RINOs Learned Nothing from Trump’s Victories

American Thinker 

It’s frustrating to watch congressional Republicans bollix up this critical moment in U.S. history.  Time is running out to secure American elections, eliminate all the welfare fraud and birth tourism that operate as magnets for illegal aliens, and pass legislation that gives President Trump’s executive orders the force of law.  You can already see the familiar scene shaping up on Capitol Hill: professional Republicans’ “failure theater” is back for another shameless performance.

Over 80% of Americans believe that our elections will not be secure until voters are required to show proof of citizenship and photo identification (common-sense requirements enforced in “democratic” nations around the world).  This 80-20 split with the electorate is important to note.  Safeguarding the legitimacy of elections is consistently popular in the United States.  Over 80% of Americans also believe that ballots should be counted on Election Day.  Similar percentages reject universal mail-in ballots.  Republican voters are close to 100% in support for these election safeguards. Nevertheless, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continues to play “failure theater” as he finds new ways to sink President Trump’s election-safeguarding SAVE America Act.  Utah Senator John Curtis is already joining forces with Democrats to push for mass amnesty for illegal aliens (a recurring dream of Establishment Republicans who enjoy betraying Republican voters more than defeating Democrats’ plans for destroying the United States).

Republican voters have watched this deranged kabuki theater all their lives.  Republican voters push for something that they want.  Republican politicians promise to “get it done on day one.”  Republican voters put those Republican politicians in office.  Then victorious Republican politicians find inexplicable ways to break their promises and do nothing.  Their failures in leadership hand control of Congress to the Democrats.  The Democrats get whatever they want done on day one…usually with the help of at least a few so-called “Republicans” in Congress.

One of the more recent infuriating examples of Republicans’ “failure theater” occurred after President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rammed socialized medicine (aka, Obamacare) through Congress in 2010 and set us down the path toward universal, government-run healthcare. 

Republican voters knew what would happen.  Private medical practices would disappear.  Inexpensive private insurance would disappear.  Families struggling to make ends meet would be forced to pay the welfare costs of people (including illegal aliens) who had no insurance coverage of their own.  Republicans knew that Obamacare would destroy the medical profession, increase consumer costs, and shove an ever-increasing number of taxpayer-funded government bureaucrats inside each examination room.  

Republicans had no power in Congress or the White House when Democrats forced Obamacare on the American people.  Republican members of the House and Senate pleaded, “Give us your vote, and we’ll save you from this Obamacare monstrosity.”  Republican voters (including grassroots conservatives who were springing up across the country as part of the largely unorganized Tea Party Movement) went to the polls in huge numbers in the 2010 midterm elections.  Republicans won sixty-three seats in the House, the largest shift since 1948, and secured the majority.  Republicans picked up seven seats in the Senate but failed to take back the chamber.  In a rare moment of honesty, Obama called the 2010 midterms a “shellacking” of the Democrat Party.  How did the victorious Republicans use their new powers in the House to hinder, block, or otherwise stymie Obama’s government takeover of medicine?  They mumbled, “Sorry, we can’t do anything without control of the Senate.”  

So grassroots Republican voters went to work again.  It took them four years, but they finally secured Republican control of the Senate in 2014.  Those midterm elections were another huge Republican victory.  Republicans picked up nine seats in the Senate, the largest gain by either party since 1980.  Republicans won thirteen more seats in the House, giving them their largest majority since 1928.  Now surely Republicans would be able to fight the Democrats’ government takeover of healthcare and put a stop to new Obama taxes and regulations suffocating the middle class…right?  Nope.  Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “Sorry, there’s just nothing we can do without the White House.”  

Republican voters spent four years giving Republican politicians the power to stop Obamacare in its tracks, and the politicians stabbed the voters in the back.  What happened next?  Two things: 

First, Obamacare (with more than a little help from pretend conservative judicial hack John Roberts) became entrenched in America’s labyrinthine regulatory system that exists to extract money and personal autonomy from the American people and deposit money and control to the permanent bureaucracy.  The old days of a private, professional relationship between doctor and patient are gone.  Now the federal government’s bureaucratic regulations combine with the insurance companies’ regulations and the corporate hospitals’ regulations to determine mandatory medical outcomes before a patient even arrives.

Second, Republican voters learned that Republican politicians can never be trusted again.  

