Category: Donald Trump

Trump Does Impeachment Victory Dance, Slams Democrats, Media as Liars

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Like he just won the Super Bowl:

President Trump, commanding a triumphant scene at the White House complete with the playing of “Hail to the Chief,” railed against what he called an “evil” impeachment process on Thursday hours after his historic acquittal in the Senate.
Greeted by thunderous applause and a standing ovation by his supporters, the president declared “we went through hell” but described the moment as a “celebration” — while maintaining as he did throughout the impeachment inquiry and trial that he “did nothing wrong.”
And on a day when he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were trading shots in deeply personal terms, Trump turned fire on those who prosecuted the case and other investigations against him. He called Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff “horrible” and “vicious” people.
“It was evil. It was corrupt. It was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars. This should never, ever happen to another president, ever,” Trump said. “It was a disgrace.”
He detailed the timeline of investigations, remarking of the Russia probe: “It was all bulls—.”
And as he did earlier Thursday at a prayer breakfast, Trump brandished a copy of the day’s Washington Post with a blaring headline: “Trump acquitted.”
“We can take that home, honey. Maybe we’ll frame it,” he joked to first lady Melania Trump, saying that it was the “best” headline he’s ever received from the outlet.

 

When Trump called Pelosi a “horrible person,” do you think any white working-class “swing” voter in Michigan or Iowa disagreed? It cannot be repeated enough that Trump’s approval rating went up during this impeachment, which Democrats ought to see as a foreboding omen. Despite everything that the liberal media did to incite this impeachment — frankly, they’ve been working on it since Nov. 8, 2016 — the American people could still see through this partisan hoax. Guess which Democrat sees what’s coming down the road? James Carville:

Democratic strategist James Carville expressed his concerns as the Democratic primary race is officially underway, saying he’s “scared to death” of the direction his party is going.
Appearing on MSNBC, Carville began by pointing to the success Democrats had during the 2018 midterm elections and stressed that it “matters” who the candidates are and what the party chooses to talk about.
“I’m 75 years old, why am I here doing this? Because I’m scared to death, that’s why,” Carville exclaimed. “Let’s get relevant here … all the Sanders people are taking pictures wishing Jeremy Corbyn the best. … I don’t want to go down that path.” . ..
“We’ve got to decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult? Or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?” Carville continued. “What we need is power, you understand? That’s what this is about. Without power, you have nothing. You just have talking points.”
Carville . . . insisted that Democratic donors “will not give a popsicle to the DNC” with the current state of the 2020 field.

Trump Derangement Syndrome — a psychiatric disorder rooted in a refusal to accept the verdict of the 2016 election — has put the Democrats so badly off-balance they cannot recover their equilibrium.




 

Trump Acquitted, Romney Guilty

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Why the hell did any Republican ever vote for Mitt Romney? He is to the GOP what Carlo Rizzi was to the Corleone family. And after the Mormon rat sold out on the impeachment vote, I find myself feeling like Don Vito: “I never knew, until this day, that it was Barzini all along.”

Trump got acquitted on both counts in the Senate, an outcome that was never really in doubt, so that Nancy Pelosi and her House Democrat colleagues have wasted all this time for exactly nothing. Trump emerges triumphant — more popular than ever — and as for Mitt Romney . . .

According to web archives, top Mitt Romney adviser Joseph Cofer Black, who publicly goes by “Cofer Black,” joined Burisma’s board of directors while Hunter Biden was also serving on the board.
According to The New Yorker, Hunter joined Burisma’s board in April of 2014 and remained on it until he declined to renew his position this past May. Meanwhile, according to Burisma’s website, Black was appointed in February of 2017 and continues to serve on its board. The timelines would indicate that Black and Biden worked together at Burisma, and indeed, web archives from late 2017 show Black and Biden listed simultaneously on the board.
Black joined the CIA in 1974 and eventually climbed the ranks to become director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed him ambassador at large and coordinator for counterterrorism. He later worked at Blackwater as a vice chairman before joining Romney’s campaign as a “special adviser” on Romney’s Foreign Policy and National Security Advisory Team in October of 2011. In 2017, Black joined the board of Burisma. . . .

