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Showing posts with label 2016 election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2016 election. Show all posts

Friday, November 30, 2018

Ann Is 100% Spot On!

Ann Coulter: ‘Trump Will Be The Last Republican President’

Michael W. Chapman
 By Michael W. Chapman | November 29, 2018 | 1:02 PM EST

Ann Coulter. (YouTube)
Best selling author and conservative pundit Ann Coulter -- who early in 2016 predicted Doanld Trump's presidential win -- said that because of changing demographics and the propensity of many young immigrants to vote for liberals, Donald Trump "will be the last Republican president."
In a Nov. 28 interview with Editor in-Chief Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily, Coulter said, “Every day, more and more immigrants turn 18 and start voting, canceling out all of your votes. It’s about five more years. Trump will be the last Republican president."
"You think, ‘Oh well, we may get another Supreme Court nomination, that will save us,'" she said.  "No, no, the Democrats – as we saw in this last election – they can’t wait 10 years for demographics to change, they have to invent the Russia conspiracy. They’re so upset about this brief interregnum with Donald Trump. No."
"Why even fight the Florida or Georgia elections?" she continued.  "The whole country will be yours moments from now. No, we can’t wait, we can’t wait."
"So, I assume they’ll pack the court," said Coulter.  "It won’t matter how many Trump appoints – he could appoint, replace four Supreme Court justices. Then President Beto [O’Rourke] or President Kamala [Harris] will come in and say, ‘Hey, I think we need four more justices on the Supreme Court.’”
Later in the interview Coulter discussed how close the 2016 race was and why the Trump team cannot plan on running the same type of race in 2020.
“They barely won the last election," Coulter said of the 2016 Trump campaign. "It was very exciting, it was great, everyone remembers election night. You always have this feeling we’re invincible and ha, ha, ha you guys are losers, you lost."


President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. (Getty Images)
But "it was really close," she said. "You switch 80,000 votes, mostly in the industrial Midwest, and he [Trump] loses."
















“I 
told him directly during the transition," said Coulter,  "‘If you don’t keep your promises, you run the exact same election four years from now, and just through the process of immigrants turning 18 and block voting for the Democrats, you lose the exact same election.’”
Ann Coulter's latest book, a New York Times best seller, is Resistance Is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind. 

Monday, March 12, 2018

Hillary Slams The Democratic Base. Is She Stupid Or Vengeful Or Trying To Destroy The Democratic Party?

WATCH: Hillary Says Racist Poor People Voted For Trump, 'Optimistic, Diverse, Dynamic' People Voted For Her

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers a speech during a campaign rally at Northern Community College in Annandale, Washington, USA on July 14, 2016.
Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
On Monday, a woman who was never elected to the presidency, Hillary Clinton, spoke to a crowd in India. There, she laid out the reason she lost: those stupid, stupid poor people.
Yes, Hillary was a blue collar candidate, all right.
Here’s what she said:
There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won. Now, I win the coasts, I win Illinois, Minnesota, places like that. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. “You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are, whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.”
Clearly, this is the way that Democrats will win back the middle of the country: by calling them racist rubes who despise immigrants and still have outhouses.
It never occurred to Clinton that perhaps she lost because she scorned those people; it never occurred to Clinton that perhaps those people scorned her not because her agenda was sophisticated, but because her hatred of them was so basic to her nature. Mitt Romney was hurt in 2012 because he suggested that 47 percent of the public didn’t pay taxes, and so couldn’t hear his call for tax decreases; Hillary lost because she thinks people who live outside big cities are idiots and deplorables.
It’s also worth thinking about Hillary’s take on wealth here. Is she advocating for an income-based voting system? If so, that gives the lie to the idea that Democrats are the party of the poor – and if Democrats actively alienate those who earn less, they’ll be alienating a core constituency, by the numbers. Those of low income already show up less often to the polls. They’re certainly not going to show up to vote for Hillary Clinton or anyone like her.
Hilariously, Democrats seem more interested in doubling down on intersectional politics than in appealing to the rural voters they’ve lost. That opens the door to Trump’s re-election. But with each passing day, Hillary shows why she never became president – and why she never should have.

