RUTHFULLY YOURS

It really is a high honor for me to address this august audience. My wife and I have been huge fans of Hillsdale for many, many years, and it’s always a race when Imprimus hits the door mat; who’s going to read it first. But I have a caveat to begin with. For the next 30 minutes, please don’t expect a discourse on de Tocqueville and Epistemology of the New Age. My first degree was philosophy and theology many moons ago, but I cannot match the erudition of the panels that we heard this morning. I’m going to bring it all down to earth and share with you my experiences inside the belly of the beast as a deputy assistant and strategist to the president, how we should move forward, and what we can expect in the years to come.

But first things first, I must make a plea to all those people who came up to me last night, and have done so since I left three weeks ago. Relax. Take a deep breath and count to 10. The fat lady isn’t singing, OK? I know that’s not politically correct, but who cares? We are in this for the long game. I’m going to be using Washington jargon, but this is about the long game. It’s not about the first eight months. It’s about eight years, and then another eight years, under President Pence. That’s the plan.

Lots of people got suicidal when my boss, Steve Bannon resigned. And then they really got suicidal when I left the building. But it’s OK. Bringing us back to the principles of the founding is not a function of where Steve sits, or whether I have a window in my office in the Eisenhower building. It’s a function of the ideas that brought a man (as we were reminded last night) brought a man who has never held public office before, or been a general flag officer, into the position of being the most powerful man in the world. There’s a reason for that, and it is much bigger than the few people who work in that wonderful peoples’ house just across the city. So, hold the line.

Common Sense, Truth, Sovereignty
The only philosophical things I’ll say is, words matter. Words matter. And the words for my address today are simple ones. The first one is a phrase. “Common sense.” The second one, which is allied to common sense, is the word “truth.” And the last one, which is the most important philosophical undergirding of everything that brought Donald Trump into the White House, and it formed his politics, is the word “sovereignty.” This is missed by the people inside the beltway. These aren’t random speeches. The war, defeating ISIS, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, these are informed by the same philosophical idea: the importance of sovereignty and the nation-state. So that’s all the philosophizing I will do.

So, let me talk to you about my experience for the last few months inside the White House. I’ll talk about three things: Who is the president? I’ll talk about what happened inside the building, and I’ll address this question that has become so popular today, of the ‘deep state’ and how it affects foreign policy going forward.

Who is the president? The president, behind closed doors, is exactly the same as he is in public. He’s not your average politician; when he sees a camera, flicks a little switch in the back of his head, and then switches on that “Washington grimace.” He is who he is. When I first met him in the summer 2015, I was asked to come brief him in New York on matters to do with national security. The man, in private, was exactly the man I’d come to know on the television screens. And that is, in itself, refreshing. There is no Janus-faced, bi-polarity with this individual.

Secondly, he is a preternatural, instinctual actor. It is not an exaggeration. Monica Crowley described him most accurately. The weekend of the election, we were with David Horowitz and his colleagues at his Restoration Weekend (which was either going to be a wake or a celebration.) But, the right candidate won. And two days after the election, Monica stated, “The people who misunderstand Donald J. Trump look at him through an ideological lens. And that is completely the wrong way to look at him. Because, Donald J. Trump wasn’t an ideological candidate; he was an attitudinal candidate.” And that is very, very much so. You cannot slap easy, lazy labels onto this man. Yes, the chattering classes would have you do so. The mainstream media would have you do so. But remember, this is a Republican candidate who strode along the campaign platform waving a “gay pride” flag. That’s not exactly a classic Republican candidate. He breaks the conventional taxonomy, and that’s important to remember.

What he is, is a man who cares about making this nation great again. That slogan is not pablum; it’s not empty rhetoric. He truly wishes to translate what he has done in the private sector, in terms of making a great brand, and translating that back to America’s position in the world and its founding principles.