Up to his eyeballs in the Deep State coup machine, you see.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)




 

Nancy Pelosi Is Tearing Apart America

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Everybody — and I do mean everybody — is talking this morning about Nancy Pelosi’s shocking gesture at the end of last night’s State of the Union Address, when she tore up the text of President Trump’s speech. It was rude and childish. My wife, a very polite Christian grandmother who generally doesn’t pay attention to politics, said of Pelosi’s tantrum: “How does she think this makes her look like the grown-up?”

President Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time high, the Democrats can’t even manage to count the votes in the Iowa caucus, yet Nancy Pelosi believes she can achieve . . . something, whatever was in her deranged mind, by ostentatiously disrespecting our Commander-in-Chief?

The speech itself was overwhelmingly positive and optimistic, full of patriotic sentiment, and insofar as Trump’s speech might have angered Democrats, the offense was a matter of policy, e.g., his criticism of “sanctuary city” laws and his advocacy of immigration limits. While one can understand that opponents of the president’s policy agenda would dislike hearing him advocate these policies from “the bully pulpit,” it did not deserve Pelosi’s disrespectful gesture. My hunch (and it is only a hunch) is that this was pre-meditated, something she had made up her mind to do before she ever saw a copy of the speech.

The net impact? Trump wins, Nancy loses.

“Whatever his faults and virtues,” says Stephen Green, “all magnified by his own boosterism and the press’s funhouse magnifying glass, Trump is unreservedly and unabashedly pro-American. A gung-ho patriot, delivering a gung-ho patriotic speech. Like running into an old friend after years and years apart, that’s something you maybe didn’t realize how much you missed until it was right there in front of you again.”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Permit me to remind readers that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Argument by Assertion

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Sitting here this morning with the TV in my home office tuned to the closing arguments in the impeachment trial, and while I actually tried to ignore this noise — the whole damned Ukraine mess just makes me angry — I could not help overhearing the endless repetition involved. We have heard over and over a handful of phrases: President Trump “violated his oath of office,” and “our democracy” is jeopardized by “foreign interference in our elections.” Indeed, the Democrats claim, “our national security” is endangered because . . .

Well, Vladimir Putin is a dictator and Russia is our enemy — or such is the essence the Democratic argument implies.

Let us cede the point that Putin is a bad guy who has done bad things, and still we are faced with the question of whether a realignment of U.S. foreign policy in Europe is overdue. We can simultaneously (a) favor the independence of Ukraine and other former Warsaw Pact nations without (b) believing that Russia is the greatest threat to those nations. In fact, I believe Stephen Miller and other key Trump advisers would argue, the greater danger to Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, etc., is from the kind of “globalism” advocated by George Soros. The minute you say “Soros,” of course, you’ll be accused of endorsing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and, perhaps also, repeating Russian propaganda. However, it’s possible to think that Hungary’s Viktor Orban and other Eastern European nationalists could be valuable American allies without embracing any kind of paranoid theory, much less anti-Semitism.

Isn’t it the case, after all, that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe is a direct consequence of increased Islamic immigration to Europe? Why do Jews feel threatened in Paris? It’s not because of any neo-Nazi menace, but rather because Paris is being overrun by Arabs. And who is supporting this influx of Muslims into Europe? Not Russia. Go back to the “Arab Spring” of 2011, which inaugurated the civil war in Syria, which in turn led to the “refugee crisis” of 2015. At every point of that timeline, the Obama administration and the Left in Europe were supporting the forces of political instability and demographic chaos. Let anyone investigate what policies George Soros’s network of tax-exempt advocacy organizations were advancing doing at that time, and see whether it’s a “conspiracy theory” to criticize his influence.

It is a fact — a matter of public record — that four of the House Democrat impeachment managers voted against military aid to Ukraine. How is it, then, they can assert that President Trump is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” because he briefly delayed this aid, when if it were up to them, Ukraine never would have gotten any such aid? It’s almost as if Democrats really don’t care about “our national security,” but are merely manufacturing this concern for political advantage.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I am deeply cynical, and you’d have to be a damned fool to believe that Democrats care more about America’s national security than does President Trump. Democrats seem to think that all they have to do is assert that Trump is guilty, and that their mere assertion is tantamount to proof of his guilt. This is the only plausible explanation for why they keep repeating the same phrases, as if they believe repetition will give their assertions the force of argument.

