Commentary: Donald Trump’s 2015 Presidential Announcement Speech, Seven Years Later

Immigration. Trade. War. The GOP already has the formula it needs for sweeping victory in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans just need to follow it.

Donald Trump showed the way. His presidential announcement speech in 2015 was a masterpiece of political rhetoric. It was also a blueprint for a message that could cut through the nightmare web of corruption, decay, and incompetence that characterizes our modern political system.

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Commentary: The Democrats’ Trump Obsession Will Do Them In

In 2020, despite gaining control of the White House and the Senate, the Democrats suffered a net loss of 13 seats in the House and a comprehensive down ballot drubbing. This was hardly a mandate for radical change. Yet, upon taking office, President Biden immediately reversed former President Trump’s successful energy policies and incentivized illegal immigrants to invade our southern border. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats collaborated with Biden to pass inflationary spending bills and embarked upon an unconstitutional crusade to convict Trump of fictitious crimes against the state.

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California Man Who Backed Clinton in 2016 Gets 35 Years to Life for Murder in Fight over Election

ACalifornia man who supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 was sentenced this week to 35 years to life in prison for fatally shooting a woman during an argument about the presidential race.

The incident occurred Jan. 10, 2017, when defendant John Kevin McVoy Jr. was told by a bandmate to “Get the f— out of my house,” after McVoy revealed he had voted for Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, according to Fox News.

McVoy then fired two shots. One hit the bandmate, identified by the Press-Enterprise of Southern California as Victor Garcia, in the head.

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Commentary: Christopher Steele Is a Product of Corrupt FBI

Just as the special counsel’s investigation into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI counterintelligence probe launched in the summer of 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—is showing signs of life, one of the central figures in the hoax is attempting to burnish his sullied image.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos has produced a documentary featuring Christopher Steele, the man responsible for the so-called dossier bearing his name. “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” streamed on Hulu Monday night; promotional clips hinted that, far from a hard-hitting interview exposing Steele for the charlatan he is, Stephanopoulos gave Steele a chance to spin his story ahead of possible new indictments related to John Durham’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.

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Republicans Demand Update on Long-Awaited Durham Report

After two years of waiting for a federal report on allegations of Democratic spying on the Trump campaign, Republicans are demanding answers.

More than 40 Republican U.S. senators sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland Thursday requesting the release of the Durham report, the long-awaited results of an investigation into the controversial origins of the FBI investigation into Russian collusion.

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Feds Subpoenaed Hunter Biden During 2016 Election, Raising Worry over Unpaid Taxes on Ukraine Work

As the 2016 election kicked into full gear, Hunter Biden’s inner circle feared an impending federal criminal indictment of his long-time business partner might expose the then-vice president’s son to legal jeopardy because he had avoided paying taxes on income from the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, according to emails on an abandoned laptop seized by the FBI.

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Clinton Associate Wrote Anti-Trump Dossier in 2016 Claiming He Had Russian FSB Source

Evidence released by the Senate this month reveals that longtime Hillary Clinton associate Cody Shearer received anti-Trump dirt in 2016 from a Russian intelligence source and got it into the hands of the FBI through the ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

Shearer’s claim that his information came from a Russian FSB source, experts say, should have alerted senior US officials that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties Russia was compromised by its sources, Clinton surrogates and alleged Russian spies.

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Michigan and Ohio Secretaries of State Endorse Zuckerberg’s Millions Directed to Elections

Michigan and Ohio state secretaries Jocelyn Benson and Frank LaRose endorsed $300 million directed to elections by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. The Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) and Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) announced Tuesday that Zuckerberg and his wife donated in order “to promote safe and reliable voting in states and localities.”

Both Benson and LaRose agreed that the investment was necessary considering the pandemic’s effects on the presidential election. LaRose reposted the press release the day it came out, citing the need for accurate information during voting.

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Commentary: Just Like 2016, NeverTrump Republicans Would Rather Lose Than Face Another Term with President Trump

Donald Trump’s chances for reelection in November have never been higher. The latest Gallup poll puts his approval rating at 49 percent, other polls have measured even higher, and he just gave the speech of his life in his 2020 State of the Union address. But watch out. Without Republican control of the Senate in 2020, much less recovering control of the House of Representatives, the impact of a second Trump term will be profoundly diminished.

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What to Expect in the Justice Department’s FISA Report

Michael Horowitz

The Justice Department’s watchdog will release a much-anticipated report Monday scrutinizing the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016.

Republicans have eagerly awaited the report, believing it will reveal that the FBI abused the foreign surveillance court process in order to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Democrats hope the report will show that the FBI had a sound basis to investigate the Trump campaign.