A Hostile Takeover
What happened in the last seven months, until I left the White House? Well, what happened on January the 20th needs to be understood. Who likes the movie “Red Dawn,” the original one? Great movie, OK? Those of you who have not seen it, watch it. Not the remake; the original.

Senate Republicans must be making progress on their latest attempt to reform health care, because the opposition is again reaching jet-aircraft decibel levels of outrage. The debate could use a few facts—not least on the claims that the GOP is engaging in an unfair process.

Republicans are scrambling to pass Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy’s health-care bill before Sept. 30, when the clock expires on the budget procedure that allows the Senate to pass legislation with 51 votes. The bill would devolve ObamaCare funding to the states, which could seek waivers from the feds to experiment within certain regulatory boundaries, and it also repeals the individual and employer mandates and medical-device tax.

The left spent weeks declaring this dead on arrival, but now that Republicans appear close to a majority here come the tweets. The Graham-Cassidy proposal “eliminates protections for people who are or ever have been sick. GONE. Insurers back to denying coverage for the sick,” Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy claimed this week.

In fact, a state that receives a waiver from ObamaCare’s regulations must show plans that retain access to “adequate and affordable” coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. ObamaCare’s rules are not the only way to do this, despite the claims of Jimmy Kimmel. The Affordable Care Act’s price restrictions have in practice degraded the quality of care for the ill and sent insurers shopping for healthy patients who are more profitable. (See “Pre-Existing Confusion,” May 2)

States could set up high-risk pools, for example. These pools subsidize care for those who need costly treatment without concealing the expense across healthy patients, who may drop coverage if they can’t afford it. This can lower premiums for everyone.

Another complaint is that Republicans may vote without a score from the Congressional Budget Office, which has said it will release a preliminary estimate but won’t rule on premiums or coverage effects for several weeks.

CBO forecasts are often wrong, but in this case they’d also be meaningless. The point of Graham-Cassidy is to allow states to experiment and tailor approaches to local populations. Some might try to expand Medicaid’s reach or even go single-payer. Others might tinker with reinsurance. The budget office can’t possibly know what 50 states would do or how that would affect coverage.

The irony is that even as critics say little is known about the bill, progressive groups are pumping out black box estimates of what would happen. A report flying around the internet from the consulting firm Avalere says that states will lose $4 trillion in funding over 20 years.

That sounds bad. Except the study assumes no state block grants past 2026—because Congress would have to reauthorize funding. That’s right: The report equates renewing an appropriation with zeroing out an account, as if Congress doesn’t periodically approve funding for everything from children’s health care to highway spending.

If I had to pick a title, I might call President Trump’s 2017 UN address, “Something for Everyone.”

For example, Trump supporters heard the words “America first” and “sovereignty” and glowed. Trump haters heard the word “sovereignty” and “American interests above all else” and ignited. So consumed were many by their own respective basking and bonfires, they failed to realize that no matter how many times Trump dropped the word “sovereignty,” it was sometimes in sentences like this: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.” In other words, we must reject threats to the new world order and back again.

I’n guessing that’s why neocons were carving the speech up into way many too portions of red meat (carpaccio?) for comfort. Loving it were Elliott Abrams at National Review, Sohrab Ahmari (“Trump’s Turtle Bay Triumph”), and that third amigo, Lindsay Graham, the kind of people once pertrified by The Great Candidate Trump America First Foreign Policy Speech of 2016. With all of that, there was plenty of smoke coming out of many ears — the New York Times, Stalin supporter Max Boot, to name a couple — which was also entertaining.

Then there were the big lines — including the big and also red line about “obliterating” the regime of North Korea if “Rocket Man” doesn’t stop launching missiles at us or our allies. Such talk thrills the Deplorables at home, but it troubles me because it tells me the generals are telling Trump what a quickee little war it will be against “Rocket Man” — just forget all about China, Russia, whether this might be a trap door into a larger regional war, and all that other strategy stuff. Here, they seem to be displaying their customary lack of forsight, and also negligence, when it comes to a fair appraisal of what US capabilities are like after 16 years of taxing stress on our military resources, which, by the way, they never seem to want to stop.