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Democrats Always Protect Their Own Regardless How Terrible They Are

Monica Lewinsky Breaks Silence, Reveals the Horrific Thing Bill Clinton Really Did to Her

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Democrats trying to ride the #MeToo movement to a blue wave in November just hit a major snag.
After a failed presidential candidate ran on an “I’m with her” slogan, and amid nationwide revulsion over seemingly endless revelations of sexual misconduct by powerful men (overwhelmingly liberals) against women, the setup for a Democrat midterm campaign aimed at turning out liberal women in huge numbers seemed set.
But now comes the most infamous White House intern in history to remind America how badly that “I’m with her” candidate treated a woman who’d been preyed on – and how the Democratic Party really feels about women who come between the party and political power.
In a 3,500-word essay for Vanity Fair this month, former White House intern/Bill Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky offered a new take on her side of the scandal that convulsed the country and nearly drove the 42nd president from office.
And even for conservatives who remember the late 1990s, it’s a reminder of the horrific treatment Lewinsky received at Bill Clinton’s hands. Lewinsky called her affair with Bill Clinton a “gross abuse of power” and alluded to the way Hillary Clinton and fellow Democrats tried to smear her as an “unstable stalker.” She noted that the road to the affair was “littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege. (Full stop.)”

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“Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern,” she wrote. “I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”
And every one of those words shows that Democrats are lying when they claim to be the party that protects women.
For liberals — even for the ones too young to remember the 1990s personally — the Clinton years are what the party aspires to be. And the Clinton machine — the one that rigged the 2016 primary to ensure Hillary’s victory — won’t have it any other way.
Hillary was supposed to have been the one who stood up for women’s rights, particularly when she delivered a famous speech in China (The New York Times called it a hint of Clinton’s future presidential run).

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She built her campaign around the whole “first woman president” idea, making much of her ability to break the “glass ceiling” of being the first woman to win the nomination of a major party for president. (Former Republican presidential contender Carly Fiorina took that claim apart in an interview just as the 2016 Democratic National Convention was getting started.)
And in 2018, Democrats are planning to use the women’s issue again in midterm elections to try to cripple the presidency of Donald Trump.
But Lewinsky’s essay is going to be a reminder of just what the Democratic Party was willing to do on Bill Clinton’s behalf in the 1990s, when he looked America in the eye on television and talked about a young White House intern like she was a two-dollar streetwalker in Little Rock.
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Clinton said in televised address in January 1998, wagging his finger for emphasis.
RELATED: Disgusting: Hillary Clinton to Be Awarded for Her ‘Impact’ on Society
Well, “that woman” remembered it differently. And she was in the unfortunate position to know. (One of her dresses was in an unfortunate position too, as it turned out.)
But Democrats locked arms to protect Clinton then, and Hillary famously branded the young Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon.”
Lewinsky was a threat to their political power then, and Clinton-machine Democrats are ruthless when it comes to threats to their power — as Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Wiley can all confirm.
Lewinsky’s essay is a reminder of just how badly Democrats treat women who get in the way of their agenda.
All the posturing in the world isn’t going to change that — and let’s hope the 2018 midterms prove it.
Like and share this article on Facebook and Twitter if you agree that the Clintons should pay the price for what they allegedly did to Monica Lewinsky.
What do you think Lewisnky's essay will remind Americans of? 

Monday, December 18, 2017

Trump Cannot Be Controlled. No Wonder The Deep State Hates HIm

WHY HAS THE DEEP STATE GONE TO WAR AGAINST DONALD TRUMP?

Some people say Trump is nothing more than another Globalist puppet. Is that the whole story?

