Making of the President 2016

As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their families.

As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Theodore H. White wrote, “There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign.’’ If only White had witnessed Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.2

The short summary of the 2016 presidential election was that the nation had decided simply “No More Bushes” and “No More Clintons.” With Jeb’s defeat in the primaries and Hillary’s defeat in the general election, American voters had decided to put a nail in the coffin of both political dynasties. Donald Trump, the most unlikely candidate had ultimately triumphed.

Trump won as an outsider, opposed down to the bitter end by the mainstream media across the board, by Republican and Democratic pundits alike, and even by the GOP elite leadership in the nation’s capital. Remarkably, the celebrity star of the hit television show The Apprentice had won the Oval Office—defying all the professional politicians who dared ridicule and oppose him.

What appeared to political professionals a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s victory over incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980, as I’ve explained at length, also had overtones of President Harry S Truman’s 1948 surprise victory over GOP challenger Thomas E. Dewey.

A week before the election, Hillary had been so confident of victory that her campaign had scheduled a $7 million barge-launched fireworks display over the Hudson River on Election Night, planned so that her supporters gathered in the Javits Center for a victory celebration could see the pyrotechnics display. The New York Post reported that the aerial detonations would last two minutes, with the triumphal celebration permitted to start as early as 9:30 pm—only a half-hour after the polls were scheduled to close in New York, evidently anticipating an early win.3

The front page of the New York Post christened the planned fireworks event as “Premature Elation,” noting, “Hillary’s already booked fireworks on the Hudson, but it ain’t over yet.” Reporting on the fireworks event, the New York Post noted that the New York Fire Department memo ordering its Marine 1 company to provide protection for the fireworks show was sent out Friday, October 28, 2016.

Ironically, the Clinton campaign had arranged the fireworks celebration on the same day FBI director James Comey sent his second letter to Congress, notifying the Republican leaders of key House committees that the FBI was reopening its criminal investigation into Hillary’s private email system, after finding new evidence on the laptop Weiner shared with his wife.

With the double hit of New York Post front page being the talk of the town that day in New York City, plus the Clinton campaign being rocked by the FBI reopening the criminal investigation into Hillary’s emails, Clinton’s scheduling of fireworks at a victory celebration definitely seemed premature. Two days before the election, Hillary’s campaign quietly cancelled the fireworks display.4

At approximately 1:35 am ET, Trump was declared winner in Pennsylvania, a state Clinton had viewed as essential to her “firewall” strategy designed to keep Trump out of the White House. With Pennsylvania securely in his column, Trump had 264 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

One of the most pivotal decisions Trump would make was his selection of West Point graduate David Urban to run his Pennsylvania campaign. A former altar boy and the son of a union steel worker from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Urban distinguished himself in combat and in government. The hard-charging Urban helped Trump make inroads into union-heavy western Pennsylvania and is the only operative to switch a blue state to red.

Another wise choice for a state director was that of Ed McMullen in South Carolina. McMullen was a Trump supporter from the very beginning and offered the campaign invaluable service for over eighteen months, culminating in Trump’s victory in both North and South Carolina. McMullen also is an example of the how Trump is capable of picking truly excellent people within his organization, a trait he carries with him into the presidency.

By the time Florida was called, Trump had already won the battleground states of Ohio and North Carolina. Victory looked certain, with Trump ahead in the vote counting in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona—any one of which would have been sufficient to elect Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States5 In the end, Trump won Arizona, along with Michigan and Wisconsin—two states Hillary and her supporters had always been sure would vote for Clinton.

Across the nation, the millions who stayed awake as the night progressed, glued to their televisions as the returns flowed in, were beginning to realize that what had seemed impossible, was now rapidly becoming reality: Trump was going to win.

As the realization that Hillary had lost set in among the crowd at the Javits Center, Hillary supporters began leaving, drifting away disconsolate, alone or in small groups. Other reports were that Hillary “couldn’t stop crying.” Once she realized she’d lost, she became “inconsolably emotional,” went into a “psychotic, drunken rage,” and began beating on her top aides, including Robby Mook and John Podesta.6

That Hillary did not appear before her supporters that evening to thank them lent support to the tweets being posted by Clinton insiders and various people in the media that Hillary was out of control, and not presentable to the public in her rage at losing.

At 2:02 am ET, early Wednesday morning, November 9, John Podesta made an appearance at Clinton Headquarters in the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City at what was supposed to be a Hillary Clinton victory celebration. “It’s been a long night and it’s been a long campaign,” Podesta said, trying to be upbeat. “But I can say we can wait a little bit longer, can’t we?” The crowd cheered enthusiastically.

“They are still counting votes and every vote counts,” he insisted. “Some states are too close to call, so we’re not going to have anything else to say tonight,” Podesta explained. Translated, that meant Hillary Clinton had no intention of appearing in public that night to concede.

“So, listen to me. Everybody should head home and get some sleep. We’ll have more to say tomorrow,” Podesta said, very business-like. “I want every person in this hall, and across the country supporting Hillary, to know that your voices and your enthusiasm mean so much. We are so proud of you and we are so proud of her,” he continued.

“She’s not done yet. So thank you for being with her. She has always been with you. I have to say this tonight, ‘Goodnight,’ and we’ll be back, we’ll have more to say. “Let’s get those votes counted and let’s bring this home. Thank you so much for all you have done. You are in all of our hearts. Thank you.”7

Podesta left the podium, having created the impression that there was still a chance Hillary might win. What was clear was that Hillary—the likely loser—was not going to make a traditional Election Night concession speech because she was not yet willing to call it quits.

A leaked video from earlier in the evening on Election Day showed the Clinton family celebrating, after they had been told mistakenly Clinton had won. Chelsea rushes into her mother’s arms, as Hillary stops clapping and the two embrace. Standing next to them, looking elated, Bill Clinton jumps up and down, pumping his fists in the air, looking like a schoolchild who cannot contain his excitement.8

From several unconfirmed reports, the reversal of fortune as the votes were being counted was crushing on the Clintons. The American Spectator reported that after Hillary realized she lost, she’d gone into a rage. “Secret Service officers told at least one source that she began yelling, screaming obscenities, and pounding furniture,” R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. reported on the Spectacle Blog. ‘She picked up objects and threw them at attendants and staff. She was in an uncontrollable rage. Her aides could not allow her to come out in public.’”

Tyrell also commented that he wanted to report on Bill Clinton’s whereabouts, but that was not possible, because when Podesta came out to give his “aimless speech,” Bill was nowhere to be found.9

Breitbart.com, noted that Tyrrell’s reporting remained a thorn in the side of the Clintons since the American Spectator first reported in the 1990s the “Trooper-gate” stories detailing Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades as related by his Arkansas security detail, that first referenced Paula Jones, setting Clinton on the road to impeachment. “In the ’90s, we published several pieces that documented her throwing lamps and books,” Tyrrell told Breitbart. “This happened pretty often. She has such a foul mouth that the Arkansas state troopers learned a thing or two from her. She has a foul mouth and a good throwing arm.”10

The question whether or not Clinton had called Trump on Election Night was not fully answered until Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, appeared on NBC’s Today Show on Wednesday morning.

Conway explained first that President Obama had called Trump on Election Night. “It was a very warm conversation and we were very happy to receive the call from the president,” she said. “They had a great, thorough conversation about Mr. Trump’s victory,” Conway elaborated. “He was congratulated and they resolved to work together, which is exactly what this country needs to get this president and the president-elect as well as others in leadership positions to help unify and heal the country. We expect the two gentlemen will be meeting soon.”11

Only after discussing Obama’s call to Trump did Conway also reveal that Hillary Clinton called Trump, just as Trump was preparing to speak to his supporters. “I gave the phone to Mr. Trump,” Conway said, “and he and Secretary Clinton had a very warm and cordial conversation. Secretary Clinton commended Mr. Trump on his victory, and Mr. Trump commended her for being smart and tough, and for running a really hard-fought campaign.”

Why Clinton called Trump to concede on Election Night, while sending Podesta out to the crowd saying she was not yet done remains an unanswered contradiction of what behind the scenes appears to have deteriorated into an angry, confused, possibly alcohol-lubricated night of defeat and self-pity.

At approximately 2:50 a.m. ET, Donald Trump took the stage as president-elect to give his acceptance speech before a crowd of joyful supporters shouting, “USA, USA.” Trump began by acknowledging he had received a concession call from Hillary Clinton.

“Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division, have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people,” Trump began his 15-minute speech.12 While many of the insulated “experts” were still picking their jaws up off the floor, the theme song of the action movie “Air Force One” played—a subtle reminder that a regular guy had just been elected president of the United States. His words echoed his optimistic core message: his victory was a massive movement for the people, focused on making government function for the people so that the United States can be the greatest nation on earth.

Trump sounded satisfied, but his tone was conciliatory. “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be President for all of Americans, and this is so important to me,” he said. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”

“As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign but rather an incredible and great movement, made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their family,” Trump continued.

He pledged to be president “for all Americans.” He promised that the forgotten Americans would be “forgotten no longer.” Once again, speaking to a crowd full of people wearing the “Make America Great Again” caps conspicuously lacking Trump’s name, the president-elect announced that Clinton had called him and congratulated “us.”

“It is a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds, and beliefs, who want and expect our government to serve the people—and serve the people it will,” he stressed. “Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream. I’ve spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world.”13

When President Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, film critic Pauline Kael famously said in disbelief, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”14 Her statement has come to symbolize the insulation of the liberal elite, living in a bubble and hearing only the opinions of fellow liberals. It has become known as “Pauline Kael Syndrome” and its most virulent strain has been discovered in late 2016, complete with paranoid delusions of Russian hacking.

Liberals are so committed to their ideology that they confuse it with morality or religion. It often takes the place of moral objectivity in their lives. If you disagree with a liberal, it’s not merely a disagreement; you are morally wrong and mean to do harm to the world. Trump and his supporters represent not merely a different prescription for what ails the country, but a ghastly evil. This childish view produces no coping skills, so liberals largely became unhinged in the wake of Trump’s historic victory.

Our televisions, radios and browsers were flooded with the tears of intolerant leftists. Their whining on hearing Trump won, their offers of safe spaces and grief counseling, their comparisons to 9/11—all this moved them even further from capturing mainstream American votes. Imagine losing a loved one in the World Trade Center and then hearing a liberal in Manhattan compare 9/11 to the results of a free and fair election in which Donald Trump won.

The snowflakes were triggered. Rather than learn from their electoral loss, the Left would wallow in hatred, divisiveness and elitism. The party that ended slavery, stopped the war in Vietnam and won the Cold War had retaken the White House, thanks to a political outsider from Queens, New York. The fragile psyches of the left and their media minions could not abide.

Even worse, their inability to cope with reality also set off a series of fiendish and outlandish conspiracy theories to delegitimize Trump’s victory, as well as schemes to steal it. The absurd lengths they went to make Pauline Kael Syndrome seem charming.

On Wednesday, November 9, when Hillary Clinton appeared in public for Hillary to give a concession speech, Hillary wore a Ralph Lauren pantsuit in purple and Bill, at Hillary’s side throughout the concession speech, wore a matching purple tie.15 The consensus explanation among fashion journalists, in the absence of an explanation from the Clintons, was yet another reference to feminism, in that purple, along with white and green, make up the suffragette flag.16

From almost the first sentences of Hillary Clinton’s twelve-minute concession speech, she displayed the same political rancor against Trump, as she did during the campaign, but here buried as a subtext.

“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country,” Clinton said.17 “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for and I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.”

Hillary appeared to be implying that Trump, as the racist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, homophobic, and sexist hater that she portrayed him as during the election campaign, could not possibly represent all Americans. She continued, implying that Trump’s voters represented perhaps the worst of America.

“But I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together, this vast, diverse, creative, unruly, energized campaign,” she said. “You represent the best of America and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life.”

Next, Hillary affirmed she still believed in America, stating this again with an undertone that suggested her belief in America had been called into question by Trump winning the election.

“We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will,” she said. “And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”

She concluded by reiterating the themes of identity politics that had characterized her campaign from the first television commercial she had produced announcing her candidacy.

“We’ve spent a year and a half bringing together millions of people from every corner of our country to say with one voice that we believe that the American dream is big enough for everyone—for people of all races and religions, for men and women, for immigrants, for LGBT people, and people with disabilities,” she said, adding, “for everyone.”