Young Americans who are just coming of age to vote in this year’s midterms will have few, if any, memories of how Donald Trump successfully beat a smorgasbord of talented Republican candidates in the 2016 primaries before overcoming Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton’s monetary and public relations advantages to take the presidency.  Although the propagandists in the corporate press will never stop blaming Hillary’s embarrassing loss on the Russians (state-sanctioned disinformation that rational people now recognize as the Clinton-Obama-Intelligence-Community-invented Russia Hoax), she had more advantages in the 2016 election than any candidate in American history.  

The Clinton campaign and its network of NGOs and partisan advocacy groups spent somewhere between three and five times as much money as Donald Trump did in the run-up to the election.  The corporate press (including so-called “conservative” institutions) almost unanimously endorsed Clinton over Trump.  Hillary’s team booked the Jacob K. Javits Center in Manhattan to celebrate her certain victory on election night under an enormous glass ceiling (which she was certain to “break” as the first woman president, get it?).  Hillary was so confident of victory that she started campaigning in Texas.  Two weeks before the election, Hillary even sent out a Tweet with a picture of herself as a little girl and a caption reading, “Happy birthday to this future president.”  Hillary, the Democrats, Republican politicians, the news media, almost all of the pollsters, almost all of the pundits, the whole permanent bureaucratic Establishment running D.C., and every elite institution in the United States all predicted a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.  Newsweek even printed a “special commemorative edition” with Hillary’s face taking up the whole cover with an emblazoned headline, “MADAM PRESIDENT,” and a subheading announcing, “Hillary Clinton’s Historic Journey to the White House.”  

Something strange happened on the way to Hillary’s coronation.  The American people elected businessman Donald Trump as president of the United States.  Some of those voters chose him because they liked his policies.  Others voted for him simply because he ran as a Republican.  Above all else, though, the American people recognized Trump as the first legitimate “outsider” running for high office.  The Establishment hated him, and, from the American people’s perspective, that hate was a ringing endorsement for Trump’s candidacy.  

Ten years later, and Establishment Republicans still haven’t learned the lesson of the 2016 election.  They think that they can weather a couple more years with Trump in office and then get back to business as usual.  They’ve got another think coming.  

After Republican politicians failed to save Americans from Obamacare, Republican voters learned that professional Republicans can’t be trusted.  Watching the Washington Establishment spend the last ten years trying to put Trump and his voters in prison have only reinforced that lesson.  Voters are going to get only louder after Trump’s presidency.  RINO “failure theater” no longer works.  Senator Thune must step up or step aside.

Podcast thread for March 29

 

hopefully, things are peaceful where you are at.

Hormuz on the Brink: A Crumbling Regime and the Race Toward Iran's Reckoning

Townhall 

The gathering storm over the Strait of Hormuz carries with it unmistakable historical resonance. When the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) begins to threaten tariffs, or more bluntly, coercive tolls, on oil tankers navigating one of the world’s most vital maritime arteries, it evokes troubling parallels with the 1956 Suez Crisis. Then, as now, a strategic chokepoint became the focal point of geopolitical brinkmanship, miscalculation, and the dangerous illusion of control. Yet history rarely repeats itself neatly. Today’s Iran is not Nasser’s Egypt. It is a regime battered from within and without, its leadership decapitated, its command structures degraded, and its ideological authority increasingly hollow. And still, like a wounded animal, it lashes out.

The IRGC’s threats over Hormuz are less a demonstration of strength than a signal of desperation. For decades, the regime has relied on asymmetric leverage, mines, fast attack craft and proxy militias to offset its conventional military weaknesses. Now, with much of its senior leadership reportedly eliminated and its domestic security wings, the Basij, in particular, under sustained pressure, Tehran is reverting to its most familiar playbook, disrupting global oil flows, raising the economic cost of confrontation, and hoping that international resolve fractures under the strain.

But this time, the context is radically different. The Islamic Republic is no longer facing a distant adversary reluctant to engage. It is confronting a convergence of forces encompassing external military pressure, internal dissent, and the growing organization of its most determined opposition. Reports that Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) Resistance Units are coalescing into what is being described as an “Army of Liberation” will send tremors through what remains of the regime’s command hierarchy. For years, Tehran has dismissed such groups as marginal or irrelevant. That narrative is now becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. An organized, armed domestic resistance, particularly one capable of coordinating with external actors, changes the strategic equation entirely. It transforms the conflict from a conventional interstate confrontation into something far more existential for the regime, a multi-front struggle for survival.