For some out of the box thinking on the subject — and just the pleasure of seeing a real strategic mind at work — read Admiral James A Lyons’ thoughts on using food as a point of pressure against the regime, food that is currently being provided by the UN to North Korea, where the regime exploits it.

Admiral Lyons writes: “Using `food’ as a weapon to force regime change is not what civilized nations normally do, but North Korea is not a normal nation. It is rogue nation that not only subjects its people to unimaginable humanitarian crises, but is also is ruled by a destabilizing regime that has threatened to cause the deaths of millions of Americans. Therefore, extreme measures are required prior to taking military actions” (emphasis added).

Back to Trump at the UN. My own eyes certainly lit up when the president explained the problem with Venezuela was not that it had implemented socialism poorly, but that Venezuela had implemented socialism faithfully. A marvelous line. More enjoyable still were the gasps, hiccupped laughs and guffaws the line elicited from all of the assembled socialists. In those moments of global upset I realized I could not think of a single UN “member-state” that was not in some large and fundamental ways itself socialist, and that, tragically, includes the USA.

And here we get to the defective foundation of not only the President’s disappointing appeal to “reform” this insidious World Body, but also of the widest possible academic and political consensus on past events, which, naturally, informs current events. That defective foundation is over three-quarters of a century at least of “court history,” not facts, not conclusions, about the subversion of the nations of the world by agents and supporters of world communism, for most of a century directed and supported by Moscow using extensive domestic networks in many countries. The United Nations is and always has been a massive New York outpost of this same global movement, at its core in direct conflict with our democratic republic and constitutional form of government.

The (unasked) question is, how could the UN possibly be anything else? It was created under the aegis of Soviet agent Alger Hiss, whose cover as a senior State Department official was first revealed publicly by Whittaker Chambers in 1948.

When Donald Trump ran for president, he criticized the interventionist policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, sparking fears that he would usher in a new era of American isolationism. But at the U.N. this week, Trump laid out a clear conservative vision for vigorous American global leadership based on the principle of state sovereignty.

Judging from their hysterical reaction, critics on the left now seem to fear he’s the second coming of George W. Bush. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called his address “bombastic.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said it represented an “abdication of values.” And Hillary Clinton said it was “very dark” and “dangerous.” This is all the standard liberal critique of conservative internationalism. The left said much the same about President Ronald Reagan.

In New York, Trump called on responsible nation-states to join the United States in taking on what he called the “scourge” of “a small group of rogue regimes that . . . respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.” This mission can be accomplished, Trump said, only if we recognize that “the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.”

He is right. Communism and fascism were not defeated by the United Nations, and global institutions did not fuel the dramatic expansion of human freedom and prosperity in the past quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. What has inspired and enabled the spread of peace, democracy and individual liberty was the principled projection of power by the world’s democratic countries, led by the United States.

This is what is needed today — and what Trump promised in his address. He recast his “America First” foreign policy as a call not for isolationism but for global leadership by responsible nation-states. He embraced the Marshall Plan — the massive U.S. effort to support Europe’s postwar recovery. And he declared that “if the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph” because “when decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.”

Trump then used this theme of sovereignty to challenge the United States’ two greatest geopolitical adversaries, China and Russia, insisting that “we must reject threats to sovereignty from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.”

The president also had a blunt message for North Korea. He dismissed its leader, Kim Jong Un, as “Rocket Man” and said Kim “is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” He made clear that “the United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” This message rattled some, and that was its intent. During the Cold War, Soviet leaders truly believed that Reagan was preparing for war and might actually launch a first strike. This belief is one of the reasons that a cataclysmic war never took place.

