I’ve got an entire chapter in my book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama that asks whether Donald Trump was ever really president during what officially was his first term. We had some debate during the production of the book between the publisher, the editor, and me over whether it was a good idea to offer up that topic as part of the book’s argument.

It seems like that argument is over, and the answer is “no.”

This isn’t intended as an insult to Trump, please understand. Quite the contrary. Within the boundaries of what he was capable of doing, he was a very successful president. (READ MORE: The Democrat Party is a Cult)

But those boundaries were tighter than in any presidency of modern times. We have to accept that now.

Now It’s Clear That Trump Was Undermined

And what ended the argument was something, ironically enough, that Mark Zuckerberg said.

The big headline coming out of Zuckerberg’s letter to the House Judiciary Committee was the Biden administration’s pressure on Facebook to suppress content, mostly involving what was considered “misinformation” about COVID-19 treatments, masks, and vaccines. But what flew in under the radar was that he also reaffirmed that the FBI pressured Facebook and other platforms owned by parent company Meta to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Let’s remember that polling following the 2020 election showed that some number near 10 percent of the votes Joe Biden garnered in that election would not have been available to him had the laptop story been given its due amount of oxygen. The Hunter Biden laptop reporting paints a clear picture of a corrupt political family trading influence to unsavory foreign actors in contravention of U.S. interests.

Furthermore, the laptop was a confirmation of what those of us who were paying attention knew; namely, that one of the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling clients was a gang of Ukrainian corruptocrats who exchanged a board seat on a mobbed-up natural gas company to the former vice president’s son for a mountain of foreign-aid swag and some well-placed favors. Like, for example, when a state prosecutor in Ukraine looked into the goings-on at that mobbed-up natural gas company, they asked Biden to get him fired, and voila:

In a sane country, the laptop would have blown open the rancid corruption of the Biden crime family and made him utterly unelectable — and the Democrats in Congress who had impeached Trump for having attempted to spur cooperation to get to the bottom of it would have been on the defensive for their votes, at least in swing districts.

But this is no longer a sane country. Trump was supposed to be the president in 2020, and the FBI was actively attempting to destroy his presidency by pressuring social media platforms to suppress true information about his opponent’s corruption.

Who Was Actually in Control?

And then, some 51 intelligence community spooks with security clearances showed up in a letter claiming that the New York Post’s reporting of what was on that laptop was “Russian disinformation” — an abject and obvious lie that has gone unpunished even to date.

This was merely a cherry on top of what had been four years of a rolling coup d’etat against a duly elected American president. It began even before Trump took office when the fraudulent Trump-Russia scandal was ginned up by the Hillary Clinton campaign and then weaponized by the outgoing Obama administration. You’ll remember that they took out Mike Flynn, who was to be Trump’s national security adviser, for the blameless action of having conversations with his Russian counterparts and then remembering those conversations differently than the FBI’s surveillance showed. That begat an investigation aimed at proving Trump was colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election, an absurd, weaponized charge that resulted in nothing other than a hamstrung presidential administration and an electoral wipeout in the 2018 midterms. (READ MORE: New York’s Broken Windows)

Not that Trump’s agenda fared all that well in a House and Senate run by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, respectively. Save for his tax reforms, very little was accomplished through legislative means.

Then there was the impeachment, and then there was the sabotage of his administration by the public health bureaucracy’s dictated response to the COVID pandemic — as the Chinese state media organs attacked Trump and other “populist” leaders like Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonairo as “not up to the challenge” the virus presented:

Again — who was actually in control?

The Disease No One Wanted to Cure

Every time Trump offered some new idea for dealing with the virus he found himself shouted down by a hostile media and abandoned by the members of his administration supposedly helping him to govern. It happened when Trump stated, based on the clear evidence available, that the COVID-19 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was treated as irresponsible by Anthony Fauci and others. It happened when Trump mentioned that hydroxychloroquine had shown positive properties in helping some COVID patients avoid hospitalization.

It happened when Trump mentioned a procedure by which doctors at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles were experimenting with ultraviolet radiation to disinfect the lungs of COVID patients on ventilators (this was where the idiotic and false narrative that Trump was suggesting people “inject bleach” to kill the virus). Each time there was silence, if not outright rejection, of Trump’s attempts to find a way past the virus. (READ MORE: The RFK Jr. Bump)

I said at the time that COVID-19 was the disease no one in the government wanted to cure. And I was right. They wanted a maximum in negative effects from the virus because it was destroying Trump’s presidency. Deborah Birx all but said as much in her book, which was full of stories about how she lied and obfuscated to thwart the White House’s efforts to make COVID-19 policy.

In a very real sense, Trump was barely president. He certainly didn’t wield power in the way we’re accustomed to an American president would.

And despite this, he’s running against an unrecognized cabal of people, with Kamala Harris as their new frontman, who concocted and are spraying out a narrative of Trump as a dictator. That’s a level of projection AMC Theaters would be proud of.

Perhaps Trump is to blame, at least to an extent, for allowing his first term to be stymied as it was. Or perhaps the American people are to blame for allowing our republic to be so corrupted.

But most of all, the blame should chiefly rest on the unrecognized cabal of Deep State elites who robbed the American people of the reckoning that Trump’s 2016 victory was intended to be.

That reckoning is yet to be unrealized all these years later. It must come. And it must carry some accrued interest.