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Trump is unpredictable. He shoots his mouth off.
No one is sure what he might do next.
That is not the Deep State’s version of what a president is supposed to be.
Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama—they were good boys. Globalists. The intelligence establishment and the military industrial complex knew “the situation” was well in hand. Trump is the strange intruder. The “crazy one.”
If his swaggering indifference to the Deep State’s agenda is merely a pose—a formidable acting job—then why is he subjected to withering attacks every day, even from his own Party? After all, he has surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs big shots—can’t they be relied on to keep him in check? What’s the problem?
Well, one huge problem is he keeps attacking mainstream media. He lashes out and calls them Fake News. He takes every opportunity to accuse them of lying. No president in modern history has dared to work that angle. Understand that the intelligence establishment—a major component of the Deep State—uses major media to shape public perception on an ongoing basis. Gunslinger Trump is upsetting that applecart, at a time when public trust in mainstream news is, all on its own, eroding. He isn’t supposed to be piling on.
If Trump’s attacks on The News are a carefully crafted theatrical ploy, somehow designed to serve the Deep State, where is the payoff?
I keep bringing up Trump vs. the Media, because, for the past 35 years, working as a reporter, I’ve seen the media damage and the mind control, the brainwashing and the corruption, the collusion between The News and the Deep State, and the resulting destruction of human life. Just to name two areas of major crimes: viciously lying war press coverage, and viciously lying medical coverage. Anyone—especially a president—who wades in and disrupts the seamless hypnotic flow of mainstream news, whatever his motives, deserves praise.
For the record, I believe Trump is, and will be, a complete and utter disaster for the environment, as regards corporate pollution. I see no evidence he will lessen medical crimes. He is out to lunch, when it comes to appointing people to forward his agendas and support his presidency. Who on his team ISN’T talking out of school? Who isn’t betraying him? Why did he extend the utterly failed war in Afghanistan? Some of his most ardent supporters saw, in him, a foreign policy man with the guts and intelligence of Ron Paul. They certainly aren’t happy.
The big lynchpin issue is immigration. It always was. Ideologues from the Left, and the Deep State, are outraged, because they want open borders. Forever. Their masters, who are far more cynical and calculating, are forcing the unending migrant flood as a method for erasing separate nations—a prime plank in the Globalist platform. Any fool should be able to see this. It has nothing to do with “humane” motives. The heaping of financial burdens on states and nations, as an outcome of the migrant flood, is also intentional. So is the resultant crime. These are not illusions. How serious Trump is about stemming the flood—that is up for grabs. But the fact that he has spoken out, time and time again, even if you assume he is lying about what he intends to do, has galvanized people all over the world. They are waking up to the resurrection of sovereign nations, as opposed to a one world-nation, under the ministrations of Globalist utopian tyrants. If Trump’s stance on the immigration issue is merely a con, it has certainly had a massive blowback effect against the new world order. For those who claim that top-down control of the planet is a given, with no exceptions, why didn’t the controllers make sure someone other than Trump was elected in 2016? If these controller-gods are so powerful, why didn’t they dump the flaccid useless Hillary Clinton and nominate a dynamic Democrat who would have taken Trump to the cleaners? Why didn’t they launch a really convincing Trump dossier and cut him off at the knees before the election?
For all the “Hegelian dialectic” people, who insist that Trump was put into office to whipsaw the public to the other side, after the socialist Obama had done his assigned job: consider the fact that any corporatist Republican candidate could have served that function—instead of a fast-talking, shooting-from-the-hip, swaggering narcissist cowboy Crazy, who suddenly began spouting anti-Globalist pro-nationalist rhetoric to a worldwide audience.
