TO: President Donald J. Trump
FROM: Susie Wiles
DATE: 10/8/21
RE: The Empire Strikes Back
America might not be great again (yet), Mr. President, but happy days are indeed here again.
When you are restored by the people to the White House in January, 2025, I believe this is a week we will all look back at and call a turning point.
Particularly this news cycle has been deja vu all over again. I know you already saw it on “Way Too Early,” where Jonathan Lemier was forced to play a long clip from your Thursday night phoner with Hannity. Joe and Mika, as you already know, played another clip as the very first element of their program!
You are back, Sir!
Not that you ever left.
There is no clearer sign of the paradigm shift (or: restoration, really) than this: You so own the libs that they are back to seeing you as irresistible box office.
As you always say, Mr. President, “The Fake News hates Trump, but they love Trump!”
The Washington Post has five stories about you today; as does the New York Times, including one about how you dominate the Republican Party, teeing up your Iowa event tomorrow with this:
On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Trump heads to Iowa for a rally at the state fairgrounds, a perennial stop on the presidential campaign circuit. Joining him will be several of the state’s top Republicans, including Gov. Kim Reynolds, Senator Charles E. Grassley and the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, Jeff Kaufmann — a testament to the former president’s enduring dominance.
Yes, some of the other stories are about the January 6 investigation and our telling your White House folks to defy the congressional subpoenas, and about your efforts to make sure the states didn’t let Biden get away with stealing the election. The press thinks these stories hurt you; our research makes clear that while they do damage in Chevy Chase, they only make you stronger in real America.
Even Fake News CNN is paying homage to you in their write up of that Des Moines Register poll you are obsessed with. I mean, interested in….
I know you’ve already checked Drudge five or eleven times, but I wanted to enshrine in this memo the portrait Matt is painting. Welcome to Joe Biden’s America:
Everywhere you look today (and, yes, I know you have already looked…), your enemies are on the ropes.
Let’s start with Joe Biden. As you have discussed with the McLaughlin Brothers five or 11,000 times, you are going to be well positioned to win any rematch because you project “strong” and he projects “weak.”
Even the Never Trumper columnists now see this.
I know you don’t care for that “beauty,” Peggy Noonan, but her column is a Halperin essential read. She invokes that Quinnipiac poll which shows Biden’s poll numbers in the toilet, a sign of what we have been telling you all week – the Gang of 500 is obsessed with this poll.
Then she writes this:
Democrats, this “I’m a big ol’ progressive and we’re rewriting spending and taxing along left-wing ideological priorities and isn’t this dynamic and exciting?” thing isn’t working. The whole “You think I’m Joe Biden but if you squint you can see I’m really Lyndon Johnson ” thing isn’t working. Ideological aggression isn’t working.
Mr. Biden is showing a lot of it. “Get out of the way,” he tells Republicans, on the debt limit. “If you don’t want to help save the country, get out of the way so you don’t destroy it.” He’s more rhetorically hostile to the unvaccinated than he is to the Taliban: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” His statement on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema being harassed in a ladies’ room by activists who hissed like the devil’s imps was wan and passive-aggressive: “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody. . . . It’s part of the process.” It doesn’t happen to everybody and to announce it is part of the process is to make it part of the process. It was as if he were saying: Yeah, she’s got me mad. Hound her some more.
This is not the sound of bring-us-together; it’s not forbearance and grace. The tone is off in the White House, and the strategy on the Hill is off. I don’t think they understand who their progressives are.
Here is the paragraph that is all about Biden’s weakness that you will most love:
Democratic leaders are letting progressives push them around. Mr. Biden may want to create LBJ-sized history but he lacks LBJ’s electoral mandate and his tactical brutality. Would LBJ have allowed a caucus within his caucus to keep him from passing a popular, bipartisan bill that would have won him greatly needed praise? I don’t think so. He didn’t just know how to count, he knew how to kill.
Even Noonan knows YOU are a killer and Biden just isn’t.
George Will is another one I know you don’t like. (Note: He stopped wearing the bow ties years ago, just in case you are inclined to mention him at the Iowa rally.) But he portrays Biden as weak as well:
By siding with progressives, Biden — an open book who has been reading himself to the nation since he arrived in the Senate 48 years ago — showed, again, that he is not (as Otto von Bismarck said of Louis-Napoleon) “a sphinx without a riddle.” Neither is Biden a progressive. He is a party man who goes where it goes.
There are a lot of Will’s fussy allusions to American and European history in his column, which you will want to skim over (I didn’t really understand them either….), but like Noonan, Will paints Biden as being owned by AOC and Co.
Weak, weak, weak.
The Washington Post has a whole story about how you own Mitch McConnell, keying off your criticism of the debt ceiling deal, but also running through your recent shared past and present. Mitch tries to ignore you, but we know he is obsessed with you and your every move, including what Senate candidates you plan to endorse. He caved on Herschel Walker and our back channel indications are he will fall in line when you endorse in some of the other races. Mitch was born at night, but it wasn’t last night – he knows your picks are going to be the nominees, so he will meekly get on board.
Cryin’ Chuck isn’t doing much better than Mitch. He overplayed his hand after Mitch caved on the debt ceiling, giving a floor speech condemning Republicans that Joe Manchin visibly winced at live and in real time, and then later denounced.
Your foot soldiers, Senators Graham and Cruz, did their/our thing, denouncing Mitch and the Democrats at the same time.
A few other items:
Per the Post (New York, not Washington or Palm Beach) Hunter Biden’s art show has been delayed until the spring, but he has already sold some of his works. As instructed, our research team is all over this.
Don’t worry about all those Establishment Republicans holding a big fundraiser for Liz Cheney in Dallas; we hear every day from our folks there who are very unhappy about what the Bushies are doing.
I know you don’t like Glenn Youngkin distancing himself from you one bit, but, as we have discussed, please hold your tongue (as best you can). If he can beat Terry, Biden will look even weaker. As Kim Strassel cleverly points out, Youngkin is running on issues (the very issues — like crime, taxes, education, the corrosive dangers of Democrat rule — that we keep begging you to talk about, along with the vital issues of how the election was stolen and the persecution of the 1/6 patriots).
One last thing. After you were so gracious to Rupert in really making Fox News’ 25th anniversary celebration a success, yes, I saw how the Post framed your Haiti comments:
Former President Donald Trump suggested without evidence Thursday night that thousands of Haitian migrants who are reported to be heading for the US-Mexico border are afflicted by AIDS.
“We have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem. AIDS is a step beyond. AIDS is a real bad problem.
Rest assured, I’ve already called over there (before you screamed at me about it) to ask WTF “without evidence.”
They promised it won’t happen again.
One request: Please don’t take Corey’s calls today.
Let’s talk after golf.
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The above is not a real memo
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For all the latest news all the time, check out the 24/7 website the Walking Duck.
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