If we hope to avoid war with North Korea today, the regime in Pyongyang must be made to believe and understand that Trump is in fact, as he said at the U.N., “ready, willing and able” to take military action. His tough rhetoric was aimed not just at Pyongyang but also at China and other states whose cooperation in squeezing the regime is necessary for a peaceful solution. Those words must be followed by concrete steps short of total destruction to make clear that he is indeed serious and that North Korea will not be permitted to threaten American cites with nuclear annihilation.

I’ve suggested that Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened, would be more accurately titled Why I Should Have Won. But if you wanted to position it as a sequel to her earlier memoir, Living History, you could title it Rewriting History, because What Happened is a recycling bin full of evasions, misleading statements, and flat-out whoppers.

The biggest lie is the one she has told many times before, on her notorious private email server: “As the FBI had confirmed, none of the emails I sent or received was marked as classified.” She has said this many times before and been called on it many times before. The verdict? “That’s not true,” said then–FBI director James Comey. “False,” said PolitiFact. The Washington Post’s strange fact-checking system initially gave her two Pinocchios, then decided to give her the full four.

On top of the lie, Clinton is being misleading in a familiar Clintonian way, because the law doesn’t distinguish between information that is classified by its nature, despite not being marked as such, and information that is marked classified. “Even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” Comey said at his July 5, 2016, press conference. This means that Hillary caused classified information to be removed from secure channels more than 100 times. That’s supposed to be a felony if gross negligence is involved, and it certainly appeared to be in her case.

Moreover, Clinton says again that setting up the private email server was a matter of “convenience.” This isn’t exactly a lie; having her emails subjected to Freedom of Information Act scrutiny in the thick of a presidential campaign could indeed have been inconvenient to Clinton’s aspirations. She suggests, without quite saying so (the obvious evasion will fool no one acquainted with the Clintons’ methods), that setting up the private email server enabled her to carry only one device. That’s nonsense. Clinton isn’t a harried soccer mom who has room for only one phone in her jacket pocket. Secretaries of state have staffers to schlep their stuff around for them, and anyway, “she used many devices,” Comey said.

The “convenience” claim, which she has been making for two and a half years, earned a “three Pinocchios” rating from the Washington Post’s fact-check column last year. We all know the real reason Clinton set up the server: She wanted her emails shielded from potential disclosure. She wanted the authority to decide which ones were private, and she wanted the ability to destroy them. This cost her dearly.

Like her husband, Clinton lies about the big things, and she lies about the small things. It’s absolutely shameless for her to claim, after mentioning that Bill Clinton was despondent when he lost the 1980 Arkansas governor’s race and “practically couldn’t get off the floor,” that her own reaction was: “That’s not me. I keep going.” The world knows that when she lost last November, she hid in her hotel all night instead of giving a concession speech to her crying supporters gathered across town at New York City’s Javits Center.

Clinton even dismisses a report by “a newspaper” that she “was having séances in the White House to commune directly with Eleanor [Roosevelt]’s spirit.” She states flatly, “I wasn’t.” But pretty much every newspaper reported this, and the reason they all did so was because it came from the single most revered political reporter alive — Bob Woodward, in his book The Choice. And who did Woodward get it from? The New Age psychologist who conducted the sessions with Hillary. The only way the “séance” story is false is if you insist on a semantic distinction between “having conversations with dead people” and “séances,” or maybe a distinction between “having” séances and simply “participating” in them. It’s not an important matter, but it’s a well-known one, for anyone who remembers the 1990s anyway. Lying is an involuntary reflex for the Clintons, like sneezing.

On her current book tour, Hillary Clinton is still blaming the Russians (among others) for her unexpected defeat in last year’s presidential election. She remains sold on a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump successfully colluded with Russian president Vladimir Putin to rig the election in Trump’s favor.

But allegations that a president won an election due to foreign collusion have been lodged by losers of elections throughout history. Some of the charges may have had a kernel of truth, but it has never been proven that foreign tampering changed the outcome of an election.

