Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you’ve got to admit one thing. The changing of the guard has rarely changed much. At least that’s how it’s been during my lifetime, save a few exceptions.
Off the top of my head, those exceptions happen to be Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
Fun fact: Reagan was 69 years old when he was sworn into his first term in 1981. He was the oldest first term president ever, until 2017, when Trump was sworn in at the age of 70. One might assume Biden would be the age record-holder; but that’s just the dementia talking.
Tonight, while pondering the presidential legacies of modern history, I came to a conclusion. Political change works in much the same way as building credit. You can spend ten years working diligently to build your score up to a 750, and then ruin it in less than ten months with just a few failed moves. Washington DC is the same way. Trump spent four years building us into something great again, and in four weeks Biden had returned us to the path of total destruction.
Sadly, Democracy doesn’t work the way we’re brought up believing it will work. One would think that party politics work together to advance our country. We assume the party in power will have this great agenda built around the biggest problems that need tackling, and the opposing party will act as a safeguard, keeping the train on the tracks, so to speak. And the President is the conductor, leading us through the tunnels.
If we’re sticking with the train analogy, Donald Trump upgraded us to the bullet train. And Biden derailed us. But it’s not quite that simple, because there’s another force at play. One we rarely speak about or acknowledge.
Permanent Washington.
Permanent Washington is the force of unelected people who are behind the scenes “getting things done”, whether they be DOJ, FBI, CIA, or even mainstream media. They shape the narrative. And no story better highlights this than the tale of Richard Nixon.
In 1972, Nixon was impeached, and as such, he resigned the presidency, only to be replaced by Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history. I became curious about Nixon in 1998. I was on bedrest with my first baby when I laid on the couch watching Clinton’s impeachment hearings begin. This was long before Google, and at the time, my knowledge of Nixon was summed up with the few things my school history books said about him- a disgraced politician. A criminal, despised by the majority of Americans.
The only problem was that most people I spoke to about politics said the same thing– “I really liked Nixon”. There’s quite a difference between “despised criminal” and “really liked”, but I chalked it up to the fact that I didn’t go around talking politics with everyone I met. My momma always said there are two things you don’t talk to strangers about: politics and religion. So, unless I was at a debate tournament, I kept my opinions to myself, politically at least.
Recently, my momma and I had a conversation about Nixon which brought that discrepancy back to mind. So, I started to do a little digging. I was a bit amazed to find that Nixon was actually a “people’s president” who won his re-election by the largest margin EVER recorded- 17 million votes.
What really happened?
Apparently, Nixon believed a sort-of shadow government was in charge. He couldn’t have been more right!
Tucker Carlson explains:
On June 23, 1972, Nixon met with the then–CIA director, Richard Helms, at the White House. During the conversation, which thankfully was tape-recorded, Nixon suggested he knew “who shot John,” meaning President John F. Kennedy. Nixon further implied that the CIA was directly involved in Kennedy’s assassination, which we now know it was. Helms’s telling response? Total silence, but for Nixon, it didn’t matter because it was already over. Four days before, on June 19, The Washington Post had published the first of many stories about a break-in at the Watergate office building.
Unbeknownst to Nixon and unreported by The Washington Post, four of the five burglars worked for the CIA. The first of many dishonest Watergate stories was written by a 29-year-old metro reporter called Bob Woodward. Who exactly was Bob Woodward? Well, he wasn’t a journalist. Bob Woodward had no background whatsoever in the news business. Instead, Bob Woodward came directly from the classified areas of the federal government. Shortly before Watergate, Woodward was a naval officer at the Pentagon.
He had a top-secret clearance. He worked regularly with the intel agencies. At times, Woodward was even detailed to the Nixon White House, where he interacted with Richard Nixon’s top aides. Soon after leaving the Navy, for reasons that have never been clear, Woodward was hired by the most powerful news outlet in Washington and assigned the biggest story in the country.
Just to make it crystal clear what was actually happening, Woodward’s main source for his Watergate series was the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt, and Mark Felt ran — and we’re not making this up — the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which was designed to secretly discredit political actors, the federal agencies wanted to destroy — people like Richard Nixon. And at the same time, those same agencies were also working to take down Nixon’s elected vice president, Spiro Agnew. In the fall of 1973, Agnew was indicted for tax evasion and forced to resign. His replacement was a colorless congressman from Grand Rapids called Gerald Ford.
Why Ford?
There was nothing extraordinary about Ford. Sort of like Mike Pence… just a run of the mill politician.
Carlson continues:
What was Ford’s qualification for the job? Well, he had served on the Warren Commission, which absolved the CIA of responsibility for President Kennedy’s murder. Nixon was strong-armed into accepting Gerald Ford by Democrats in Congress. “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford,” Speaker of the House Carl Albert later boasted. Eight months later, Gerald Ford of the Warren Commission was the president of the United States. See how that works? So those are the facts, not speculation. All of that actually happened. None of it’s secret. Most of it actually is on Wikipedia, but no mainstream news organization has ever told that story. It’s so obvious, yet it’s intentionally ignored and as a result, permanent Washington remains in charge of our political system.
Unelected lifers in the federal agencies make the biggest decisions in American government and crush anyone who tries to rein them in and in the process, our democracy becomes a joke. Now, you may have noticed that the very first person in the Trump administration the agencies went after was Gen. Michael Flynn. Why Flynn? Because Mike Flynn was a career Army intel officer who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency. In other words, Mike Flynn knew exactly how the system worked, and as a result, he was capable of fighting back. Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI lured Mike Flynn into a meeting without his lawyer, concocted a series of fake crimes and forced him to resign.
So, that’s how things actually work in Washington. Let’s stop lying about it. Joe Biden, meanwhile, whooped like a hyena when the Justice Department destroyed Mike Flynn. So, there is, we have to say, a certain perverse justice in watching something very similar happen to Joe Biden himself six years later. Joe Biden does not deserve our sympathy. He’s being shafted, but don’t weep for him, and yet, the rest of us do deserve a better system, an actual democracy. When people nobody voted for run everything, you are not living in a free country.
So what does all this have to do with the real threat Donald Trump poses?
Simple. Trump was willing to get rid of “Permanent Washington” by draining the swamp from every corner. Of course, he was not without mistakes. While Trump made huge strides, his mission was not yet accomplished when the 2020 election happened. Those behind-the-scenes power-players saw Trump as a threat to their way of life, so they were forced to take him out.
Everything that has gone wrong since is because no one saw Trump coming, and once he got here, he was making way too many waves. However, Permanent Washington shouldn’t have that kind of power. That’s the biggest threat to democracy we will ever face, and frankly, it should scare everyone. You know, as a kid, I thought I wanted to grow up and be the first female president. Now, I wouldn’t take the job if you quadrupled the salary, begged me to do it, and threw in Biden’s Corvette.