At the same time, the deployment of 5,000 US Marines toward the region underscores the seriousness of Washington’s intent. While Pentagon officials have been careful to avoid the language of invasion, the presence of such a force is hardly symbolic. It represents a credible capability for rapid intervention, whether to secure key infrastructure, support allied operations, or exploit any sudden collapse in regime control. Pete Hegseth’s assertion that the war could be concluded in “weeks rather than months” may strike some as optimistic. Wars, particularly those involving fragmented state structures and ideological militias, have a habit of defying timelines. And yet, there is a logic to the claim. The Iranian regime, for all its bluster, appears increasingly brittle. Its capacity to coordinate sustained military operations has been degraded. Its ability to project authority across its own territory is being openly challenged.

What remains, however, is dangerous.

Even in its weakened state, Iran retains a significant arsenal of ballistic missiles. These weapons, already used to strike targets across the Middle East, provide the regime with a means of escalation that does not depend on conventional force projection. They are instruments of disruption and terror, designed to widen the conflict, draw in regional actors, and complicate the calculations of those seeking a swift resolution. There is also news that Vladimir Putin, who for years has imported thousands of suicide drones from Iran for his war in Ukraine, is now returning the favor by shipping a large number of deadly drones manufactured in Russia to Tehran.

This is where the parallels with Suez begin to diverge. In 1956, the crisis ultimately exposed the limits of old imperial power and ushered in a new geopolitical order. In today’s Middle East, the outcome of this confrontation may similarly mark a decisive turning point, but the direction of travel remains uncertain. Can the regime survive? In the narrowest sense, it is possible. Authoritarian systems have an extraordinary capacity for endurance, even in the face of severe external pressure and internal unrest. The remnants of the IRGC and Basij, though diminished, are unlikely to dissolve overnight. There will be pockets of resistance, particularly in areas where the regime’s ideological grip remains strong or where fear continues to outweigh dissent.

But survival is not the same as viability. A regime that can no longer guarantee internal security, that faces an organized and emboldened opposition, and that has alienated much of its regional environment, is a regime living on borrowed time. Its threats over Hormuz may disrupt markets and unsettle governments, but they will not restore its legitimacy or rebuild its shattered command structures. Indeed, such actions may accelerate its isolation. The countries of the Gulf, already wary of Tehran’s ambitions, will see in these threats further confirmation of the regime’s recklessness. Even those international actors inclined toward caution will find it increasingly difficult to argue for restraint in the face of actions that jeopardize global energy security. The coming weeks will be decisive.

If the MEK-led resistance can translate its momentum into sustained territorial and organizational gains, and if external pressure continues to degrade what remains of the regime’s coercive apparatus, the prospect of a rapid political transformation cannot be dismissed. Conversely, if the regime manages to regroup, reassert control over key centers of power, and exploit divisions among its opponents, the conflict could settle into a more protracted and unstable phase.

What is clear is that the Islamic Republic is facing the most serious challenge in its history. The convergence of internal uprising and external pressure is something it has long feared and sought to prevent at all costs. Now that moment appears to have arrived. The world should take note, not only of the danger posed by a desperate regime, but of the opportunity to support a transition toward a more stable and accountable future for Iran and the wider region. History teaches us that moments of crisis can become moments of transformation. Whether this proves to be one of them will depend on the choices made in the days ahead.

Trump Understands Iran Poses An Imminent Threat

American Thinker 

In a letter posted on X, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent said that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US and claimed the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” With his departure, Kent is the most high-profile figure within the Trump administration to publicly criticize the US-Israeli attack on Iran. His parting words sound more like the superficial babblings of commentators like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, whose so-called analyses of our policy are based more on superficial opinion than on historical realities.

It should be noted at the outset of this article that the threat posed by Iran is an ongoing, real-time danger—more than a threat. We have experienced many real attacks by Iran. A recent document published by the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in China lists 42 attacks on Americans by Iran between November 1979 and June 2025, causing the deaths of 1,229 Americans and the wounding of hundreds more.

Although this was not a singular event like the Mexicans crossing the Nueces River in the 1840’s to begin the Mexican-American War or the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941, the sheer number of those who lost their lives and the duration in decades of these attacks should convince anyone that Iran had already been inciting and been acting offensively in a war with the USA for 47 years which we have been downplaying.

We have been in a state of denial and, yes, fear of the Iranians for all this time. We are a superpower, and they have been beating the crap out of us.

