A dissident history of the Trump campaign and presidency (Part 1)

The 2015-2016 campaign

This is part 1 of 3 of a series looking back at the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. Part 1 deals with the Trump 2015-2016 campaign, Part 2 will look at Trump’s presidency, and Part 3 will look at the 2020 election.

This is a look back at the Trump 2015/2016 campaign and presidency from a dissident perspective. It’s hard to believe these events were almost a decade ago; I was intensely following every tick and update in the news cycle as it happened, and it served as my second major update to my political worldview (the first was the 2007/2008 online political rants by Mencius Moldbug, which have been preserved online here if you scroll down a bit; he hasn’t said anything useful in years, but I’ll always be grateful for his early writings on what he referred to as the “Cathedral”). Trump’s efforts and the intense governmental and media responses to him led me to a more concrete understanding of the “deep state” and the NPC phenomenons, while the so-called “COVID pandemic” opened my eyes to the global structure of the modern world. His presidency, for all its trials and tribulations, was a unique one that stood apart from both the Democrats and the Republicans that came before him, and for that it is worthy of study. As I get older and my memory fades a bit as the details retreat into the past, as younger generations come up without having experienced it, as historians begin to try to shape history with their subjectivity and spin, and as we head into the 2024 election cycle with Trump’s potential imprisonment, it’s helpful to write down my own perspective of what transpired.¹

All of the following is from memory without relying on any underlying books or long-form support. I experienced it all in the moment and this should offer a different perspective.

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Trump declares his candidacy

Trump famously launched his presidential campaign on June 16, 2015, riding down the escalator at Trump Tower two days after his birthday. He was sixty nine years old.

Trump had previously run for president on the Reform Party ticket in 2000 in what was widely considered to be a marketing gimmick, ultimately withdrawing after sabotaging the candidacy of Patrick Buchanan², and he had considered running for president in both 1988 and in 2012, the latter of which he ended up supporting “binders full of women” Mitt Romney. Still, one can compare Trump’s relative lack of eloquence in 2015 with this interview he gave with Oprah in the 1980s and see a substantial difference, a difference which has only grown over time (and the same would apply to other elderly politicians such as Joe Biden):

It was unclear what made Trump decide to run this time around: some argued it was another marketing stunt to promote his brand, some argued Trump was doing it selflessly to improve America in his advanced age (after all, why take on the headache otherwise? He was living an amazing life), and some argued it was a Democrat ploy to create chaos in the Republican camp by splitting the globalist and populist wings of the party by running as a comically far-right populist - as Trump was a registered Democrat from 2001-2009 and was good friends with many powerful liberal politicians, including Bill and Hillary Clinton who attended his 2005 wedding to Melania (and both had connections to Jeffrey Epstein, although only Bill had visited Epstein’s island and flown on his plane on many occasions):

The Clinton’s at Trump’s wedding

Indeed, Bill Clinton “casually encouraged” Trump to run on this basis.

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Trump’s strategy

The GOP strategy for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney had been a “big tent” strategy — they assumed they would get the white and Christian vote, and so they spent much of their time “reaching out” to socially liberal independents, hispanics, and women and ignoring their base. Trump’s strategy would go the other direction: even though whites were a rapidly falling percent of the U.S.’s population (65%~ or so, down rapidly from 90% at the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act) and were increasingly an aging demographic, his approach would be to juice and energize this demographic by appealing to anti-immigration, protectionist, and law and order sentiments, perceived as “dog whistles” for all the -isms and -phobias out there (i.e. see this Washington Post article claiming that “America First” was a Nazi code signal, also here). Whites felt like a despised, dis-privileged and long-forgotten group by the establishment³, with a rapidly shrinking middle class status and if he could tap into their desires and provide them a voice, there was the off-chance that their enthusiasm could launch him right to the top. He wanted to model his themes around restoring the greatness of America much as Ronald Reagan had done (indeed, the “Make America Great Again” slogan came from Reagan):

Trump would double down on these sentiments at every opportunity and never apologize, in affect widening the otherwise ever-narrowing Overton window when he wasn’t punished for his outbursts. He would speak from the hip and from the heart, not relying on teleprompters or media strategists; he already had many decades dealing with the media and being in the spotlight and he was in his element. For example, he claimed that Mexico “wasn’t sending their best” where “they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people”, then doubled down on it:

These comments were common, and it was completely without precedent.