“Well, you see, they needed a really strong America-first nationalist guy, Trump, so they could take him down and snuff out the flames of separate nations, once and for all. They also wanted to exacerbate the divide-and-conquer strategy for America—causing the deepest conflicts to come to the surface and rip America apart at the seams”—
I’m not rejecting those arguments completely; but I am saying elite controllers would be taking quite a gamble with that strategy, because the Trump effect vis-à-vis nationalism is formidable, and elite Globalists aren’t in the habit of encouraging all the points that defeat their own stance. They aren’t in the habit of pushing a man into the spotlight (and the Oval Office) who talks those points endlessly and puts dangerous ideas into millions of minds. Whether fake or real, Trump is that man, he talks that talk, and he does it relentlessly. There was no way to stage the 2016 election without spawning all this anti-Globalist rhetoric?
Trump has also attacked the intelligence establishment and the FBI. Not just once, but many times. Yes, you could say his appointments to headline jobs in those agencies belie his words—but why allow such a president to exist in the first place? Trump is actually mirroring a few of the major charges the political Left has leveled at the intel establishment for decades. And people out in the real world are agreeing with his harsh criticisms. When Trump first started this drumbeat, Senator Chuck Schumer said it was big mistake, because the intelligence community has “six ways from Sunday getting back at you.” Schumer didn’t say Trump was wrong. He just said Trump was crazy.
And that may be a clue. Trump just doesn’t care. He grew up hustling in the real estate field. He rubbed elbows with the Mob. He made deals however they could be made, with whoever showed up with money. He survived, went broke, survived again. He developed a giant ego. He promoted himself ceaselessly, once he’d achieved a bit of fame. In his world, bureaucrats are the lowest form of human life. He’s a hard charging asshole, and after a few drinks, he might gleefully admit it.
This is not a character the Deep State wants around, and especially not in the White House. “I’m the president and you just handed me this CIA assessment? It reads like sheer bullshit. Why don’t you fill me in on the real facts, if you know what they are, or is your problem stemming from the fact you’re ignorant?” Even on that level, the intel community doesn’t want Trump around. Face it, Washington is full of bullshitters on every conceivable platform. These people have never done a thing to justify their existence, much less their jobs. They skate all day, every day, and they expect to skate all the way into their pensions. Now along comes this bull in the china shop. No one really knows when he’s telling the truth and when he’s lying, but he does seem to have a nose for spotting fakers—maybe because he’s faked it for so long himself. And done it well. Done it better than most. Certainly done it better than jive analysts at the CIA, who really have faint knowledge about what’s going on in hots spots across the globe, but try to talk a good game.
Don’t kid a kidder.
On this level alone, Trump has not endeared himself to denizens of the Deep State.
Continuing with the theme of “Trump just doesn’t care,” it’s possible he’s willing to be drummed out of office. He’s daring the press and his other enemies to try it, and his position is: “If you can carry it off, go ahead. See what trouble and disaster you bring down on your own heads, if you win.” He’s willing to fly away from the White House, as Nixon did, and go back to Trump Tower in New York and pick up from where he left off. That’s a strong position. He’s always been a go-for-broke character, and if this president thing doesn’t work out, there are other worlds to conquer. Such a stance would make his enemies nervous. He’s quite able to call their bluff.