She built to her conclusion with the most retweeted line of her speech, and of the election as a whole—as might have been anticipated, another reference to feminism: “And—and to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”18

Trump won the votes of white women overall, 53 percent to Hillary’s 43 percent, failing to win over white woman without a college degree—a subgroup that Trump won 62 percent to Hillary’s 34 percent. “Although Clinton didn’t outright lose women, their relatively anemic support for her in key states played a role in her Electoral College demise,” wrote Clare Malone at poll-analyst Nate Silver’s much followed website, FiveThirtyEight.com. “Preliminary exit polls Tuesday (Election Day, November 8, 2016) showed that her loss in Florida was driven, in part, by her poor performance among women in the state.”19 This had to be a crushing defeat for Hillary Clinton, especially after predicating much of her campaign rhetoric on her enthusiasm to break the glass ceiling to become the first female president.

I feel strongly that Donald Trump and the Republicans now have a unique opportunity to make major gains among African American voters. Although Trump only ran marginally better among African American voters than Romney or McCain, the small difference was significant in the overall outcome of the race.

The Trump campaign emulated Richard Nixon’s ability to craft messages able to sway African Americans. First, the Trump campaign focused its message on specific segments of black voters that would defect from the Democratic Party fold. Strategists working for Trump took care to master the issues that mattered to African American millennials, social conservative and pro-life African Americans, urbanized African Americans living in depressed communities (especially Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio), Haitian Americans living in Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania, and disgruntled black voters who supported Bernie Sanders during the Democratic Primary of 2016.

Working carefully with African American outreach advisors, Trump nuanced and tailored his campaign message to the bloc of black voters who hated Hillary Clinton and did not want her to win. Trump shunned taking a race-neutral approach, instead deciding to reach out to black voters the Clinton campaign presumed to own. Instead, of avoiding the prickly issues of race and poverty—as politically correct Democrats had done for decades—Trump aimed his frank and matter-of-fact message at poor, working class, and lower middle-class African Americans who knew the Democratic Party had done nothing to improve their economic status. Media pundits and seasoned political experts viewed Trump’s down-to-earth rhetoric about African Americans as political suicide, but many blacks were relieved and thankful that the Republican put their issues in the forefront of the campaign.

In addition to this, Trump’s call for a restriction on immigration greatly aided the growth of popularity among blacks. Nationwide, African Americans have been increasingly harmed by illegal immigration, and they detested the Democratic Party’s championing this issue while neglecting blacks. Thus, Trump’s ads and speeches that directly targeted the economic concerns of the middle-class—good jobs, safe and prosperous communities, a solid education, tougher immigration laws, and homeownership—all tenets of the proverbial and shared American Dream—were well received by millions of blacks. One of the most important elements of Trump’s appeal to blacks in 2016 was that he proactively dignified the human worth and value of blacks that Democrats have neglected in both cities and towns across America. Trump, moreso than any modern presidential candidate, aggressively dispelled the notions of those in the GOP who continue to associate racial stereotypes that equated blackness with dependence on government handouts, welfare, affirmative action, and welfare benefits at the taxpayers’ expense.

African Americans supported Trump because they, like white Americans in the rust belt, want change. In 2008 and 2012, African Americans voted in incredible numbers for Barack Obama because he promised change. He did not deliver. Trump is a man known for getting things done, and he has done more to speak to the forgotten African Americans and the fly-over whites who have suffered for decades as the elites have outsourced the industrial base and care little for those left behind. Many African American voters cast ballots for Trump because they were angry with the Democratic Party, and the do-nothing two terms of Barack Obama. A massive “stay home don’t vote movement” largely promoted over social media was a factor in why many blacks who voted in 2008 and 2012 for Obama chose to stay home from the polls in 2016. This, and the perception of those blacks who had voted in the primary election for Bernie Sanders that Clinton’s campaign had rigged the election so Sanders would lose, led to lower voter turnout among African Americans. In addition, many blacks who supported Sanders voted for Trump as a form of protest.

Another factor in the 2016 general election, was that many African Americans refused to vote for Clinton because of her role in starting the illegal war against Libya. In that war, US-funded Islamic terrorists/mercenaries ethnically cleansed black Libyans, known as Tawerghans. Rumors circulated amongst the black community that Hillary Clinton tried to have former Congressman Reverend Walter Fauntroy, who was an African American, assassinated in August 2011, and that she succeeded in having Muammar Gaddafi sodomized and executed in October 2011. Many media pundits that vilified Gaddafi in their support of Hillary Clinton had no idea that Gaddafi was considered a savior to scores of millions of blacks and Arabs. Gaddafi gave millions of dollars to African American causes and, in particular, prevented the closure of Shaw University, a historic black college in North Carolina.

The presidential campaign unearthed many atrocious things that the Clintons and their Clinton Foundation have done to blacks on a global basis. For example, the Clintons made a fortune selling illegal and unsafe blood of African Americans prisoners in Arkansas to unsuspecting African nations—surely causing sickness and disease to already impoverished people. Reputable newspapers published stories of the Clinton Foundation selling cheap watered-down HIV-AIDs medications to over 9 million African people—while reaping tremendous profits and hastening the suffering and death of those who they had swindled. Those familiar with the twenty-two-year war in Central Africa that has resulted in over 6 million deaths, millions of rapes, and millions internally displaced in Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and the Central African Republic, and these conflicts could have been prevented had Bill Clinton as president and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state sought to promote peace versus quick-profits for multinational corporations. Arguably, many African Americans and members of the Haitian American community, which numbers over a million persons, are outraged by the exploitative policies they employed through their economic raping and looting of Haiti for over twenty-five years, and misappropriating more than 96 percent of nearly $14 billion in relief funds earmarked for reconstruction of the earthquake-leveled island nation. Those that have done further investigation know that the Clintons have undermined democracy in Haiti by stealing elections, imposing illegal land-grabbing deals on the sovereign nation, and abusing State Department connections to secure pay-to-play arrangements or shake-down tactics to enrich the Clinton Foundation, which amounts to nothing more than a private family slush fund.

Many people in the black community felt a Trump candidacy fulfill the fundamental principles shared by Black Conservatism: the pursuit of educational and professional excellence as a means of advancement within the society; the promotion of safety and security in the community beyond the typical casting of a criminal as a “victim” of societal racism; self-reliant economic development through free enterprise rather than looking to the federal government for assistance; the need to empower the individual and community via self-improvement moral virtue, conscience, and the Christian faith; that life starts with conception and eugenics, abortion, and amoral living are existential threats to black survival; and, that black people have been enslaved by welfare dependency. Approximately, 15 to 30 percent of blacks are moderately conservative, or very conservative. A Pew Research Center survey showed that 19 percent of blacks identify as Religious Right. Trump’s pro-faith, pro-life, pro-guns, pro-family, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, and pro-America platform placed him in line with many white Evangelicals who since 1996 seenincreased fellowship with African American Christians. Furthermore, the African American church has traditionally been an important element of social and political movements in the black community. On issues concerning the LGBT agenda, black Protestants are more socially conservative than other groups, excepting white Evangelicals, and many black Christians have tired of Obama and the gay-pandering Democratic Party that has fixated on sexuality and ignored the more pressing issues of African Americans.

Many African Americans voted for Trump because he is against abortion, and black prolife activists like Dr. Alveda King, Reverend Clenard Childress, Lonnie Poindexter, Elaine Riddick, Dean Nelson, Reverend William Owen, and hundreds of others have slowly begun to turn the tide against Planned Parenthood of America. Hillary Clinton’s adamant endorsement of American Birth Control League founder Margaret Sanger as her hero and inspiration is comparable to telling a Jew that Hitler is your mentor. In spite of the mainstream media’s marginalization of pro-life activists, anti-abortion fighters have made Margaret Sanger one of the most hated women among African Americans—especially millennials. Planned Parenthood has had to recruit major black movie stars and pop music artists to counter the covert information war being waged against eugenics and abortion. In 2009, Life Dynamics released the landmark anti-abortion film “Maafa 21” and it has become an underground expose on Planned Parenthood’s eugenics agenda targeting blacks. Millions of people have seen the film and many blacks have converted to the pro-life perspective, which means that Trump, who has spoken out against Planned Parenthood, received votes from anti-abortion African Americans who are often religious people who view voting for Hillary Clinton as an act against God.

African Americans, initially, were excited about the election of Obama in 2008, and, in 2012, they held their noses and voted again for the incumbent—many grasping to the maniacal urban legend that the second term would be devoted to making things right. Obama’s prioritizing of illegal immigrants, radical championing the LGBT agenda, his cowardly reluctance to speak out against racial injustice, and his exclusion of subprime borrowers from his foreclosures relief package deeply embittered low and middle income African Americans.

Ironically, African American voters never had high expectations from a black president, believing that he himself would face near insurmountable structural and systemic racism. Nevertheless, they found themselves disgusted that Obama strove to disappoint and insult them by trampling under foot practically every issue that mattered to them, with what appeared to be a deliberate and cynical pragmatism. As the newness of Obama wore off, a quiet riot of black rage was kindled against the Democratic Party and its black functionaries and auxiliaries Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Donna Brazile, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Leadership Council for Civil Rights. Each time a black community rose in revolt from Ferguson to Milwaukee, or gross injustice like Flint’s unsafe drinking water, or another police officer acquitted for killing a black man, a popular sentiment grew that, in practice, the substance of Obama was no different from any of the previous white presidents.

Moreover, President Obama and Hillary Clinton failed to see that much of the African American community no longer viewed a black in the White House as symbolically significant, and the incumbent’s vain request for blacks to vote for his legacy as an insult. Obama campaigning to place a black in the White House had symbolic relevance to millions of African Americans, but his stumping for Hillary Clinton degraded the incumbent into just another politician. Obama and Clinton miscalculated the symbolic importance of the first black president giving his approval as a type of electoral apostolic succession. Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan succinctly mocked Obama as having no legacy with African Americans. In a nutshell, Hillary Clinton’s decision to have the Obamas campaign for her was counterproductive with black as well as white voters. Obama never had a political base among African American voters, nor had he any coattails to lend her. Furthermore, most African Americans remembered the deep rift between the Obamas and the Clintons,

Hillary Clinton’s banishing of Danney Williams was a 21st century example of how 19th century Hillary truly is. The alternative media’s release of the short film Banished: The Danney Williams Story unearthed the existence of Bill Clinton’s thirty-year-old out-of-wedlock black son that Hillary abandoned by forcing Bill Clinton to cut all ties with Danney and Danney’s mother. According to Danney’s aunt, Hillary Clinton had threatened to have the Williams family disappear. In subsequent years, while Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton enjoyed the comfort of the Arkansas governor’s office, Danny’s mother Bobbie Williams was jailed, men attempted to kill his aunt, and child welfare services took custody of the boy and his younger siblings. In foster care, Danny and his siblings suffered intense deprivation, struggling to be raised in a Little Rock under siege of drugs and gang violence. Danney had to live under the shadow of knowing his stepmother Hillary hated him and unsure whether or not his father—the president of the United States—cared.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Danney gave two press conferences and a video appeal to President Obama for help. The appeals to Bill Clinton might not have helped Danney touch his father’s heart, but his story moved millions. The unwanted mixed raced son, the aloof white father, and the hateful white wife is as much a part of the South as football and fried chicken. Few African Americans could not feel and share Danney’s sorrows, and in a political season the saga of the unwanted black boy banished by the same woman remembered for calling African American youth predators angered even stalwart Clinton supporters. Moreover, Danney Williams’ story confirmed in the minds of many African Americans what they thought all along—that Hillary Clinton was a nasty, racist, hateful and cruel “Plantation Missus” who viewed blacks as dirt beneath her feet. Danney was the double deluxe combo burger of lies and deceit that Hillary could neither swallow nor wash down with a large drink. Her visceral hatred and contempt for her black stepson was a camel straw to many black females and young people already leery of the former First Lady.