We should have attacked Iran long before President Trump, yet we have had a paralysis of will regarding Iran. We have been attacked repeatedly by Iran, sometimes losing hundreds of American lives, but we failed to retaliate.

I use the term “failed” advisedly because sometimes it is wise to walk away from a fight, but if the enemy persists and grows in influence such that we also began to be attacked by Iran’s “proxies” such as Hezbollah, the Taliban, ISIS, Al-Queda and more recently the Houthis then we are not facing mere skirmishes but are facing an unstated declaration of war from specific enemies. Each of these enemies is governed by a different epicenter of power, but the persistent and dominant leader in the Islamic war against the infidel during our period of history has been Iran.

During the first half of the 20th century, the main Islamic enemy was the Ottoman Empire. It joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I as another attempt to legitimize invading Europe, which the Islamic world did and continued trying to do even after Muslims were expelled from Spain in 1492. The Islamists have been at war with the West and with Christendom since the founding of Islam in the 7th century.

However, America, in the grip of a Rodney King mentality that wants to know “why can’t we all just get along?” does not generally teach the long wars of Islam against the West, wars that in different forms and styles have persisted for more than fourteen hundred years. This is no small matter.

It is not a matter of Israel drawing us into a nonsensical war instigated by some small aggressions by an unimportant country. Rather, the 47 years of Iran’s aggression are the latest wave of aggression that has emanated from different warlike centers in the Islamic world for more than 1,400 years. The moral decline and lack of historical knowledge among our population have led some people—too many people—to question our right to fight and the legitimacy of fighting. After all, don’t we believe in freedom of religion?

The correct understanding is that we believe in freedom of speech, but it does not include incitement to violence or shouting “Fire!!” in a crowded theater. So, wavering on our attacks or opposing our attacks on Iran as being somehow hypocritical and seeming to backslide on our ideal of freedom of religion would be a misapplication of the freedom of religion concept.

Resigning from counterterrorism, as Mr. Kent did at the very time when the greatest counterterrorism operation in history is underway, would be a collapse in realpolitik. Iran is and has been an existential threat to the West and even to parts of the Islamic world. Its fanatical obsession with the enemies of Sharia law has allowed Iran to even be bombing its Sunni Muslim neighbors as being too moderate and too willing to make deals with the “Great Satan.”

Another historical thread is also at work in the resistance to our war with Iran. We have encountered losses or stalemates in so many wars since the end of World War II, wars against powers much weaker militarily than the USA, weakening our confidence.

Despite our victory in WWII, we could only come to an end of the Korean conflict by fighting to a stalemate in Korea, revealing that after WWII, we had become a paper tiger. Then we fought against Ho Chi Minh to prevent a communist takeover in Vietnam, but (helped by opposition within America) we lost that war, were driven out, and Vietnam became a communist country.

Some communist teacher colleagues of mine boasted how they vacationed or had their honeymoons in Vietnam after we left that land. After Vietnam, Iraq “lost” to the U.S., but the influence of barbaric Islamic ideology in that country continued to thrive. Also, Iranian Shi’ite ideology increased in that country.

Then, following the horror of 9/11 in New York City, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon, President Bush declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan, yet 20 years later, the same Taliban regained governing control (following 20 years of generals declaring in Congressional hearings that victory would come soon).

Over the years, from the end of WWII, the USA has increasingly appeared to be an ever-weakening “superpower.” This is the historical context of the Obama/Biden attempts to appease the Iranians with pallets of money and “flexibility” regarding Iran’s uranium enrichment. We had become gutless wonders seeking to bribe our enemy into submission.

The above stalemates and defeats took the wind out of our sails as patriotic Americans. Trump’s appeal to many of us is that he boldly sees that Iran – despite attempts by Dems and Internet pontificators to see our attack on Iran as unlawful – is an instigator for 47 years, an instigator that has been viewed through the eyes of denial and fear.

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Conrad Black: With Iran war, Trump boxes China in

 The U.S. is at minimal risk from high oil prices, not so for China

The Iran war was unleashed so suddenly and has proceeded so swiftly that some of its principal objectives and consequences have scarcely been noticed. A few commentators have recognized the pattern of the Trump administration’s removal of Venezuela and soon Cuba and by the actions of Israel, Syria, as well as Iran, as Russo-Chinese allies. But the real background to the status of the Strait of Hormuz as a conduit for 20 per cent of the world’s oil exports has not been seriously publicly explored. There is no doubt that the United States could force the Strait open and it has substantially prepared to do that by obliterating the missile firing capability on the southern Iranian coast and by severely reducing the number of potential interoceptive Iranian warships and swift boats.