Meanwhile, as long as he’s in office, he’s a proponent of President Calvin Coolidge’s famous “the business of America is business.” This is, at once, a gift to, and a theft from, Globalists. It’s a gift, because Trump intends to give mega-corporations, which are the action arms of Globalism, free reign to dominate the marketplace, horribly pollute to their hearts’ content, cooperate with government allies in stepping up surveillance of the citizenry, and pay less taxes, as long as some of these companies, or a few of them, bring jobs back to America. It’s a theft, because Trump isn’t structuring these corporations as part of the infamous Globalist trade treaties, like the TPP. (Unless he goes back on that promise, too.) He’s prone to making separate trade deals with separate nations. At least on the surface, he appears to want to prove that this tactic can succeed. And it can build up the US economy. Even, worst case, if he’s lying about opposing trade treaties, once again he’s planted an idea in many minds: you don’t need Globalist trade deals to make trade work. This is not a Deep State idea. Far from it. It’s corrosive to the Deep State.
Look at how many counties and states turned red in the 2016 election. Territorially, it was overwhelming. What were all those people on all that land thinking? It was a mixed bag. On the one hand (without mentioning it), they wanted the government benefits they were accruing, as a matter of course, to remain in place. At the same time, they wanted freedom, the right to be left alone, the right to reject political correctness, the right to celebrate America as an independent and sovereign nation, the right to feel proud of their country, the right to be able to work and find a job, the right to own guns, the right to shut down open borders, the right to uphold the traditional family, the right to reject major media as a bunch of liars and crooks (and ditto for the Washington swamp).
The Globalists deviously put a man in the White House who was stimulating that whole range of sentiment and conviction? Really?
Then we come to the Clintons. Major league bullshitters in their own right—and on a level Trump could hardly aspire to. The Deep State, with some reservations, had accepted the idea that one of their own, Hillary Clinton, with all her personal and family and political baggage, was going to be the next president of the United States. She and Bill seemed to be made of Teflon, or some similar substance that swallowed scandals whole and made them disappear. The press had played a central role there. (The press that Trump was violently attacking.) Forget the Clinton Foundation. Forget Hillary’s decades-long shameful defense of her husband’s sexual predations. Forget Mena and the cocaine trafficking and Bill’s arrangements with the CIA. Right out in the open, Hillary, with her sidekick, Barack Obama, had destroyed a whole country. Libya. They had reduced an entire nation to bloody chaos. If she could get away with that, she could get away with anything. So, for the Deep State, she still held promise. She could work a hustle beyond any hustle Trump could dream of. Good. She would do a good Globalist job as the next American president. The press would keep things reasonably quiet. She and Bill would continue their deep and long relationship with the CIA and all the CIA stands for.
But there was one major issue. Apparently, once again, the all-knowing and all-seeing and all-controlling controllers of the Deep State, who manage society flawlessly, as Hegelians par excellence, had screwed up royally. They hadn’t talked with Hillary’s doctors. These gods, who can execute the synthesis of opposites on a grand scale, who know the future decades in advance, had failed to notice Hillary was sick. Quite sick. Sick enough so that if she won the election, she might have to hide from the public for the better part of her term, and even that (absurd) tactic might not work.
So perhaps midway through the 2016 election campaign, the Globalist gods of the Deep State decided to back off and let Trump win. Not because they favored him, not because they knew they could manage his every move, and not because they had turned him into one of their own, but because they had messed up and had to scramble and make the best of an unpleasant situation. Because on a gross physical level, Hillary was toast.
But they would attack President Donald mercilessly and do whatever they could to drive him out of office and take him down. They would sink their claws into Vice President Mike Pence and reassemble however much of his brain they needed to adjust, for the moment when he would step into the presidency.