This is not how actual arguments work, however, and preaching to the partisan choir — Democrats telling their own dimwit supporters that their hatred of Trump is justified — will not persuade anyone who understand the Constitution, which gives the President nearly unlimited authority (for good or ill) in conducting our foreign policy.




 

Senate Votes 51-49 Against Witnesses; Impeachment Circus Will End Wednesday

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Our long national nightmare will soon be over:

Senators defeated a last-ditch effort by Democrats to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Trump Friday evening, then approved a final schedule that will force a vote Wednesday on Mr. Trump’s fate.
That means the president will deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday while still under the cloud of impeachment, but will almost certainly be acquitted the next day.
In a series of votes, Republicans blocked Sen. Charles E. Schumer’s attempt to get former National Security Adviser John R. Bolton to testify. The GOP also shot down an attempt by Democrats to outsource all witness decisions to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has been presiding over the trial but not playing an active role in decision.
After defeating those motions, the Senate adopted its final schedule on a 53-47 vote.
Under the new rules, the chamber has adjourned until Monday, when it will return to hear final arguments from the House Democrats prosecuting the case, and from the president’s defense team.
The trial will then take a break Tuesday, giving Mr. Trump space to deliver his speech from the House chamber that night. Then the trial will reconvene Wednesday at 4 p.m., when a final vote on both articles of impeachment will occur.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) There was never really any chance that Trump would be removed from office, which would take 67 senators voting to convict. Nancy Pelosi knew that when she gave Adam Schiff the green light to commence this partisan witch-hunt in September. From the beginning, Schiff’s investigation was compromised by the fact alleged “whistleblower,” Eric Ciaramella, had no direct knowledge of the July 25 phone call at the center of the Ukraine (non-)scandal. Ciaramella is a Deep State protégé of John Brennan, and a known Biden supporter, while Ciaramella’s former NSC colleague Sean Misko, “joined Schiff’s committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint.” Whatever your opinion of Trump’s Ukraine policy, the Schiff investigation looked like a subversive plot against the president organized by a cabal of Democrat operatives.

Republican senators recognized this; the real question was whether such deliberate sabotage of the administration was acceptable. And thanks to “Cocaine Mitch,” the answer is, hell no. Exit quote:

“You know what I believe about all of this? It was a bunch of partisan bullshit in the House. It continued in the Senate. It’s gonna end Wednesday, the president’s gonna get acquitted, this is all gonna blow up in their face.”

You tell ’em, Lindsey.




 

Collins Announces ‘Yes,’ Alexander ‘No’ on Calling Impeachment Witnesses: TIE?

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Last night, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine announced that she would vote to open the impeachment trial to more witnesses and documents, while Sen Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said he would vote against more witnesses. Mitt Romney, worthless backstabber that he is, says he wants John Bolton to testify. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is probably a “yes.” If the known whip count stays the same — that is, if there are no surprise “yes” votes — then the result would be a 50-50 tie, and the motion for new witnesses would fail, unless Chief Justice John Roberts intervened to cast a “yes” vote, which would be controversial.

This is Alexander’s explanation for his “no” vote:

“I worked with other senators to make sure that we have the right to ask for more documents and witnesses, but there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense. …The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.
“The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday.”

Alexander cedes two points: First that the House Democrats have proven their case, and second that Trump’s conduct was “inappropriate,” while at the same time asserting that what has been proven falls short of the “high bar for an impeachable offense.” This is shrewd, and probably reflects what a lot of independent voters think about the case, that the attempt to influence Ukraine was “inappropriate” (i.e., it doesn’t look good), but the Democrats went too far with their rush to impeachment.

In other words, you can disapprove of what Trump did without believing that he needs to be immediately removed from office for it. With the election barely nine months away, let the people decide. The fact that the Democrats rushed to impeach was essentially a vote of “no confidence” in their field of presidential candidates. Meanwhile . . .