In 2016, the palpable disdain that young blacks felt for Hillary Clinton was aggravated by the State Department email scandal and the lack of her being prosecuted, the social media exposure of the corruption of the Clinton Foundation in Libya, the alternative media onslaught (Black Twitter et. al.), the theft of votes from the Bernie Sanders campaign—especially in New York, the beating of pro-Sanders demonstrators at the Philadelphia Democratic Convention, Clinton’s silence on all the police slayings of black men, and the viral Danney Williams stories morphed into a massive stay home and “ABC (anyone but Clinton)” movement. In as much as Hillary Clinton had been painted as the “queen of Black pain”, young African American people—especially males—chafed as they learned about the gross criminality of Hillary Clinton. Clinton who perjured herself before Congress and committed numerous crimes, and, unlike the hundreds of thousands of black men arrested and forced to plead guilty for crimes they had not committed, the former First Lady, senator, and secretary of state basked in her arrogance, white privilege and impunity. Given the millions of blacks harmed by Clinton’s laws, the email scandal enraged and estranged African American voters from the Democratic Party.

In 2012, African American voter participation exceeded that of white voters for the first time in US voting history. In 2012, the impact of black voters was so important that black voters accounted for Obama’s entire margin of victory in seven states, including Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Black participation had increased in all three presidential election cycles since 2000—a trend that Hillary Clinton reversed in 2016.20 In 2016, Black voters all over the United States staged a franchise rebellion against the Democrats. Hillary ran, Hillary lied, and Hillary lost. This, in no small part, was due to the millions of black voters who stayed home or voted for Trump November 8, 2016.

The expectation of the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media was inconsistent with the prior trend, over fifty years, of African Americans giving 11 to 16 percent of their vote to Republican and Independent candidates in presidential elections. Among recent presidents, only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Al Gore in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 have received 90 percent or more of the black vote. Hillary Clinton received 88 percent of the African American vote.

I set up an organization to conduct exit polls in pre-selected precincts so that we could later analyze whether there were significant differences between the vote totals reported by computer voting machines and our exit polls. We were immediately sued in federal court in six states by the democrats and the Clinton campaign, charging that we planned to intimidate voters and harass them on election day in an effort to suppress voter turnout.

I organized Stop the Steal, Inc. with the goal of posting non-partisan “Vote Protectors” at some 7,000 polling locations in key precincts throughout the nation. The volunteers were trained to take scientifically based exit polls to help determine whether or not the final totals reported from voting machines reflect the actual vote.

The goal was to conduct scientifically valid, methodologically sound exit polls outside certain targeted precinct polling places in eight swing states. We planned to then compare the reported voting machine total to the exit poll results in that targeted precinct. The US State Department under Hillary Clinton required not more than a 2 percent deviance between actual reported results and exit poll results in judging the integrity of foreign elections. All we asked is the same standard apply to the 2016 presidential election. We targeted precincts to include historically partisan areas as well as swing precincts. What we sought to obtain was valid and accurate exit polls in which voter participation is entirely voluntary.

Led by Marc Elias of Perkins Coie LLP in Washington, the general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Democratic Party in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Ohio filed lawsuits to block Stop the Steal, Inc. from putting volunteers at polling locations to take exit polls and public surveys to prevent voter fraud.

Just days prior to Election Day, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted an emergency motion by Stop the Steal, Inc. and stayed the restraining order issued Friday, November 4 by the District Court in Ohio that would have barred Stop the Steal Vote Protectors. The Court of Appeals wrote: “After reviewing the District Court’s order, the motion for an emergency stay of that order, and the Plaintiff’s submission in response to the Petition for Initial En Banc Hearing, we conclude that the Plaintiff [Hillary Clinton by way of the Ohio Democrat Party] did not demonstrate before the district court a likelihood of success on the merits, and that all of the requisite factors weigh in favor of granting the stay.” A federal judge in Phoenix refused to issue a similar injunction sought by Democrats that would have ordered Stop the Steal not to engage in their announced plans to conduct exit polls. US District Judge John Tuchi’s ruling said the Arizona Democratic Party failed to show evidence that the Republicans were conspiring to conduct illegal voter intimidation.

The democrats’ lead attorney David Boyce appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court and the court reaffirmed that neither Roger Stone nor Donald Trump (who was also sued) had any plans to, or ever would, engage in voter intimidation. Given that Boyce had been my nemesis in the 2000 Bush versus Gore Florida recount, the score is now Stone: 2; Boyce: 0.

Stop The Steal’s online instructions for volunteers conducting the exit poll under the name “Vote Protectors” told volunteers to limit their dialogue with voters to a simple, respectful script. If exiting voters agree to participate, Vote Protectors were instructed to ask a simple three-question poll. Vote Protectors were forbidden from wearing campaign hats, buttons or T- shirts or acting in any partisan manner. The instructions also made clear to Vote Protectors that “at no time should you reveal or discuss your own vote intentions as this would taint the polling sample.”

This was a beginning effort in what we plan over time to implement as a permanent truth campaign to be implemented in mid-term and presidential elections nationwide. There is excellent support for expanding the Stop the Steal program to be found in State Department publications instructing foreign nations on how to conduct elections free of voter fraud. A 2015 publication of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a division of the State Department, entitled “Assessing and Verifying Election Results,”21 noted Parallel Vote Tabulation, PVT, is the most scientifically reliable methodology to verify the voting tabulation process, whether the voting is done by paper ballot or electronically, by voting machine.

• is an independent tabulation of polling station results—using data from all stations or a representative sample of them—for the purpose of projecting election results and/or verifying their accuracy. To be credible, a PVT should be conducted by trained observers who observe and report on the entire process at the polling station on election day.

• PVT observers collect the reported results from the polling stations and use their data to independently tabulate the election results. Discrepancies between the PVT results and the official results may suggest manipulation or reveal mistakes in the tabulation process.

The USAID distinguishes that while exit polls share characteristics with PVT, with both utilizing a methodology that relies largely upon taking surveys. Exit polls are less rigorous, such that while exit polls might be suggestive of results, PVT surveys tend to be more reliable in their conclusions.

“Exit polls can deter fraud at the national level when publicized before an election,” the USAID publication notes with regard to detecting fraud. “Exit polls, however, are conducted outside polling stations, minimizing the deterrence effect on polling station officials.”

In the days immediately following the election, demonstrators in various cities across the United States took to the streets, protesting Trump’s win. Holding signs that said, “Not My President,” the #NeverTrump crowd on the far-left ignored Hillary Clinton’s repeated admonitions to Trump at the end of the election campaign that refusal to accept the election outcome was “destructive to democracy.”

On November 10, Trump tweeted, “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protestors, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”22 The next day, Trump made his message more conciliatory, tweeting: “Love the fact that the small group of protestors last night have passion for our great city. We will all come together and be proud!”23

On November 11, 2016, the Associated Press reported Portland, Oregon, was the epicenter of the anti-Trump riots spreading across the country, with some 4,000 protestors marching in Portland’s downtown area, smashing windows, and chanting, “We reject the president-elect.” As midnight approached, Portland Police pushed back against the crowd, as protestors threw objects at them. As the protests dwindled through the night, Portland police announced twenty-six demonstrators were arrested. In Denver, protesters managed to shut down Interstate 25 near downtown briefly, as demonstrators made their way onto the freeway. Traffic was halted in the northbound and southbound lanes for about a half-hour. Protesters also briefly shut down interstate highways in Minneapolis and Los Angeles. In San Francisco’s downtown, high-spirited high school students marched through, chanting “not my president” and holding signs urging a Donald Trump eviction. Protestors in San Francisco waved rainbow banners and Mexican flags, as bystanders high-fived the marchers from the sidelines. “As a white, queer person, we need unity with people of color, we need to stand up,” a fifteen-year-old sophomore in Los Angeles explained to the AP. “I’m fighting for my rights as an LGBTQ person. I’m fighting for the rights of brown people, black people, Muslim people.”24

The AP further reported that in New York City, a large group of demonstrators gathered outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue chanting angry slogans and waving banners bearing anti-Trump messages. “In Philadelphia, protesters near City Hall held signs bearing slogans like “Not Our President,” “Trans Against Trump” and “Make America Safe For All.” About five hundred people turned out at a protest in Louisville, Kentucky and in Baltimore, hundreds of people marched to the stadium where the Ravens were playing a football game. The AP noted hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside Trump Tower in Chicago and a growing group was getting into some shoving matches with police in Oakland, California. Mostly peaceful protests took place in Los Angles.25 By Friday, three days after the election, some 225 people had been arrested, in anti-Trump protests, with at least 185 in Los Angeles alone.26

NBC’s KGW in Portland, Oregon, reported that most of the 112 protestors arrested in Portland participating in anti-Trump demonstrations did not vote in Oregon, according to state election records, with seventy-nine of the demonstrators arrested either not registered to vote in the state, or not recorded as having turned in a ballot.27 An analysis conducted by the Oregonian newspaper in Portland estimated the percentage of those arrested in ant-Trump demonstrations who did not vote as “at least one-third,” commenting that most of the protestors were college students and out-of-state college students could have voted in their home state, explaining why they were not registered to vote in Oregon.28 Other reports provided proof George Soros had funded anti-Trump leftist groups responsible for organizing the demonstrations in various cities across the United States.29 This harkened back to proof James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas had provided during the campaign showing Democratic operatives had paid protestors to disrupt and even cause violence at various Trump rallies across the country.

On Saturday, November 12, 2016, four days after the election, Hillary Clinton, on a thirty-minute conference call with top donors that had raised at least $100,000 for Hillary’s presidential campaign, blamed the decision of FBI director James Comey to reopen the criminal investigation on her private email server as the reason she suffered the devastating loss in the presidential election. “While Clinton accepted some blame of her loss, said donors who listened to her call, she made little mention of the other factors driving Trump’s victory: A desire for change by voters, possible sexism, the difficulty of a political party winning a third White House term, her campaign’s all-but-dismissal of white working class voters and flaws within her own message,” Lisa Lerer wrote, reporting for the AP.30

Amy Chozick, reporting for the New York Times quoted Clinton’s comments during the conference call with top donors. “There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful. Our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum,” Chozick reported Clinton said (according to a donor on the call). Clinton’s campaign told the New York Times that Comey’s decision hurt in particular with white suburban women who had been on the fence and broke for Trump after Comey’s letter reopening the criminal case reminded them of the email controversy. Chozick also reported that Clinton said that before Comey’s second letter, “We were once again up in all but two of the battleground states, and we were up considerably in some that we ended up losing. And we were feeling like we had to put it back together.”31

Chozick noted that some donors on the call stated their belief that Clinton and her campaign suffered avoidable missteps that handed the election to an unacceptable opponent. “They pointed to the campaign’s lack of a compelling message for white working-class voters and to decisions years ago by Mrs. Clinton to use a private email address at the State Department and to accept millions of dollars for speeches to Wall Street,” Chozick wrote. Hillary’s campaign had been so confident in her victory that aides were popping open Champagne on the campaign airplane Thursday, heading to New York for the victory celebration. According to the New York Times article, Democratic pollsters attributed Mr. Trump’s razor-thin victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—states that President Obama had won—largely to a drifting of college-educated suburban women to the Republican nominee at the last minute, because of the renewed focus on Mrs. Clinton’s email server. “We lost with college-educated whites after leading with them all summer,” Chozick noted Brian Fallon, a Clinton spokesman, said on Wednesday, the day after the election. “Five more days of reminders about Comey, and they gravitated back to Trump.” Chozick quoted Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat and donor to Mrs. Clinton, as summing up Clinton’s loss as follows: “You can have the greatest field program, and we did—he had nothing. You can have better ads, paid for by greater funds, and we did. Unfortunately, Trump had the winning argument.”32

Then, on December 15, 2016, in a speech to donors at a Thursday night gathering in New York, Clinton blamed her defeat on a long-running strategy implemented by Russian President Vladimir Putin to discredit the fundamental tenants of American democracy. The Associated Press reported that Clinton cited “a personal beef” with Putin as the reason Russia meddled in the US presidential election to Clinton’s detriment. “Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyber-attacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me,” the AP reported Clinton said. “He is determined not only to score a point against me but also undermine our democracy.” Clinton argued that Russia had hacked both the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, releasing the emails captured in the hacking attacks to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks, as part of a plot to boost Trump. “This is part of a long-drawn strategy to cause us to doubt ourselves and to create the circumstances in which Americans either wittingly or unwittingly will begin to cede their freedoms to a much more powerful state,” she said. “This is an attack on our country.”33

Again, Amy Chozick reported on Clinton’s speech in Manhattan to donors. “Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” Chozick reported that Clinton said. “Make no mistake, as the press is finally catching up to the facts, which we desperately tried to present to them during the last months of the campaign.” Clinton told the group that the New York Times reported that the Russians had collectively poured some $1 billion into sabotaging her campaign. “This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.” Clinton called for Congress to set up a commission similar to the commission set up after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. “The public deserves to know exactly what happened, and why, in order for us to prevent future attacks on our systems, including our electoral system,” Clinton argued.34 Clinton did not specify what exactly Putin’s “personal beef” involved, nor did she offer any proof Assange and WikiLeaks had obtained the hacked emails from Russia.

