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COUNTERPUNCH

I DON’T KNOW if you’ve heard, but the Mueller Report is out. Turns out I’m not a Russian agent after all! After spending almost $40 million in taxpayer money, employing nineteen of the most prejudiced Democrat lawyers they could find in Washington, DC (some of whom had worked for the Clinton family and others who had been at her “victory party”), magically without a single Republican, and taking nearly two years to do an investigation that anyone with half a brain could have done in five minutes, the Mueller team found absolutely zero evidence of collusion or obstruction.

Now, most people would have been willing to leave it at that. Most people would have been relieved to have their name cleared in public after so many years of having it dragged through the mud. And if I were “most people,” this chapter might be a little different. Maybe it would open on the afternoon the Mueller Report came out. There’d be some vivid writing about how relieved I felt, how I could breathe easily for the first time in years. Or maybe there’d be scenes from right in the middle of the whole ordeal, and I’d tell you about how I’d curled up in a corner every night with a teddy bear praying that I wasn’t going to go to prison over this made-up nonsense. I might include some tear-filled speeches from my friends and family about how they were going to stick with me till the end, how they brought me strength in troubled times.

If that’s what you’re expecting, you’d better go buy a different book.

I’m not “relieved” to have the Mueller investigation over with. I don’t feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I’m not breathing any easier than I was on the day that old, over-the-hill puppet was first appointed. I’m not relieved because I know that it was never about Russia or collusion or obstruction. It certainly wasn’t about “the integrity of our elections” or “national security.” If the Mueller investigation had been about any of those things, the Democrats would have been celebrating along with everyone else when we learned that the President of the United States had not colluded with a foreign power. But they didn’t celebrate. They waved the report in the air like a bunch of lunatics and claimed that You have to read between the lines, man! It’s all in there! They had officially joined the ranks of the tinfoil hat brigade who think the moon landing was staged in a television studio or who think we’re keeping aliens in Area 51 (if you really want to see aliens, the first place I’d look would be in Nancy Pelosi’s office).

From the day the Mueller investigation began, it was about one thing and one thing only: taking down my father, the only president in the history of this country who was elected without the approval of the ruling class. He was a populist candidate who spoke for real Americans, and that meant he had to go. The investigation was, and always had been, a complete farce. It was started by people who hate Donald Trump more than they love America.

But for some reason, we were all expected to stay quiet and let the Mueller team carry out their crooked investigation in peace. While the Democrats were telling outright lies about us on the floor of Congress during the day, then moving their clown show over to cable news and doing the same thing every night, we were supposed to just nod along and not say a word. Sorry, not the way I operate. Throughout the entire investigation, I kept up the heat on television and on Twitter, calling out all of the lies Adam #FullofSchiff was telling about me—which, by the end of the whole thing, got to be like a full-time job—and taking shots right back at the Democrats who were trying to remove my father from office.

You might be shocked to hear, but not everyone was pleased with my combative stance. One afternoon, right in the heat of the Russia hoax, even my lawyers approached me and said, “Don, you might want to slow down on social media, maybe not be so aggressive.” I politely declined. Shortly after that, my father—yes, my father, Donald J. Trump, our tweeter-in-chief, the so-called Shakespeare of 140 characters—told me that I might be getting “a little too hot” on my social media accounts.

I respect the heck out of my dad, and when he gives me advice I take it ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. This, however, was probably the one time I decided not to listen! He knew as well as I did that there’s no such thing as being “too hot” on social, at least as far as I’m concerned. I consider myself a shit-talker par excellence.

Plus, I knew that when it came down to it, all the morons in the House and the Senate—these clowns like Eric Swalwell and Ted Lieu who were attacking me every day—would throw me in jail themselves if they had the power to do it. They didn’t give a damn about investigations or getting to the truth. They just wanted to get my father out of office and punish anyone who supported him—starting with me and my family.

So, no, I didn’t think it was the time to “slow down” or “take it easy.” I still don’t.… and I won’t.

Throughout the entire Russia investigation, it seemed, the Democrats in Congress had only one reason to exist, and that was to try and make my father and me cower in a corner, curl up in a ball, and die. Well, that had about as much chance of happening as them finding proof of collusion. My lawyers could’ve talked to me until they were blue in the face, which they pretty much did, but my attitude wasn’t going to change. Not one bit. Because I fight back. That’s what we do.

