But there was a problem — a huge problem: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”

Twitter, Media, And Democrats Are All Guilty In The Hamilton 68 Scandal

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND at the Federalist:

FEBRUARY 01, 2023

Besides Hamilton 68, three groups deserve condemnation for peddling the Russian-bots hoax: the media, corrupt politicians, and Twitter.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

The latest chapter of “The Twitter Files” broke on Friday, with the release of internal communications that provided a takedown of Hamilton 68, which wrongly purported to expose Russian disinformation on social media. The details released, however, prove equally devasting to the corrupt media, dishonest Democrats, and Twitter itself. 

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s most recent exposé provided more details of the internal angst at Twitter caused by Hamilton 68, which Taibbi described as “a computerized ‘dashboard’ designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure ‘Russian disinformation.’” As Taibbi explained, former FBI counterintelligence agent Clint Watts conceived of the dashboard, which the Alliance for Securing Democracy think-tank hosted. It then served as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years.”

“Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s ‘research,’” Taibbi stressed, adding, “Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.”

But there was a problem — a huge problem: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”

Exposed

The internal communications revealed that Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and determined the methodology relied on a list of some 644 accounts. Twitter executives then ordered a forensic analysis of those accounts and determined that only 36 were registered in Russia, many of which were connected to Russia Today, the government “news” service.

According to Taibbi, “the accounts Hamilton 68 claimed were linked to ‘Russian influence activities online’ were not only overwhelmingly English-language (86%), but mostly ‘legitimate people,’ largely in the U.S., Canada, and Britain.” 

Email exchanges captured the problem, with Twitter insiders saying, among other things: “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” “Hardly evidence of a massive influence campaign.” “These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.” 

As Twitter executive Yoel Roth synthesized: “I think we need to just call this out on the bullsh-t it is.” But while Twitter brushed reporters and politicians off Hamilton 68’s Russian-bots storyline, the tech giant’s concern about “playing the long game” kept it from calling BS on the project.

[READ: The Astounding Saga Of Hamilton 68 Illustrates Scope Of America’s Institutional Rot]

In a devastating Friday thread and subsequent article, however, Taibbi did. So devasting was his reporting, it prompted Hamilton 68 to post a response framed as a “FACT SHEET: Hamilton 68 Dashboard (2017-2018).”

Taibbi, who had basically begged Watts and those connected to the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) to speak with him before his “Twitter Files” reporting went live, was neither amused nor persuaded. He countered with his own response, saying: “After refusing to answer questions pre-publication, Hamilton 68 and Clint Watts printed a response to the Twitter files that’s both laughable and damning.” And he went on to add an addendum highlighting the changes Hamilton 68 made to its webpage’s discussion of the project. 

These revelations prove devasting to Hamilton 68 and scandalous to the Alliance for Securing Democracy. But three additional groups deserve equal focus and condemnation for peddling the Russian-bots hoax: the media, corrupt politicians, and Twitter.

Media

Based on the Hamilton 68 dashboard, as Taibbi detailed, the legacy press ran “hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years” — a forgivable mistake, maybe, if the media had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information. But they did because Twitter itself refuted Hamilton 68’s representations. “Off the record,” Twitter also “cautioned” reporters that they “should be very skeptical of ASD’s claims.” 

For instance, when the media began reporting, based on the Hamilton 68 dashboard, that the trending of the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag — a campaign that pushed for the declassification of then-Rep. Devin Nunes’ memo on FISA abuse — was the result of Russian bots, Twitter told reporters it had “been monitoring closely since #releasethememo started trending late last week,” and that the hashtag “appears to be organically trending.” 

But as Twitter’s internal communications revealed, “Twitter’s efforts to privately nudge reporters away from the story failed miserably.” One Twitter employee seeking to steer reporters away complained in emails that “Reporters are chafing.” “It’s like shouting into a void,” Emily Horne wrote to her Twitter colleagues. 

Even after Twitter responded publicly with a letter revealing that its internal investigation “has not identified any significant activity connected to Russia” regarding the hashtag, the press persisted in pushing the fake Russian-bot story. That same letter stressed that the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag “was also used by several prominent, verified U.S. accounts on the evening of Thursday, January 18,” with Twitter adding, “Typically, hashtag use by high-profile accounts, including those with high numbers of followers, plays a role in driving conversations around a hashtag on Twitter.” Yet the corrupt press kept peddling the Russian-influence narrative.