The press and sleazebag Robert Mueller would head up phase one of the raid on Trump. Violations of financial laws, sexual misdemeanors and felonies, cooperating with the enemy (Russia)—whatever could be cobbled together, true or false—was fair game. Operation Oust the President was seriously underway.
Some people believe I’m a Trump supporter. As I’ve been saying all along, I praise him on three counts: he helped keep Hillary Clinton from the Oval Office; he has relentlessly attacked major media; and he has mouthed strong anti-Globalist ideas. Everything else is up for grabs.
There has never been a doubt in my mind that he is a liar. But why is that news? Pardon me for noticing that every president is a liar. Obama, Bush, and Clinton run a close race for the recent winner on that score. My personal choice is Obama, only because he did the best work of the three in pretending he was honorable.
Bottom line for now: the Deep State has to hate Trump, because at the very least, he is a symbol and a lightning rod for anti-Globalism and pro-Nationalism.
Apparently, he has calculated (and made) a number of deals (that’s what he does) in order to (hopefully) stay in office. Deals with Goldman Sachs, deals with the military, deals with the military industrial complex, etc. These arrangements, of necessity, mean he has to walk back and discard some of his campaign promises. This is old hat for him. It’s business.
At the risk of repeating myself, most people don’t fully grasp the pernicious influence of mainstream news. Not just that influence now, not just in the past few years, but forever. The ability of the press, in concert with versions of the Deep State, to twist and deform and undermine and reverse and fragment public perception, on every major story and issue, is basically substituting death for life. If the population is, on a daily basis, under the influence of such mind control, then what kind of breakthrough is possible? No breakthrough. None. The game is over. Fortunately, through the Internet, that brainwashing is being shattered by independent media, piece by piece. And then—along came Trump. From a position of devil-may-care, extreme visibility, rudely, crudely, relentlessly, impulsively, he has attacked the press. He’s “crazy” that way. Like some wild Salvador Dali, he’s turned the tables on consensus reality. I don’t care why he’s doing it. I don’t care how he’s doing it. He’s doing it. This is an opening. This is an accelerated opportunity for all sorts of independent voices who, for their own reasons, oppose the Deep State. This opportunity must be taken.
There are certainly risks, when it comes to Donald Trump. But taking apart major media is not one of them.
Coda 1: The biggest risk is war. With North Korea. This is where cooler heads must prevail. This is where even arch Globalists must weigh in. They want control of a viable planet, not one in smoking ruins. If the business of America is business, an atmosphere in which sellers and buyers can operate is an obvious requirement. Not a nuclear atmosphere. But this isn’t just a Trump problem. It would have been a Hillary problem, if she had won the White House. Presented with a (completely insane) Pentagon “strategy” for defeating North Korea, either president would become “interested.” Given Hillary’s track record in Libya, she might be more eager than Trump…
Coda 2: Hollywood, in its own fanciful way, is marshalling its troops for yet another round of attacks on Trump, in the form of a movie, “The [Washington] Post,” which details the release of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971, as an act of defiance against corrupt government. Viewers are supposed to get the idea that the press is the hero, and their war now against Trump is a holy crusade, for which we should all be grateful. Hail to the press! We love you. We need you. There is also a report that George Clooney will produce a mini-series on the Watergate scandal for Netflix. Yet another Watergate re-run. I wonder how many lies this one will push. The theme, again, will certainly include the press exposure of the Nixon-team crimes. By extension, we are supposed to imagine the press is now the champion of truth in its anti-Trump campaign. Both these projects are oblique efforts to repair the press’ tattered image. They are Real and True. The independent media are Fake and False. Good luck with that one.
Sorry for the length of this article. It was far too short. I had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor…
This article first appeared at NoMoreFakeNews.com.