In 2012, then-president Barack Obama inadvertently left his mic on during a meeting with outgoing Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Obama seemed to be reassuring the Russians that if they would just behave (i.e., give Obama “space”) during his re-election campaign, Obama would have “more flexibility” on Russian demands for the U.S. to drop its plans for an Eastern European missile defense system.

Medvedev’s successor, Vladimir Putin, did stay quiet for most of 2012. Obama did renege on earlier American promises of missile defense in Eastern Europe. And Obama did win re-election.

But that said, Obama would have defeated Mitt Romney anyway, even without an informal understanding with Russia.

In 2004, there were accusations that the George W. Bush administration had struck a deal with the Saudi royal family whereby the Saudis would pump more oil, leading to lower U.S. gas prices. Bush supposedly wanted to take credit for helping American motorists and therefore enhance his re-election bid.

Whether the conspiracy theory was true or not, Bush beat lackluster Democratic nominee John Kerry for lots of reasons other than modest decreases in gasoline prices.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, supporters of incumbent president Jimmy Carter alleged that challenger Ronald Reagan had tried to disrupt negotiations for the release of the American hostages being held in Teheran. They claimed that Reagan’s team had sent word to the Iranians that they should keep the hostages until after the election.

The Reagan team countercharged that Carter himself timed a hostage rescue effort near the election to salvage his failing re-election bid.

The truth was that by November, nothing Reagan or Carter did could change the fact that Carter was going to lose by a large margin.

Sometimes challengers have been accused of turning to foreigners for election help.

There were allegations that in 2008, Obama secretly lobbied Iraqi officials not to cut a deal with the outgoing Bush administration concerning U.S. peacekeepers in Iraq. Supposedly, Obama didn’t want a stable Iraq, which might have helped Iraq War supporter and rival candidate John McCain, who had argued that after the surge, Iraq was largely under control.

Such allegations were mostly irrelevant, given that there were plenty of other reasons why McCain lost the election.

There were also allegations that in 1983, Senator Ted Kennedy sent a letter to Russian leader Yuri Andropov, asking him not to overreact to President Ronald Reagan’s hard-nosed anti-Soviet stance. This was supposedly an attempt to undercut Reagan before the 1984 election. Whether the rumor was true or not was immaterial: Reagan beat Democratic nominee Walter Mondale by a landslide.

Recently, another old charge of foreign collusion has been resurrected. Democrats allege that during the 1968 campaign, Republican nominee Richard Nixon opened a back channel to the South Vietnamese to convince them to stall peace talks to end the Vietnam War. Supposedly, Nixon was worried that President Lyndon Johnson might order a halt to the bombing. Then, Johnson opportunistically would start peace talks in order to help his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, defeat Nixon in the election.

Samantha Power was unmasking United States citizens at an astonishing rate in the final months of the Obama administration, Fox News reported Wednesday evening.

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations unmasked at such a rapid pace that she ended up “averaging more than one request for every working day in 2016,” multiple sources said to Fox. And she continued to seek identifying information about Americans caught up in incidental surveillance right up to President Trump’s inauguration:

Two sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said the requests to identify Americans whose names surfaced in foreign intelligence reporting, known as unmasking, exceeded 260 last year. One source indicated this occurred in the final days of the Obama White House.

The details emerged ahead of an expected appearance by Power next month on Capitol Hill. She is one of several Obama administration officials facing congressional scrutiny for their role in seeking the identities of Trump associates in intelligence reports – but the interest in her actions is particularly high.

In a July 27 letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said the committee had learned “that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama Administration.”

That one official is widely believed to be Power.

Her lawyer, David Pressman, had no comment on this story, but in a previous statement said:

While serving as our Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Power was also a member of the National Security Council responsible for advising the President on the full-range of threats confronting the United States. Any insinuation that Ambassador Power was involved in leaking classified information is absolutely false.

But nobody accused her of leaking classified information. (Not that there aren’t suspicions.) All she’s being accused of doing is seeking a freakishly large number of unmaskings for someone in her position.