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway recognized in real time what was happening, dissecting the media’s unreasonable reliance on Hamilton 68’s information. Even after Twitter publicly refuted Hamilton 68’s claims, the press “uncritically accept[ed] and promote[d] a secretive group’s unverified claim of a Russian conspiracy,” Hemingway stressed. 

Americans should be outraged that our “free press” peddled Hamilton 68’s bogus claims of a Russian influence campaign, and every reporter who ran the unsupportable stories should be called out for pushing fake news.

Democrats

Likewise, the Democrats who fanned the claims of Russian interference based on Hamilton 68 deserve censure. 

Rep. Adam Schiff and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse, among others, not only pushed the unfounded claims that Russian bots were behind the trending hashtags, but they also demanded that Twitter and other tech companies investigate and stop such supposed interference.

These Democrats and the others pushing the conspiracy relied solely on Hamilton 68 as a source and did so even though Twitter had refuted the claims. In fact, internal Twitter communications show executives tried to warn senator staffers that the Russian-interference story didn’t stand.

“It might be worth nudging Blumenthal’s staffer that it could be in his boss’ best interest not to go out there because it could come back to make him look silly,” one email suggested. We tried to “wave him off” because “we don’t believe these are bots,” said another. But Blumenthal and the other Democrats continued to scream about the supposed Russian operations, and for that they should be made to look silly.

Twitter

While Twitter did try to warn off the media and politicians, it also deserves an equal share in the blame for peddling the Russian-bots hoax because it knew Hamilton 68 was BS.

“We should have a separate discussion about if/when/how we confront ASD privately with our knowledge of their flawed methodology/dashboard and seek to help them reorient in a more accurate direction,” one Twitter insider wrote after Schiff and Feinstein began pushing the conspiracy theory.

Roth asked whether it was “now the time to go public with the fact that any given user only counts once towards a trend.” Another Twitter executive seemed fine with going public, writing: “If ASD isn’t going to fact check with us, we should feel free to correct the record of their work.”

But rather than clearly and unequivocally refute Hamilton 68, Twitter merely made hints off the record, thereby allowing both the media and congressional Democrats to mislead the public about Russia’s responsibility for various social media trends.

So, yes, Hamilton 68 deserves censure. But so too do the corrupt media and Democrats who pushed the Russian-bot hoax — and the Twitter execs who stood by while they did.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

“The anti-Trump conspirators, with The Times as drum major, then went on to not one, but two, phony impeachments (accusations), with the second accusation extending beyond his term in office.”

February 1, 2023

The anti-Trump New York Times can’t stand the truth

By David Zukerman at American Thinker:

To vary, for sake of accuracy, the “You can’t handle the truth” line blurted out by Jack Nicholson as Col. Nathan Jessup, in the movie  “A Few Good Men” —   The New York Times, and its political reporters and columnists, can’t stand the truth, certainly not when it comes to covering Donald J. Trump.   Ever since 2016, The New York Times, its reporters, and columnists, have promoted the lie that Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States by means of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. For this, it received a Pulitzer Prize.

After Mr. Trump was elected president, The Times led the campaign to undermine his leadership by pressing, successfully, for appointment of a special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump. With President Trump in office no more than four months, Robert Mueller was named special counsel and soon was surrounded by a staff of Trump-haters.   Twenty-two months later Mueller closed shop, with an embarrassing appearance before Congress.  The anti-Trump conspirators, with The Times as drum major, then went on to not one, but two, phony impeachments (accusations), with the second accusation extending beyond his term in office.

More recently, the release of Twitter files shows that Twitter executives told Democrat officials that claims of Russian bots interfering in the 2016 election were hogwash.  Was the truth conveyed to the American people?  Pas de tout!  The lie of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has been maintained by the Trump-hating media — and continues in the face of the emergence of truth, at long last.

This UK Daily Mail disclosure indicates that the anti-Trump conspirators are worse than corrupt; they are rotten to the core.

In 2018, Democrats discredited the Republican memo on FBI surveillance abuse by falsely suggesting it was being promoted by ‘Russian bots’ with the hashtag ReleaseTheMemo.

The memo, written by former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, pointed out flaws in the investigation into Trump’s supposed links to Moscow.

Nunes’s memo was verified by the Department of Justice a year later. 

