the January 6 Committee Star Chamber. Naturally, the committee, wrapping up its vendetta on Monday, recommended that the Department of Justice (just typing the word “Justice” brings a smile to my face) charge the once and possibly future president with various crimes, to wit “inciting or assisting an insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to make false statements to investigators, and conspiracy to defraud the US government.”
What will happen? Will Trump be checking into Club Fed soon to be fitted with more orange to complement his complexion? Or will the whole thing backfire as its status as a politicized vendetta becomes unbearably obvious?
My friend Andy McCarthy, though no friend to Donald Trump, thinks that the committee’s “theater” (that’s “theater of the absurd” in my view) may in the end actually benefit Trump because everything about the Committee’s procedure was so obviously politicized. I agree, though I would turn up the volume on that observation to eleven.
The saga of the Deep State vs Donald Trump is not over. I am not even sure volume one has concluded. I have no idea how the rest of the story will unfold. But I am confident that it will be engrossing if not, alas, entirely edifying.
