Soft Coup

The narrative rules all. No matter that it is wholly inaccurate, blatantly biased, and obviously dishonest. The media will run with it and never correct it. Hence, we see disgraced FBI Assistant Director, Andrew McCabe, bouncing from media source to media source, lying about the reasons for a soft coup that he and others planned in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election. It's worth noting that McCabe was fired after an internal FBI investigation found he lied repeatedly about his actions. He should be indicted, not lionized by the likes of 60 Minutes. But 60 Minutes, like the rest of the trained hamsters in the media, have a narrative to promote.

The narrative tells us that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, and that is the only reason he beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. As backup, the narrative tells us that when he was elected president, Trump obstructed justice by firing a duplicitous FBI director, James Comey, who admitted to taking notes on his interactions with the president surreptitiously and then leaking dishonest and damaging information to media unfriendly to the president.

Victor Davis Hansen comments:

The deep state is by nature cowardly. It does not move unless it feels it can disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed, those efforts will be seen as popular and necessary—as expressed in tell-all book titles such as fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or in disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The Threat.

In candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of the battlefield translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political progressives and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal likely would appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to that end.

All through the 2016 campaign and during the first two years of the Trump presidency the media’s treatment, according to liberal adjudicators of press coverage, ran about 90 percent negative toward Trump—a landmark bias that continues today.

Journalists themselves consulted with the Clinton campaign to coordinate attacks. From the Wikileaks trove, journalistic grandees such as John Harwood, Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, and Glenn Thrush often communicated (and even post factum were unapologetic about doing so) with John Podesta’s staff to construct various anti-Trump themes and have the Clinton campaign review or even audit them in advance.

As I have noted in a number of posts over the past two years, what McCabe and his accomplices planned was a soft coup. It had nothing to do with Russian "collusion" which was and is a fabrication meant to destabilize the administration of a duly-elected president. It had nothing to do with "obstruction of justice" which was a backup excuse with no legal or factual basis. It had everything to do with overturning the results of a democratic election.

The untold story is the amazing resilience of Trump and his administration. Never in American history has an administration been subjected to a coordinated onslaught of negative press, exacerbated by the widespread use of social media and the blatantly dishonest reporting of a biased mainstream media. Again, Hansen comments:

So-called “bombshell,” “watershed,” “turning-point,” and “walls closing in” fake news aired in 24-hour news bulletin cycles. The media went from fabrications about Trump’s supposed removal of the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office, to the mythologies in the Steele dossier, to lies about the Trump Tower meeting, to assurances that Michael Cohen would testify to Trump’s suborning perjury, and on and on.

CNN soon proved that it is no longer a news organization at all—as reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris all trafficked in false rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump, while hosts and guest hosts such as Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, and Anderson Cooper stooped to obscenity and grossness to attack Trump.

Both politicos and celebrities tried to drive Trump’s numbers down to facilitate some sort of popular ratification for his removal. Hollywood and the coastal corridor punditry exhausted public expressions of assassinating or injuring the president, as the likes of Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp, Robert de Niro, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others vied rhetorically to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead, and blow up the president.

Left wing social media and mainstream journalism spread sensational lies about supposed maniacal Trump supporters in MAGA hats. They constructed fantasies that veritable white racists were now liberated to run amuck insulting and beating up people of color as they taunted the poor and victimized minorities with vicious Trump sloganeering—even as the Covington farce and now the even more embarrassing Jussie Smollett charade evaporated without apologies from the media and progressive merchants of such hate.

At the same time, liberal attorneys, foundations, Democratic politicians, and progressive activists variously sued to overturn the election on false charges of rigged voting machines. They sought to subvert the Electoral College. They introduced articles of impeachment. They sued to remove Trump under the Emoluments Clause. They attempted to invoke the 25th Amendment. And they even resurrected the ossified Logan Act—before focusing on the appointment of a special counsel to discredit the Trump presidency. Waiting for the 2020 election was seen as too quaint.

And despite all of this Trump derangement, the Trump administration has accomplished much for the American people, including a vibrant economy that has provided historic benefits for people of color and the middle class.

Victor Davis Hansen is a historian, so he looks at things as a historian would. He writes:

There are many elements [of the soft coup] to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.

I'm not sure he's correct. The media, the deep state, and the Democrats are working feverishly to be sure that the truth never surfaces. After all, it would destroy their narrative and in the process, destroy their credibility for all time.

UPDATE:
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For those moderate Democrats and progressives who use magical thinking to somehow justify what McCabe and his FBI cabal now admit they did, consider this comment by Mark Penn:

The most egregious anti-democratic actions ever taken by the what can now fairly be called the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey.

Justice Department and FBI officials spied on U.S. citizens with false warrants, gave a pass to one presidential campaign with a predetermined investigation, investigated another political campaign on the basis of no verified evidence, and illegally leaked information on investigations. They discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump, and appointed a special counsel as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

It is now crystal clear that the highest echelons of the Justice Department and FBI had morphed from the world’s most professional law enforcement organization into a Third World rump group. They had the hubris to believe that they – not the American people or their duly elected representatives – should decide who governs and how.

The next time you read the Washington Post's tendentious slogan, "Democracy dies in darkness," note that the WaPo, the NYT, the LA Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and many, many other supposed "protectors of the truth" and "watchdogs over government" have studiously ignored this major scandal.

Renegade elements of the FBI tried to depose an elected president, and because the media really, really didn't like that president, they decided the FBI actions were okay and that they would help promote the books the perpetrators wrote to help justify their near-criminal actions. What a disgrace!