California Democrats Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff wrote an open letter saying the ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was being promoted by ‘Russian influence operations’.

And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) then said it was ‘reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans’.

Here are just a few Times-related sources, dredged up via Google, alleging the Trump-Russia lie:

The rottenness at the core of The New York Times continues.  On January 27, The Times published a long article, “The Long Futile Search Into Russia Inquiry.” That was the title of the long article in the January 27 print edition.  Online, the article had a rather different title:  “Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Trump-Russia Investigation.”  While it is not unusual that the titles in the print edition differ from those online for the same articles, the thought occurs that here the change was prompted by realization at The Times that the words “Long, Futile Search” could describe the effort by The Times to smear Mr. Trump as Putin agent as a “Long, Futile Search.”

The January 27 hatchet job contained an explanation for suspicions that President Trump was a Putin agent that only a mindless leftist would accept, including that he had flattered Russian President Putin and had sarcastically called on Russia to release Mrs. Clinton’s lost 30,000 emails if it had them.

The deep state’s campaign against President Trump continued into 2019.

A Washington Post January 2019 front page “bombshell” that the FBI had investigated Mr. Trump gave the paper the opportunity to quote Mrs. Clinton’s smear, in the 2016 presidential debates, that Mr. Trump was a Putin puppet.   The Washington Post piece followed a Times story, a few days earlier, on the FBI probe of the president.

And more than two years after Mr. Trump peacefully left office, the media campaign against him continues — because the media cannot stand to report the truth in its political reportage.

In a Times follow-up, January 31, to the hatchet job on John Durham, Michelle Goldberg even includes a lie about the Trump-Zelensky phone conversation of July 2019.   Goldberg wrote that Mr. Trump had pressured the Ukraine president into doing “his personal bidding ” by threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine. Here is a link to the text of the Trump-Zelensky phone conversation, which includes — not stated by Ms. Goldberg — the president’s concern that Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to prevent a probe of corruption in the country — a probe that might have expended  to  his son Hunter’s very lucrative deal with a Ukraine gas company, Burisma.   Mr. Trump called the elder Biden’s interference “horrible.”   And, of course, they were

The Goldberg column refers, in the headline, to “The Durham Fiasco.”    Only a formerly-respected newspaper that can’t stand the truth would pour objective reality into a lie-making machine, with a smear like that.  How, indeed, the once-mighty have fallen, and so low.     

KNOW YOUR RUSSIAN AND SOVIET HISTORIES!

February 1, 2023

The Real Lessons of the Real History of The United States and post-Glasnost Ukraine

By Jared Peterson at American Thinker:

I am responding to “Ukraine and the Unlearned Lesson of History,” by Jacob Fraden. published in AT 1/31/23.

I’ll start with the author’s contention that Russia’s war against Napoleonic France was one of its wars “of aggression.”  On June 24, 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of 650,000, approximately the 12th European county to receive the French tyrant’s military attention. Who was the aggressor here?  Tsar Alexander I was a hero at the Congress of Vienna, for crushing that invasion and breaking the French chronic aggressor’s back once and for all.

And most of Christian Europe had the sense to be grateful to Russia for driving the hated Turkish muslim conqueror and oppressor out of the Balkans and other parts of Europe. As to Russia’s wars with the Swedes, Lithuanians, Poles and Germans (13th through early 17th centuries), for much of that time those four, not Russia, were the aggressors. In fact, the Poles and Lithuanians burned Moscow in the early 17th century. And yes, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries Russia expanded eastward through Siberia and Asia, absorbing territory thinly populated by backward peoples. Who, of all people, are we Americans to fault Russia for THAT? Go to the blackboard, and write MANIFEST DESTINY 100 times.

It’s not merely this writer’s logic about the present that’s flawed – he’s terminally confused about the past.

More pertinently to the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, after the Soviet collapse in 1991, Russia wanted peaceful integration into the European economic, political and security system. No knowledgeable person at the time doubted the sincerity of this wish; and no one in the 1990’s saw prostrate Russia as a threat to anyone. It was we, rather, the US military industrial complex (“MIC”) and neocon hegemonists, who rejected this desire, fervently and repeatedly expressed by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

The promises of no eastward expansion of NATO by Secretary of State James Baker (and no doubt other Western leaders) were promptly ignored by Clinton and his gang. NATO expanded successively in two major tranches -1999 and 2004 – and thereafter the well of the West’s relations with Russia was poisoned. But that poisoning, no doubt, was the neocon object of the NATO expansions.