On November 18, 2016, ten days after the election, in his first post-election interview, Podesta sat down with NBC News host Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press to answer questions about Clinton’s Russian hacking allegations. Podesta alleged the presidential election had been “distorted” by the Russian intervention. Asked if the election was a “free and fair” election, Podesta railed against Putin. “I think the Russians clearly intervened in the election. And I think that now we know that both the CIA, the director of National Intelligence, the FBI all agree that the Russians intervened to help Trump and that as they have noted this week, NBC first revealed that Vladimir Putin was personally involved with that,” Podesta insisted. “So I think that people went to the polls, they cast their votes, Hillary Clinton got 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, but you know Donald Trump is claiming the Electoral College victory. And you know tomorrow, the electors will get to vote.” Pressed by Todd to answer directly the question whether or not the election was “free and fair,” Podesta accused Russia of wanting Hillary Clinton to lose. “A foreign adversary directly intervened into our Democratic institutions and tried to tilt the election to Donald Trump. I think that if you look back and see what happened over the course of the last few weeks, you see the way the votes broke, you know,” Podesta replied. “I was highly critical of the way the FBI, particularly the FBI director, managed the situation with respect to the Russian engagement versus Hillary Clinton’s emails. I think that all had an effect on the election.” Adding this comment, Podesta expanded the criticism against Comey to include a failure to investigate the supposed Russian hacking.35

In an interview published on July 25, 2016, Julian Assange said in a Skype interview with Richard Engel that NBC Nightly News that there was “no proof whatsoever” that WikiLeaks got almost 20,000 hacked Democratic National Committee emails from Russian intelligence. Assange said DNC servers have been riddled with security holes for years and that many sets of documents from multiple sources are now in public hands.36 On December 16, 2016, Assange made another public appearance, in an interview conducted by Sean Hannity that was first broadcast on Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show and subsequently broadcast that night on Hannity’s Fox News television show. In this interview, Assange made clear Russia did not provide WikiLeaks with the Podesta emails or the DNC emails. Assange insisted the source of the email leaks “was not a state party,” denying that the Podesta and the DNC emails came from any government. ”We’re unhappy that we felt that we needed to even say that it wasn’t a state party. Normally, we say nothing at all,” Assange told Hannity. ”We have a conflict of interest. We have an excellent reputation, a strong interest in protecting our sources, and so we never say anything about them, never ruling anyone in or anyone out. Sometimes we do it, but we don’t like to do it. We have another interest here that is maximizing the impact of our publications. So in order to protect a distraction attack against our publications, we’ve had to come out and say ‘no, it’s not a state party. Stop trying to distract in that way and pay attention to the content of the publication.’” While Assange refused to comment on Hannity’s suggestion that the leak came from a disgruntled source within the DNC, possibly even within Podesta’s office, Assange did not deny this either, but he vociferously denied the source was Russia.37

In a discussion with Hannity on his television show after hearing the Assange radio interview, Eric Bolling, the cohost of the Fox News television round-table The Five, argued that Clinton did not make a public statement on Election Night because, according to reports, she got violent with her top campaign officials, Robby Mook and John Podesta. “Okay, so she blamed them first,” Bolling commented. “So then we had to go through this charade, this song and dance of recounts. That didn’t work out,” Bolling continued. “Then it became the Russians’ fault, that the Russians affected the election. It’s none of the above. They had a flawed candidate—the worst candidate, not necessarily the worst human being, but the worst candidate that ran for president in my lifetime. The Russians didn’t make her come up and say ‘Deplorables,’ and it wasn’t Donald Trump who made Obamacare premiums skyrocket—double in some cases the week of the election.”38

In the initial phases of advancing the story that the Russians were responsible for the WikiLeaks emails, Democrats pushing this story traced it back to intelligence supposedly developed by the CIA. In the eight years of the Obama presidency, evidence amounted that partisan operatives within the administration had successfully politicized both the IRS and the Justice Department. New York Republican Representative Peter King raised the possibility that the same had happened to the CIA under CIA Director John Brennan. King, a member of the House intelligence community has insisted CIA Director Brennan was orchestrating a “hit job” against president-elect Donald Trump by claiming that Russia was behind the hack of the Clinton campaign chairman John Pdesta’s emails. “And that’s what infuriates me about this is that we have John Brennan, supposedly John Brennan, leaking to the Washington Post, to a biased newspaper like the New York Times, findings and conclusions that he’s not telling the intelligence community,” King said in an appearance on ABC’s This Week, on Sunday, December 18, 2016. “It seems like to me there should be an investigation with what the Russians did, but also an investigation of John Brennan and the hit job he seems to be orchestrating against the president-elect,” King insisted.39

Brennan’s CIA career is speckled with controversy. He once voted for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall for president of the United States. He allegedly converted to Islam and even flat-out refused to put his hand on the Bible while taking the oath of office. He joined the CIA in 1980 and worked his way up to the top. But his support for Gus Hall, the US Communist Party’s presidential candidate, nearly derailed his effort to work for the spy agency in the first place. Brennan had to undergo a polygraph test in order to work for the CIA. Not surprisingly, he panicked when he was asked: “Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the U.S.” Obviously, he had done so. “I froze,” Brennan said recalling the incident. “That was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate.” So Brennan did what appears to come naturally for him. He lied by telling a half-truth. “I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, or signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.” Brennan told the polygraph examiner that he was not a member of the Communist Party, thereby evading having to admit he once was a Communist Party member. The polygraph examiner accepted that as sufficient. “He looked at me and said, ‘OK,’” Brennan explained. “When I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, ‘Well, I’m screwed.’” But, amazingly, Brennan was still brought into the CIA.40

Former FBI Islam expert John Guandolo has warned that by appointing Brennan to CIA director, Obama chose a man “naïve” to infiltrations, but also picked a candidate who is himself a Muslim. He claimed Brennan converted to Islam years earlier in Saudi Arabia as the CIA station chief in Riyadh. “Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia,” Guandolo told radio host Tom Trento. “That fact alone is not what is most disturbing,” Guandolo continued. “His conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him. The fact that foreign intelligence service operatives recruited Mr. Brennan when he was in a very sensitive and senior US government position in a foreign country means that he is either a traitor … [or] he has the inability to discern and understand how to walk in those kinds of environments, which makes him completely unfit to the be the director of Central Intelligence.” Brennan served as CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the 1990s.41

Brennan became Obama’s CIA director on March 7, 2013 in a ceremony that outraged many Americans when he was photographed taking his oath with his hand on a copy of the US Constitution and not a Bible. During a private ceremony in the Roosevelt Room, Vice President Joe Biden swore Brennan in with his right hand raised and left hand placed “on an original draft of the Constitution that had George Washington’s personal handwriting and annotations on it, dating from 1787,” according to White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest, as he told reporters at their daily briefing. “Director Brennan told the president that he made the request to the archives because he wanted to reaffirm his commitment to the rule of law as he took the oath of office as director of the CIA,” Earnest elaborated.42 Conservative blog EmptyWheel.net was quick to catch the significance of Brennan’s move. “That means, when Brennan vowed to protect and defend the Constitution, he was swearing on one that did not include the First, Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendments—or any of the other Amendments now included in our Constitution,” EmptyWheel.net noted. “The Bill of Rights did not become part of our Constitution until 1791, 4 years after the Constitution that Brennan took his oath on.”43

When he was serving as assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Brennan gave a speech on February 13, 2010, to New York University law school students He included a lengthy statement in Arabic that he did not translate for his English-speaking audience. Noting he was an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo in the 1970s, Brennan proceeded to use only the Arabic name, “Al Quds,” when referring to Jerusalem, commenting that during his 25-years in government he spent considerable time in the Middle East, as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. “In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina,” he said. “I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims of making that pilgrimage.”44

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who garnered just 1 percent of the national vote, raised approximately $7.3 million to force recounts of the presidential vote in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.45

Stein’s recount effort traced back to a New York Magazine article published in the end of December, 2016 in which “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” called on Clinton to demand a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, arguing that electronic-voting machines may have been manipulated or hacked. “The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots,” New York Magazine reported on November 22, 2016, fourteen days after the election. “Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review—especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee,” the magazine report continued.46

This argument was largely undermined three days later, on November 25, 2016, when Politico reported that one of the cyber security experts relied upon in the New York Magazine story, J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, admitted that he had no evidence the 2016 presidential election had been hacked by Russia or anyone else in any state.47 “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyber attack?” Halderman asked in an article he posted online on November 23, 2016.48 “Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.”

“Clinton would have to win those states back in order to change the outcome of the election,” wrote Shane Harris in the Daily Beast on November 23, 2016. “And while it’s tempting to blame hackers, and not the failure of the political professional class, for Trump’s upset, experts warn not to get your hopes up for a shocking turnaround. For hackers to have changed the votes in three states would have been even more surprising than Trump’s victory,” the Daily Beast story concluded.49 With experts virtually unanimous in agreeing Stein’s recount folly had virtually zero chance of changing the election outcome in any of the three states she chose to contest, the consensus judgment was that her real goal was to delegitimize a Trump victory she knew from the start she had little or no chance of reversing.50

Still, on November 28, 2016, Clinton’s campaign said it would participate in Stein’s recount effort, as explained by Clinton’s top campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, in a carefully worded letter.51 “Regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself,” Elias wrote.52

This prompted an angry response from Trump. “The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future,’” Trump said in a statement, which called the recount “ridiculous,” insisting the election “is over” and that the Green Party attempt to fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts is a scam. “This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount,” Trump insisted. “This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.”53

Stein’s recount effort failed miserably. In the Michigan recount, instead of swinging the election to Clinton, the recount found evidence of massive voter fraud in Wayne County, pointing to Democratic Party voter fraud in Detroit, where Michigan’s largest city in Michigan’s largest county had voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes that the number of people recorded having voted. Overall, state records showed 10.6 percent of the precincts in the state’s twenty-two counties could not be recounted because Michigan state law bars recounts for precincts submitting ballot boxes with broken seals. The Detroit news reported the problems were the worst in Detroit where officials could not recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent of the total, with two-thirds of these precincts having too many votes. The newspaper further noted Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly prevailed in Detroit and Wayne County, while Republican President-elect Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes, or by 47.5 percent to 47.3 percent.54

In Wisconsin, the Stein recount resulted in a net gain of 131 votes for Trump.55 On December 4, supporters of Stein’s recount withdrew a last-ditch lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court aimed at forcing a statewide ballot recount after the court demanded a $1 million bond be posted by the one hundred Pennsylvania residents who brought the lawsuit.56

Green Party candidate Jill Stein squandered whatever ecomentalist credibility she had by launching a Soros-funded recount effort. The sole result was a slight increase in Trump’s margin of victory. As recount expert John Haggerty said, the Wisconsin recount was a fraud upon the taxpayers of Wisconsin, though it did confirm that the Wisconsin election system is reliable. Stein’s Michigan recount efforts also yielded zero change in results except for a wider margin for Trump, but may have exposed some fraud. In Pennsylvania, there wasn’t even enough evidence for a recount to occur.57

Soros should ask for a refund, not a recount. Environmentalists should ask Stein how much coal or oil and how many trees were wasted in generating the electricity necessary to conduct those pointless, self-aggrandizing recount fiascos.

In October 2016, I wrote an article for The Hill newspaper.58 In it, I wrote that Donald Trump has said publicly that he fears the next election will be rigged. Based on technical capability and recent history, Trump’s concerns are not unfounded. A recent study by Stanford University proved that Hillary Clinton’s campaign rigged the system to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. What was done to Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin is stunning, but potentially not an isolated event. Why would the Clintons not cheat again if doing so had worked?