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Florida Officials, Congressional Delegation Demand FBI Disclose Election-Hack Details

by John Haughey   Russian hackers gained access to voter information files in Washington County, a sparsely populated Republican-dominated Panhandle county, where 77 percent of its 11,000 votes cast in the 2016 presidential election went to Donald Trump. The revelation was reported by The Washington Post Thursday night, citing two unnamed officials “with knowledge of the investigation,” who said Washington County was one of the two Florida counties breached by the Russian military spy agency, the GRU, in the days before the November 2016 election. The Washington Post also cites two unnamed Florida sources that the second county the FBI maintains was penetrated by the GRU in 2016 is “a mid-sized county on the East Coast of the state.” The disclosures have further inflamed already angry state officials, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Florida’s congressional delegation, who are demanding the FBI and the Trump Administration be more forthcoming in discussing with them and county election officials what its investigation has uncovered. “The public needs to know which counties were hacked and what steps are being taken to hold the bad actors accountable,” U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Orlando, said during a bipartisan Washington D.C. press conference staged by five of the…

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Analysis: The Steele Dossier and the ‘Raw Intelligence’ Canard

by Chuck Ross   Defenders of the FBI’s activities during the 2016 campaign have adopted a familiar refrain over the past 28 months to describe the Steele dossier, that infamous document that served as a road map for the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government. “It’s raw intelligence,” according to countless politicos and pundits, including CNN contributor Asha Rangappa, Democratic Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, former CIA executive John Sipher and numerous other commentators. The spy term, which describes information directly from a source that has not been fully analyzed, is intended to downplay the dossier’s significance to the collusion narrative. Christopher Steele, the dossier author, gathered his intelligence from a trusted network of sources, the argument goes, and provided it to seasoned investigators to analyze. But the charitable defense faces new challenges, especially in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report. The problem with the “raw intelligence” canard is that it ignores questions about how Steele obtained his information and what the former spy did with it once he received it. The FBI also treated Steele’s allegations as more than mere raw intelligence. The bureau relied heavily on Steele’s work, even though it was unverified, to obtain spy…

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Andrew McCabe Defends FBI’s Use Of Steele Dossier, Confidential Informant In Trump-Russia Probe

by Chuck Ross   Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is defending the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier as well as the bureau’s use of a confidential informant to make contact with the Trump campaign as part of an investigation into possible collusion with Russia. In an interview as part of a recent book tour, McCabe disputed Republicans’ claims that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court about aspects of the dossier in applications warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. And in his book, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, McCabe defended the use of an informant who appears to be Stefan Halper, a longtime FBI and CIA informant who cozied up to Page and two other Trump advisers, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos, during the 2016 campaign. “I do believe that we adequately notified the FISA Court of the information we were using, and what we thought of the information,” McCabe told New York Times reporter Adam Goldman in an interview that aired on C-SPAN on Saturday. McCabe, who was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018, said that the bureau’s applications for FISA warrants…

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Commentary: Democrat Excess Leads to New and Improved Trump in 2019

Donald Trump

by Jeffrey A. Rendall   Predictions. It’s what New Year’s is all about. It goes without saying that 2018 was full of surprises. Heading into this year Republican majorities in both houses of Congress had just passed a massive reorganization of the federal tax code, including a sizeable tax cut for most Americans in the bill language. By January 1, Democrats were already griping about reduced rates for corporations and businesses, claiming, as they always do, that the benefits of the new law would rain down disproportionately on the wealthiest and most powerful taxpayers. Never mind that many, many companies had already announced sizeable end-of-the-year bonuses and raises for employees based on the improved future tax outlook. Nonetheless, Democrats were convinced the popularity of the new law would not improve (especially if they demagogued the matter) over the course of time. Democrats believed they could parlay President Donald Trump’s lukewarm favorability numbers into a “wave” in November. After all, they’d just been eminently successful in stealing a senate seat in deep red Alabama (with a huge assist from the Washington GOP establishment), so the sky was the limit, right? Last month’s election came and went, Democrats gained 40 seats in…

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Commentary: The Incorrigible Mr. Comey

by Julie Kelly   As I wrote last week, the Republican Congress largely has failed to hold accountable the masterminds behind the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: The unprecedented weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to spy on a presidential campaign and sabotage an incoming administration. The man primarily responsible for executing the scheme, former FBI Director James Comey, exited the Trump Administration as a martyr and a hero. Republican lawmakers blasted the president for his (totally justified) firing of the deceptive FBI director in May 2017, lauding his public service and reputation even as the disturbing details of the way his agency spied on the Trump campaign and hid the probe from Congress were coming into view. After successfully escaping any accountability for his actions, it’s no surprise that Comey now is threatening to thwart Congress once again. On Thanksgiving morning, Comey responded on Twitter to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee: “Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I’m still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a ‘closed door’ thing because I’ve seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Let’s have a hearing and invite everyone…