The eastward expansion of NATO was condemned at the time of its first occurrence by no less an authority, and American patriot, than George Kennan, former ambassador to Russia and arguably the author of America’s Cold War policy of containing Soviet expansion.

In the 90’s Russia could do nothing about this massive breach of faith by the West. But object it did, and repeatedly. By Vladimir Putin’s assumption of power in 2000, no significant Russian leader could have been found who saw the West’s expansion of NATO as anything but threatening, or Gorbachev’s failure to prevent that expansion by formal treaty as anything but naive and incompetent.

Without firing a shot, in the period 1989-1991 the Soviet Union gave up an empire, more accurately, a cordon sanitaire, in Eastern Europe; and by 1994 it had withdrawn all of its troops from the region. At the same time, believing the West’s assurances that there would be no NATO eastward expansion and that Russia would be economically and politically integrated into Europe, Russia disbanded the Warsaw pact.

For all of these historically unique concessions Russia got no thanks, no integration into Europe, and successive gratuitous and – from its standpoint, threatening – eastward expansions of NATO.

By 2004 the US neocons had Ukraine in their sights as the next Western military base to be constructed on Russia’s doorstep – Ukraine, the eastern half of whose population was ethnically Russian, Russian speaking or pro Russian (or all three), and which for about 300 out of the last 350 years had been part of either Russia or the Soviet Union. 

In 2007, in Vladimir Putin’s Munich speech, the Russian government made it plain that Ukraine was the reddest of red lines. Russia would never tolerate a Ukraine militarily aligned with NATO, stuffed with sophisticated American weaponry, on its front porch. In fact, that reality had been clear since America’s open and obvious support for the 2004 so-called “color revolution.”

This plainly and repeatedly communicated position was nothing more than Russia’s iteration of the same policy that President Kennedy announced in 1962 – that no great power would be permitted to establish a threatening military presence in America’s part of the world. Does America have a better right to a militarily nonthreatening Cuba than Russia has to a similarly benign Ukraine?

But nothing changed the attitude if the US neocons and MIC. In 2008 that deep thinker, George W. Bush, successfully twisted NATO’s arm (over German and French objections) into promising that Ukraine and Georgia would “eventually” be offered NATO membership. Russia was further enraged. And the clueless President of Georgia took the promise as a signal that he could, with impunity, move militarily against Russian ethnics living in the northern part of Georgia. In the event, Russian protective military action put a quick stop to that.

The final straw was US support for the violent, anti-democratic riots in Ukraine in 2014, which resulted in the the deposing of freely elected, pro-Russian Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovic. The pro-West, democratically illegitimate regime that replaced Yanukovic threatened to ban the use of Russian as an official language, and to take other steps perceived as highly adverse to the overwhelmingly pro-Russian Donbas population; in consequence, demands came from the Donbas for some form of guaranteed autonomy within Ukraine.  The new Kiev government’s response was to wage a war against its own Donbas population, which, by 2022, had cost the lives of 15-20,000 Donbas residents.

Also shortly after its installation in 2014, the newly, non-democratically installed Kiev regime hinted that Russia’s long term Sevastopol naval lease would not be renewed. Russia responded by reincorporating Crimea – to the relief of the vast majority of Crimea’s population. With the exception of Nikita Khrushchev’s purely internal administrative change,  Crimea had been part of Russia since 1793 when Catherine the Great had defeated the Turks.

When the Biden administration took power in 2021 it immediately began treating Ukraine as a defacto member of NATO. NATO troops paraded with Ukrainian in Kiev, the supply of Western weaponry to Ukraine dramatically increased, and, generally, there was every indication of an impending move by Kiev, assisted by US weaponry, to  crush the pro Russian Donbas population once and for all.

Throughout 2021 Russia repeatedly requested talks with the Biden administration the object of which would be to assure Ukrainian neutrality and non-NATO membership and some form of protective guarantees for the the Donbas population. These pleas were ignored.

And the war came.

This is a brief, hurriedly written summary of Russia’s “wholly unprovoked” war in Ukraine.

Much more could be written about every topic touched on.