Those addicted to the assumption that the Trump administration is incapable of ingenious strategic planning have failed to notice that while the United States is not at all dependent on Middle Eastern oil and the European Union receives only six per cent of its crude oil and nine per cent of its natural gas through the Hormuz Strait and 16 per cent of its petroleum and 45 per cent of its natural gas from the United States, China receives almost half of its crude oil imports from the Hormuz Strait. The flow of oil through the Strait to China has been reduced by up to 75 per cent and the rise in domestic Chinese gasoline prices would send any Western public into the streets in protest. The world oil price is supposedly uniform but the United States could ignore it almost completely if it wished and Europe certainly could, with American assistance, seriously mitigate its impact. China does not have that luxury.

The United States has relaxed its interception of so-called ghost-tankers delivering contraband oil from Iran to China, to take some upward pressure off the world oil price, but it could stop oil shipments from the Persian Gulf to China anytime it wished. Our generally strategically unsophisticated media have assumed that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz at will, and that this gives it a chokehold on Western Europe, as well as an ability to endanger the financial security of the Gulf states. It really does not have much impact on the Europeans and if the Gulf states were seriously inconvenienced, they can cease to finance Iran and inflict much more financial damage on the Islamic Republic than the shattered and punch-drunk Iranian leadership could have on them.

Since the United States could assure passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz anytime it wished, it is not only giving its ostensible allies the time to consider if they do not in fact find their interests to be well-served by cooperation with their great American ally. More importantly, it is inviting the People’s Republic of China to determine whether it puts higher value on its access to relatively affordable oil as to half of its consumption, or more highly values its opportunistic association with the deranged theocratic despotism in Iran, even now that it is in its death throes. 

When Donald Trump returned to the presidency of the United States a year ago, China appeared to have a strategic advantage in several areas. It was pouring a vast quantity of lethal narcotics through Venezuela and Cuba and Mexico into the United States at great profit to itself, had substantially assembled dominant positions as a source of a number of strategic minerals, and was threatening the entire West’s supply of semiconductor chips from Taiwan. The era of plausible predictions of the Chinese overhaul of the United States as the world’s greatest economy has mercifully ended, but the proportions of its failure have only become clear in the last year as the Chinese economy is now slowing down and the American economy, barring short-term flutters in commodity prices, is growing at an accelerating rate.

The United States, at minimal risk to itself and brief and modest upward impact to the domestic gasoline price, has put its chief rival, its principal ostensible allies, and the ambiguous powers of the Middle East, all on the horns of a dilemma. As the Chinese determine whether clinging to the alliance with the terminally diminished terror state of Iran can justify accepting steeply higher oil prices, and the Europeans reflect on whether they should get used to the relationship with the United States becoming a somewhat more reciprocal operation; the Gulf states, who have received four times as many missiles from Iran as Israel, must finally consider the virtue of coming off the fence they should not have been on between Iran and the United States and Israel, and committing their own armed forces to this war and pulling the financial plug on the evil and faltering regime in Tehran.

The Americans are taking practically no casualties and are under no appreciable pressure at all to stop or moderate their daily pummelling of the terrorist ayatollahs. Europe, after testing the waters with their haughty affectation of neutrality and moral equivalence between the country that pulled them through the World Wars and the Cold War, and the lunatic clerical gerontocracy in Tehran, which has now developed missiles that could reach Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London, are now among the 30 countries pledging to contribute to the long-term accessibility of the Hormuz Strait. The United Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are daily receiving outrageous and completely unprovoked acts of war from Iran, and cannot conceivably imagine that turning the other cheek as they have is a viable response.

Given its ambition to hold the entire world to ransom by its promotion of terrorism and its pyrotechnic cheerleadership of antisemitism, the indiscriminate belligerency of the Iranian government, such as it is, roiling and wallowing in a St. Vitus’ dance, makes some sense, although it is hopeless. Europe, mostly run by left-wing governments dependent to some extent on Islamic voters to remain in office, will have to determine if the old continent can shake off its enfeeblement, hypocrisy, and envy of the rise of America, and can reinject some promise into the European project. 