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Commentary: Trump Fights the Left and Its ‘Appalling Contempt’ for the American People

by D. Hawthorne   On February 2017, during the second month of his presidency, I argued Donald Trump was best understood through the lens of a turnaround executive. Through that lens are three focal points: Blowing up political correctness, because an American turnaround cannot happen if we are unable recover the meaning of words and talk forthrightly about what is really going on. Delegitimizing the false narratives of the mainstream media, because a turnaround cannot be sustained if basic communication channels remain corrupted. Taking down the administrative state, because a turnaround will fail if unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats continue to override the sovereignty of the American people by controlling our society. Turnarounds Begin Only When Enough People Accept Something Is Wrong Like many turnaround efforts, the past months confirmed a deep cultural and political crisis, with numerous irreconcilable differences. First, as John Zmirak points out, while the Left and Right in America have had their differences, they also mostly agreed in 1996 on the broad outlines of sovereign borders, constitutional gun rights, fidelity to the Constitution, men and women being equal but different, abortion as rare, marriage between one man and one woman, that religious freedom and rights of conscience are…

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Dems Worry As ‘Poll Surge’ Echoes 2016’s Support for Hillary Clinton Heading Into Election

United States Capitol

by Chris White   Democratic candidates are entering a last-minute surge in the polls in the last few hours before Election Day, but a number of Democrats are seeing a lot of comparisons to the 2016 presidential election. Democrats and Republicans are essentially tied in the roughly 30 House districts rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report, which relied on 10,000 interviews for its conclusion. Data, which was released Monday, shows Democrats are on the cusp of taking the House despite the narrow margins. But many liberal activists and Democratic strategists remain unconvinced. “We’re kind of just in the bed-wetting phase now,” Democratic pollster John Anzalone told reporters Sunday. He campaigned hard for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before then-presidential candidate Donald Trump pulled the rug out from underneath her campaign. Other activists shared similar concerns, with one even recalling having nightmares about poll numbers. “I’m old enough to remember when The New York Times gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning on election night and to have been traumatized by the New York Times election needle,” Ezra Levin, who co-founded the Resistance organization Indivisible, told Politico. He added that Democrats are unlikely to be reassured until Tuesday…

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This Ohio County Swung From Obama to Trump in 2016, Here’s What Eight Fair Attendees Think Two Years Later

Donald Trump

by Rachel del Guidice   Attendees of this 169-year-old Ohio county fair don’t come out to see politicians and politics aren’t on the forefront of their minds, but a large portion of the folks at the Stark County Fair had strong opinions on both when asked. The political climate of this county, known for its rural, farming areas and also home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, housed in Canton, has flipped in recent years. In 2008, than-candidate Barack Obama won 51.59 percent of the vote in Stark County and and former Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who died last month, won 46.14 percent of the vote. Obama won the county again in 2012 with 49.21percent of the vote, inching past presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who received 48.74 percent. But in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received 38.68 percent of the vote, while Donald Trump received 55.85 percent of the vote. Some cities in Stark County such as Alliance, Massillon, Canton Township, East Canton, Navarre and Perry Township all went for former President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. These cities flipped to Trump in the 2016 and support for the president was strong among the attendees roaming around the fairgrounds. While harness racing, baking contests, and pavilion concerts were vastly more…

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Three Revelations From New York Times Reporter’s Book on Hillary Clinton

by Katrina Trinko New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s new book on her time covering Hillary Clinton doesn’t show either her employer, The New York Times, or Clinton herself in a particularly flattering light. Chozick, a member of the largely female press corps that followed Clinton on a near-daily basis at times, crisscrossing the country with her, reported on Clinton’s 2008 campaign for The Wall Street Journal and her 2016 campaign for The New York Times. And in “Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling,” Chozick talks about what it was really like. I’ve assembled three of the revelations I found most interesting. But first, a couple of caveats: I’m not familiar with Chozick’s reporting for the Times, so all my assessments are based on a reading of the book itself. And secondly, Chelsea Clinton is already alleging Chozick got facts wrong, although Chozick is pushing back, noting her book was reviewed by a fact-checker. [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more ] Now to dive in … Hillary Clinton didn’t act like a feminist heroine on the campaign trail. For years, it’s…

