There Is Nothing Normal About the 2020 Presidential Election

There Is Nothing Normal About the 2020 Presidential Election
Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden in Burlington, Iowa, on Aug. 7, 2019. (Tom Brenner/Getty Images)
Lee Smith
11/6/2020
Updated:
11/17/2020
Commentary

Allegations of nationwide voter fraud that may give the White House to Joe Biden have eclipsed the news that the prestige press and social media worked so hard to stifle before Election Day.

His son Hunter Biden’s laptop and a former business associate have provided ample evidence that the Democratic candidate and his family were paid millions of dollars by the Chinese Communist Party for unspecified services.

While that news may shock or anger America’s working middle class, whose jobs have been systematically shipped off to China the last 20 years, for the ruling establishment, the growing prospect of a Biden presidency comes as a relief. After all, they saw President Donald Trump’s efforts to decouple the United States from China as an assault on their center of gravity—the decades-long trade relationship with Beijing that made America’s corporate, political, and cultural elite rich and powerful.

The political class can barely stifle its glee that Trump may be on his way out, especially in such vicious fashion. Even many conservatives see nothing but silver lining. The GOP gained House seats, they say, and attracted African American and Hispanic voters in record numbers. And if Republicans hold the Senate, that will put the brakes on any progressive initiatives a Biden-Harris administration is likely to push, such as packing the Supreme Court.

That assessment is delusional. With a number of vulnerable Republican seats up for grabs in 2022, the Senate is almost certain to change hands in two years. In addition, given Biden’s rapidly declining mental state, it’s likely the presidency would by then pass into the hands of Harris, who owns the Senate’s most progressive voting record. Republicans appear to have forgotten that under a GOP-led Senate and House, Obama legalized Iran’s nuclear weapons program, despite the fact that they and most of the country opposed an agreement that gave the bomb to a longtime U.S. enemy.

The lesson conservatives should have learned was that with an allied press corps, an “echo chamber,” it isn’t hard for a Democratic president to outmaneuver Republican opposition.

But all of this assumes that American politics are still fundamentally normal—notwithstanding the largest voter-fraud operation in world history. But our politics are not normal, for the 2020 vote is the culmination of an unprecedented four-year period in U.S. history, during which U.S. spy services, Pentagon officials, diplomats, the press, and even Trump’s predecessor conducted a rolling coup against the American president.

In summer 2016, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign hired a British ex-spy to compile opposition research on the Trump team falsely smearing the Republican candidate as a Russian plant. The FBI used the Clinton-funded dossier to put Trump and his aides under surveillance. After Trump was elected, outgoing President Barack Obama instructed CIA Director John Brennan to institutionalize the anti-Trump dossier with an intelligence community assessment finding that Russia did indeed help Trump win the 2016 race.

That is, Trump’s predecessor, with the help of America’s foreign espionage agency, delegitimized his presidency at its origin.

Only months into the new administration, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed as a special counsel to investigate Trump’s alleged ties to Russia and thereby continue, for nearly two years, the anti-Trump plot. In the fall 2019, House Democrats, the press, and intelligence officials turned a phone call between the president and his Ukrainian counterpart into grounds for impeachment, although he was acquitted by the Senate.

In the spring, Democratic governors and mayors used the coronavirus to justify draconian lockdowns that targeted Trump’s working-middle-class base. Many of the small businesses that survived the lockdowns were destroyed when Democratic-aligned groups Black Lives Matter and Antifa razed and looted cities across America.

The coronavirus also gave Democrats a pretext for promoting mail-in voting. Trump and others warned, rightly, that vote by mail was a recipe for election fraud and was destined to create chaos. But chaos was the plan.

As Election Day neared, Democratic operatives published scenarios forecasting what would likely happen in November. Trump would appear to be winning on election night, but his lead would be erased as millions of mail-in votes flooded in. The Trump campaign would then take its allegations of election fraud to court. So far, so good. But the scenarios also predicted that violence would erupt across the country. And according to the Democrats, here’s how the story is supposed to end—in every scenario, the ultimate decision over the election was left not to the Supreme Court, never mind voters, but to the Pentagon.

Wherever America is heading in the coming weeks and months, it’s clearly not the same country in which its citizens woke up on Nov. 3. The concern isn’t simply over an election that may have been stolen, but that the nature of the U.S. government has been transformed.

If so, Trump may go down in history as the last American president chosen by the American public.

Lee Smith is the author of the recently published book “The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Lee Smith is a veteran journalist whose work appears in Real Clear Investigations, the Federalist, and Tablet. He is the author of “The Permanent Coup” and “The Plot Against the President.”
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