But that this tragic, needless war was in fact provoked by the West’s low-grade war against Russia over the last 30 years is indisputably clear simply by reciting the pertinent history. This does not excuse or justify the Russian invasion. But it shows that it was the West, led by American neocon hegemonists, that created Russia’s accumulating perception of threat, which in turn made the war all but inevitable.

We, successive governments of the United States of America, bear a large share of the responsibility for creating the conditions in which the Ukraine war occurred. If our self image of America as a uniquely humane and benign force in the world has any merit, it is we who have a moral duty to assist in bringing this ruinous, and highly dangerous, conflict to an end.

The flow of ever more destructive Western weaponry to Ukraine should stop. The mindless, anti-historical demonization of Russia should stop. Negotiations to bring about a conclusion to the war should begin.

Map credit: Basque Mapping CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

When The Snow Gets Into The Gopher Dem Nose!

 FEBRUARY 1, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

LET’S GO CRAZY, STAR TRIBUNE EDITION

Minneapolis’s Star Tribune illustrates how the major daily newspaper of a metropolitan area can contribute to its decline. The owner of the newspaper has a high tolerance for mediocrity and the local news reads like public relations for Minnesota’s DFL. Today’s case in point is Briana Bierschbach’s page-one story on the new abortion law Democrats rammed through the legislature in record time: “Gov. Tim Walz signs law strengthening abortion rights in Minnesota.” Subhead: “It’s the first in a series of bills that Democrats say will help guarantee access to the procedure for decades to come.” This is today’s page one above the fold, just beneath the Star Tribune logo.

The text of Bierschbach’s story reminds me of Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.” Here is how the song goes: “This is your celebration / Celebrate good times, come on / Let’s celebrate /Celebrate good times, come on / Let’s celebrate / There’s a party going on right here / A celebration to last throughout the years.” It’s the unmistakable subtext of Bierschbach’s story.

One problem with the story is its failure to explain what the bill actually accomplishes. Even readers who are inclined to agree, as most undoubtedly do, won’t get it.

NRO mitigates this particular deficiency in the subhead of John McCormack’s paywall protected story “Abortion Extremism on the March in Minnesota.” The subhead on McCormack’s story accurately explains: “A new law declaring a ‘fundamental right to abortion’ contains no limitations based on how developed the child is and whether the child could survive outside the womb.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you can see why Bierschbach’s long story obscures and conceals this point. It might moderate the celebration slightly.

McCormack’s story embeds the Alpha News tweet below. Bierschbach doesn’t mention any particular proposed amendment. McCormack also links to Alpha News editor Anthonhy Gockowski’s story “Walz signs abortion-until-birth bill into law.” Compare and contrast.

Here’s a running list of every amendment that has been rejected by Democrats in the Minnesota Senate tonight:

A More Honest Review Regarding The Abused President Donald J. Trump…

January 31, 2023

Is Donald Trump Worth The Fight?

By Vince Coyner at American Thinker:

Donald Trump was a great, if imperfect, president. By the third year of his presidency, the country was flourishing. The economy was roaring, jobs were up, incomes were up, gas prices were down, and America and Americans were doing fairly well.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the election. The swamp struck back via Covid and the George Floyd protests. Neither of those was of Trump’s making, but Democrats used both to steal the election. The Democrats didn’t create Covid or put Floyd in the morgue, but they used the lockdowns and the riots to sufficiently upend American life so that they could steal the election under the cover of chaos.

Those were tests, and Donald Trump failed. With Covid, he allowed the country to be misled by a snake oil salesman and, with the Floyd protests, he didn’t send in the troops. It’s easy to understand, of course, why he failed.

Anthony Fauci had played a role in America’s various health crises for decades and was an internationally respected doctor. As the media was hyping the idea that the virus could wipe out mankind, Fauci was a voice of calm, reassuring the country that, with distance, masks, and lockdowns, we would persevere.

At the same time, when Trump raised questions about anything that diverged from the Big Pharma/media narrative or suggested we should remember the economic costs of lockdowns, the media, medical people, and scientists attacked, lampooned, and vilified him unmercifully. Given the fusillade facing him, it’s not a surprise that Trump couldn’t recognize the lies the American people were being served.

Image: Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore. 