Pushback from the media was weak despite his statements; he was considered a clown figure who had no chance of winning either the nomination or the presidency, and it was assumed he would turn off independents and cause lots of chaos in the Republican party just as the Clintons had hoped for. There were many Republicans extremely turned off by his crassness, his casual racisms, his unpresidential speaking style, including many normal voters who expressed these sentiments to me personally - they cared a lot about rhetoric and style, presentation, and to them Trump made a mockery of the whole system (indeed, the mockery of the system was one of the main selling points to his supporters who felt excluded from the political process after the FBI-led implosion of the Tea Party movement). Additionally, given his entertaining showmanship and background in television with The Apprentice he dramatically increased viewers of political media networks. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. all had big spikes in viewership regardless of their stances - everyone had an opinion about Trump and either loved him, wanted entertainment or (later) hated him.

A counter to the “Trump as an intentional agent to destroy the Republican party” was that his powerful Trump brand could be tarnished through such a strategy, but a counter to that argument was that his brand was not significantly impacted until after he won the nomination and especially after he won the election, when shocked liberals turned their mockery and scorn into red-hot hatred which ultimately made his brand radioactive - a major loss, because prior to running in 2015 Trump’s brand commanded a major premium and he licensed it for controversial Trump Steaks, Trump University, and many resorts and hotels.

There were three phases to the Trump campaign, coinciding with his three campaign managers. He pivoted from one phase to the next adroitly and it increased hopes for his level of political cunning and skill (hopes which were later proven to be misplaced).

1. First Phase: Primaries. The first phase was Corey Lewandowski leading Trump’s campaign in the primaries. Trump did not want to expend too much money as he likely thought he would lose and it would be a marketing gimmick; Corey didn’t have much political experience, I don’t think he was paid all that well, but he was a go-getter and a hands-on hustler and he turned out to be a pretty effective campaign manager. He later went on to monetize his influence with Trump via lobbying and became a political commentator. Ben Shapiro, who was extremely anti-Trump leading up through the general election, claiming he would never, ever vote for him (later changing his mind for 2020), while working for Breitbart tried to get Lewandowski fired and criminally charged in a completely nonsensical event (which I discussed in detail here).

2. Second Phase: Republican National Convention. The second phase was highly experienced and skilled political operative Paul Manafort being brought in to help Trump navigate the internal politics at the Republican National Convention, where insiders were angling to use complex maneuvers to take the nomination away from him and give it to Ted Cruz. Ultimately Manafort was successful in quashing the intrigues and getting Trump nominated, although the price to pay (I think) was Trump being forced to nominate deep state operative Mike Pence as his Vice President as an insurance policy (a tactic that was previously used against Reagan who had Director of the CIA George H.W. Bush placed on his tail). Although, to be fair, Pence also shored up Trump’s support with social conservatives who did not trust him due to his past Democrat affiliation and prior support for abortion. (Manafort was later punished and imprisoned for assisting Trump through the RNC process via FARA charges that were directly applicable to his boss Tony Podesta, but Podesta got off scot-free as the brother of John Podesta of Hillary Clinton campaign manager and Pizzagate fame.)

3. Third Phase: General Election. The third phase was Steven Bannon being brought in for the general election. Bannon ran Breitbart which was the earliest and largest media supporter of Trump’s campaign, and Breitbart became very popular and successful as a result of Bannon’s efforts (and once he left it faded into neocon oblivion). Bannon was a hard-drinking Irish populist who had interest in esoteria such as Julius Evola and he had made his fortune through investment banking, securing a small ownership percentage of the show Seinfeld. Bannon well understood the populist phenomenon although he had a huge ego and wanted to secure the limelight and credit for himself. We will return to Bannon in Part 2 of this essay (as the establishment targeted him in revenge and eventually sent him to prison for contempt of Congress in 2024), but he deserves some credit for increasing Trump’s popularity through the general election.

I’ll offer some additional comments on each of these phases.