The issue here is both voter fraud, which is limited but does happen, and election theft through the manipulation of the computerized voting machines, particularly the DIEBOLD/PED voting machines in wide usage in most states.

Politico profiled a Princeton professor, Andrew Appel, who demonstrated how the electronic voting machines that are most widely used can be hacked in seven minutes or less!59 Robert Fitrakis, Professor of Political Science in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College, explained this further in his must-read book on the strip and flip technique used to rig these machines. Professor Fitrakis is a Green Party activist.

Similarly, a computer hacker showed CBS how to vote multiple times using a simple $15.00 electronic device. We are now living in an alternative reality of constructed data and phony polls. The computerized voting machines can be hacked and rigged and, after the experience of Bernie Sanders, there is no reason to believe they won’t be. Don’t be taken in.

To be very clear, both parties have engaged in this skullduggery and it is the party in power in each state that has custody of the machines and control of their programing. In the future, the results of machines in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio should be matched with exit polls.

In this election cycle, Illinois is a state where Trump had been running surprisingly strong, in what has become a Blue state. Does anyone trust Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Clinton hatchet man, not to monkey with the machines? I don’t. He was using city-funded community groups to recruit anti-Trump “protestors” who posed such a threat to public safety that Trump’s Chicago event had to be canceled when the Secret Service couldn’t guarantee his safety.

How could the pols of both parties do it? As easy as determining, on the basis of honest polling, who is going to win. Then, if it isn’t your candidate, simply have the votes for the other guy be given to your guy and vice versa. You keep the total vote the same. This is where the “strip and flip” technique described by Professor Fitrakis would come in. Maybe you don’t need all the votes the other guy was going to get. If you have a plan in mind involving votes and their redistribution, you can find a programmer who can design the machine instructions to produce the desired outcome. The $15 device noted above can be purchased at any Best Buy.

For all these reasons, Europe has rejected electronic voting machines. They are simply untrustworthy. This is not a secret. The media continues a drumbeat insisting voter fraud is non-existent without ever addressing the more ominous question of manipulation of the voting machines. Additionally some states still use machines that include no paper trail. The ”evidence” is destroyed. Florida’s machines had no paper trail in Bush versus Gore.

The United States must follow the lead of European nations who use exit polling to determine who won and lost. The tabulated votes only serve as a formal verification. But that is done with paper ballots and hand counts under supervision, the way we used to do it.

After I wrote about these ideas, all hell broke loose. David Brock and his followers attacked The Hill for giving me a forum. “Why is The Hill publishing crazy conspiracy theories by Trump associate Roger Stone?” screamed the New Republic.” This new op-ed piece by the longtime Republican trickster weaves a conspiracy that the entire election will be rigged to stop Donald Trump, from rigged voting machines to rigged opinion polls that are meant to fool the public.”

One month later, Jill Stein demanded the previously mentioned $3.5 million recount in Wisconsin and a spot recount as a preliminary step in Michigan. Their specific complaint was that computerized voting machines could be hacked and manipulated easily. You can’t have it both ways.

Nowhere is the wisdom of the Founding Fathers more evident than in the adoption of the Electoral College. The rural farmers and urban bankers who came together to form our government had a natural distrust of each other and knew that growing populations could silence the electoral voices of enormous areas of the country. Their solution, the Electoral College, has long been the thorn in the left’s side; when the left loses, that is. The idea that the votes of regular folks in what liberals call “the fly-over states” could prevent the electoral dominance of the “sophisticated” voters in California and New York (living, dead, undocumented, or otherwise) is abhorrent to the elite left. Once again, the left whines about the inherent unfairness of the system—when the left loses—and the need to change it so that the majority of the country has less of a voice—whenever the popular vote in California and New York would have elected an Al Gore in 2000 or Hillary Clinton in 2016. With the GOP holding the cards, no radical insanity like dumping the Electoral College can succeed.

Some outlandish talk of convincing electors to abandon their obligations surfaced between the election and the casting of 2016 electoral votes. Trump managed to win battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, despite the predictions of specious “pundits” who were so off target their errors are rapidly becoming legend. Like most liberal fantasies of 2016, the “faithless elector” dream went nowhere and Trump was confirmed.

In our country, the presidency isn’t decided by the national popular vote. To whine about a free and fair election in which the winner of the popular vote did not win the White House is like claiming that the basketball team who completed the most passes should win the game. We don’t score it that way and the players all know it.

Perhaps the most desperate last-ditch effort to block Trump from the White House was organized by a group of citizens calling themselves “Hamilton Electors.” The scheme involved unearthing obscure arguments from the Federalist Papers in a twisted attempt to argue the Electoral College was created to keep a scoundrel like Trump from becoming president. “We honor Alexander Hamilton’s vision that the Electoral College should, when necessary, act as a Constitutional failsafe against those lacking the qualifications for becoming President. In 2016, we’re dedicated to putting political parties aside and putting America first,” the Hamilton Electors website proclaimed. “Electors have already come forward calling upon other Electors from both red and blue states to unite behind a Responsible Republican candidate for the good of the nation.”60 The goal of this #NeverTrump effort was to convince enough of the 538 members of the Electoral College, scheduled to meet in their state capitals on December 19, 2016, to switch their votes from Trump to prevent Trump from getting the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected president.

As freelance journalist Lilly O’Donnell pointed out in The Atlantic in an article published on November 21, 2016, Michael Baca of Colorado and Bret Chiafalo of Washington state were the two Democratic electors who called themselves “Hamilton Electors.”61 The two Democratic state electors tried to lead a national movement aimed at throwing the 2016 election into the House of Representatives. Given that Republicans control the House, the most the Hamilton Electors could hope to accomplish would have been to delegitimize Trump’s victory—the same goal Jill Stein’s recount effort was reduced to accomplishing. Neither succeeded in their improbable and ill-conceived stratagems. Baca and Chiafalo conceded that Alexander Hamilton’s argument in authoring Federalist Papers Number 68 was correct in that the Electoral College is necessary because choosing a president by popular vote would allocate to the most populated states—like New York and California today—an undue advantage that would allow disregarding the choices of lesser populated states in selecting a president.62 But they emphasized the argument of Alexander Hamilton, a founding father and the first US Treasury Secretary, that “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” To be successful, the Hamilton Electors had to convince thirty-seven electors committed to vote for Trump to vote for someone else—a nearly impossible feat to accomplish.

As the Hamilton Electors’ plan gained publicity in the mainstream media, the electors in Colorado and Washington state began to promote the idea that renegade electors should vote for a moderate Republican candidate, such as Republican Governor John Kasich of Ohio, a former GOP presidential candidate who sat out the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, as an expression of his opposition to Trump. In their best-case scenario, the Hamilton Electors dreamed of uniting 135 Republican and 135 Democratic electors behind Kasich, thus securing the presidency for a moderate Republican. In their fallback strategy, the Hamilton Electors plotted to convince thirty-seven of the Republican electors in states that voted for Trump to switch their votes to Kasich, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Their thought was the GOP leadership in the House might be willing to twist arms of Republican House members to vote for Kasich instead of Trump, in a strategy designed to secure the presidency for the GOP, while at the same time dumping Trump.

The Trump camp seethed as the Clinton campaign chose to remain silent on the Hamilton Electors’ scheme. A petition on Change.org got more than 4.9 million signatures calling on “Conscientious Electors” to protect the Constitution from Donald Trump by supporting Hillary Clinton as the winner of the national popular vote. “Donald Trump has not been elected president,” the petition on Change.org to make Hillary Clinton president read. “The real election takes place December 19, when the 538 Electoral College Electors cast their ballots—for anyone they want. Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.” The petition campaign, not directly supported by the Hamilton Electors, stressed that in fourteen states that voted for Trump, the electors could switch their vote to Hillary Clinton if they choose to do so, without risking any legal penalty.63

What the move to defeat Trump in the Electoral College neglected to mention, Trump had a 3 million majority in the popular vote if New York and California were excluded from the total. Hillary’s 2.8 million popular vote majority was due largely to her victory in California, where her margin of victory was larger than President Obama’s in 2012—61.5 percent versus Obama’s 60 percent. Hillary won California by 4.3 million votes. Political analysts realize that California is rapidly becoming a one-party state. Between 2008 and 2016—the eight years of the Obama presidency—Democratic Party registrations climbed by 1.1 million in California, while Republican Party voting registrations dropped by almost 400,000. Moreover in the congressional races in California, there was no Republican even on the ballot to vote for. Senator Barbara Boxer ran for reelection opposed only by two Democrats and there were no Republicans on the ballot for House seats in nine of California’s sixteen congressional districts. Taking California out of the popular vote calculation, Trump won nationwide by 1.4 million votes. If California had voted like other states going Democratic for the president in 2016, where Clinton averaged 53.3 percent of the vote, Clinton and Trump would have ended up in a virtual tie in California. As California moves more solidly to the political far-left, the Golden State has increasingly less in common with the vast majority of Red States in the nation’s interior.64 But a quick look at the county map of the United States makes clear that California’s interior consists predominately of red counties, except for the narrow strip along the coast that includes the state’s major cities, from San Francisco in the north, to Los Angeles and San Diego in the south.

As December 19 approached—the day set for the electors to meet in their various state capitals—Republican members of the Electoral College faced intense pressure, including personal harassment and death threats, as pro-Hillary and anti-Trump forces combined in their desperate attempt to keep Trump out of the White House.65 While those supporting Hillary and opposing Trump liked to portray themselves as the unbiased, “Kumbaya” loving left, open to diversity of all imaginable mixes of ethnicity, race, and personal political inclination, their intolerance was displayed in their hatred towards Middle America and all things Trump. The bullying from the Trump haters was nearly overwhelming, with some electors receiving as many as 50,000 emails in the run-up to December 19, clogging their electronic devices with unwanted anti-Trump venom. A Harvard University group backed by constitutional law Professor Lawrence Lessig got into the act, offering free legal advice to electors deciding to change their votes.66

Despite all the media hoopla, the Electoral College “block Trump” scheme was as dismal a failure as Jill Stein’s ill-conceived recount maneuver. In the end, Trump received 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227—two fewer than he earned on November 8—with more electors going rouge and defecting from Clinton than defected from Trump.67 Ironically, four members of the Electoral College from Washington State casted their votes for a candidate other than Hillary Clinton, even though she won the state’s popular vote. Elector Bret Chiafalo, one of the two organizers behind Hamilton Electors, decided at the last minute to join two other Washington state electors to switch their vote from Kasich, voting instead for former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The last of the four defecting Washington electors voted for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American Indian tribal leader in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, instead of voting for Clinton, as they were pledged to do.68 In the end, eight Clinton electors defected from Clinton, with the four defecting in Washington state being joined by a Clinton elector in Hawaii who voted for Sanders. The three electors who tried to defect from Clinton—one in Colorado, one in Maine, and one in Minnesota—were either voted out of order or replaced by a Clinton-supporting elector.69 In the final analysis, only two Republican electors, both from Texas, cast protest votes—one for former Senator Ron Paul and the other for Kasich.70

President Trump needs to be mindful of which national Republican leaders supported his movement and which tried to attack him, lest he be sabotaged in his own White House. His promise was to “drain the swamp,” to disrupt the stranglehold of big government interests in Washington. He seems to have done just that with his cabinet, as of the time of this writing. “Drain the Swamp” never meant appointing only candidates with no ties to corporations or government. Rather, it’s about appointing people who will effectively eliminate government bloat, corruption, inefficiency, and cronyism so the government functions well for taxpayers.

Trump’s appointments have less to do with cronyism and more to do with patriotism than any recent president. Some of his choices, like Nikki Haley for ambassador to the United Nations, were vocal critics of Trump’s candidacy. That’s because Trump values people who can do their jobs and because he is serious about unity. Uniting the GOP has to be a Republican president-elect’s goal, hence the appointments of Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer. But consider the prominence of chief strategist Steve Bannon and how it enrages the left. That’s because they know how capable Bannon is.

