Andrew L. Urban
As of March 13, 2024, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are confirmed as the US presidential candidates, after the latest primaries.
Don’t be surprised if the next anti-Trump scandal is set off with a manipulated or AI photo of him kissing Kate, the Princess of Wales, while she struggles to push him away. (Have you seen the AI image of Trump in a scrum with police?) You laugh, but the index of today’s Democrats’ ‘Get Trump’ Playbook should stop you mid-chortle.
Fake Trump scuffle
The opening section of the Playbook has a dedication to the erstwhile (aka former, aka fired) FBI agent Peter Strzok, who assured his girlfriend during the 2016 election campaign in a text, “no, we will stop him” becoming President. The voters be damned. It’s classic Democrat Playbook style – and confirms that it is the Deep State that runs America these days. (So don’t concern yourself, America, which candidate wins the Presidency; the Deep State has your back … in its sights.)
There’s the key chapter in the Playbook on launching a huge conspiracy in which a secret dossier falsified by a real spy and the CIA made out that Donald Trump was a Russian asset helped by Putin to win the 2016 election. The dossier, with Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints found on it, included colourful accounts of Trump hosting a golden shower sex party in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes. But then projection is a Democrat characteristic. Like warning how Trump would destroy democracy … see Merrick Garland’s resistance to voter ID laws, below.
Two multi-million dollar investigations (Mueller and Durham) found no evidence for the claims. It was the first major ‘I told you so’ moment for Trump. Knitted into the fabric of that caper was the finding that his campaign had been spied on. They all laughed when he so claimed at the beginning of his presidency. Another ‘I told you so’ moment …
Dozens of America’s most senior intelligence (?) officers accepted that Russian interference story as factual. Those same (now former) intelligence officers then showed up in another chapter of the Playbook. On the eve of the 2020 election, these security chiefs respond to the New York Post’s revelations about content in Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop by labelling the disconcerting and damning emails pointing to Joe Biden’s corrupt influence peddling, as most likely a product of Russian disinformation.
Adam Schiff … a nose for lies
These gormless/biased (take your pick) Democrat operators stick with the lies but dispute the truth. But then the truth is a stranger in the camp where Democrat Representative Adam Schiff is still claiming he has amassed evidence that proves the Trump-Putin election conspiracy. Schiff is now running for the late Diane Weinstein’s Senate seat. Fate can be cruel to America.
Two impeachment attempts are fired up in the ‘Get Trump’ Playbook. Both generate fulmination among the left but neither passes the pub test. Nor the Senate.
Then as Trump’s popularity climbs in the run-up to the 2024 election, desperate Democrats embark on the most brazen of all Playbook plans: lawfare.
Democrat prosecutors unleash a barrage of indictments, most of dubious merit, from Georgia to New York. In Georgia, Fulton County (a County!) DA Fani (pron. Fahni) Williams looks up the Playbook and charges Trump with 13 counts, including racketeering, under Georgia law for scheming to steal the 2020 election (four years earlier). Biden won the state by fewer than 12,000 votes; see voting stats below.
The indictment overlaps somewhat with New York Democrat special counsel Jack Smith’s election-related case, in which Smith’s team charged Trump with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Trump could face up to 20 years in prison for each of the obstruction-related charges and 10 years for the conspiracy against rights charge. That’ll take him off the ballot for the rest of his life, right?
But Williams ends up in court defending her appointment of boyfriend Nathan Wade as Trump’s prosecutor (at US$650,000), despite his lack of experience. Her claim that she appointed him before their romance began was undermined by witnesses. On March 15, 2024, Wade resigned; Willis remains but the future of the case is uncertain.
In 2018, New York’s Attorney-General, Letitia James, makes it her election promise to “get Trump” – before any charges are laid. (Don’t they have malicious prosecution laws in New York?) Once elected, she smirked as fellow Democrat, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, argued a civil suit against Trump and the Trump Organization for allegedly lying “by billions” about the value of real estate in order to get favourable loans and pay less tax. It is the world’s first case of an alleged fraud without any fraud victims. The sympathetic (to James) judge awarded penalties in excess of A$500 million against Trump. There was no jury. And there was nothing tethering the enormous fine to any reality.
Trump would need to pay the fines before launching an appeal. Judge Arthur F. Engoron no doubt set the ridiculous fine so high to try and prevent Trump being able to afford an appeal. A Democrat Playbook Lawfare Special now known as the Engoron Play.
Clearly, in the ‘Get Trump’ Playbook of the Democrats, considerations are not guided by a distinction between right and wrong; the mantra is ‘whatever it takes’ – as long as it works to hurt the Trump campaign. When E. Jean Carroll won a civil case where Trump claimed innocence but was found to have sexually abused her some decades earlier, she was awarded a Trump-sized US$5.5 million in damages. When Trump publicly questioned her honesty, Carroll went to court to sue him for defamation. An inescapably ‘New York’ jury decided Carroll should receive US$83.3 million in damages to repair her reputation and to punish Trump. Maybe US$83 million of it to punish Trump.
In a March 3, 2024, Playbook election update, the Democrats’ Attorney-General Merrick Garland vowed to fight voter ID laws which Trump’s camp had been advocating, claiming that they are ‘discriminatory’ and ‘unnecessary’. Not to mention making voter fraud far more difficult.
It is in this context – the entire Democrats’ ‘Get Trump’ Playbook where the normal legal rules no longer apply – that rigging the 2020 election doesn’t seem like a crazy, right-wing nut job conspiracy theory and more like another chapter in the Playbook. But let me quote the intriguing vote number comparisons in some swing states, which I have referenced before. Here’s a taste:
In 2012, Barack Obama won 1,773,827 votes in Georgia. In 2020, Biden supposedly won 2,473,633 & Trump got 2,461,854.
Obama in 2012 won 531,373 votes in Nevada; Biden, we are led to believe, won 703,486. Trump, got 669,890.
In 2012, Obama won 1,025,232 votes in Arizona. Biden was credited with 1,672,143. Trump, got 1,661,686. In the same election, Republicans won over a dozen House seats and lost none. Yet they rejected the Republican presidential candidate?
Obama’s total votes totalled 66 million in 2012. By 2020, US population was up 6%, yet votes credited to the Democrat candidate Biden was up 23% on Obama’s tally. A blow to Obama’s ego, no doubt.
THAT’S funny!? – as famed author the late Isaac Asimov might have murmured, the remark he once identified as the most important response to an assertion that defies common sense.
If Trump does win – overcoming any election rigging in this year’s election – it would be a triumph for America’s democracy – but a tragedy for America and the world if he withdrew or lessened US support for Ukraine as some fear. That decision would repudiate America’s historical role as world leader.
It has to be remembered that in 2017, Trump approved the sale of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine as it battled Kremlin-backed forces in the Donbas region. Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine’s national security council, told The Times in December: “Trump was the first US president to provide lethal weapons to our country. This is an inconvenient thing to talk about in the US now.”