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First phase: Primary

John McCain had lost badly against Obama in 2012. The expected nominee for the Republicans in 2016 was Jeb Bush, who was backed by his powerful Bush family including two prior recent presidents as well as his steel-willed mother. Jeb served as the governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, he was very tall, he was married to a hispanic woman, he had the right politics and connections and had solid name recognition. He was considered a shoe-in. Just as the presidents were Bush (Sr) → Clinton → Clinton second term → Bush (Jr) → Bush (Jr) → and then Obama (2x), this would set up a Bush vs. Clinton match in order to continue each family’s legacies.

The problem with Jeb was that he was a gawky, fairly inept nepo-politician. He became known for his statements like “please clap”, standing on his tiptoes to try to appear more dominant, and selling overpriced items like guac bowls. Trump, who was excellent at sniffing out his opponent’s weaknesses called him “Low Energy Jeb”, a nickname which stuck. Trump came up with many other nicknames that stuck against other candidates such as Lyin’ Ted for Ted Cruz (while mocking his wife’s appearance and accusing his father of helping assassinate President John F. Kennedy), Little Marco for Marco Rubio (who infamously called him “Big Don”, a terrible response), Pocahantas for Elizabeth Warren (because she faked having Indian heritage), Crooked Hillary, and other memorable comments like “Look at that face!” referring to Carly Fiorina. When John McCain criticized Trump, Trump responded, “He’s not a war hero - he’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” Great stuff.

Trump dominated all of the primary debates and he soared in the polls. I had to scrape the Archive website to find this, but the following shows the polling for the 2015-2016 Republican nomination. One can see that it was an open-ended free for all until Trump emerged victorious:

Also of note is how inept the Republican National Committee was. The RNC did not have control over picking the candidate — the voters had real power to decide because of the RNC’s weaknesses. This is in stark contrast to the Democratic party, where their committee had steel-eyed control over the nomination process and could pick or choose whoever they liked without voter input — this is how Joe Biden was nominated in 2020 as he came in a distant third and fourth place during the early Democrat voting primaries, then he mysteriously came in first in South Carolina despite poor polling and then “won” Super Tuesday. Of course, Hillary Clinton would be chosen and nominated in 2016 because she played along with stepping aside and supporting Barack Obama during his upstart 2008 campaign.

One of the interesting moments was when the RNC, working in conjunction with Fox News where its owner, Rupert Murdoch, hated Trump with a burning passion (although his deputy Roger Ailes who turned Fox News into the behemoth it was liked him; he died shortly after the election in 2017), instructed gun-for-hire Megyn Kelly⁴ to dynamite Trump with an extremely devious question during a debate. Trump was perceived as being weak with women because of his apparent misogyny so she went in for the kill. She asked him, "You don't use a filter. However, that is not without it's downsides, in particular when it comes to women. You've called women you don't like "fat pigs", "dogs", "slobs", and "disgusting animals". Your twitter account -" and Trump cut her of and responded: "Only Rosie O'Donnell." The whole crowd laughed.

This became one of the defining moments of his campaign and showed his genius for quick wittedness and charm. However, this incident along with many others revealed to the public how deeply anti-populist Fox News was. For example, they asked Trump detailed questions about how he would pay for his proposals and then after he answered Fox showed detailed graphs showing how his math didn’t add up, whereas Jeb received only softball questions. After one primary debate the “conservative” pollster Frank Lutz used a fake focus group to turn attention and support away from Trump (part 1 and part 2). Eventually Fox’s animus would become quite obvious where, for example, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich would be cut off for speaking about George Soros.

Trump’s one-liners regularly went viral and support for Trump on social media, especially Twitter and 4chan with creative and funny memes (especially using Pepe the Frog), became a important part of his success. After the election the establishment would map right-leaning posters on social media and force those companies to ban those posters in addition to demanding severe content moderation; an especially influential individual, Douglass Mackey, would be criminally charged for shitposting. They also filled up 4chan with bots and FBI agents, rendering it unreadable.

Trump ended up dominating the Republican primaries, easily winning Super Tuesday on March 1. There were a number of security related incidents, one on March 12 at a rally (and the arrested man was only charged with misdemeanors) and one later on November 6.