Trump’s choice of former Texas Governor Rick Perry as Energy Secretary drew jabs from the still clueless left, because Perry stated back in 2011 that the Department of Energy would be a department he would consider closing. Then, famously, Perry in a critical debate moment could not remember that the Department of Energy was one of the government bureaus he planned to close. What could be better for “drain the swamp” enthusiasts than to know as a Department of Energy employee that your future boss sees so little value in what you do that he wants to close your department, but it is of such insignificance to him that he cannot even remember your name. Of course, Republicans understand why this makes Perry the perfect choice to lead the agency in an administration whose goal is to downsize government. This simple point is lost on the “fake news” sources like CNN and MSNBC.

Kellyanne Conway is a no-brainer as a top counselor to the president, as the true feminist and first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign. Don’t hold your breath reading about this remarkable achievement in the mainstream media, where women are told they must choose between family and careers but can’t have both. Monica Crowley is a fellow Nixon alumnus and a gifted communicator who will work tirelessly to help keep this country safe as Trump’s senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council.

Hillary Clinton ran a 1980s-style campaign based on identity politics and it never knew how to connect with most Americans. The Russians had no role in her horrible campaign. The Russians did not force Hillary to ignore swing states. The Russians did not force the DNC to rig the primary in favor of a candidate with absolutely no charisma. The Russians did not force John Podesta plus dozens of Democratic Party leftist operatives to write truths in their emails about Clinton that they could never permit the American people to read.

The Clinton campaign’s use of social media was a total failure, a wasteland compared to the massive presence Trump commanded. The Russians had nothing to do with that either. Hillary’s left, who jumped up and down swearing that the election could never be hacked weeks earlier when they thought they were going to win, decided only after they lost that the election had been hacked by the Russians.

I, myself, was the intended victim of an outlandish Russian hacking conspiracy fantasy. The White House and its press servants accused me of informing Trump that the Russians hacked the DNC. No such conversation ever took place. President Obama knew the content of Clinton’s emails all along, yet started a baseless accusation that I had colluded with Russian hackers. I had strictly an arms-length relationship with Julian Assange. Many of the items that would’ve been leaked were known to have existed for years. Chief among them were instances of Podesta’s corruption. He knew, as I did, that they would eventually surface.

The post-election attack on me by Podesta was simply recycled from before the election. Unable to hide the embarrassing content of his emails, which included allusions to nauseating Satanic rituals, Podesta desperately thrashed about, trying anything and everything he could do, including lying, to discredit the leak itself. Unable to find a connection between Trump, Assange and the Russians, he invented one, arguing not only that the Russians stole the election, but that the Russians stole the election with my help. Not a single shred of evidence was ever produced, but some leaders in the intelligence community said what they were told. CIA Director Brennan, for example, who owned the security company that broke into State Department files to sanitize Barack Obama’s passport records prior to the 2008 election,71 claimed he was sure that the Russians hacked our election. So, not only did the far-left Democrats pulling the strings in the Obama administration politicize the IRS and the Department of Justice, they even succeeded with John Brennan’s appointment to politicize the CIA. The mainstream media, the White House, Podesta, and the CIA failed in their outrageous accusation toward me just as they failed in the election. They treated us, the American people, like we are stupid, while Trump treated voters as equals.

Podesta desperately tried to use one of my own tweets as some sort of proof. I had pointed out that anyone, including the Russians, could have hacked Hillary’s insecure, homemade email server. That her homemade email server was vulnerable to foreign attack was a major point of attack on Clinton. The Left and the mainstream media Clintonistas laughed at it for many months before Podesta signaled to switch to the narrative that the Russians had hacked emails between Clinton and the DNC and that I was somehow involved. As I told the press before the election, I was happy to speak with the FBI but they never contacted me. The intelligence community under President Obama cannot even agree among themselves. Despite the press smokescreen smear of this author’s name, not a single shred of proof was ever offered by anyone.72

John Podesta’s claim that my tweets somehow proved both my advance knowledge of the WikiLeaks hacking of his email account and the subject matter of the ultimate disclosures, is an example of claiming 2+2=6.

My specific tweet, saying “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel,” needs to be seen in context. I posted this at a time when Podesta and his allies were savaging Paul Manafort with a series of leaks and false claims regarding his business activities in Ukraine. I knew from my own research that Podesta had been involved in money laundering for the Clinton Foundation and the Russian Mob. My tweet was a specific reference to an article I posted online on StoneColdTruth.com on October 13. It’s important to note that none of the information regarding Podesta’s activities in this article comes from WikiLeaks in their subsequent releases. The two are not connected.

I candidly admitted that Julian Assange and I shared a mutual friend who told me that Assange was in possession of “unspecific political dynamite” that would “adversely affect the Clinton campaign.” The claim that I knew the specific subject matter of the subsequent WikiLeaks disclosures or that I had special knowledge of the timing of these disclosures is false, although the media generally expected a major release by Assange on October 5. In fact, Assange had already said on the record that he had information that was potentially politically damaging for Hillary Clinton. Instead on the fifth he announced there would be disclosures for each of the following ten weeks.

The entire “Stone knew” theme that Podesta repeated on CNN before the election (once again with CNN affording me no opportunity to respond) and then, along with other Clintonistas, recycled after the election, was as false after the election as it was before.

In fact, the entire “Russians hacked the election” media frenzy led by CNN and the New York Times was, and will always be, an utterly false narrative. A close examination of the intelligence services heads’ testimony before Senator John McCain’s Armed Services Committee show that the CIA’s claim that Putin had personally directed an effort to hack and influence the American election was based on an “assessment” of the agency and that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee had been “briefed,” meaning that no one had yet seen actual evidence of the claimed Russian hacking.

Speaking about a special report by the intelligence services on January 7, 2017 the New York Post reported:

“No evidence was presented to back up that conclusion, [that the Russian’s had hacked the Democrats] with officials saying that information had to remain secret. This document’s conclusions are identical to the highly classified assessment, but this document does not include the full supporting information, or provide specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign.”

However, there is evidence that the DNC emails were, in fact, leaked by disgusted whistleblowers coming from within the Democrat Party itself, rather than from any external government. Former British Ambassador Craig Murray told a British newspaper that he flew to Washington, DC, to personally receive some of the leaks and they were not provided by Russians.73 Moreover, it defies reason that Putin, whose origin is the old USSR, would work against the candidate who gave him a sweetheart deal on our uranium—namely Hillary Clinton. All this in conjunction with Canadian penny-stock-jock Frank Giustra pouring millions into the coffers of the Clinton Foundation—in favor of the party that brought the USSR to its knees under President Ronald Reagan.

Hillary Clinton was the war candidate; Trump was the peace candidate. It is just that simple. When President Trump has cleaned house of the Obama and Clinton cronies infesting the CIA, he can certainly investigate these bizarre theories if he so chooses, but those who know him well are confident that his topmost priority will always be the safety and security of United States and its people.

As someone involved in politics for more than forty years I can attest to the fact that you ruffle some feathers and, dare I say, make some enemies along the way. So what? If the bed-wetters and pearl-clutchers aren’t upset with you, you aren’t making a difference. “Politics ain’t beanbag,” as the saying goes, and I’m no stranger to controversy or a fight.

I’ve been called just about every name in the book, and new books could be written using just the words that have been created to attack me. But there is one word that no one has ever attempted to attach to me before Hillary invented the “Russians did it” nonsense: traitor.

Think of me what you will, I love my country. I’ve spent my life defending it from those who seek to harm it, both foreign and domestic. So imagine my surprise when a third-rate bureaucrat, posing now as a fourth-rate partisan, former CIA director Mike Morell dared accuse me in testimony to Congress of “actually working on behalf of the Russians.” Morell rambled, without a shred of proof, spinning his own version of “Fake News” that Paul Manafort, who had consulted with Ukraine, and I “maybe have financial relationships with Russia, financial relationships … and they’re actually working on behalf of the Russians in getting this material out (WikiLeaks’ release of the DNC and Podesta emails) and spreading it around.”74 It’s astounding, jaw-droppingly astounding, that someone once trusted with managing a key US intelligence operation had no proof for an accusation of that magnitude—especially when WikiLeaks emails establish that Podesta had been paid by Russia via Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg with the money laundered through a Russian holding company in the Netherlands.75

Congressman Jerry Nadler started this witch hunt when he called on FBI Director James Comey (famous for limiting the criminal investigations of Clinton aide Sandy Berger for stealing documents out of the National Archives, smoothing over the controversy surrounding Bill Clinton’s pardon of Mark Rich, and being a director of HSBC bank during its infamous money-laundering scandal) to investigate me for my nonexistent ties to Russia. I am accused of treason. That’s what Nadler, CIA hack Michael Morell and the Clinton thugs have accused me of. Where’s the proof? But, I forgot, far-left Democrats defending Hillary Clinton don’t need proof when they can invent “Fake News,” while accusing those of us seeking to defend ourselves as “conspiracy theorists.”

It was particularly galling to see Congressman Jerry Nadler and Congressman Elijah Cummings hectoring the FBI Director as to whether he had responded to their demand to investigate my nonexistent ties to the Russians. This was the lowest form of McCarthyism, whereas Nadler and Cummings and the Congressional cohorts had no proof whatsoever of any involvement on my part with the Russians or any other foreign actor during the election. To be perfectly clear, I had and have no Russian clients, no Russian influences, and no Russian contacts. Although, I have been known to enjoy Russian vodka.

It was clear that Trump favored détente and hardheaded negotiations with the Russians while Hillary Clinton seemed to be hurdling towards war with them over Syria. Thus, once again, Trump was the “peace” candidate, an important appeal to Bernie Sanders voters who had overwhelmingly been against the Iraq war.

But Morell, happy to become a flying monkey in Hillary Clinton’s thug army, went out of his way to spread the lie to Congress that I knew in advance that WikiLeaks would hack the revealing emails of Hillary’s campaign chief John Podesta. This because of a tweet I posted in August at the time my boyhood friend and colleague Paul Manafort was under attack for his perfectly legal work in Ukraine for a democratic political party. I predicted that Podesta’s business dealings would be exposed. I didn’t hear it from WikiLeaks, although Julian Assange and I share a common friend. I reported the story on my website, documenting how Russian mafia money laundering flowed millions into the Clinton Foundation bank accounts, with Viktor Vekselberg—Podesta’s Russian benefactor—arranging, as previously mentioned, for two transfers of unknown amounts to a private Clinton Foundation bank account—the first on February 10, 2015, and the second on March 15, 2016.76

So let’s be crystal clear. I had no advance notice of WikiLeaks’ hacking of Podesta’s emails. I didn’t need it to know what Podesta had been up to. I do not work for any Russian interest. I have no Russian clients. I have never received a penny from any public or private Russian entity or individual and that includes Russian intelligence. None. Nada. Zilch.

This is the new McCarthyism. I don’t favor war with Russia, a war the Obama administration and Hillary’s 2016 campaign seemed determined to provoke. Like Trump, I favor a period of Nixon-like détente and hard-headed negotiations with the Russians that would allow us to work together to crush ISIS. This does not mean I am pro-Putin or approve of Russian totalitarianism. Being in politics a while, I do understand deflection. The Clintonistas hope they can distract public attention away from the stunning criminal activities exposed through WikiLeaks by attacking those who they say leaked them. In this case that IS NOT ME.

Now let’s take a look at Mr. Morell. He is essentially the man who ran the Benghazi cover-up.77 “Former CIA Director Morell received information from the CIA Station Chief in Benghazi that there was NEVER a protest the night of the terrorist attack,” according to the Gateway Pundit.78 “Morell later viewed video of the terrorist attack showing there was no protest. Morell later said the FBI changed the talking points to say there was a protest. He changed the talking points to benefit the Obama administration.”

What’s almost as bad is Morrell’s failure to disclose that he is on Hillary Clinton’s payroll. After Morell left the CIA, he became a senior counselor at Beacon Global Strategies, the consulting firm founded by longtime Clinton ally Philippe Reines. Then, there’s the opinion piece Morell published in the New York Times on August 5, 2016, in which he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The point is the FBI and CIA are supposed to work to protect Americans from all manner of threats and should be above partisanship. Yet, just like the IRS, the Obama administration has weaponized the FBI and the Department of Justice against conservatives. But it’s not just Podesta and the Clinton Foundation that have taken money from the Russians. Bill Clinton received $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow on behalf of a Russian investment bank tied to the Uranium One deal.79 That’s right, the Clinton crime family was paid a half million by a Russian bank that benefited from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s approval of a deal that gave Russia control over one-fifth of the United States’s uranium.

