Daily Verse | Revelation 9:16
The number of the mounted troops was two hundred million. I heard their number.
Wednesday’s Reading: Revelation 10-13
Wednesday and we’ve hit mid-week already and the Left has already peaked with hyperventilation about “Let’s go Brandon.” It’s mind-numbingly absurd, yet there’s undoubtedly a method to the progressive madness that we seem to be surrounded by.
Into the cyclone drops a book by Peter Navarro, one of President Trump’s three senior staffers who stayed with him all the way from the election in 2016 to the end of his first term in 2020. In his memoir, In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year, Navarro reveals the disloyal staff Trump surrounded himself with, who ultimately became his undoing.
In Bruce Bawer’s review of the book he writes,
Mike Mulvaney, acting chief of staff, was a neverTrumper. Economic advisor Gary Cohn (now vice-chairman of IBM) “never saw an American job he didn’t want to offshore in the profane name of supply chain efficiencies.” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross operated on “transactionalist Wall Street DNA.”
Navarro, who’d earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, was brought aboard by Trump to deal with the China trade situation and build up U.S. manufacturing. He supported full instant tariffs to wipe out China’s trade advantages. But the White House was packed with people who passionately opposed tariffs and were uncomfortably chummy with the Chinese. Jared Kushner? A “panda hugger.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin? The “second coming of Neville Chamberlain” and as a “Judas” who’d made millions in Chinese business and who “simply couldn’t believe” that the PRC “posed any economic or military threat to the United States whatsoever.”
When virus deaths mounted in China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s second-in-command Stephen Biegun, who’d been Ford Motors’ “offshorer in chief” to China, opposed a travel ban because he feared it would offend Xi. Living outside the Beltway but also exerting an outsized anti-tariff influence in the West Wing was the “Billionaires’ Cabal” – whose membership ranged from Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn (both heavily invested in Macao casinos) to Steve Schwarzman and Larry Fink.
He goes after Faux-chi, too, saying that “Fauci conspired to keep the first of the COVID vaccines from being unveiled until after the November 2020 election – the goal, of course, being to deprive Trump of electoral victory; as a result, tens of thousands of Americans were robbed of their very lives.”
But he also gives some insight into what happened with the Bat Flu response:
Trump has been widely criticized for the slowness with which his administration recognized the seriousness of COVID-19. In fact, according to Navarro, the fault lay not with Trump but with many of his advisors. Larry Kudlow publicly pooh-poohed the virus. Mark Short did a lousy job as head of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force. Navarro, for his part, corralled U.S. business leaders into helping combat the pandemic. Among this book’s heroes are FedEx CEO Fred Smith, who, while fiercely opposed to Trump’s trade policies, readily provided planes to ship desperately needed testing swabs from Italy to six U.S. cities. Other corporate good guys include Honeywell, UPS, and Pernod (which shifted its factories on a dime from making booze to producing sanitizer). Among the bad guys: GM, which, it will be remembered, had to be forced to manufacture ventilators. Worst of all: Big Pharma.
Finally, he gets at the 2020 election:
After the shock of the 2020 election loss, Navarro was also shocked by the defeatism of many of his colleagues. When Rudolph Giuliani insisted on challenging the results, many White House officials accused him of “grandstanding”; after Rudy was put in charge of that initiative, Jared Kushner and others tried to foil his efforts. Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell complained that she’d warned GOP bigwigs since May 2019 about the Democrats’ plans to steal the election, but had been ignored. Meanwhile one major inside-the-Beltway law firm after another passed on representing Trump in his vote-fraud case – such being “the hardball Globalist Swamp reality of Washington, D.C.”
Voter fraud was scarcely in Navarro’s wheelhouse. But just as he’d switched from trade to COVID, now, confronted by apathy and duplicity all around him, he felt compelled to throw himself into the job of “definitively answering the question of whether the election was in fact stolen.” Poring through mountains of material from the four states under dispute, he concluded that the election had been “stolen beyond any shadow of a shadow of a probabilistic doubt,” and wrote a report to that effect.
Unfortunately, others who were expected to serve the cause failed it spectacularly. Lawyer Sidney Powell, who kept making extravagant claims on TV about election fraud, never produced any proof, thus making the whole effort look bogus. Attorney General Bill Barr also proved a crushing disappointment. But the greatest betrayal was that by Mike Pence, who on January 6, acting in his role as President of the Senate when that body met to certify the November 3 vote, could quite legitimately have paused the certification to give state legislators time to investigate claims of fraud. Instead Pence ended up, in Navarro’s words, being “the Brutus most responsible both for the final betrayal of President Trump and the unceremonious burial of electoral integrity.”
I don’t know much about Peter Navarro, but this book seems like it would be a good read … especially regarding the 2020 election which was, without a doubt, rigged (i.e. stolen) to favor the Democrats.