In significant quarters of the United States, the election of Richard Nixon was a cultural event.  An appalling cultural event.   Nixon was seen by many as an abomination of the symbol  America was supposed to project to the rest of the world in their chief executive position.  He was a dark, conniving destroyer of reputations, who saw communists where others saw progressives, and worst of all, had support of what he referred to as the “silent majority” — to liberal elites, the great reactionary underbelly of American life.  This sense of Nixon, epitomizing the cancer on progress as a people,  was forever memorialized by Pauline Kael, the entertainment critic for New Yorker Magazine, stating, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them”.  The cultural divide extended uniformly through the American Media and the country’s universities, who saw their burgeoning activism and progressivism threatened by the whims of an electoral college that had rewarded, in the defiance of the popular will, a person antithetical to all  they envisioned for a country in transition.  Finally, it was immersed in the permanent government, the Washington bureaucracy, that could not conceive of a cadre of Nixon loyalists infecting the levers of power, only 8 short years from the time their Camelot infused hero, John Kennedy, had supposedly banished Nixon to the political wilderness.  Yet there he was.  With his election , Nixon had overturned their world, and the clash as to who would control the narrative, and who’s narrative would prevail, commenced almost immediately.

Five years later, despite President Nixon’s seemingly immense electoral popularity, the permanent state and media, helped by Nixon’s many flaws, managed to take him down.  The President, who in 1972 was elected by one of the greatest landslides in American history, found himself only 20 months later, by August 8, 1974, without any residual  political support and had to resign, rather than face impeachment.  The attack that had exposed his fatal mistake, had both external and internal elements.  The American press, led by the intrepid reporters Woodward and Bernstein, had done the heavy lifting of telling the story of Nixon and his staff, but its was many years  later, when it was finally admitted that ‘Deep Throat’ ,the prime whistleblower who functioned as Woodward and Bernstein’s inside mole, was Mark Felt, Associate Director  of the FBI.  The deep state and press, sharing a mutual disdain for Nixon, had collaborated to bring him down.

Thus, the means for securing a vaccination against elections that threatened the accepted status quo- in essence, sustained, intense and disproportionate press focus on perceived vulnerabilities of an unacceptable president, coupled if possible with deep state cooperation and coordination — was realized.  For the next forty years, with variable intensity, the machinery was oriented towards reigning in Republican Presidents.  The exception was the Clinton experience, where the mainstream media, positioned to bury the “intern” story, was caught completely off guard by a new force to this point not recognized, the internet, with a new arm of investigative oversight less biased by traditional views of the world exemplified by a uniquely new reporter, Matt Drudge.

The years of the Obama Administration were the reconstruction of the Kennedyesque narrative.  Mr. Obama, a compelling figure who pushed all the right buttons — suave, progressive, intellectual — was feted for eight years by a compliant press the protected the image against whispered, darker reflections of a more imperious side – Fast and Furious, the weaponization of the IRS and other government agencies, the Benghazi debacle.  None of the narratives gained weight, or reached the White House, because the press, having learned from the Clinton experience wouldn’t let it, and the politicized Justice Department had determined the ends justified the means.  The end of the Obama Administration presented real dangers, though, to all that had been accomplished.  An unstable maverick in Donald Trump had managed to wrest the Republican nomination, and showed no indication that he would follow the civility of previous Republican candidates to avoid the risk of a war on culture.  At the same time, the Obama legacy was to be put in the hands of Hillary Clinton, a uniquely soiled candidate who encompassed the worst traits of her husband’s love affair with crony capitalism and innate dishonesty without the accompanying natural political instincts.   What to do….What to do.

It progressively appears the old war horse of media narrative and deep state coordination was dusted off and pointed at Trump.  Unlike in Nixon’s case, no one waited to see how the election would turn before initiating action.  Too much was at stake, and no one would be able to trust the internet to cooperate.  Trump was a perfectly designed foil.  He had no political experience and no real organization.  His business life was riddled with shady characters, shoddy tactics, and international scope.  He was the perfect anti-Obama — rude, bombastic, and reactionary.  Not since the juxtaposition of Kennedy to Nixon, was the righteousness of the process so obviously clear to both media and deep state characters as the potential jump from Obama to Trump.  With such juxtapositions, the trust in the natural electoral process to do the right thing could not be calmly and passively accepted.  The first action was to somehow cleanse Hillary Clinton of her stunning malfeasance in her Clinton Foundation activities, laced with sloppy security breeches codified in thousands of destroyed emails on a private server — and the on going abeyance of the Obama Administration, and perhaps the President himself.   This required tortuous legal justifications by the Justice Department and FBI, that under a Republican Administration would have led to a Constitutional crisis —  interviews not recorded and not taken under oath, immunity provided preemptively, legal decisions to ignore the mountain of evidence and declare outcome prior to any legal process.  Despite the smell, the media accepted the outcome with satisfaction.  The second process was to turn the legal investigative engine upon the opponent Trump, taking the kernel of longstanding Russian interference with American elections and point a one sided lens upon Trump.  Cooperation with the Clinton campaign with acceptance of opposition research purchased by Clinton and then laundered like dirty money through government investigative organs to have it appear as clean counter intelligence,  appears to have required coordinated activity with both the Justice Department and FBI, and possibly National Security agencies.  Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal was the first to report the identification of a possible mole positioned by the FBI in the opposition Trump campaign.  Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, a former federal prosecutor, has outlined in devastating fashion, the two juxtaposed processes of investigation of Clinton and Trump, as near polar opposites by the same legal arms of our government.  After the stunning election of Trump to the Presidency, the narrative had to be put into over-drive, from one of Russian Interference to the quid pro quo of Russian Collusion, and from nearly the first day, the elected President has been under attack in a fashion positioned to overturn the election.

In my childhood, I remember the daily broadcasts of the Congressional hearings that pealed away Nixon’s defensive layers one by one, until the core conspiracy had been identified, vilified, and the outcome inevitable.  The combined pressure of external and internal forces is immense and inexorable.  Nixon’s supreme failure was the confluence of the elite institutions hatred of his persona and resultant success threatening the accepted meme, and the extent to which he used unsavory elements to fight back.  Trump’s own naivety may have been his best weapon.  Nearly two years of searching for evidence of ‘Russian Collusion’ has turned up nothing potentially for the simple reason that there may have been no there there.  The Trump phenomena did not rely on traditional campaign structures and was therefore was not sophisticated enough to contemplate an organized coordinative process involving Russians, hackers, and Facebook ads.  Trump was too busy utilizing a previously unconceived triad of threadbare campaign finance, old fashion rallies, and celebrity fueled twitter artillery.  Stunningly, he won, and the unseemly, unsophisticated attacks and subsequent dismantling of the progressive legacy have driven the permanent state and Obama holdovers to the precipice of madness.

The clarity as to what has transpired has only begun to be revealed, and a painful boomerang may yet strike heaviest on those who sought to artificially direct the outcome.  Unlike forty-five years ago, the country may not accept the logic to overturn the election, and those that hoped to control events in a constitutional republic, may find enough of the old pride to assure  a government of the people, by the people, for the people, has not yet perished from the face of the earth.