A former president of the United States should not be giving speeches to Russian interests for huge sums of money while his wife has a say in deals that benefit Russia to the possible detriment of US national security. But Morrell, apparently, doesn’t have a problem with that. His loyalty is for sale and the checks have cleared. Morell is firmly in the pocket of the far-left behind Bill and Hillary Clinton. That Michael Morrell has exposed himself as a partisan hack willing to sell his name to a corrupt political family isn’t a surprise. Nor is it surprising this hack would smear patriotic Americans to distract from the astonishing corruption of the Clinton campaign exposed by the WikiLeaks revelations. These are, after all, the Clintons.

From the beginning of the race the pollsters in both the Democratic Party and the mainstream media entirely misunderstood and underestimated who would vote. It was never realistic to think that Hillary’s voter turnout model would be exactly like Obama’s. There are numerous reasons why Hillary Clinton did not perform as well among African Americans as Obama did. Hillary’s support was soft and a majority saw her as “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.” Hillary would also bleed among progressive democrats and Bernie Sanders supporters whose views on trade and war were closer to Trump’s than they were to Hillary’s. The media blissfully went on using an outdated model, padding the numbers of Democrats in their samples either by design or stupidity.

Trump’s pugnacious pollster Tony Fabrizio saw a different model. From the beginning he assumed a lower black turnout, a surge of white Catholic democrats who voted for Obama but would move to Trump, and the exodus of older white women, 53 percent of whom ended up voting for Trump. Fabrizio pushed relentlessly to “expand the map” into Wisconsin and Michigan as well as doubling down on western Pennsylvania in order to provide a clear path for Trump to reach 270 electoral votes assuming, as Fabrizio did, that Trump would carry Ohio and Florida.

Fabrizio’s turnout model was deadly accurate. The polling of Fabrizio colleagues John McLaughlin and Kellyanne Conway confirmed the wily New Yorkers’ projections.

The answer to why the polls were so wrong is relatively simple. The truth is Hillary Clinton was an unattractive presidential candidate who did little to inspire Democratic voters to go to the polls, especially in comparison to Barack Obama—a charismatic candidate capable of translating the idea of “first black president” into votes. Identity politics worked for Obama because identity appeals were not Obama’s only campaign themes. In 2008, the mantra of “hope and change” resonated with voters tired of America’s seemingly endless wars in the Middle East. The economic downturn caused by the bursting of the subprime bubble just as George W. Bush’s second term was coming to a close gave added energy to Obama’s appeal. Running on her decades of public service experience proved a detriment for Hillary. She could not shake her history of scandals, with Whitewater compounded by the Benghazi disaster, her email scandal, and a Clinton Foundation “pay-to-play” money machine that functioned primarily as a Clinton family piggybank.

The polls relied upon by the mainstream media in 2016 were predicated on the assumption that Hillary would draw Democrats to vote in numbers and proportions similar to those experienced in 2008 and 2012. When that did not happen, the polls erred by oversampling Democrats. The result was that polls skewed to favor high Democratic turnout overplayed Hillary’s support while downplaying Trump’s genuine appeal. What pollsters had failed to estimate correctly in 2016 was the extent to which voters in the heartland of America had become disenchanted with the Obama White House. To say heartland voters were disenchanted in 2016 with the idea of Hillary Clinton succeeding Barack Obama to the White House is an understatement. Hillary Clinton was unique among all candidates in 2016 for her ability to create Hunter S. Thompson-like “fear and loathing.” White middle-class voters faced the prospect of having to listen to her pontificate for four years as president. While Barack Obama had failed to deliver on the promises he made in 2008, Hillary Clinton by comparison looked old, most likely sick, and generally angry at the world, while being largely devoid of any new ideas. The point is that the Hillary Clinton who lost to Barack Obama in 2008, was the same failed candidate who lost to Donald Trump in 2016.

“Barack Obama’s two victories created the impression of a strong wind at the back of the Democratic Party. Its constituencies—the young, the nonwhite, and the college educated—were not only growing but were also voting in increasing numbers. The age-old issue of voter turnout finally seemed to be helping the political left,” wrote David Leonhardt in the New York Times on November 17, 2016. “The longer view is starting to look quite different, however. None of the other three most recent Democratic presidential nominees—Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore—inspired great turnout. George W. Bush, as you may recall, was widely considered to have won the political ground game. In off-year elections, Democratic turnout is even spottier, which helps explain the Republican dominance of Congress, governor’s mansions and state legislatures.” The point was clear: In the simplest terms, Republican turnout seems to have surged this year, while Democratic turnout stagnated.80

The post-mortem voter analyses were clear. The New York Times pointed out that in counties where Trump won at least 70 percent of the vote, the number of votes cast rose 2.9 percent versus 2012. By comparison, in counties where Clinton won at least 70 percent, the vote count was 1.7 percent lower this cycle. In addition to increasing his share among white women without college degrees, Trump got 29 percent of the Hispanic vote compared to Romney’s 27 percent in 2012, plus 8 percent of the black vote compared to Romney’s 6 percent.81 Trump could concede the elite in the coastal strip from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego, plus New York City and the boroughs to Clinton, as long as Trump won big among working-class voters in the rest of the nation. This was the same lesson Richard Nixon taught the Democrats in 1968. But the Nixon-hatred that dominated the Democratic Party in 1968, morphed into the Bush-hating of the 2000s, to end up at the Trump-hating of today—all to the detriment of the Democrats themselves. The truth is the elite, far-left socialists who currently control the Democratic Party have little in common with the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. If the far-left elitists controlling the Democratic Party have their way, the Democratic Party will likely become a European-style Social-Democratic Party with decreasing chances of electoral success on a national basis.

As is traditional, the leadership of both presidential campaigns met for a one day post-election analysis conference at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School for Government. Representing Clinton were Robby Mook, Mandy Grunwald, Teddy Goff, Karen Finney, Jennifer Palmieri, and Joel Benenson. Representing Trump were Kellyanne Conway, David Bossie, Tony Fabrizio, Brad Parscale, and Corey Lewandowski. The Clinton and Trump staffers tore into each other over how they conducted themselves throughout the election. Conway, however, handled herself with aplomb while the Clintonistas essentially whined. In the conference, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook did acknowledge that Clinton’s operation had made a number of mistakes and miscalculations, while being buffeted by what he described as a “head wind” of being an establishment candidate in yet another election year where voters wanted change. While Clinton needed upwards of 60 percent of young voters to win, millennials who had supported Sanders abandoned Clinton in droves. “There was a large part of the Democratic primary electorate who had concerns about the secretary’s veracity and forthrightness,” Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager explained to the Kennedy School audience.82 Among the white working class, Hillary Clinton lost fourteen points of support compared with 2012. But it wasn’t just white working class voters that the Democrats lost in 2016. Even among black and Latino working class voters, she lost eight points of support. Altogether, this cost Clinton approximately 6 percent of the total vote.83 That 6 percent translated into a Donald Trump landslide outside of California and New York.

Even David Plouffe, who did not attend the conference and who was a key architect of Barack Obama’s demographic strategy that drove his impressive numbers-driven Get Out the Vote (GOTV) ground-game strategy in 2009 and 2012, had to admit he got it all wrong when it came to strategizing for a Hillary Clinton win in 2016. In a New York Times mea culpa, Plouffe said that “presidential campaigns are driven in large part by personality, not party.” He noted that Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump were all able to create electoral coalitions unique to each of them. Abandoning the “one model fits all candidates” approach to conducting demographic analysis for Democratic Party candidates, Plouffe acknowledged his assumption that Clinton would be a repeat of Obama was wrong.84 In the final analysis, Hillary Clinton lost a second time in 2016 precisely because she was Hillary Clinton—a two-time loser presidential candidate with low approval ratings on character and trustworthiness, who was unable to shake a personal political history littered with scandals piled upon scandals and lies followed up with lies.

Although they will try, what Hillary Clinton and her team of lawyers will never be able to cover up is the damage she did to the Democratic Party brand in a campaign pock-marked by rigging the election against Bernie Sanders, her elitist sense of entitlement, and the release of thousands of emails that showed the disdain she and the far-left elite currently running the Democratic Party have for the American working-class voter in “fly-over” Middle America—Nixon’s Silent Majority—the precise group Democrats still need to win elections.

The Harvard discussions were chaotic, at least in part because the Trump team’s fractured leadership was overrepresented in many of the panels.

Corey Lewandowski, for example, was included in both the primary-election panel and, inexplicably, the general-election panel. He seemed to play a bigger role at the conference than he had on the campaign trail. Incredibly, Lewandowski would tell the Harvard conference that he had written Trump’s announcement speech, which was ludicrous given that Trump spoke without notes and there was no prepared text to memorize.

The Clinton team expectedly responded to questions with emotion and venom. Jennifer Palmieri actually broke down during part of the public session. Throughout the conference, there were a variety of panels on the election media coverage, the primary campaign, whether or not Trump has a mandate to lead, possible Russian hacking, and many other topics were discussed.

This is the problem with the media: You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes—when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar—you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.

As silly as Lewandowski’s media critique is, he is totally right when he says that some Trump supporters did not take the billionaire literally. The Post’s Jenna Johnson interviewed a bunch of such supporters in June, around the time when a Fox News poll showed only two-thirds of Trump backers believed he would actually build a wall on the border with Mexico. The rest just liked his attitude—and didn’t care when journalists pointed out the challenges Trump would have to overcome to make the wall a reality.

The strangest criticism of the media, however, was by Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. His complaint: journalists accurately reported what Trump said.

LEWANDOWSKI: I had the privilege of being in that San Diego event when Mr. Trump called out Judge Curiel and we had talked about it on the way to the venue, and you know I made the strategic recommendation as did others not to do that.

DAN BALZ: You give him advice. When you say don’t do that, does he just simply clam up? Does he say, ‘Corey, I know what I’m doing now.’ Was anyone telling him to do this with Judge Curiel?

LEWANDOWSKI: Donald Trump is a person who takes input from a lot of people and listens to every side of an argument before he makes his decision.

BALZ: But, was there anybody telling him to do this with Judge Curiel?

LEWANDOWSKI: Uhh, no. (Laughter) Look, again you have a person who has achieved remarkable business success relying on their own gut … And his instincts of what the American electorate has wanted and what it has been looking for have been so spot on. And he has been so successful in the business world that candidly—look it’s very difficult I think for any one person to give him advice on something where he has his mind set and change that opinion. And this narrative gets developed on the Judge Curiel thing. It is always the team that comes in after this has been done that tries to talk him into understanding either the severity of it or that it’s time to change a narrative. And what we know about Donald Trump is he has the ability to change a narrative with 140 characters.

This was similar to the session on the primary campaign, when Lewandowski also bailed on Trump, when asked about the McCain incident.

QUESTIONER: Speaking of early outrages, one of the seminal moments early on in the campaign was Donald Trump’s remark about John McCain. I guess I’ll go back to you, Corey. Was that another one of these instances where it was not realized in the moment, and the firestorm came after and where do you think that came from?

LEWANDOWSKI: No that was realized immediately—that one I knew. (Laughter.) I’ve said this you know and I’ll say it again. I was in Iowa when Mr. Trump made those remarks. As soon as he was done speaking at that particular event, I said to him ‘Hey Mr. Trump can I speak to you for a second in the green room.’ And he said, ‘That was great, wasn’t it?’ And I said, ‘I’d like to talk to you for a second.’ I closed the door and I said, ‘You know, sir, I think we have a problem.’ And, you know, because I’m a campaign guy, my advice was, ‘Look, probably we need to go apologize to John McCain for making a remark,’ and Donald Trump said, no, we’re going to do a press conference—and if you remember, it was a 28-minute long press conference in the basement of a building in Iowa, where he fielded a series of questions and pushed back on the notion that he was going to apologize to John McCain, by saying he believed that the veterans haven’t been served to the fullest capacity, and that the veterans’ scandal in Arizona is something that should have been fixed and solved. Lewandowski recalled that many people had phoned, particularly that day—“and we flew back to New Jersey and had a series of phone calls, and wondered what to do.” Finally, Donald Trump did what he always does. “He doubled down. The media outcry was fierce … I actually called my wife and said ‘Look I think the campaign is over, I’m coming home.’” Donald’s instincts are so different, and he is so willing to fight and run with what he feels in his gut. “We didn’t poll-test things, we didn’t go out and focus-group things like other campaigns did. We just did it.” Because we were such a small team and because Donald Trump was so insistent on just doing what he feels, we relied on his ability to read the American people and fight through that like we did so many other things to ultimately be successful.”