I wasn’t surprised when those same lawyers came back to me at the end of the investigation, when the report was out and everyone was beginning to learn the truth, and told me I had probably been right all along to hit the Democrats so hard. I don’t blame them for being skeptical, though. None of them were actually there when this supposed collusion took place.

I was.

Like the rest of my family, I worked on the Trump campaign. I know what it was like in the early days before the primaries, when the whole world was against us and we were struggling just to compete in a crowded Republican field. As I’ve often said, we couldn’t have colluded to order a cheeseburger, much less coordinated an espionage campaign with a foreign power.

Especially in the beginning, the Trump campaign was filled with political neophytes, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. Almost all of us came from walks of life other than politics, meaning we were used to actually working for a living. All of us were accomplished, just not in the political arena. While the other campaigns were wasting time with polling data and staff shake-ups, we were figuring out ways to streamline the process and reach as many voters as possible. No one had time to reach out to foreign governments and ask for help. I mean, look, candidly? I got one unsolicited email. The Clinton campaign sought out and paid for foreign operatives to do research on its opponents. That’s a big distinction.

If you were a liberal in early 2017, the Russia collusion story was really all you had left to cling to. It absolved you and your candidate of all blame for her defeat, and it gave you a perfectly sensible reason to reject the results of the election. All of a sudden, once Big Bad Russia got involved, Donald Trump became an “illegitimate president,” and the whole getting-elected thing was just a colossal misunderstanding. It was the do-over they all wanted so desperately. Not only did Democrats get to carry on as if their candidate hadn’t lost, they also had free rein to take down just about everyone who had ever associated with Donald J. Trump, from his close associates and friends to the people who share his last name. Ask me how I know!

I mean, I’m old enough to remember when Barack Obama made fun of Mitt Romney by telling him “the 1980s called and want their foreign policy back.” But now, miraculously, Russia could be brought back from obscurity to be the villain in the Democrats’ assault on democracy. They always get to have it both ways.

Thank God we’re on the other side of the Russia hoax now. The reports have been written, the testimony—days and days and days of it—has been given, and we know the truth. There was no collusion. No obstruction. Not so much as an unpaid parking ticket as far as my father and his closest aides from the campaign are concerned. And finally, the liberal media have given up on the story.

Yeah, right.

They’ve kept up the delusion, assuring their disillusioned followers that more evidence is coming, more interviews are being unsealed, and there are more investigations to be done. No matter how many times Robert Mueller tells them to shut up and read the report—which, as my father has correctly said, exonerates him completely—they keep bringing up the man’s name as though he’s some kind of conquering hero, even dragging him in front of Congress so he could stutter and babble his way through five hours of testimony. Hell, I’m still waiting for all the evidence that Adam #FullofSchiff claims he’s been privy to over these past two years. It seemed as though he was on television every night, claiming he had “seen evidence” of collusion.

I have to admit that I almost felt bad for Robert Mueller during that testimony. And if it weren’t for the fact that I was probably number two on the guy’s kill list for years, I might have. I’m not against old people; I’ve always respected my elders. But watching those Democrats in Congress go at him, question after question, all of them trying desperately to make him tell them about the smoking gun they all wanted so badly, was like watching a bunch of kids find out Santa Claus isn’t real. For years, they had been living in their filter bubbles and echo chambers, able to spread lies about the Mueller Report without anyone throwing any facts into the mix. They had staked their entire reputations on the allegations being true and gone all in. They’d chosen—or rather, they’d used—Mueller because they’d thought he was beyond reproach, someone whom no one—not even my father—would dare attack. After all, he was a former prosecutor, the former head of the FBI, a decorated Marine. But it all came tumbling down when we realized he was nothing more than a pawn for the leftists running the show—an empty suit to fit their narrative and nothing more. Worst of all for Democrats, in their hysteria to destroy Trump, they forced the man they had elevated for two years to appear before Congress and he proved what he and the MAGA-sphere had known all along: that he was the author of his report in name only. Asked about key figures in the report and dates that anyone who’d even been following the story on Twitter would have known, Mueller came up short again and again. Oh, he said, I don’t know, I need to check that, I don’t know who that is… That’s beyond my purview. Seriously Mr. M? Well, it was right there here, so it really isn’t. You wrote the report and you can’t tell me what’s in it? You didn’t know anything about Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm hired by the DNC to dig up dirt on my father? You didn’t know that they were the genesis of the entire investigation and all of the FISA warrants? Sorry, I don’t buy it. You spent two years and nearly $40 million and you didn’t bother to learn how it all started? The genesis of the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people is “beyond your purview”? G.T.F.O.