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Second phase: Republican National Convention

Jared Kushner was apparently responsible for firing Lewandowski, and he worked with Paul Manafort to hire Cambridge Analytica to provide data analytics for Facebook and other social media for targeted advertising. Cambridge Analytica was later targeted and destroyed by the establishment as revenge for helping Trump in his campaign, and Facebook was forcibly revamped under threat of antitrust action to ensure that populists could not advertise on the platform again by enforcing strict establishment censorship policies. Zuckerberg tried to resist for a bit believing such censorship would hurt his platform but he ultimately caved under the weight of the full establishment court-press.

Anyway, Mickey Edwards (who served in Congress for 16 years and was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee) offered comments at Politico where he argued for taking the nomination away from Trump using a complex manuever. Ted Cruz was chomping at the bit and told RNC attendees to “vote your conscience” while being boo’d during his speech. However, Paul Manafort out-manuvered them.

One can see Trump’s dramatic entrance at the 2016 RNC, held on July 18-21, on CBS where the commentators alluded to his clown-like attitude; the media still wasn’t treating him seriously:

Efforts to remove him continued even after the RNC.

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Third Phase: General Election

Trump brought on Steve Bannon to lead his general election campaign in August 2016 against Hillary Clinton, which was a brilliant move. Bannon would be used to help fine-tune Trump’s messaging to increase white enthusiasm for the candidate further. There were three presidential debates which were interesting at the time but completely forgettable in retrospect; I don’t recall anything about any of the three, and both seemed to do okay during them. Contrasted with Trump’s message to “Make America Great Again” - a focus on the population and state of society - Hillary’s message was “I’m With Her” - a focus on her ego and her gender, which arguably sums up the core differences between their campaigns. Trump consistently egged on his crowds with chants of “Lock Her Up!” for possession of a private server holding classified documents (which Anthony Weiner had access to through his wife Huma Abedin).

“And I’ll tell you what. I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception,” he said at the Oct. 9 presidential debate. “There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”….

In Florida on Oct. 12, he told the crowd that “this corruption and collusion is just one more reason why I will ask my attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor,” and later adding, “She has to go to jail.”

Meanwhile, Hillary smeared “half” of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” in a September speech.

Strangely, Hillary was filmed having some sort of episode where she lost control of her motor functions while being asked a question by Debbie Wasserman Schulz on June 10, 2016:

And on September 11, 2016 Hillary was filmed collapsing and being tossed into a van like a slab of beef:

Perhaps because of these medical issues, but also substantially because of how dominant she was in polls, Hillary took time off in the stretch of campaigning.

Speaking of polls, Hillary was dominating essentially all polls up through the general election itself, leading by an average of 3.2 points:

This gave her an 88% chance of winning per RealClearPolitics:

Pollster Nate Silver gave Trump a 28.6% chance to win, higher than other pollsters.

Indeed, Hillary did win the popular vote by a substantial amount — you can see above she won by 2.1% versus a projected 3.2%. But because we live in a constitutional republic instead of a democracy in order to ensure that less populated states still have a say in national politics, Trump won three critical swing states by a total margin of 107,000 votes, clinching his victory. It was a number of the state polls that were substantially inaccurate; the national polls were pretty close to the final results.

Trump did this despite (or perhaps because of) being treated as a clown joke by the establishment. He ran a shoestring budget where the Trump campaign spent $343 million, only about 59% as much as the Clinton campaign. (Interestingly, Harvey Weinstein had a close relationship with Hillary and donated around $50,000 to her, hosted a star-studded fundraiser for her, and bundled around $1.5 million for Democrats alone since 1990. The “Me Too” movement originating with Weinstein happened in October 2017; would it have materialized if Hillary had won? The odds would have been substantially lower, I think - he could have utilized much greater political clout against it.)

There were a couple of interesting political developments that impacted the final election result. For one, there was an “October surprise” with the release of the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged, “I moved on her like a bitch” and "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."

This caused a huge uproar given its crassness and sexism, comments that would have forced any other candidate to withdraw. Look at the uproar over the nothingburger over Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comments back in 2012. Globalist agent Mike Pence plotted to backstab Trump and media outlets called for Trump to withdraw. Reince Priebus, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Trump, “You have two choices. You either drop out right now, or you lose by the biggest landslide in American political history.” But Steve Bannon said that he told Trump that he still had a “100% probability of winning.” To his credit, Trump shrugged off the intense media hostility and moved forward regardless.