Monday, November 27, 2017

America Is Disintegrating Right In Front Of Our Eyes

Are Americans Destroying Themselves from Within, as Lincoln Feared?

By November 27, 2017


BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 658, November 27, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedom, it will be because we destroyed ourselves,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. Americans must keep his wisdom in mind. The wheels of two Russiagates – Trump’s and now Hillary’s – are deepening domestic conflicts, and calls for Trump’s impeachment grow. Where is the US headed?
Trump and Putin’s Joint Statement on Syria
Among the accomplishments of Donald Trump’s just completed Far East tour was a joint statement on November 11 with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Syria. (Their planned Danang summit was canceled, however. As prominent advisor to the Russian foreign affairs ministry Andrey Kortunov explained, “Putin is presently toxic for Trump;” i.e., any contact with him harms Trump at home.)
In the statement, the two leaders agreed:
 “…there is no military solution to the conflict in Syria… the ultimate political solution… will include … free and fair elections under UN supervision.” They also resolved “…to maintain open military channels of communication between military professionals to help ensure the safety of both US and Russian forces …until the final defeat of ISIS is achieved.”
As Kortunov said, Syria was “a step in the right direction, but collaboration remains situational, not strategic.”
Trump’s foe, Hillary Clinton, and her advisor, former acting CIA Director Mike Morell, had a very different agenda for Syria. In August 2016, Morell advocated “killing Russians” and “mak[ing] Russians pay a price.” A hawkish supporter of US military interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Clinton publicly endorsed Morell’s advice. Trump, on the other hand, rather than threaten to fight the Russians, sought a limited partnership with them against ISIS. It is thus hardly surprising that Putin decided to support Trump in the 2016 election.
Clinton, the defeated candidate, has not accepted the election result and is leading the effort to try to undo it. Her reasoning, as she alleges in her new memoir, What Happened, is that Trump’s victory was the result of a “Russian plot.” To Morell, Trump’s election was “the political equivalent of 9/11.”
North Korea: Coercive Diplomacy
As Trump was preparing for his Far East tour, he was demonized by two former presidents with smear code words. “Bigotry,” declared George W. Bush on October 19, “…is blasphemy against the American creed…Russian interference in our election should never be tolerated.” Obama followed a day later: “We have folks who are deliberately trying to get folks angry, to demonize people with different ideas.” On November 7, the eve of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a third president, her husband Bill Clinton, spoke of Trump’s comments about “fake news” as mirroring the “’dictators’ club’ of world leaders.”
All three presidents failed to cope with the North Korean threat, leaving Trump holding the much-kicked can. Unlike them, Trump is trying something new: coercive diplomacy. Along with Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric” has come the deployment of three US Navy aircraft carriers in the waters off North Korea, flights of the US and allied air force near North Korea’s borders, US army maneuvers near the DMZ with their South Korean counterparts, and a tightening economic embargo.
This is something North Korean dictators have not experienced since their capture of the Pueblo US navy intelligence ship in 1968. Like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, President Trump has thus come to be viewed by his adversary as an unbalanced, unpredictable hawk. Yet his coercive diplomacy has already had a sobering effect on “Rocket Man.” There have been neither nuclear explosions nor ballistic missiles over Japan since September 15.
Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un’s depiction of Trump as a deranged “dotard” has been effectively endorsed by Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, who called him “mentally unstable.” This, and calls to impeach the “warmonger,” have the North Koreans licking their lips.
Hillary and Vlad: From Love to Hate
Adding to the growing rift at home is an emerging new Russiagate – Hillary’s.  Viewed by Putin in 2009 as the quarterback in the “reset” of US-Russo relations, he welcomed Bill and Hillary’s help in the purchase of vast uranium stakes in America’s west by his nuclear agency, Rosatom. From 2010-13, three purchases of stakes from Canadian mining company Uranium 1 were made by Rosatom with the consent of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the nine-member Committee on Foreign Investment in the US  [CFIUS].
The sales gave Russia a controlling interest in over 20% of America’s uranium reserves. Thereafter, the Clinton Foundation received $145 million in donations from interested parties, as reported by Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash.  Bill also earned a $500,000 speaking fee for a single speech at a Kremlin-allied bank.
What is now being investigated is whether the sale of the uranium to Russia endangered US national security. New revelations indicate that the Obama administration approved the deal despite evidence obtained by the FBI allegedly linking the Clintons to collusion with Russia in a massive uranium racketeering scandal involving kickbacks and money laundering.