A key exchange that came between Palmieri, pollster Joel Benenson, and Kellyanne Conway is worth noting:

JOEL BENENSON, CLINTON CHIEF STRATEGIST: Don’t act as if you have some popular mandate for your message. The fact of the matter is that more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.

CONWAY: And there was nothing that said the road [to the White House is measured by] popular vote anywhere.

BENENSON: Kellyanne, I’m not—

CONWAY: It’s the road to 270. That’s where we all competed.

BENENSON: I premised my statement by saying that.

CONWAY: Hey, guys, we won. You don’t have to respond.

PALMIERI: OK, there you go.

CONWAY: I mean, seriously?

BENENSON: No.

CONWAY: Hold on. Why is there no mandate? You’ve lost 60 congressional seats since President Obama got there. You lost more than a dozen senators, a dozen governors. 1,000 state legislature. You just reelected a guy who represents liberal New York and a woman who represents San Francisco as your leader. You’ve learned nothing from this election.

ROBBY MOOK, FORMER CLINTON CAMPAIGN MANAGER: I think there’s a lot of things we need to examine coming out of this. And you just named a lot of them. Congress has got to investigate what happened with Russia. We cannot have foreign aggressors I would argue intervening in our elections. And we know that the Russians were promulgating fake news to Facebook and other outlets.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, DONALD TRUMP’S ADVISER: I think the biggest piece of fake news in this election was that Donald Trump couldn’t win.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, TRUMP SENIOR ADVISER: You think this woman who has nothing in common with anybody …

(CROSSTALK)

JENNIFER PALMIERI, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: I’m not saying why, but you won, that’s the kind of campaign that was run.

CONWAY: He flipped over 200 counties that President Obama won … you think that’s because of what you just said or because people aren’t ready for a woman president, really? How about it’s Hillary Clinton? She doesn’t connect with people? How about they have nothing in common with her?

Some felt the real fight came before the main Harvard roundtables, with what became an interrogation of CNN chief Jeff Zucker.

The issue—his favoring of Trump with massive coverage, and his hiring of ousted Trump manager Lewandowski as a CNN contributor. The various campaign managers for the losing Republican primary candidates came at Zucker like a gang of chum-hungry sharks. These campaign managers shouted Zucker down with increasing anger as he defended how much airtime the network gave Trump during the primary season. They contended that it was both out of whack and out of balance. Zucker’s self-defense essentially amounted to asserting that when CNN reached out to the various candidates, Trump was most often the only one who answered the call.

Several of the campaign managers assembled told Zucker that they’d not received these alleged calls. Others joked about how CNN was willing to give their candidates only a brief amount of time or air segments at off-hours. As anyone who actually witnessed the primary campaign can attest, none of the other candidates’ events got the lavish, fulsome coverage that Trump’s got. And that includes coverage of Trump events during times when Trump wasn’t even in range of the camera lens. As one audience member shouted, “You showed empty podiums!” (Which was technically accurate, as there were podiums at these events.)

Zucker was unable to explain sufficiently to the assembled campaign managers how it came to pass that CNN offered so many hours of coverage to Trump’s many empty stages and unoccupied lecterns. With the limited exception of Corey, the Trump strategists peppered throughout the room didn’t stand up to defend Zucker. Even Corey, however, snuck out of the room for a while.

In the afternoon Lewandowski, the erstwhile CNN contributor, was in more of a fighting mood, getting confrontational once the conversation turned to Zucker’s decision to hire Lewandowski in the first place: Lewandowski seized the microphone from the questioner who broached the topic in a bid to defend himself, allowing the student to finish asking it, but insisting he was adding value to the CNN airwaves. Zucker said Lewandowski was a “good investment and decision,” as Lewandowski clapped and the rest of the room remained silent.

Politico reported that Lewandowski eventually turned his attention to the New York Times over their Trump coverage. We had one of the top people at the New York Times say, “I’m willing to go to jail to get a copy of Donald Trump’s taxes so I can publish them.” Dean Baquet came here and offered to go to jail—you’re telling me, he’s willing to commit a felony on a private citizen to post Trump’s taxes, and there isn’t enough scrutiny on the Trump campaign and his business dealings and his taxes? It’s egregious. He should be in jail.”

Lewandowski said this in reference to the Times report on fragments of Trump’s tax returns from 1995. Not only did the documents suggest that Trump lost nearly $1 billion in a single year, but the Times also noted that Trump might have used it to avoid paying income taxes for almost two decades. The deduction, in fact, was perfectly legal and allowable under IRS rules.

Donald Trump has the opportunity to be a truly great president. He comes to office beholden to no one but the American people. His campaign was eschewed by financial and political elites and he triumphed despite being vastly outspent in both the primaries and the general election. This freedom gives him wide latitude for reform.

While campaigning for the Republican nomination, Trump unveiled the most dynamic and pro-growth tax reform plan in US history. It would drop corporate tax rates below those of Mexico and China, bring at least $2 trillion into the country through fair taxation in inversion and enact an across the board tax cut like those of presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. One only wishes CNBC analyst and apostle for economic growth Larry Kudlow and supply-side economist Steve Moore, the architects of this plan, were on the inside working with the president on this rather than someone from the Goldman Sachs team. It is the way forward for the Donald and America.

The danger for President Trump is if he fails to recognize the machinations of the establishment-types who didn’t support his candidacy but now kiss his ass while they seek appointments and other favors. They are not committed to a reform agenda and will do their best to derail his. President Trump must not be seduced by the very people whose policies have run the country into a ditch, remembering that his election was a rejection of these very same people.

The thing to remember about Donald Trump is that he is very, very tough. Beneath a generally genial nature lies a fierce competitor who leaves little on the table. He is indeed a master negotiator and a pragmatist. Although his election is compared to Ronald Reagan’s sweeping 1980 victory, Trump is more like Nixon than Reagan—a pragmatist who speaks for the Silent Majority.

Like Nixon, Trump is no ideologue. He is essentially a populist with conservative instincts. On the biggest issues facing the country in 2017—the economy, terrorism, and immigration—Trump takes the populist/right position. At the same time, on the issues of trade and war, Trump’s views are closer to Bernie Sanders than they are to Hillary Clinton or say, George W. Bush. Indeed, Trump had to win three out of ten Sanders voters in order to win—a goal he achieved.

Trump must revitalize the economy, secure our borders, revamp our immigration laws, rebuild our infrastructure, and renegotiate our trade deals. This is a tall order but Trump is capable of doing it all if he is not seduced by the courtiers and Washington insiders who belittled his candidacy and financed his opponents.

Donald, as he told me to call him in 1979 when we first met, is surrounded with some enormously capable people. Eldest daughter Ivanka Trump is a wonder woman, balancing a marriage, motherhood, her own businesses, and her father’s business, all the while remaining physically fit and remarkably well-dressed. Poised and approachable, she is her father’s best ambassador. Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner is highly intelligent, appropriately discreet, effective, and trusted by his father-in-law. Donald Jr. and his brother Eric were incredible surrogates for their father, working talk radio like demons in the swing states, as well as appearing at rallies and events to galvanize their father’s supporters.

With the leading candidate for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee being a radical Islamic who blames the Jews for the Holocaust, the choice of a wealthy white woman named Ronna Romney, Mitt Romney’s niece, as the national chairwoman of the Republican National Committee is puzzling. It appears that Reince Priebus was allowed to call this shot. I suspect the president will paper her over with a “General Chairman” with greater outreach appeal to working-class Democrats.

The antics of the Democrats in harping on the popular vote victory of Hillary Clinton, demanding and getting a $3.5 million recount in Wisconsin, which actually resulted in a net gain of 131 votes for Donald Trump, failing in a random recount in a cross section of Michigan counties and a last-ditch effort to persuade electors to reconsider voting for Trump, which in the end garnered exactly one vote, demonstrate the resolve of the globalists not to release the reigns of power that they have held through the Presidencies of Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama. The “Russian’s hacked the election” meme grows tiresome and is still unproven, but it’s not going away.

President Trump needs to remember who his supporters are, and remember that they are the “forgotten Americans” who are choking on high taxes, leery of Wall Street, allergic to Goldman Sachs, tired of the lack of job opportunities, and convinced that the entire system is rigged against them (which it is).

Even if Trump had not won the general election, the nation would still owe him a debt of gratitude for keeping Jeb Bush out of the White House. That he would take on the vaunted Clinton machine with a guerilla-oriented campaign, built largely around his communication skills, and win, is nothing short of a miracle. The media tried to count him out of the race at least three times but, in truth, his polling numbers had remarkable resilience and consistency where short term gaffes cost him little and his support remained steady. Trump voters were far more intense and passionate about their support for their candidate, an enthusiasm gap that Hillary was never able to bridge. As I look back at it now, Hillary’s awkward attempt to dance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show probably doomed her candidacy.

How sweet is the irony that Hillary’s special gal-pal Huma Abedin, who jealously guarded access to Hillary, and was measuring the drapes for her White House office, would bring her candidate down on 650,000 emails the New York City Police Department found on her husband’s laptop. The announcement of FBI Director Comey that there was nothing improper in these emails was false, with the NYPD pressured not to contradict the Bureau, lest the Department of Justice indict several officers in the Eric Garner affair. Indeed, NYPD officials who have read these email files confirm that they show proof of corruption, treason, self-dealing, and sexual exploitation of minors. While President Trump has announced he does not favor the prosecution of the Clintons over Clinton Foundation corruption, Trump has said nothing of the new crimes that these 650,000 emails could reveal. The NYPD retained a copy of the files before forwarding the originals to the FBI. Congress directed the Department of Justice to preserve all files for future examination. In other words, the Clintons and their daughter, having lined their pockets through a level of greed and avariciousness never before seen in any post-presidency, may yet be brought down. Paying for Chelsea’s $5 million wedding with Clinton Foundation funds? Really?

Looking to the future, will Hillary Clinton’s most radical supporters on the far-left ever really support “The Donald,” or will they descend into the frenzied, intolerant rage that typifies the worst of their “feminist superiority complex?” Will the Democratic Party devolve into a self-righteous, name-calling fringe party dominated by the educated white elite on both coasts? More importantly, will minorities living in America’s aging metropolitan areas wake up to the reality that the media elite in Hollywood and New York City care little about their true econmoic plight, as along as continued welfare dependency and a sense of victimized entitlement keep them voting Democratic?

Donald Trump spared America from the return of Bill Clinton to power. Clinton chuckled to a longtime New York Democratic consultant that, if Hillary retook the White House, “he would be running things again.” Unlike Trump whose issue agenda was very specific, Hillary essentially ran without ideas or proposals, merely vowing to do Obama one better in every regard. Their time had passed.

“Conspiracy theorist” is what they call you when you refuse to accept the conventional or media-backed narrative of any particular event. Politics is a game of smoke and mirrors where the reality of most things is far more complex than what the rubes are being told on the TV networks.

That this election marked the tipping point at which the so-called mainstream media lost its monopoly on truth, on the dissemination of information, as more and more voters started receiving their political news on their handheld device from outlets more diverse and in many cases more accurate. What is remarkable is the sheer magnitude of the CNN assault on Trump and the fact that it seemingly had no effect on Trump’s support or election whatsoever. The voters are clearly wise to the establishment media and the fact that they are parroting the narrative of the ruling elite who have all but run the country into the ground.

Trump’s victory was as improbable as it was spectacular. He himself would tell you that, for all of his skill and foresight, luck has always smiled upon him. That’s why he is a “winner.”

Donald Trump loves winning and he hates losing. He is determined, stubborn, and incredibly smart, and his masterful use of social media has transformed American politics. Trump has figured out that he can speak directly to voters without the filter of the old media. Perhaps he is our last best hope to return to being a nation of winners.