Michael Barone finds the Transatlantic elite response to its political defeats in 2016 is identical to the response of the Bourbons to the Revolution in France. They are determined to learn nothing and forget nothing.

It was no coincidence that Donald Trump scheduled a trip to Britain, purportedly to inspect one of his golf courses in Scotland, on June 23, 2016. That was the day of the Brexit referendum, in which 52 percent of the electorate — 17.4 million voters — voted for their nation to leave the European Union.

Candidate Trump’s earlier endorsement of Brexit was criticized by elevated opinion as an unfriendly interference in another nation’s internal affairs. Few if any of the scoffers had similarly criticized former President Barack Obama for urging Britons to vote “remain,” even threatening that if they voted “leave” they would go “to the back of the queue” in seeking a free trade deal with the United States.

Thirteen months before Trump’s trip and the British vote, few thought there was any possibility of a Trump candidacy or a Brexit referendum. The shock of Brexit in June and Trump’s victory in November has not been fully absorbed by British or American financial, media, and political elites in all the time since.
30 Democrats in Puerto Rico with 109 lobbyists for weekend despite shutdown

As the gifted British political analyst Douglas Murray writes in National Review, “Instead of accepting the votes and trying to learn from them, elites have expended almost all their available energies trying to pretend that voters in 2016 were bad or duped. The past two years could have been spent trying to learn something or build something. Instead, the best minds of Left and Right have spent their time making claims of ‘racism,’ ‘Russia,’ and ‘Cambridge Analytica.’”

The unlearning continues. Here, the government (actually, less than one-quarter of the federal government) is “shut down” over Democrats’ resistance to Trump’s demand for funding the border wall — er, barrier — which he negligently failed for two years to obtain from the Republican-majority Congress.

Most Democratic politicians — and, polls show, many Democratic voters — favored border barriers before Trump’s victory. Now, they insist walls are “immoral” and ineffective.

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Robert Reich served as Secretary of Labor under William Jefferson Clinton. He has also been a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. So, you would think that he’s taken a high school Civics course and/or actually read the Constitution. But you’d clearly be dead wrong.

Robert Reich thinks, that because Impeachment is not likely to occur, and even if it did, Trump’s conviction and removal from office is yet more unlikely, he can personally simply invent a whole new process and procedure to set aside 60-odd million votes and the results of a US presidential election.

Impeachment isn’t enough.

Impeachment would remedy Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But impeachment would not remedy Trump’s unconstitutional presidency because it would leave in place his vice president, White House staff and Cabinet, as well as all the executive orders he issued and all the legislation he signed, and the official record of his presidency.

The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency.

Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions, and records were made without constitutional authority.

The Constitution does not specifically provide for annulment of an unconstitutional presidency. But read as a whole, the Constitution leads to the logical conclusion that annulment is the appropriate remedy for one.

After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.

It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.

The Constitution also gives Congress and the states the power to amend the Constitution, thereby annulling or altering whatever provisions came before. Here, too, it would logically follow that Congress and the states could, through amendment, annul a presidency they determine to be unconstitutional.

As I’ve said, my betting is Trump remains president at least through 2020 – absent compelling and indisputable evidence he rigged the 2016 election.

But if such evidence comes forth, impeachment isn’t an adequate remedy because Trump’s presidency would be constitutionally illegitimate.

It should be annulled.

What Robert Reich has in mind for Trump is the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsany’s tale, whom the Gods decided must not only cease to be, but must cease ever to have been.

This one is so crazy that I guess even the New York Times turned it down.

Assuming you believe the Russians hacked the DNC emails and gave them to Wikileaks (which Julian Assange — a leftist anarchist and no Republican, obviously– denied), Daniel Greenfield argues that you ought to ask yourself, Cui bono? Who were the Russkies trying to benefit?

The Russia conspiracy theory hinges on the single creaky claim that the Democratic National Committee hacks were a Russian plot to elect Trump. The theory and all its illegitimate stepchildren, including Robert Mueller and his infinitely expanding corps of prosecutors, lives or dies by the DNC hacks.

Trying to elect Trump by releasing damaging insider information from the DNC never made any sense. The DNC was already a dysfunctional organization that was being run by the Clinton campaign. Undermining its leadership had little impact on the election, but a great deal on control of the DNC.

There has never been any evidence that the DNC hacks swung the election. The vast majority of people never even heard of them. Only a handful of political insiders and watchers, already deeply and unpersuadably committed to one side or another, could name the contents of a single email.

When you want to understand the motive of a crime, follow the money. See who benefited from it, not casually, but deeply and significantly enough to justify the effort and risk of undertaking it.

The hacks targeted Clinton allies and sought to undermine their influence within the Democrat Party.

Russiagate’s fervent conspiracy theorists spin an unlikely scenario in which Moscow had picked Trump early on, and then abandoned him in a crowded field against 16 candidates, while assuming that he would naturally triumph. Instead of leaking Jeb Bush’s campaign emails or Marco Rubio’s, they bided their time and waited to release Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s and John Podesta’s emails.

That’s not a plan to help Trump win. It is a plan to take over the DNC.

Let’s look at what the Russians were actually doing during the election. They had set up fake Facebook sites aimed at the left on issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to the pipeline protests. That is not the behavior of a foreign intelligence operation that wanted Trump to win and the left to lose. Instead the Russians appeared to have allied with the left to push the Democrats even further to the left.

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Mueller Indicts 13 Russians

13 guys posting opinions on social media successfully interfered with the lawful functioning of an American presidential election overruling the wishes of 127+ million voters? Wow!

Babylon Bee:

A new, exclusive CNN investigative report revealed Thursday that millions of American voters may have potentially colluded with the Trump campaign to elect Donald Trump as President of the United States.

While Russia has been accused of interfering in the election, the breaking report indicates that the collusion may have extended to a significant portion of the U.S. population—“as many as 60 million citizens, and possibly even more.”

“The conspiracy goes much deeper than anyone expected,” Jake Tapper said on his news segment The Politics Lead.

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The libertarian humorist interviews with (T)Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie.

The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government,” P.J. O’Rourke writes in his new book, How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). “Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.”

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