Billy Bush who interviewed Trump in the video was punished by the establishment but then let back in the fold after a brief banishment due to his family connections.

One should note that establishment Republicans refused to vote for Trump: George W. Bush refused, John McCain refused, Mitt Romney refused. In other words, Trump was a true anti-establishment candidate given the 2000-2008 president, the 2008 Republican nominee and the 2012 Republican nominee all refused to support him. Additionally the so-called “conservative” National Review came out against Trump and even laughably tried to run their own candidate, David French, against him. Among the United States' 100 largest newspapers by paid circulation, 57 endorsed Hillary Clinton while only two, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Florida Times-Union, endorsed Donald Trump, an astonishing disparity of media and elite support. It is easy to imagine that if Trump had lost - as everyone expected him to - the full establishment would have smeared the populist right as a minority of extremists that deserved and needed to be suppressed.

Still, an essay by Michael Anton, writing under a pseudonym, in September called “The Flight 93 Election” about how America was transforming into a totalitarian state and this was the last chance to stop it also helped bolster (to a small extent) spirits and motivation about voting, at least to those on the far right. Peter Thiel endorsed Trump and spoke at the Republican Convention, then watched the election results with Curtis Yarvin (In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and Milo Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote. “Just plays it very carefully”). Thiel would later grow disillusioned at what he saw as Trump’s incompetence.

On the Hillary front there were two major developments that worked against her. In June and July 2016 Wikileaks released a trove of Democratic National Convention emails which led to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory⁵ and showed that the DNC heavily favored Hillary over Bernie Sanders. This did substantial harm to support for her campaign. (Hillary proposed drone striking Assange and later he would be indefinitely jailed on fake charges and Wikileaks effectively destroyed in revenge, while rumored DNC leaker Seth Rich was assassinated in public on July 10, 2016 with the assassin never caught; it was likely done by an FBI agent for the purposes both of revenge and to prevent the forming of an alternative narrative to the planned Russia hack narrative being planned by the security state). Assange’s general motivations and personality were covered in a prior post here.

The second negative development for Hillary was that on October 28, 2016, eleven days before the election, FBI head James Comey notified Congress that the FBI had started looking into newly discovered emails relating to Hillary’s email server.⁶ The public notification of the reopening of this investigation may have swung critical swing state voters away from Hillary. Comey, who was a major supporter of Hillary despite his nominal “Republican” voter registration, felt forced to re-open it because police officers in New York City had acquired Hillary’s backup server documents that were on Anthony Weiner’s computer and were threatening to go public with it. By reopening the investigation but actually doing nothing to investigate he felt he could both pacify the New York police and to ensure Hillary’s victory would not be contaminated by illegitimacy. But still, he reopened the investigation specifically because he thought Hillary was so far ahead in the polls that she simply could not lose. He wrote as much in his autobiography: “It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.” He repeated the admission verbally in an interview.

A couple comments on election night. The New York Times had an incredible live needle meter on their website showing the odds of each candidate’s victory, updated as new results came in. The New York Times like all media was highly confident of Hillary’s victory, so they tried to appear a bit neutral with this meter. The needle looked like this and it fluctuated wildly during the night, starting close to 100% that Hillary would win and then over time moving further and further in Trump’s direction:

For those who watched the results live on this website as I did, it was an incredible, once in a lifetime experience; it felt like Rocky Balboa overcoming impossible odds. I was screaming at my screen as were many others.

After being blown out so badly by this result, in subsequent elections the New York Times either removed the needle entirely, removed its live features or otherwise limited its scope.

The New York Times wasn’t the only one who was blown out, of course; all the mainstream media was. Of particular note was Stephen Colbert’s election night special; he had a whole Showtime live show which was supposed to inaugurate Hillary’s reign and where he could gloat at the broken, defeated middle America white masses, but instead he gets more and more scared throughout the show and starts drinking live on air. It was a really special show and of course Colbert ruthlessly scrubbed every reference to it from the internet (including from torrent sites), although here is a 12 minute clip of it. It feels like a funeral:

Even Trump was shocked that he won and possibly horrified. He did not have a concrete plan in place for what he would do if he won as he spent all his efforts on campaigning.

