[T]he story of Trump's rise and fall and redemption isn't over yet. If he doesn't drive Barack Obama out of Washington, D.C., and dismantle his private- and public-sector network, Trump can still ultimately lose. His first term was undermined by Obama allies in U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and there's evidence that the heart of the resistance is now ensconced inside the Pentagon and already poised to fight him. This threatens not only the Trump presidency but also the stability of the country. After fulfilling campaign promises to close the borders, embark on a massive deportation program sending millions of illegal aliens home, and appoint an attorney general capable of restoring the rule of law, the president-elect's top priority must be to bring an end to the Obama era.
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Obama never hid his role as the real center of power during Joe Biden's term. When he retired the old man to make way for the candidate he's preferred since at least 2019, Obama simply grabbed the mic and took center stage. The "Kamala Harris" campaign--whose "New Way Forward" slogan he premiered--was, in reality, just another Barack Obama campaign...
Smith analyzes Obama's election night message, noting that Obama has once again established the predicate for an unconstitutional attack by the bureaucracy on the elected president. Obama claim that the forces of democracy lost "all around the world" to the forces of authoritarianism, therefore obligating the Deep State to fight Trump.
Just like the did for the past nine years.
No doubt this document was read, drafted, and revised dozens of times by a team of Obama loyalists to ensure that every word served a purpose. "Around the world" is intended to underscore the small "d" in democratic--Obama is not talking about an American political party but rather a political system. Trump didn't beat Democrats, he thwarted democracy by defeating its defenders. In contrast to Harris, Trump is more like a right-wing fascist, or an authoritarian strongman, like Vladimir Putin, for instance. Thus, in the context of democracy, Trump's presidency is not legitimate. And that calls for resistance.
Immediately after Hillary Clinton's 2016 defeat, Obama set in motion the multi-pronged operation to undermine his successor. Obama told his FBI Director James Comey to continue the investigation, and surveillance, of the president-elect that was initiated while Trump was the GOP candidate. Further, the outgoing president directed CIA chief John Brennan to produce an official assessment asserting that Trump owed the presidency to Putin. By using the U.S. government's official imprimatur to validate the conspiracy theory that Trump had been compromised by a foreign power, Obama delegitimized Trump's presidency at its birth and divided the country. Now Obama is looking for another play, and it appears that it involves splitting the armed forces.
Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed Pentagon personnel to carry out a smooth transition and reminded them "to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command."
It's not the first time an outgoing Pentagon chief counseled his subordinates to abide by their oaths to the Constitution--what's of potential concern is that the phrase "lawful orders" appears to contain a warning that some military officials' decisions regarding lawful orders may be shaped by anti-Trump animus. What orders is Austin referring to? First, Trump has indicated he might use the military to assist in carrying out his incoming administration's operation to deport illegal immigrants. Further, the Trump White House is planning to shrink the size of the bureaucracy, which also includes Pentagon officials. The resistance has already picked up on the cues left in Austin's message.
For instance, in a report on Pentagon officials discussing how to respond in the event Trump issued unlawful orders, CNN correspondent Natasha Bertrand emphasized the threat implicit in Austin's wording and wrote that "the US military will obey only lawful orders." Bertrand famously drove the Trump-Russia narrative with leaks from intelligence officials, and in October 2020, she was first to report on the letter authored by 51 former spies falsely claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation." That is, the CNN reporter is a delivery mechanism for anti-Trump information operations, and this particular op has been in the works for nearly a year.
In January, NBC News reported that former Obama officials and Democratic Party operatives were already plotting to derail Trump's agenda under the pretext that he was aiming to use U.S. military to implement his political agenda...
The scenarios were made public on July 30 in an obvious media rollout, with stories in The Bulwark, where Brooks herself sketched the scenarios; The Washington Post, in a piece authored by Gellman; as well as The New Republic and The Guardian, the last of which gave the most detail on the various war games. One scenario posits the possibility "that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests." In other words, riots designed to block Trump policies would be as bad or worse than the spring and summer 2020 George Floyd riots when Trump reportedly entertained the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act. Those social justice demonstrations left 19 dead and caused billions of dollars worth of damage in dozens of cities across the country.
"In the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise," according to the Guardian report, "the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement." The account relayed that as the scenario unfolded, Trump fired the officers who disobeyed his orders and replaced them with officers who implemented them.
A "tabletop exercise" wargaming the Deep State's insurrection against Trump. Very much like the tabletop exercise the FBI put the media through in 2020, gaming out a scenario in which Russia leaks, get this, a faked/altered version of Hunter Biden's laptop. Pre-programming the media to treat the real laptop as a Russian fake, while all along, the FBI already knew the laptop was real.