As recently as May 18, 2020, long after the last echoes of #UkraineFirst bureaucrats and #AmericaLast liberal law professors had faded, House Democrats were still filing pleadings asserting an active impeachment investigation remains underway. If they spent half the time legislating that they spend investigating, Americans would have better roads, cleaner air, and better health care. But it isn’t about the American people to the radical Left—it is about power and power at all costs. Trump shocked the world by taking control from the elites of Permanent Washington. They wanted it back. They still do. And they may yet get it. In politics, there are neither permanent defeats nor permanent victories. We must keep fighting.
To quit is to admit their defeat. They can’t abandon the strategy of trying to delegitimize President Trump and our movement, because they’ve seen that they can’t beat us in fair debates, open hearings, or fraud-free presidential elections. Politics used to be “win the argument, win the vote,” but if the vote can be subverted and overturned, well, why participate politically? Better to demonize, denigrate, and destroy than debate.
The Russia hoax was born of Obama’s train-wreck foreign policy and Hillary’s failed candidacy. The straight-to-DVD Ukrainian impeachment sequel followed the scuttled Russia hoax. Had they succeeded with Russia, you better believe you wouldn’t know the name of any Ukrainian president or prosecutor—not unless you were Joe Biden keeping track of familial kickbacks.
In the fights still to come, remember: Speaker Pelosi doesn’t lack political skill. Her strategy and tactics changed from Russia to Ukraine. They continue changing. We didn’t beat her then and won’t beat the radical Left now by gently lecturing in dulcet tones that people on our side should contain their “outrage.” We were at our best when we were on offense—like General Grant!
Every part of the swamp wants its shot at our president. First, the FBI failed with the Russia hoax, then the State Department crowd in Foggy Bottom failed with the Ukraine hoax. Impeachment proves that conservatives lose when we wait and see. We win when we take bold action and hit back hard—harder than they do.
I wasn’t on the Judiciary Committee just to politely take lectures from law professors who couldn’t win an election for the Mosquito Control Board but whose hatred for President Trump triggered their anti-democratic impulses. I wasn’t sleeping on a cot in the Longworth Office Building four nights a week so some #AmericaLast Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduates could substitute their foreign-funded “studied” judgment for that of those of us who had successfully earned the trust of American voters. That’s not how it works when America is at her best.
The Ukraine saga taught us how we must keep fighting in the era of Trump: unapologetically, sometimes loudly, with all we’ve got.
It started with what President Trump would later dub “a perfect call.”
September 25, 2019
The White House. Roosevelt Room.
The Wall Street Journal had explosive reporting. President Trump had, on eight occasions, directly and explicitly threatened the president of Ukraine, they alleged. Either fork over dirt on Biden to help me win an election, or I’ll withhold the weapons you want, so the story went. The Journal said a transcript existed of the call. A whistleblower had firsthand evidence!
I was about to learn that none of it was true.
About a dozen senators and representatives sat nervously under the portrait of Theodore Rex, raised up on his magnificent horse in obvious triumph of some kind. We were young and old. Male and female. Moderates and right-wingers. Our commonality was that we had been selected by the White House to review the Trump-Zelensky phone call transcript for the first time. We were the supporters the president knew he needed on the front lines, going line by line.
“The reporting is false,” said White House Counsel Pat Cipollone as he handed out the transcript. “The president is going to be releasing this transcript today. Once people see it, this should all go away. I honestly don’t get what all the fuss is about.” Pat is a brilliant legal mind but, like the rest of us, he clearly misjudged the power of an unquenched craving for impeachment.
Sen. Ron Johnson is a Ukraine policy encyclopedia. After several minutes of group silent reading, he blurted out, “This is it? This is nothing. We’ve been trying to get Ukraine to clean up their act for years. President Trump was reinforcing what Republicans and Democrats have been working towards with Zelensky. He’s obviously looking out for our country.”
About time, if you ask me. Senators Barack Obama and Chuck Hagel spent billions of your dollars in the Ukraine, that most corrupt of European countries, to pay the Ukrainians not to arm up. Rather hilariously, the senators offered the same deal to Russia, which wisely realized that if Ukraine disarmed, Russia could just take what it wanted from them. And that is exactly what ended up happening.
Democrats, who once joined Senator Ron Johnson in signing bipartisan letters urging action against rampant corruption in Ukraine, would soon act as if the place were the Garden of Eden, free of all sin. They suddenly contended it was ridiculous and possibly criminal for heightened investigations into dirty deeds in the former Soviet satellite state. Trump asking President Zelensky to help was tantamount to treason!
Goldman Sachs labeled Ukraine the third-most corrupt country in the world in which to do business. It’s a big world, with lots of corrupt places. International money flows through Ukraine in—shall we say—odd ways. To attack a U.S. president for asking why is insane.
Several Biden allies and former Obama administration intelligence operatives on the call sensed a potential threat to the establishment’s brand-new (yet quite old) Great White Hope, Joe Biden. As Biden appeared likely to become the Democratic presidential nominee, these hacks couldn’t just sit back and do nothing while
