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The desperate Dems, pole-axed by Trump’s fast start on his second term, have revved up their TDS Rube Goldberg scandal machine. The so-called SignalGate affair is being vigorously flogged, with the usual help from Republican Fifth Columnists. But the “-gate” suffix doesn’t mean what the Democrats think it does.
Recently, a group meeting including Trump, Vice President Vance, Def Sec Peter Hegseth, and other defense and national security officials, convened to discuss a punitive attack on Yemen’s Houthi terrorists, and inadvertently included Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, best known for his inveterate, hysterical hatred of Donald Trump, and his eager peddling of the preposterous Russia hoax.
More interesting is the use of the “-gate” suffix, which in addition to being a lazy cliché, should remind us that the Watergate “scandal” birthed the progressives’ half-century-old paradigm for eliminating political enemies by violating the Constitution, relying on lawfare, and unleashing the Dems’ media press agents who disseminate their propaganda.
But the suffix “gate” doesn’t signify a president’s “dirty tricks,” failed attempts to cover them up, or intrepid reporters, judges, and prosecutors doggedly exposing the truth, as the received wisdom has it; but rather the corruption of the media and the bipartisan political establishment. Moreover, the near-decade-long attacks on Trump are the manifestation of postwar progressives who, like their communist kissing cousins, pursue their malign aims by using tactics like “any means necessary,” and “never letting a crisis go to waste,” which means inventing crises when none exists.
SignalGate’s primary target after Donald Trump has been Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, who’s been demonize by the Dems as singularly and dangerously unsuitable for that post. As Cynical Publius writes on X (@CynicalPublius): “The reason why the Democrat/Media Complex keeps droning on about SignalGate and ‘Hegseth must resign’ is that they are trying to repeat their successes in 2017 of pushing out Jeff Sessions as AG and General Mike Flynn as NSA on fabricated ‘scandals.’”
The Trump administration saw these tactics increase geometrically during his first term, which was crippled by incessant lies and hoaxes turbocharged by the corruption of the DOJ, FBI, and Federal prosecutors, all zealously publicized by the lamestream media.
Then, in 2020 their efforts succeeded in stopping Trump’s reelection, with the help, inter alia multa, of weaponized Covid mitigation protocols––such as lock-downs that doubled the number of 2016’s notoriously corruptible mail-in ballots— and a 12th hour, widely publicized letter signed by 51 national security and intelligence “experts” who fraudulently claimed that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell,” as real journalist Miranda Devine called it, was a product of Russian kompromat.
All these corrupt tactics may seem novel, but their fons et origo is the Watergate “scandal,” which has become for the Dems a byword for Republican corruption, and for conservatives the epitome of the Democrats’ suborning the integrity of the corporate media and the federal judiciary.
The truth of Watergate has been known since the Eighties. A few years ago, writing in The American Spectator, Francis P. Sempa provided a survey of the skeptics’ arguments and evidence. Historian Paul Johnson, for example called Watergate a “media putsch,” the fruit of an “anti-Nixon campaign” that was “continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful.” And don’t forget, Sempa reminds us, that “Woodward and Bernstein were being fed ‘information’ and ‘leads’ by the then-deputy director of the FBI, who was angry at Nixon because Nixon didn’t appoint him as FBI director to succeed J. Edgar Hoover” ––a powerful reminder that anonymous informants are frequently the fruit from a poison tree.
Even more redolent of the attacks against Trump is this observation: “‘After Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972,’ Johnson notes, one powerful news editor proclaimed, ‘There’s got to be a bloodletting. We’ve got to make sure that nobody ever thinks of doing anything like this again.’ ‘The aim,’ Johnson wrote, ‘was to use the power of the press and TV to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972, which was felt to be, in some metaphorical sense, illegitimate.’ “Some in the media,” Sempa writes, “started referring to the ‘Nixon regime,’ as if Nixon’s 49-state electoral victory was somehow anti-democratic.”
Particularly comprehensive are three books by Geoff Shepherd, especially The Real Watergate Scandal (2015), which Sempa says “shatters the conventional Woodward–Bernstein ‘history’ of Watergate peddled by the mainstream media and other Nixon haters.”
Shepherd’s precis of that book lays out the true corruption at the heart of the “Watergate
scandal”:
“Nixon was done in by the officers of the court, the very people sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution––federal judges and federal prosecutors, who met in secret and reached backroom deals on how best to take him down and secure convictions of his senior aides . . . documents at the National Archive . . .make clear that as the Watergate scandal unfolded, federal judges hearing the Watergate case held secret meetings with persons whose interests were adverse to President Nixon’s and his top aides’. The most outrageous of these confidential gatherings were the ex parte meetings between judges and Watergate prosecutors.
Secret meetings, secret documents, secret collusion between judges and prosecutors, culminating in the reversal of the will of the people expressed in President Nixon’s re-election . . . the subversion of the right to due process guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Constitution was part of the conscious plan to engineer the downfall of the president.”
American democracy from the start has featured bouts of political corruption, the “politics of personal destruction,” and numerous other violations of our so-called “norms” regularly used as rhetorical cudgels against Trump. But you have to go back to Abraham Lincoln’s administration to find the level of invective, lies, and blatant violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, all swaddled in narcissistic self-righteousness and hypocrisy, as we’ve witnessed being inflicted on Donald Trump, his administration, and especially his supporters––those “bitter clingers” and “deplorables.”
Here, too, our times echo the Nixon era’s elite snobs, who never forgave him for graduating from obscure Whittier College instead of from an Ivy, and for being an anticommunist and, as Paul Johnson wrote, “for outing Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy in the late 1940s.” Trump’s offenses comprise “his low-brow” MAGA supporters, his often brutal and funny straight talk, his defeat of the Dems political grande dame Hillary Clinton, and especially his undoing their machinations in 2020 to deny him a second term and, adding insult to the injury, winning the popular vote and Congress, and having one of the most popular and action-filled starts to a presidency in recent history.
Most of all, unlike Richard Nixon, who resigned rather than fight the political snobs who turned his name into a leftist joke, Donald Trump fought back against the political establishment. Republicans need remember this contrast between Nixon and Trump, and stop being bamboozled with lectures about “civility” and “norms” and other gate-keeping tools of exclusion, and just “fight, fight, fight!”
