I am not alone among conservatives when I admit that I am no fan of author Michael Wolff. I loathed him and wrote a hit piece when he disparaged President Trump in his last book, Fire and Fury. But Wolff brings to light two purported revelations about the 2020 election in his new book that, to the extent that they are true, bode ill for conservative media’s flagship network and establishment Republicanism.
The first assertion in just-released Landslide is that Fox News, spearheaded by the vitriol of Rupert Murdoch, threw Trump under the electoral bus at the eleventh hour as votes in Arizona were being counted.
Fox News has vehemently denied this.
The second troubling truth is that in an internal Republican National Committee email, RNC chief counsel Justin Riemer pointedly questioned Trump’s concerns about election integrity, in effect calling out any Republican who shared those concerns. The overarching inference of the communique is that high-echelon members of the RNC showed their true colors as operatives interested more in out-of-power fundraising than in keeping our best president since Reagan in power.
Surprisingly, in the face of the undeniable existence of the email, the RNC has vehemently denied this. But in an on-air segment, after seeing the email, Newsmax TV host Grant Stinchfield said, to paraphrase, that despite his reservations about Wolff’s reportorial ethics, it “seems to be true.” Trump campaign lead counsel Jenna Ellis, who received the email while at dinner with several RNC staffers, has left the Republican Party as a result.
There’s a sense of a troubling entrenchment on the right suggesting that former conservative behemoth FNC and the braintrust of the GOP no longer consider the best interests and choices of the American people a top priority. For close watchers of the political scene, the potential revelations here may seem like the observations of Captain Obvious. But if it is true that both Fox News and the RNC heatedly or cynically abandoned Mr. Trump when he needed them most, the truth of these abandonments must be communicated writ large to millions of voters who are still wondering, in the wake of 2020, what the hell happened.
In an interview conducted in the days after the election (on Fox, if memory serves), legal scholar and former vice chairwoman of the California GOP Harmeet Dhillon elucidated in depressed tones that something nefarious was going on at the highest levels of the RNC. Dhillon intimated that Machiavellian designs were afoot, and that the clear evidence that Trump was the overwhelming preference of Republican voters was swept under the rug in the interest of returning to some kind of noxious status quo.
While the RNC betrayal and Murdoch’s alleged walkaway may be fundamentally unrelated, Dhillon’s perspective bolsters the reporting in Wolff’s new book a bit too neatly for comfort.
It must be said: People and organizations have the absolute right to switch horses at any time. There is no law saying that Fox News must remain loyal to any president, or that the RNC can’t make decisions based on its sense of the way political winds are blowing. If Rupert Murdoch did use the profanity claimed by author Wolff in going with the early Arizona call, that is his right. If the RNC contained a contingent of movers and shakers who decided that despite Trump’s populist appeal the time had come to usher in a return to business as usual, there is no official body that will call them to account for the course change.
Related: Did Don Lemon Really Just Stand Up for Tucker Carlson?
Don’t worry about Fox News, they’re still atop the ratings heap. The RNC continues to raise money, though interestingly, and this is key, not as much as Donald Trump.
From Reuters: “The RNC ended June with almost $80 million in the bank.”
From Newsmax: Former President Trump’s combined war chest hit $102 million this month.
Trump, never one to mince words, put the word out in March, calling on Republican donors large and small to give to him, and not the Republican apparatus.
In real estate, it’s all about location, location, location. In politics, its consequences, consequences, consequences.
And that’s where it gets ugly for the RINOS who turned their backs on Trump. They had every right to do what they did, but they are now responsible for the results, to their viewers and their donors. If they, as Wolff and Dhillon suggest, moved to cull what they considered a harmful “cult of personality” out of conservatism’s mainstream and do their part to ensure Joe Biden’s election, they have helped to bring upon the nation a destructive regime and historical embarrassment.
They, in their considerable power, bear responsibility for the border crisis, Keystone, Biden inflation, Biden’s questionable cognitive ability, Harris’s incompetence, America’s fallen state of growing international disrespect, CRT in the schools, and BLM without castigation running wild in the streets. They bear retroactive responsibility for an election that millions of citizens suspect was manufactured in various ways to produce a certain result.
Along with McConnell and the rest of the GOP capitulators, the fingerprints of Rupert Murdoch and RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel are all over the Senate-approved trillion+ “infrastructure” bill. Thanks to them, a debt-laden reconciliation blockbuster is waiting in the wings.
And yes, Fox News and the RNC, in their actions to oust Trump and clear the way for the Biden administration and its corrosive socialism, must bear responsibility for the charade of the January 6 persecutions.
U.S. citizens, from the highest offices in New York City to the rural communities of the heartland, have the right to change their minds right up until the last second before the polls close. That is, if the polls ever really close.
But — Captain Obvious, please report for duty — elections have consequences.
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