It is not unprecedented for a UN ambassador to make an unmasking request, but according to Fox’s sources, the number is normally in the low double digits. Power allegedly requested over 260 unmaskings in Obama’s last year.

During congressional testimony since the unmasking controversy began, National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers has explained that unmasking is handled by the intelligence community in an independent review.

“We [the NSA] apply two criteria in response to their request: number one, you must make the request in writing. Number two, the request must be made on the basis of your official duties, not the fact that you just find this report really interesting and you’re just curious,” he said in June. “It has to tie to your job and finally, I said two but there’s a third criteria, and is the basis of the request must be that you need this identity to understand the intelligence you’re reading.”

Senators Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham have publicly complained that they think they were surveilled. CONTINUE AT SITE

This week CNN is reporting more details on the Obama Administration’s 2016 surveillance of people connected to the presidential campaign of the party out of power. It seems that once President Obama’s appointee to run the FBI, James Comey, had secured authorization for wiretapping, the bureau continued its surveillance into 2017. CNN reports:

US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.

Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.

This means the wiretapping was authorized more than ten months ago and perhaps more than a year ago. It was presumably a tough decision for a judge to issue a secret warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enabling the administration to spy on someone connected with the presidential campaign of its political adversaries.

One would presumably only approve such an order if the request presented by the executive branch was highly compelling and likely to produce evidence that the subject of the wiretap was in fact working with Russia to disrupt U.S. elections. Roughly a year later, as the public still waits for such evidence, this column wonders how this judge is feeling now, especially now that CNN has reported that at least two of its three sources believe the resulting evidence is inconclusive.

One would also presume—or at least hope—that seeking to wiretap associates of the leader of the political opposition is not an everyday occurrence in any administration. At the very least, it seems highly unlikely that such a decision would be made by a mid-level official. CNN notes, “Such warrants require the approval of top Justice Department and FBI officials, and the FBI must provide the court with information showing suspicion that the subject of the warrant may be acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

It seems reasonable for the public to know exactly which officials made this decision and who else they consulted or informed of their surveillance plans. Was the President briefed on the details of this investigation?

And as for the information showing suspicion, where did the FBI come up with that? A September 7 column from the Journal’s Kim Strassel raises disturbing questions, based on recent events and a Washington Post story from last winter. Ms. Strassel writes:

The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation took a sharp and notable turn on Tuesday, as news broke that it had subpoenaed the FBI and the Justice Department for information relating to the infamous Trump “dossier.” That dossier, whose allegations appear to have been fabricated, was commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and then developed by a former British spook named Christopher Steele. ..

The Washington Post in February reported that Mr. Steele “was familiar” to the FBI, since he’d worked for the bureau before. The newspaper said Mr. Steele had reached out to a “friend” at the FBI about his Trump work as far back as July 2016. The Post even reported that Mr. Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”

Hillary Clinton should have paid more attention to her husband’s former adviser Paul Begala, who once said, “Never interrupt your opponent when he’s destroying himself.” And even if the former Democratic nominee resists that strategy, her party might want to insist on it. Because Clinton’s highly publicized and problematic book tour is rescuing President Trump from a political corner into which he had largely painted himself.

Trump has had a bumpy month with his base, thanks to some surprise engagements with Democratic leadership and a continuing reshuffle of White House personnel. His core group of populist voters have become restive, with anxiety growing over the president’s commitment to the border wall and immigration enforcement. Isolationists drawn to his primary campaign have expressed dismay over his escalation of personnel in Afghanistan. When Trump undercut Republicans in their attempts to leverage the debt ceiling for budget cuts, many hardcore Trump supporters flipped out.

Thus far, the president’s base has still mostly held together even through these twists and turns, but not everyone has remained on the “Trump Train.” Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter has repeatedly offered harsh criticisms of Trump as he looks to broaden his appeal, especially after a tweet that indicated the much-ballyhooed border wall might be more of a renovation and beefing up of existing barriers on the southern border, at least in the near term. After White House director of legislative affairs Marc Short announced that Trump would cut a deal to enshrine the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in statute, Coulter blasted Trump for allowing “the swamp” to overwhelm his presidency.

