Think Trump Isn’t Copying Hillary? Think Again.
Next week, Bill Barr has a memoir ‘One Damn Thing After Another’ coming out which says that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen from Donald Trump. Like every other rational, intelligent human being, I’m sick and tired of Donald Trump continuing his nonsense about the 2020 election. He went on and on about the big ‘steal’ at CPAC this past weekend, and even his adoring fans at Orlando forgot to clap most of the time.
Notwithstanding what Bill Barr claims, I don’t really blame Trump for spending the last two years whining about how he was a victim of electoral theft, because all he’s really doing is copying what Hillary said and did in 2016.
The difference is that Hillary didn’t start kvetching about her electoral victory being stolen from her until after the campaign came to an end. However, Hillary didn’t have some half-assed lawyers submit illiterate briefs to various state courts. Her ‘theft’ was investigated for two years by the former head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, and cost the taxpayers $32 million bucks.
What did Mueller find about Russian ‘collusion’ with the Trump campaign? Zilch is what he found out. Sorry, but the convictions of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and several other Trump Quislings had to do with lying to FBI agents or lying to the Grand Jury or both.
Hillary’s own version of the election ‘steal’ can be found right at the beginning of the book ‘What Happened?’ which she published to explain why she lost a campaign that everyone assumed she was going to win. The very first sentence of the text has Hillary saying that he didn’t want to make the same mistake in 2016 that she made in 2008, which was that she didn’t have a top-notch staff.
She then goes on for the entire first chapter telling us that in 2016 she was surrounded by professionals who were the best campaign, the most experienced, the smartest and the hardest-working campaign staff of all time.
How could she lose an election against someone like Trump when she had such a great team? She lost because Trump made all those secret deals with the Russians to post fake advertising on social media and publish hacked emails during the campaign.
There is not one word in this entire narrative which even hints at the fact that Hillary effectively dropped off the campaign trail for six weeks following Labor Day, which is when campaign events really count. There is also not a single word about how come it took her and that wonderful, experienced staff more than two months to come up with an explanation for the existence of a mail server containing sensitive emails sitting in a room in her house.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that after publishing this book, Hillary then went quietly off to join the ranks of other losers in Presidential campaigns. To the contrary, she started a PAC — Onward Together — that was going to give money to younger candidates who needed her help to mount their first electoral campaigns. Except nobody donated any money and that was the end of that.
Although the Democrats had the good sense not to let her become the Presidential candidate again in 2020, Hillary didn’t take the hint to keep her mouth shut. In fact, she tried to intervene in the primaries and made several nasty and negative comments about Bernie Sanders even before the contest between Bernie and other candidates even began.
Was Hillary’s behavior any different in this respect from the way that Donald Trump is going around these days trying to ‘cleanse’ the GOP of RINOS and other Republican officials who don’t support him?
My point is that Trump’s behavior since the 2020 election might be different from Hillary’s post-2016 election behavior in degree but certainly not in kind. The difference, it seems to me, is more a function of the fact that the sitting President, in this case someone named Joe Biden, is always the head of the party, and can more or less decide who speaks for the party and what they are going to say.
Trump’s behavior reflects the fact that the GOP still has to figure out who will be in charge of the party and who will be out. If someone other than Trump emerges as the party leader over the course of this year, Trump will disappear with or without his new social media venue which still doesn’t work.
To sum up: I voted for both of them but I’m glad we finally got rid of Hillary and for that matter, her husband as well.
