How do you continue to support this guy?"
A stranger on Twitter asked me this in the wake of the recent indictment of former President Trump on three dozen felony counts regarding possession and sloppy handling of classified documents. After I made the mistake of responding, the stranger retorts: "BS and you know it. That’s not what happened. You’re lying."
The frustrated liberal’s ever-present fallback.
One reason this writer continues to support "this guy" Trump is because so many other people hate him, so many authorities and politicians and institutions are working so diligently to destroy him.
Now they have gone too far.
It is an outrage that, for the first time in our 250 years as a nation, a sitting president’s henchmen have indicted his predecessor — and his likely opponent for re-election.
President Trump was arraigned in federal court in Miami on Tuesday of last week, and a friend of mine was in the courtroom to witness it: Silicon Valley trademark lawyer Raj Abhyanker.
He is the CEO of Trademarkia.com, and he waited in line from 10 o’clock Monday night till 2 p.m. on Tuesday to get one of only nine seats assigned to regular Americans.
Members of the media were paying $500 a seat to people who waited in line for them, as Raj reports. On the latest episode of "What’s Bugging Me" on Ricochet, Raj told me how surreal and sad the whole scene was.
"I felt kind of sad. It was a very somber feeling. And it was sad to see former President Trump treated this way," he says.
There was "the historical aspect of it, but it was also just a human, you know, a person that has done public service, that has been the President of the United States, he sacrificed his successful career to take this risk of the public spotlight.
"Now, to see him the defendant, it was a little bit jarring — it was very jarring."
The 49-page indictment never asserts any criminal intent in Trump’s possessing classified documents.
It fails to cite any imminent threat to national security that required instant action and such rapid prosecution, nor does it assert that President Trump did anything wrong with the documents.
He never sold anything to the Russians, okay?
His real violation was failure to bow to the same feds who spied on him, undermined him, and opposed him at every turn — how dare he.
Of the total 37 counts against Trump, 31 of them are one count apiece for each document he shouldn’t have held. So, out of the thousands of documents the FBI seized in the outrageous raid on Mar-a-Lago only last August, all of 31 are cited as illegal: needle in a haystack.
The media never will report it this way; they will do whatever they can to stop Trump from getting elected. This is because he calls them out for their flaws and sins — and a lot of what he says about them is dead-on right.
The FBI, the Justice Department, and the Deep State hate Trump, too. Recall that 51 former federal spooks with the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, etc. signed a bogus public letter falsely insisting the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was Russian disinformation — so as to help elect Joe Biden.
The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress, and way too many Republicans despise Trump, as well.
They see him as uncouth and unsophisticated in the polite, backscratching ways of Washington, and they hate what they fear: a politician who cannot be bought and owned.
So much of the fight about Trump ignores policy and focuses on him personally — his character flaws, alleged misbehavior 25 years ago, mean tweets, his chiropractic talent for bending the truth — that we forget his record as president.
In his first three years in office, the economy grew 50% faster that the average growth of the previous ten years. Employment for blacks, Hispanics and women hit all-time highs.
Under President Trump, the U.S. was the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world, and prices at the pump were below $2 a gallon. On the global stage, we were respected… and feared, because the same traits his haters decry also give our enemies pause.
Trump doesn’t take static from anyone.
That’s one of the main things many of us love about him.
Dennis Kneale is a writer and media strategist in New York and host of the podcast, "What's Bugging Me." Previously, he was an anchor at CNBC and at Fox Business Network, after serving as a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal and managing editor of Forbes. Read Dennis Kneale's reports — More Here.