On the George Floyd-inspired Antifa/BLM riots, Trump failed, and that’s on him, although again, one can see why he acted the way he did. As one article explains, Section 252 of the Insurrection Act

permits deployment (of military troops) in order to “enforce the laws” of the United States or to “suppress rebellion” whenever “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it “impracticable” to enforce federal law in that state by the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

Thus, Trump could have used the military to stop the violence that cities were unwilling or unable to stop. Trump knew this, saying in early June 2020, “If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” The Democrats pilloried him, with Pelosi stating: “But there is no reason for the U.S. military to be called out for this.”

Trump chose not to act, likely because he knew Democrats would brand him a tyrant or dictator if he did, despite the fact that FDR, Kennedy, LBJ, and Bush 41 all used troops for far smaller riots. His forbearance was irrelevant because Democrats attacked him anyway for thinking about troops.

That Donald Trump failed at leading the country through those two disasters is, sadly, understandable. Given the savagery and breadth of the relentless attacks on him, it would have taken someone just short of Zeus to have succeeded. The result of that failure was that Democrats stole the election, and Trump lost the White House.

Fast forward two years. In November, Trump announced he was running, and he said many of the right things, starting with “In order to make America great and glorious again. I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.” Possibly the best line of the night was, “But just as I promised in 2016, I am your voice. I am your voice. The Washington establishment wants to silence us, but we will not let them do that.”

That all sounds great, but the question is: Has Trump learned the hard lesson… that the swamp is the Terminator, it will not stop, it cannot be negotiated with, the swamp knows no parties or limits, and it must be crushed? Otherwise, it will kill him, kill his supporters and kill the Republic of the United States.

Recent events seem to suggest that he has not learned.

First, he endorsed Dr. Oz over a rock-solid MAGA candidate in Pennsylvania. Oz was anything but MAGA and went on to lose to a literally brain-damaged Democrat. Trump made other MAGA endorsements, but Pennsylvania’s was for one of the most important swing states in the nation, and he blew it.

Next, in December, he endorsed the decidedly not MAGA Kevin McCarthy for Speaker even though there were several MAGA candidates in the running. In 2021, McCarthy stated, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.” That’s true, except for virtually every single MAGA voter in America and 70% of the larger GOP as well.

Then, earlier this month, Trump threw his most ardent supporters, the pro-life movement, under the bus, stating, “It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans…that lost large numbers of Voters.” He continued, “Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the U.S. Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again.” That was completely unnecessary and wrong, to boot.

Then, quixotically, he invited the biggest dolt in Congress, Senator Lindsey Graham, who actually proposed a nationwide abortion ban less than two months before the election, to be with him at his first campaign event! Most Republicans despise the warmonger and big-spending Graham, behind only McConnell and perhaps Collins, Murray, and Romney.

Then, finally, despite six years of failure, Trump supported the grifter Ronna McDaniel to lead the Republican Party over the incomparable super lawyer and MAGA candidate Harmeet Dhillon. If there was ever anyone in the Republican Party who should’ve been ousted and replaced by a dyed-in-the-wool grassroots MAGA candidate, it was McDaniel.

McDaniel was recently revealed to have spent over $2 million from the RNC treasury on luxury travel and private jets, $300,000 on flowers, $75,000 on “beauty and spa treatments,” and $1,280 on LBGTQ+ filings! She did all of this while undermining MAGA candidates in the midterms.

McDaniel is the antithesis of the grassroots MAGA voter. She is the polar opposite of the farmers, plumbers, police, truckers, and steel workers who put Trump into office in the first place and the ones who recognized the coup. They’re the 50,000 people who filled stadiums and were in the trenches with him. But McDaniel and the establishment loathe them.

If Trump circa 2024 hasn’t figured out that success lies with the grassroots MAGA voters who put him in the White House rather than with the establishment grifters who lead the party today—with his help—then I’m not sure what the motivation is to support him is.

2024 is too important a moment in American history to let serial failures like the establishment McFailures (McConnell, McCarthy, and McDaniel) lead the way. This election may well be the last opportunity for Americans to rescue the nation from a Democrat party that has turned our cities into dystopian wastelands, turned 40% of American children into gender-confused lab rats, and seeks to balkanize the nation based on race, sex and anything else the swamp’s denizens can think of. The swamp’s goal is power, and it knows no party. McDaniel & Co. is its GOP arm, and if Trump doesn’t recognize that, then the baggage that comes with supporting him isn’t worth the fight because, with those charlatans leading the way, come January 20, 2025, there will be another Democrat being sworn in.