They need America much more than America needs them but above all they need to rediscover some of the distinction of Churchill, Adenauer, de Gasperi, de Gaulle and Thatcher. The spectacle of the great original nation-states and cradle of Western civilization cowering before terrorists is deeply sad. And China is about to receive a lesson, as within living memory, Germany and the U.S.S.R. did, on the difficulties of speeding past the United States as the world’s leading power. Underestimating America, and especially Trump’s America, remains a hazardous business.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-with-iran-war-trump-boxes-china-in

Millions Gather To Express Total Ignorance About Political System

 

U.S.·Oct 18, 2025 · BabylonBee.com

U.S. — Millions of Americans took to the streets today in order to express to the world their total and absolute ignorance about the political system they live in.

Several major cities including Boston, New York City and Chicago saw over one hundred thousand residents show up to proclaim their abject incomprehension of governance.

"The world needs to understand how incredibly little we know," said local man Roger McMahon, who had joined the march. "I really do not think the greater population appreciates how completely uneducated and illiterate we are when it comes to our own political system. That's why I'm here marching. We're going to join our voices together and let the message ring loud and clear that we are uneducated rubes in desperate need of a middle-school social studies class."

Rallygoers marched throughout the day on Saturday, chanting various slogans such as "Where do I live?" and "How does government work?"

"It's incredibly inspiring, seeing so many people walking arm in arm saying 'Hey, I don't know anything,'" said local woman Barbara Samson. "It feels incredible to be part of this movement of telling people that I'm a real dullard."

At publishing time, the rest of the world had politely told the rallygoers that the message had been received.

No Endorsement from Trump in Cornyn -vs- Paxton Runoff

Conservative Treehouse 

According to Politico, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was spotted in Mar-a-Lago last Friday talking face-to-face with President Trump.

With the base and President Trump still leveraging everything possible for the SAVE America Act, President Trump seems unlikely to endorse John Cornyn or Ken Paxton until the dust on that issue settles.

The only way Senator John Cornyn can survive the primary challenge from Paxton is if President Trump endorses the incumbent.  If President Trump stays out of the race, Ken Paxton looks likely to achieve victory.  Surprisingly, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSCC) has not spent more money on Cornyn, another good sign.

(VIA POLITICO) – […] Paxton, though, hasn’t rested his case. He traveled to Mar-a-Lago last Friday for a Palm Beach County GOP dinner, and was spotted speaking to Trump himself, according to three sources familiar.

Trump and Paxton were on the patio, one source added, with another saying the two discussed the runoff. “It was a positive meeting,” said yet another person. A Paxton spokesperson declined to comment on the meeting.

It’s the latest sign of a fierce and feverish effort to keep Trump from endorsing Cornyn.

Even when all signs pointed to a Cornyn endorsement following the longtime senator’s showing in the primary, MAGA faithful kept pressing for Paxton. Now they’re optimistic their guy can come out on top — and they’re still taking shots at Cornyn every chance they get.

“The Cornyn endorsement looks dead, but it’s Trump, so it’s never certain,” a person close to the White House said. (read more)

U.S. senators (mostly) write foreign aid policy, rules and regulations thereby creating the financing mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds.  They are guided by K-Street lawyers who represent various interests.

Those same senators then receive a portion of the laundered funds back through their various “institutes” and business connections to the foreign government offices. Everyone in DC knows the gig.

Example: Ukraine laundry to Biden, Haiti laundry to Clinton, Iran laundry to Obama.

The U.S. State Dept. served as a distribution network for the authorization of the money laundering by granting DC conflict waivers, approvals for financing (McCain Institute, Clinton Global Initiative etc), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money.

The officials within the State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of “indulgence fees”, commissions, junkets, gifts and expense account payments to those with political oversight.

If anyone gets too close to revealing the process they become a target of the apparatus.

President Trump was considered a threat to this process.

In reality all of the U.S. Senators (both parties) on the Foreign Relations Committee understand what is going on and/or are participating in a process for receiving taxpayer money and contributions from foreign governments. [See Bob Menendez]

A “Codel” is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payments terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing.

On the right the McCain Institute was/is one of the obvious examples of the financing network. [That is the primary reason why Cindy McCain was such an outspoken critic of President Trump.] On the left you see the Clinton Global Initiative, same/same.

This is why Senators spend $20 million on a campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year.

The “institutes” is where the real foreign money comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc. etc. There are trillions at stake.

The current nation of focus is the Ukraine laundry operation. The U.S. intelligence services, including CIA operations in USAID, have historically been the bagmen. That’s also why they consider Gabbard a threat.