Trump’s approval ratings have gone up since the impeachment began, and this despite (or perhaps because of) liberal media bias:

Jake Tapper doesn’t want you to know the name of the so-called “whistleblower” who caused the impeachment drama. Of course, the identity of Eric Ciaramella was never much of a secret — lots of people in D.C. knew that the former National Security Council staffer was the reputed source for California Rep. Adam Schiff’s investigation of President Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ciaramella’s name has been in many news stories in recent months: “Report: Anti-Trump Complainant Eric Ciaramella Worked With Brennan, Biden, and DNC Operative Chalupa” (American Greatness, Oct. 30, 2019) and “Open Society Emails Show Anti-Trump CIA ‘Whistleblower’ Eric Ciaramella Was Updated on George Soros’s Personal Ukraine Activities” (Gateway Pundit, Nov. 17, 2019), to cite just a couple. But CNN viewers have never heard Ciaramella identified, and Jake Tapper evidently wants to prevent anyone else from reporting this fact, either.
Wednesday afternoon, Tapper tweeted, “A Trump campaign official just RTed a tweet containing the name of the alleged whistleblower.” Tapper’s third-grade tattletale behavior was in response to Trump campaign deputy communications director Matt Wolking retweeting investigative journalist Paul Sperry, with a photo showing Ciaramella meeting with Ukrainian officials in 2015.
Why doesn’t Tapper want anyone to see that photo? . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Eric Ciaramella’s Name Is Not a Secret, and #TeamTrump Only Hires Winners

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK, Martinsburg, W.Va.
Working from a McDonald’s here this morning because my brother Kirby has an all-day doctor’s appointment at the VA Medical Center, and contributions to the tip jar would be sincerely appreciated. Meanwhile, in the Historic Impeachment™ drama, Jake Tapper is a whiny bitch:

Trump campaign deputy director of communications Matt Wolking retweeted this tweet by Paul Sperry, which features the name of the alleged whistleblower:

And CNN’s Jake Tapper is on it:

Does Wolking’s retweet constitute a “formal threat” or nah?

Honestly, it’s kind of strange for Tapper to be hyperventilating about this. For better or for worse, Eric Ciaramella’s name has been out there for a while now.

This entire Historic Impeachment™ drama — which has done no real harm to Trump, but turned into a debacle for Democrats — was begun when Ciaramella decided, on the basis of hearsay, to play tattletale. He is not an actual “whistleblower,” since he had been kicked out of the White House for suspicion of leaking to the media and thus had no direct knowledge of the Ukraine phone call that was allegedly the “high crime” for which Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi decided that Trump needed to be impeached. The fact that someone as untrustworthy as Ciaramella continues to be employed at the CIA is the real scandal.

The reason that Jake Tapper and others want to pretend that Eric Ciaramella’s name is a secret — and, as I’ve noted, Facebook will ban you for saying the name of the “whistleblower” — is because knowledge of what actually happened contradicts the Democrats’ narrative.

Report: Anti-Trump Complainant
Eric Ciaramella Worked With Brennan,
Biden, and DNC Operative Chalupa
— American Greatness, Oct. 30, 2019

Open Society Emails Show Anti-Trump
CIA “Whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella
Was Updated on George Soros’s
Personal Ukraine Activities
— Gateway Pundit, Nov. 17, 2019

Whistleblower Was Overheard
in ’17 Discussing With Ally
How to Remove Trump
— Real Clear Politics, Jan. 22

Those are just three headlines that Jake Tapper and the rest of the “fake news” media don’t want Americans to know about, because they show that the origins of the Historic Impeachment™ drama are connected to the origins of the “Russian collusion” hoax which, as everyone now knows, was a phony “scandal” ginned up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign using the Steele dossier as a pretext for surveillance of the Trump campaign. So now Jake Tapper is trying to play tattletale on Matt Wolking, as if the Trump campaign’s deputy communications director doesn’t know what he’s doing? Oh, baby, was Jake ever wrong about that!

This is the “Streisand Effect” in action — by pretending that we have to treat Eric Ciaramella’s name like it’s top-secret classified information, Tapper and other Democrat operatives in the media have inadvertently made everyone curious to know the identity of the “whistleblower.”

