Finding Trump

In 2003, I took my children to see the animated movie, Finding Nemo, about a little clown fish who gets lost from his family and his quest to be reunited with them. At the point of the movie when it looked like Nemo was going to be lost forever, my 5-year-old son turned to me and whispered, “don’t worry daddy, they’re going to find Nemo. They couldn’t call the movie, Finding Nemo, if they didn’t find Nemo.” I thought about that movie and my son’s observation on Thursday, when former President Donald Trump and 18 of his associates were arrested in Fulton County Georgia for conspiracy to overturn an election. Trump who is leading current President Joe Biden in the polls for the 2024 Presidential election, had been indicted earlier by far-left wing District Attorney, Fani Willis, because he had the temerity to question the results of the Presidential election that Joe Biden supposedly won in 2020.

Trump’s indictment was the result of a grand jury investigation that was triggered by the reporting that Trump had asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to “find the votes” he needed to win, implying that Trump had wanted the Secretary of State to fabricate votes out of thin air for him. In reality, Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.” He didn’t say “create the votes” or “manufacture the votes” or “stuff the ballot box”, he said “find the votes” that he believed were legitimately his. Similar to my son’s observation about Nemo, he wouldn’t have used the word “find”, if he didn’t actually believe the legitimate votes existed. Trump believed, and still does, that Republican votes in certain counties were suppressed, and that there were votes for him that were illegally not counted. None of Trump’s opinion are criminal. Believing that an election was fraudulent or stolen is not criminal behavior. Asking someone to look for votes that you believe actually exist but have been suppressed is not criminal. Challenging Presidential election results is not criminal. Prior to 2020, three times this century, losing Presidential candidates challenged the results of their election – all of them were Democrats, though.

Remember what happened down in Florida, after the 2000 election which Al Gore lost to George W. Bush. The entire concept of “hanging chads” was Al Gore’s attempt to “find the votes” for him that he believed were not counted. That was the whole process of studying the “hanging chads” – to find enough votes for Al Gore to overtake George W Bush. Gore wanted the vote counters to look at a ballot, where the voter had not voted for President and study the “chad” – the small rectangular part of the ballot that the voter punches to indicate his vote. If it was any way disengaged, without being fully punched, Al Gore wanted the vote counters to count that as a vote.

Gore also wanted the vote counters to study those same ballots where no Presidential candidate had been voted for, and divine who the voter would have voted for based on the number of Democrats versus Republicans that were voted for on the down ballot, and if there were more Democrat votes than Republican votes, then that would be counted as a vote for Gore, and vice versa for Bush. The problem was that Al Gore only wanted that type of recount to occur in Dade and Broward Counties, which are both heavily Democrat, so they would logically “find” more votes for Gore than Bush. Gore refused to allow that type of recount opened up to the entire state which would have produced an evenly distributed additional vote count between Bush and Gore. So, 20 years ago, Al Gore was trying to “find votes”, and not only was he not criminally charged for trying to do so, the media and the entire Florida election apparatus, aided and abetted Al Gore’s attempt to “find” enough votes that would put him over the top in the state of Florida, and hand him the Presidency.

On Wednesday, the day before Trump was arrested, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of the Wagner Russian mercenary group was killed in a plane crash, in the Tver region northwest of Moscow. 10 other passengers onboard the plane were also pronounced dead at the scene. Prigozhin, the 62-year-old paramilitary leader, had been a close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but he recently led a rebellion against Putin on June 23 after spending months vocally criticizing the Russian government’s war in Ukraine. After the coup attempt was stopped, Prigozhin made a deal with Putin to never return to Russia.

On July 21, 2023 after the rebellion was put down and Prigozhin was exiled, U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken said, “If I were Mr. Prigozhin, I would remain very concerned. NATO has an ‘Open Door’ policy; Russia has an open windows policy, and he needs to be very focused on that.” In no uncertain terms, Blinken was suggesting that Putin would have Prigozhin killed for his rebellion. After Prigozhin death, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, “no one should be surprised. The disastrous war in Ukraine led to a private army marching on Moscow, and now — it would seem — to this.”

Does anyone else find it disturbing that the same week that Vladimir Putin had his main political rival executed by blowing up his private airplane, Joe Biden had his number one political opponent, arrested and indicted for the fourth time. That is what totalitarians do. They have their political rivals eliminated. Putin, does it with a bomb; Joe Biden does it with handcuffs and a jail cell. The result are the same. The political opponent of the President is eliminated. The will of the people thwarted.

We no longer live in the United States of America, at least, not the United States of America, that our founders envisioned, not the United States of America that is enshrined in our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, and our Bill of Rights. That country is gone, and we will probably never see it again. The biggest threats to our Constitutional Republic are the people who are screaming about “threats to our democracy”. In the name of protecting “our democracy”, they our destroying our Constitutional system of government. We live in a country that arrests political opponents of the regime and the powerful. We live in a country that punishes you for saying the “wrong” things.

We live in a country where the powerful can commit massive voter fraud, and then arrest and jail the person who points out that you committed massive voter fraud. Why didn’t George W Bush’s DOJ arrest and charge Al Gore and John Kerry for questioning the results of their lost elections? Why did Bush allow Gore to challenge the election results all the way up to the Supreme Court. Why didn’t Donald Trump’s DOJ arrest and charge Hillary Clinton for questioning the result of the 2016 election she lost? Why did Trump allow a 2 ½ year investigation into the 2016 election? Because those elections were fair. They could stand up to the most severe scrutiny. Why was Trump arrested for questioning the results of the 2020 election? Why were people silenced as election deniers for questioning that election? Because it was fraudulent. It could not stand up to scrutiny, therefore, everyone had to be silenced.

On Saturday, former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin said he believed that both President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden were bribed by Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and Biden leveraged $1 billion of aid to Ukraine to get Shokin fired because he was investigating the Biden family’s corruption in Ukraine with Burisma. When you are so corrupt that you cannot stand up to an investigation, you have the entire investigation shut down, like Biden did. When you won a fraudulent election, you have to arrest the people who are saying that the election was fraudulent.

Nobody in the science community is trying to silence “flat earthers” – the people who actually believe the earth is flat. The scientific position that the earth is round can stand up to most severe scrutiny, so opposing opinions do not need to be silenced. But people who question climate change or radical gender ideology have to be silenced. They are called “climate deniers” or “transphobes”, because those ideologies cannot stand up to the scrutiny of scientific fact and logical reason – no dissenting opinions are therefore, allowed.

Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed because he spoke out and took action against Putin’s fraudulent war in Ukraine. Joe Biden had Viktor Shokin fired because he was exposing the corruption of Joe Biden and his family in Ukraine. Donald Trump was arrested because he was stating the truth about the 2020 election – that it was stolen. If you want a good indication of which positions are real and which are false, the positions that allow opposing points of view are true, the positions that shut down opposing points of view are false. If you are not allowed to question the results of an election, and will be thrown in jail for doing so, then that election was more than likely fraudulent. That is why Donald Trump was arrested and indicted for the fourth time this week. He spoke the truth. But in the United States in 2023, the truth does not set you free, it gets you thrown in jail.

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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.