It’s not about Trump, It’s the movement, stupid

The Democrats see a clear line to November. Knowing they have a fatally flawed candidate, whose disregard for classified information may have gotten an Iranian nuclear defector killed last week, they want to make this election all about Donald Trump.

You can see it in Hillary Clinton’s relentless attack ads, and in the statements of her surrogates. They are trying their hardest to sweep her reckless transmission of classified information over her unsecure server under the rug.

{mosads}As Clinton spokeswoman Kristina Schake said without blushing on Monday, they want you to believe that it comes down to a mere “disagreement” among professionals as to what actually constitutes classified information.

In the normal world, such a flagrant disregard for national security would probably lead to an indictment. In the Clinton world, breaking the law and getting away with it is the new normal.

To reinforce their fantasy portrait of Donald Trump, the Democrats have worked hard. They have recruited, Republican Senator of Maine, Susan Collins, who says she absolutely cannot, ever, under any conditions, support Donald Trump for president. What a shock.

They have also recruited 50 former national security professionals, mostly Republicans, who proclaim that Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history.”

Let’s be very clear about what is going on here. On the one hand, you have Clinton and her political campaign, desperately seeking to spin the news cycle away from her flaws. This is a deception operation, similar to what she conducted in Benghazi with the help of deputy CIA director Mike Morell, a man whose flagrant lies should have shamed him from ever appearing in public again.

On the other, you have the dying shrieks of the permanent government, the Washington establishment, equally desperate to preserve their influence and their privileges.

They know their power and incomes will diminish greatly in a Trump administration. The insiders will get frozen out. That is precisely what the American people want. And this is why Trump appeals across party lines, across racial divides, to men and women of diverse backgrounds and income.

This is not a political campaign. It’s a movement and the establishment can’t get over it.

The national security and foreign policy establishment has not served this country well in recent years. President George W. Bush had a strategy when he went into Iraq that has been much maligned and misrepresented by this same establishment: defeat Saddam Hussein, then turn over the country to the Iraqis.

That is why the military plan, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, ultimately adopted called for only 160,000 troops. His war aim was to remove Saddam from power, smash his army, then get out.

In October 1998, the Senate unanimously passed the Iraqi Liberation Act, which called on the United States government to train and equip the Iraqi opposition. That opposition coalesced into the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, and included the two major Kurdish parties, the pro-Iranian Dawa party, secular Shiites, and Sunni tribal and political leaders.

The establishment hated the INC, and hated Chalabi even more, and was determined that the United States should never help them to gain power. So when President George W. Bush appointed establishment ambassador J. Paul (“Jerry”) Bremer to head the Coalition Authority, his first decisions were to disband the Iraqi Governing Council, which was dominated by the INC, and to cashier the Iraqi army.

Instead of liberating Iraq, as Bush had wanted, the shadow warriors in the national security and foreign policy establishment transformed our intervention into an occupation, with predictable results.

The permanent establishment has been urging U.S. presidents since the mid-1990s to seek an accommodation with the terrorist regime in Iran. Under George H. W. Bush, U.S. officials had no fewer than 28 high-level meetings with their Iranian counterparts, to no avail.

In 2003, the United States encouraged the European Union to launch nuclear negotiations with Iran that went nowhere for two years, as the wily Iranian negotiator— Hassan Rouhani, now president of Iran’s Islamic state— refused to make concessions.

Rouhani’s stonewalling gave Iran the breathing space it needed to complete its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan, key infrastructure for making the bomb. Obama completed that deal last year with disastrous results.

These are the men and women who oppose Trump. They are the elite, the policy establishment, and they brought us this mess.

Instead of government by and for the elites, Trump and the pro-America movement will bring back a sovereign government by and for the people. There are plenty of us who believe in constitutional government—and who have decades of experience in foreign policy, intelligence, and national security— to help out.

Kenneth Timmerman’s latest book is Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama Blamed for Benghazi. He is a Trump supporter.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.