Tell you what: if you see me on the street, feel free to ask me questions about this book you’re reading right now. I might not be a fancy former head of the FBI or anything, but at least I can remember things I’ve written myself.

In their desperate attempt to get him to testify beyond the report, the Dems actually did more to discredit the whole farce than anything before. And for that, I say: thanks!

But if you think a little thing like the debacle of Mueller’s appearance before Congress is going to stop the Democrats, think again. They are obsessed. They’ll believe anything that confirms what they already believe, and they’ll call anything that contradicts what they already believe a lie.

If you’re trying to find the starting point of this lunacy, look no further than the night of the 2016 election, right around the hours of midnight to six o’clock in the morning, when the craziest wing of the American left finally lost its mind for good. DJT has been living rent-free in their heads ever since—a strong real estate play from the best in the game.

It was in those few hours, right after the networks finally called the presidential election, that the liberal press and the Clinton camp first started groping around for anything that would explain their loss. For them, my father’s victory was the worst possible thing that could have happened. The postmortem that immediately followed the election read as if the world had come to an end. “The world’s shining light of democracy has gone dark,” one journalist said. Paul Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote that markets were plunging, and that they would probably never recover (How’d that work out?). A few weeks later, Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN—who, by the way, has my father to thank for his job—blamed himself, saying that the network probably shouldn’t have aired so many of DJT’s campaign rallies. Yeah, right, Jeff. You could have filled the airspace with New Year’s Eve with Anderson Cooper reruns, and my dad still would have won. I guess these days CNN is paying reparations by choosing to be the anti-Trump network at all costs—especially in the ratings. All the experts proved what we’ve all known all along. That they are full of shit. They all got it so wrong they needed cover and when they saw something, no matter how asinine, it became gospel to cover their abject failure.

Still, the left wouldn’t feel sorry for itself for long.

First it picked up the Russian spy story and started pushing it to every devastated reporter who would listen.

Then it did everything it had told us the Trump supporters would do if Hillary won. Think about it. For weeks leading up to the election, we had been hearing about all the horrible things Donald Trump would force his supporters to do if he lost. DJT wouldn’t accept the defeat they were all so sure was coming. The editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post both ran many articles warning us about the chaos that was about to ensue. According to popular opinion, Trump supporters were going to riot in the streets, refuse to accept the results of the election, and begin some kind of underground coup against the duly elected president, Hillary Clinton. They would start a second civil war. The streets would become absolute anarchy.

And when things didn’t go the way the Democrats had wanted them to go, what happened?

Let’s see. They held riots in the streets. (Check.) They refused to accept the results of the election, cooking up one of the strangest spy-movie stories I’ve ever heard in order to maintain their collective delusion. (Check.) Then they formed an underground group of online keyboard warriors called “the Resistance,” dedicated to taking down my father one stupid hashtag at a time. Prominent journalists, liberal activists, and actors have all identified themselves as proud members of “the Resistance” on Twitter. When I’m attacked by an outraged mob online, their voices are usually among the loudest. (And Check.)

The hatred that fomented online and in protests became hand-to-hand combat—and I mean real violence, the kind you usually see only in Third World countries. I’m not kidding. The same party that used to preach peace, tolerance, and inclusivity (mostly platitudes when you look at its history, which I will) has now become the party of hate, violence, and suppression of free speech.

So-called activists on the extreme left have moved from their safe spaces and the basements of their parents’ houses out into the streets, usually clad in black hockey pads and carrying weapons. Sometimes they call themselves antifascists, or Antifa, but most of the time, they don’t know why they’re there or what they even believe. All they know is hate and anger. Time and again, these people try to shut down speakers with whom they don’t agree. They attack journalists in the streets and threaten anyone who doesn’t go along with their twisted sense of social justice and equality.