Matt Wolking is a guy I’ve known about 10 years, and I’ve known his wife longer than that. She was working the registration desk at a Young America’s Foundation conference I covered in 2007, and she was so cute that I never forgot her name. Alisa was among the guests (along with Andrew Breitbart, Ace of Spades and Mary Katherine Ham) at the notorious CPAC party that Matt Vadum and I threw in 2008, where the hotel security showed up to shut us down just about the time Rep. Bob Barr arrived. Then, when I was covering the giant Tea Party rally in Washington in September 2009, Alisa spotted me in the crowd and talked me into getting her backstage where she chatted up an Indiana congressman named Mike Pence. Anyway, she and Matt have two kids now, and Matt’s working for the Trump campaign, getting paid to make a fool out of Jake Tapper. Life is good. Winning is good.

 

So here I am at the National Affairs Desk, where breakfast cost me $6.55, and Kirby just called from the VA Medical Center to say they’ll give him a lunch break at noon and he wants me to bring him a Quarter Pounder With Cheese ($4.59) for lunch, so I’ll once more remind our readers that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thanks in advance. We’re winning, but we still gotta eat.





 

Report: Impeachment Could End Friday

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The long, sad circus is coming to its inevitable conclusion:

A Democratic push to force Republicans to accept witnesses at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate appeared to be flagging on Wednesday, raising the possibility the president could be acquitted as early as Friday.
As senators spent the day posing questions to both the Trump legal team and the Democratic managers of the trial, the White House objected to the planned publication of a book by former national security adviser John Bolton in which he is said to have depicted Trump as playing a central role in pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden.
U.S. Senator John Barrasso, the No. 3 Republican in seniority, said it was possible the trial could end on Friday without Democrats achieving their goal of having witnesses called to testify.
“The momentum is clearly in the direction of moving to final judgment on Friday. That vote will be Friday. We still have a couple members who said they want to listen to the answers to questions, but that’s where the momentum is,” Barrasso said.
Asked when on Friday the vote might take place to settle the debate over witnesses and move to either acquit or convict Trump, Barrasso said probably Friday afternoon or late that day.
Other Republican senators were predicting a similar outcome in conversations with reporters during breaks in the trial on Wednesday.

Last week, Democrats endlessly repeated what we had already heard in House hearings last year. The president’s defense team took over this week, and utterly destroyed the Democrats’ case. If this were a court trial, the judge would order a directed verdict of acquittal. As it is, Republican senators have no incentive to defect, and it’s likely that some Democrats will join the vote for acquittal, whenever that may actually occur.

Meanwhile, the idea that having John Bolton as a witness would be valuable took a big hit Wednesday, when video surfaced of House impeachment manager Adam Schiff twice — on MSNBC in 2018 and on CNN in 2005 — casting aspersions on Bolton’s integrity and honesty:

 

 

Fox News has identified clips of Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., now the lead House impeachment manager, in which he says Bolton had a distinct “lack of credibility” and was prone to “conspiracy theories.” This week, Schiff said Bolton needed to testify in the impeachment trial as an important and believable witness.
“This is someone who’s likely to exaggerate the dangerous impulses of the president toward belligerence, his proclivity to act without thinking, and his love of conspiracy theories,” Schiff told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 22, 2018, when Trump named Bolton national security adviser.
“And I’ll, you know, just add one data point to what you were talking about earlier, John Bolton once suggested on Fox News that the Russian hack of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] was a false flag operation that had been conducted by the Obama administration,” he said. “So, you add that kind of thinking to [former U.S. attorney] Joe diGenova and you have another big dose of unreality in the White House.”
Schiff made similar arguments back in May 2005, saying in an interview with CNN’s “Crossfire” that Bolton was “more focused on the next job than doing well at the last job” when he was up for nomination as ambassador to the United Nations under then-President George W. Bush.
“And particularly given the history, where we’ve had the politicizing of intelligence over WMD [weapons of mass destruction], why we would pick someone who the very same issue has been raised repeatedly, and that is John Bolton’s politicization of the intelligence he got on Cuba and other issues, why we would want someone with that lack of credibility, I can’t understand,” Schiff had said.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)