Trump Reveals the Biggest Lesson Learned From His First Term

Trump Reveals the Biggest Lesson Learned From His First Term

On Wednesday night, former President Donald Trump joined Fox News host Sean Hannity for a town hall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Due to time limitations, Fox aired the remaining portion of the event on Thursday night.

One woman asked Trump, “What could you share that you’ve learned from your first time being in the Oval Office for those who are hesitant to vote for you now?”

He replied:

So, we need a strong president and you know, I actually think we had a very stable administration. But we were hit with this weaponization. … All of the different Russia, Russia, Russia hoaxes and we won every single one of them. The most important thing and I found – and you can say this is true in business also – we have to get the right people. When I first went there, 2016, I had a lot of good people, I had a lot of good advice, but I put people in that, in some cases, were not what I really wanted.

I didn’t know much about Washington. I was there 17 times in my whole life. And I wasn’t in D.C. very much.

But I got to know ’em, and I got to know ’em the hard way. And I know the good ones, the bad ones, the weak ones, the smart ones, the dumb ones. I know ’em all now.

…

But a big key to running it is: Get the right people. You put the right person and the right group of people at the heads of these massive agencies, you’re going to have tremendous success. And I know now the people better than anyone would know them.

Trump was spot on. As difficult as it may be to believe that the brash billionaire from New York had little or no idea of the traps being set for him by the administrative state (or whatever one chooses to call the permanent group of unelected government officials who run Washington, D.C.), Trump did not exaggerate. His unfamiliarity with how things worked in the Capital City left him completely unprepared for the injustices already in place or the outrages to come. It’s fair to say he was naive. He took advice from those who wanted him to fail and trusted the wrong people.

By the spring of 2016, it was apparent that Trump would likely win the Republican presidential nomination, and the Democratic machine went into overdrive to derail his candidacy. And following his shock victory that November, they set out to destroy his presidency by any means necessary, including the weaponization of federal agencies against him.

The Democrats’ persecution of Trump had begun. Here are a few examples of what happened behind closed doors during the 2016 election cycle.

The Steele dossier:

Washington attorney Marc Elias, then a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, represented both the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

[Prior to April 2016, opposition research firm Fusion GPS had been commissioned by the Washington Free Beacon to provide dirt on Trump. In April, the Free Beacon ended its relationship with Fusion, and the firm’s founder, Glenn Simpson, approached Elias to see if he might be interested in continuing the research. Needless to say, he was.]

Elias hired Fusion GPS and laundered funds from the DNC and the Clinton campaign through his law firm to pay Simpson. Simpson hired former British spy Christopher Steele to create the bogus collection of derogatory stories about Trump that would come to be known as the Steele dossier.

Simpson also hired Nellie Ohr, who was married to Bruce Ohr, the fourth highest ranking DOJ official at the time. Bruce Ohr acted as a back channel between Steele and the FBI.

The first stories from the fictitious dossier were leaked to the press in September 2016.

Bruce Ohr testified in an August 2018 Congressional hearing that he had warned the FBI that none of the information in the dossier had been verified. Moreover, during a January 2017 interview, Steele’s primary subsource, Igor Danchenko, told the FBI that the stories had been “made up” in a Russian bar. Yet the bureau still used the dossier as the basis of their FISA Court application for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in October 2016 and for three renewals.

The DNC’s server was hacked:

In late April 2016, the DNC noticed unusual network activity and called in cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. As the story goes, technicians told the DNC the Russians had hacked their servers, and their emails had been leaked to Wikileaks. Strangely, the DNC refused to let the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security conduct forensic examinations of their server. Additionally, the FBI accepted CrowdStrike’s unverified and redacted report, even passing it on to the Mueller team.

After the emails were released the weekend before the Democratic Convention, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters, “some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”

Democratic lawmakers and the media ran with this narrative.

The New York Times wrote an article supporting the DNC’s version of the story in July 2016. The FBI leaked information to bolster this narrative and the Times ran a second story.

The DNC version of events was repeated so frequently and with such conviction that, ultimately, it became accepted as the truth.

The Russian collusion scandal was born.

And simultaneously:

In 2014, Admiral Mike Rogers, who served as the Director of the National Security Agency under President Obama, discovered that American citizens were being spied upon and drew attention to the abuse of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the Obama administration. Used as intended, it’s a useful law enforcement tool. Abused as it had been by Obama administration officials up until Rogers’ discovery in 2014, it became a weapon.

The Obama White House used these intercepts, which are meant to be used to thwart terrorist attacks, against their opponents for political purposes.

It was Mike Rogers who traveled to Trump Tower on November 17, 2016, to brief then-President-elect Donald Trump that communications from the building were being tapped. Later that day, the Trump transition team announced they were moving their operations to a new location in New Jersey. Within days, The Washington Post reported that “[then-Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter had recommended the removal of Mike Rogers from his NSA position.” Rogers was not fired, for obvious reasons.

Trump is still standing:

In January 2017, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Unfortunately, that’s true, and no one knows that better than Trump.

Yet, despite the Democrats’ nine-year campaign to destroy him, Trump is still standing. His eyes are wide open. As he said during the town hall, “But I got to know ’em, and I got to know ’em the hard way. And I know the good ones, the bad ones, the weak ones, the smart ones, the dumb ones. I know ’em all now.”

If he wins, with people like J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. by his side, he will be formidable.

Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

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