Hillary refused to concede the night she lost; John Podesta told the waiting crowd to go home. Apparently she threw a $950,000 champagne bottle at the television screen in rage. She blamed everyone else for her loss instead of herself; she focused her ire on James Comey and later on women generally for not being sufficiently “with her.” Her foundation, long accused of pay-for-play, lost a staggering $16 million dollars in 2018 following her loss as she had no more influence to offer donors.

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Conclusion

Trump’s win based on polling and general sentiment was unexpected both to himself, his opponent, the deep state and society broadly. James Comey was confident enough that Hillary would win based upon her ubiquitously wide lead in all polling to re-open the investigation into her email server in order to assist her legitimacy. Trump had no solid plan for how he would govern if he won and the establishment was not prepared for him to win either, although Mother Jones reported the existence of the infamous, unproven, Clinton-funded Steele Dossier that would form the basis of the Russia-Trump collusion (which Peter Strzok would refer to as the “insurance policy”) a week before the election, and the FBI formally initiated spying on Carter Page, a low level Trump staffer and FBI informant (“operational contact”) in order to “legally” spy on the Trump campaign⁷ (although they were already spying on it through the entrapment of George Papadopoulos), a topic we will return to in Part 2. If one takes a conspiratorial view where the establishment planned for Hillary to win, one may also note that it would have planned for divided government: the Republicans also won the House and the Senate with substantial margins: 246-187 Republicans to Democrats in the House, and 54 to 44 Republicans to Democrats in the Senate.

How the newly elected president with no prior political experience would handle things while his party controlled Congress, along with how the establishment would try to stymie his efforts, will be explored in Part 2. How these forces coalesced in the 2020 election will be reviewed in Part 3.

Thanks for reading.

1. It’s strange, I both expected and predicted Trump to be convicted back in July 2023 (writing “So here is the call: the call is that Trump is very likely going to prison. It will happen one way or another, even though all of the charges and potential charges are ridiculous both on their face and in the details”) and am still sad and disappointed when he was actually convicted. I felt internally it should be addressed again, but a format of more predictions didn’t seem correct. When I seized on this format I immediately felt an extreme urge to put pen-to-paper immediately and the demand felt overwhelming and oppressive. Carl Jung experienced a similar feeling with his autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections where he commented:

A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course. Thus this "autobiography" is now taking a direction quite different from what I had imagined at the beginning. It has become a necessity for me to write down my early memories. If I neglect to do so for a single day, unpleasant physical symptoms immediately follow. As soon as I set to work they vanish and my head feels perfectly clear.

2. From here: “In one sequence, the film shows how Stone helped sabotage the Reform Party’s chances in the 2000 presidential election by urging Pat Buchanan to run as a Reform candidate, then backing Trump to run against Buchanan. In part because of Trump’s brash attacks on his rival (“He’s a Hitler lover,” Trump repeatedly says about Buchanan), the Reform Party imploded, paving the way for Bush’s contentious win that year.”

3. My preferred label for the “establishment” or the “deep state” is "globohomo”, which is a portmanteau of globalization plus either homosexuality or homogenization, and it is an umbrella term where the U.S. government including its security state are just one part of a broader structure. However, the label is pejorative and this essay is meant to be more objective and appeal to a broader audience than my typical posts, where I am typically comfortable with stream-of-conscious subjectivity, so I will stick with more neutral terms herein.

4. Kelly was very popular at the time but later imploded her career with a poorly-thought-out strategy to appeal to liberals by moving to NBC. Now she sits in the netherworld, ranting to basically no audience.

5. I provide links to Wikipedia sometimes because it can provide basic information on a topic, but keep in mind Wikipedia is run by far-leftists and spooks and the information presented within on any politicized topic is going to be twisted into a gross facsimile of itself. Unfortunately I don’t have the resources to provide in-depth research on every point being made.

6. The initial investigation was headed by Peter Strzok who changed the description of Clinton's actions from "grossly negligent", which could be a criminal offense, to "extremely careless". Strzok would later go on to lead the Crossfire Hurricane coup attempt against Trump.

7. The FBI could legally spy on anyone within two-steps of a counter-intelligence target, i.e. any of Carter Page’s contacts and any of the contacts of his contacts. That meant anyone in the campaign.