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How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Targeting Model Really Worked – According to the Person Who Built It

by Matthew Hindman The researcher whose work is at the center of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data analysis and political advertising uproar has revealed that his method worked much like the one Netflix uses to recommend movies. In an email to me, Cambridge University scholar Aleksandr Kogan explained how his statistical model processed Facebook data for Cambridge Analytica. The accuracy he claims suggests it works about as well as established voter-targeting methods based on demographics like race, age and gender. If confirmed, Kogan’s account would mean the digital modeling Cambridge Analytica used was hardly the virtual crystal ball a few have claimed. Yet the numbers Kogan provides also show what is – and isn’t – actually possible by combining personal data with machine learning for political ends. Regarding one key public concern, though, Kogan’s numbers suggest that information on users’ personalities or “psychographics” was just a modest part of how the model targeted citizens. It was not a personality model strictly speaking, but rather one that boiled down demographics, social influences, personality and everything else into a big correlated lump. This soak-up-all-the-correlation-and-call-it-personality approach seems to have created a valuable campaign tool, even if the product being sold wasn’t quite as it was billed. The promise of personality targeting In the wake of the revelations that Trump…

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Commentary: Cambridge Analytica’s Marketers Weren’t Mind-Readers or Brain-Washers

President-elect Donald Trump

by Andrew McKie   When examining the alleged role played by Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and “big data” in the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, it’s worth looking at a book which opens by declaring that “is an attempt to explore a strange and rather exotic area of modern life.” It continues: It is about the way many of us are being influenced and manipulated – far more than we realise – in the patterns of our everyday lives. Large-scale efforts are being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness, so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, ‘hidden’.” The only thing is that the book was written before the elections, before the founding of Cambridge Analytica or Facebook, indeed before the birth of Mark Zuckerberg. It was published in 1957 – before even the period in which Mad Men, the television series set amongst pioneering advertising men, is set. Donald Trump was 11 when it came out. It’s Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders,…

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Commentary: Republicans Hold the Key to Their Own Success in the 2018 Midterm Elections

by Jeffrey A. Rendall   Now that 2017’s few elections and reflections on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s triumphant win in the 2016 election are in the rearview mirror it’s time to look ahead to the all-important midterm elections of 2018. Midterms are always a big deal because they portend to reveal how well – or how poorly – a president is received by a wide cross-section of the American public. Ahead of next year’s vote media pundits are doing what media pundits always do, namely find any way feasible to describe the Republican Party as being in trouble. Their routines are predictable: wake up in the morning, put on a pot of coffee, take their anti-depressant medication, check Trump’s twitter feed, organize their angry thoughts and then scribble a story bashing Trump and predicting doom. In Trump’s case it’s been happening for well over two years now so liberal journalists have the shtick down cold. The only problem is their predictions rarely come true. Other commentators actually look at the facts and try to draw some reasoned conclusions. David M. Drucker and W. James Antle III of the Washington Examiner wrote earlier this week, “One year out from the midterm congressional…

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Commentary: How Donald Trump’s Epic 2016 Win Made America Great Again

by Jeffery Rendall   November 8, a day that will live in infamy. Not to everyone, mind you, but particularly to Democrats, liberals and GOP establishment #NeverTrumpers that still can’t understand or accept what happened a year ago today. Donald Trump’s triumphant victory in the Electoral College would make him president. TV news anchors and pundits working election night acted as though they’d just been kicked in the mid-section after a gluttonous meal. Some looked like they had tears in their eyes; their lips trembled; others pinched themselves in a vain attempt to awaken from a horrible nightmare. The rest of us just hooted, hollered and celebrated. It was like the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team defeated the Soviets all over again. Or Apollo 13 gently floated back to earth. The relief and excitement was tangible. Some found Trump’s triumph was sweet; others thought Hillary Clinton’s downfall was sweeter. It didn’t matter – the day had come. For those who supported Trump and earnestly hoped some kind of “miracle” would transpire to keep the Clintons permanently out of the Oval Office it was a day and night to never forget. It was like Christmas morning had arrived early, though this particular…

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Commentary: After Las Vegas Massacre, Hillary Clinton Demonstrates Again Why She Lost the 2016 Election

The nation mourned, the law enforcement investigated, President Donald Trump, his wife and his White House prayed – and Hillary Clinton called for gun control and attacks on the National Rifle Association. That’s the response to the horrific killings of dozens and injuring of hundreds by gunman Stephen Paddock, 64. Hillary: This is why you lost.…

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Bitter: Hillary Considers Contesting Election Result 10 Months Later

Former 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton admitted that she wouldn’t “completely rule out questioning the legitimacy” of the presidential election’s results if the ongoing probe into Russia’s election interference reaps further results during an interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air” that aired Monday. Clinton has not been shy about discussing the stunning blow she was dealt…

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