Then there is the unverified dossier of Trump’s purported activities with prostitutes while staying at the Moscow Ritz Carlton in 2013. The dossier was produced, with Hillary’s money, by British MI6 agent Christopher Steele from Russian sources. Steele was a subcontractor for a Washington company, Fusion GPC, that provided opposition research to both political parties. The dossier is said to have been passed to the FBI by Trump foe and Hillary Clinton’s close friend, Senator John McCain.
The Trump-Putin Bromance
In 2013, while organizing the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Donald Trump developed an excellent relationship with the pageant’s host, Russian mogul Aris Agalarov. This is the same Agalarov whose family manager, Rob Goldstone, arranged the June 9, 2016 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and a lobbying group headed by Russian lawyer Natalia Vesselnitskaya. She is connected to Russia’s chief prosecutor and Putin’s confidant, Yury Chaika. Like Steele, she also worked with Fusion GPS.
Goldstone e-mailed Trump Jr.: “Emin [Agaralov’s son] just called … with something very interesting.” He had offered to provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.” Trump Jr. responded with interest and a meeting took place – a meeting about which political novice Trump Jr. should have informed the FBI. But he denies ever receiving any Hillary “dirt,” and there’s no evidence that he did.
It is true that President Trump doesn’t want to show his tax returns for 2008-13, and it is undeniable that he had some lucrative real estate dealings with Russian oligarchs during those years. We may yet learn more.
“Toxic” Putin
The canceled summit prevented Trump from exploring with Putin a possible dual Russian-Chinese embargo of North Korea. However, Trump does at times display naiveté about foreign leaders, who might try to exploit his lack of experience.  Now, with the help of his savvy generals, he has the time to bone up on Putin, the complex anti-communist, Machiavellian autocrat, who manages at the same time to be a friend of Israel, an ally of Iran, and an anti-ISIS partner with Trump. Trump must be careful with the “toxic“ Kremlin leader, whom Henry Kissinger has described as “a cold calculator of the Russian national interest.”
Trump has finally realized that Putin organized the hacking of DNC e-mails to find compromising material on Hillary Clinton. As Donna Brazile revealed in her book, Hacks, the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders (a sort of Menshevik) lost in the primaries to Clinton (referred to in Bill’s White House as a “Bolshevik”) through the devious machinations of her loyalists.
Trump’s reluctance to accept that it had been Putin who ordered the hacking derived from his mistrust of the leaders of the intelligence community, who were largely Obama loyalists hostile to him. He does trust his new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, who briefs him daily. Thus he finally acknowledged, “…I am with our agencies, especially as currently constituted with the leadership.”
Conclusion
Like Nixon in 1973-74, Trump returned from a successful trip abroad greatly concerned about the future of his presidency. Even Nixon during Watergate, however, was not so viciously and repeatedly attacked at home while he conducted diplomacy abroad.
Trump’s congressional foes continue to slow down crucial legislation and his new senior appointments to the government while railing that progress is not being made. If the Democrats become the majority party in Congress in 2018, they will control its agenda and might even prepare the president’s impeachment, as occurred in Washington in 1973-74.
Though we cannot predict the outcome of the ongoing power struggle, we worry about the continuing pattern in American politics in which the party out of power seeks primarily to sabotage and block the one that’s in.
In spite of Trump’s fumbles, political correctness deficit, and failure to combine his coercive diplomacy with a public one to expose the horrors of the North Korean communist gulag, his savvy foreign affairs strategy is working. He became the first American leader to be honored with an invitation to dine in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Like Nixon earlier, he is respected by some foreign leaders of both an authoritarian and a democratic bent.
Still, the crucial question persists. Can America overcome the perils of domestic division that Lincoln feared on the eve of the Civil War? At present there is a lack of bipartisanship in Congress, a media that too often conflates fact with speculation, a growth of extremist groups on both sides of the political spectrum, and increased killings of police.
Can the idiosyncratic yet patriotic president find some of Lincoln’s inner strength and skill to forge a national consensus at home? And can Americans, for the sake of the survival of the republic and the preservation of alliances with democratic partners in Europe, Asia, and Israel, stop hating each other?  Or are they destined to destroy themselves from within, as Lincoln feared?
Dr. Jiri Valenta is a Non-Resident Senior Research Associate at the BESA Center. He and his wife, Leni, are the principals of The Institute of Post Communist Studies and Terrorism (jvlv.net). A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Jiri served for a decade as a professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the US Naval Post-Graduate School and was a consultant to senior members of the Reagan administration.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family