In any administration, the transition from campaigning to governing presents challenges. Presidents find that promises made might not be realistic after all. But voters expect to see results quickly, and it takes some finesse and salesmanship to keep them in the fold while negotiating through a three-branch federal system designed explicitly to force cooperation on policy.

For Trump, the challenge is even more difficult, as he ran as an outsider who could “drain the swamp” and disrupt business as usual in Washington, D.C. Eight months into office, his supporters still back him, but some of them have begun to doubt him. Until this month, Trump repeatedly cast Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as villains blocking his initiatives in order to delegitimize his presidency. His direct negotiations with the two Democratic leaders on the debt ceiling and DACA robbed him of that argument, at least for the near future, and raised questions about whether Trump might start aligning with liberals to get some legislative wins.

Things were looking bad for the president … until Hillary elbowed her way back onto the national stage.

In an NPR interview Monday for her campaign memoir What Happened, Clinton seemed to suggest to Terry Gross that she might launch a legal fight to contest the 2016 election results.

“Would you completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election,” Gross asked, “if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now?”

“No,” Clinton replied, “I would not.” When Gross persisted, Clinton reiterated, “No, I would not rule it out.”

Now, none of this should be read as Clinton insisting on a do-over, or even planning to challenge the nearly year-old election results. But the fact that she won’t rule it out is illustrative of her ongoing delusions.

Let’s remember that no one has ever suggested that votes got changed via outside interference, nor did vote-counting machines get corrupted. Thanks to Jill Stein’s challenges in the so-called Blue Wall states that gave Trump his victory, we have recounts that validated the Election Night totals in both Michigan and Wisconsin. Other than recounts on a state-by-state basis, there are no legal means to change election results, let alone throw out a presidential election and demand a do-over.

Remember, too, that Clinton herself demanded that Trump accept the outcome of the election in a presidential debate last October. When Trump said he’d wait and see how the election was conducted, Clinton called the remark “a direct threat to our democracy.” In further remarks, Clinton added, “He’s denigrating — he’s talking down our democracy. I for one am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our major two parties would take that kind of position.”

My, how one’s position changes when the ox that gets gored is one’s own.

Wiretapping: The U.S. government under President Obama wiretapped former Trump campaign Chair Paul Manafort in New York’s Trump Tower under “secret court orders before and after the election,” CNN reported, citing “three sources familiar with the investigation.” Assuming CNN’s report is true, it means President Trump, who was ridiculed earlier this year for claiming that his iconic building had been wiretapped, has been massively vindicated. But don’t hold your breath waiting for an apology.

Just months ago, Trump was called a liar and worse for his tweets alleging that Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped.

“Terrible!” Trump tweeted on March 4. “Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

Some suggested he was paranoid, had lost his mind or was flat-out lying, and CNN — which, to its credit, broke the wiretapping story — was among the worst in the mainstream media.

Actor James Woods, active on Twitter, compared the shifting headlines from CNN on the allegations over the past six months:

CNN, Sunday, March 5, 2017: “Trump’s baseless wiretap claim”

September 5, 2017: “Donald Trump just flat-out lied about Trump Tower wiretapping”

September 18, 2017: “Exclusive: US government wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman”

That about says it all. And on that last headline, it’s important to note that not only was Manafort working out of Trump Tower, he was living there. So the claim, again if true, means Trump was 100% correct about being wiretapped.

This is more than just “I told you so.” The entire investigation into alleged Trump campaign ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election appears to center on the wiretaps of Manafort, whose consulting work included some foreign political groups, including in Ukraine.

Even so, top U.S. intelligence officials have steadfastly and adamantly denied any wiretap of Trump. CONTINUE AT SITE