We Should Not Be Inaugurating Donald Trump as President on January 20

As the title of this post says, we should not be inaugurating Donald Trump as President on January 20, 2025, because … well, let me explain.

First, if it wasn’t for FBI Director James Comey and his totally bizarre decision to re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server just eleven days before the 2016 election, it is entirely probable she would have won the election.¹  I am not sure Mr. Comey’s decision to do this has ever been adequately explained.  Even though Mr. Comey said, nine days later, on November 6, that nothing new was found, the damage was done.  By resurrecting the issue at the last minute of a very close election, Mr. Comey very probably swung the election to Donald Trump. 

Without the boost that Mr. Comey’s intervention provided, Trump would have probably have lost, Hillary Clinton would have become President, and Donald Trump would have returned to his real estate business and maybe his TV show.  The one thing he would not have had was a political career.  Losing to Hillary Clinton, not the world’s best candidate, would have almost certainly finished him politically.  And we would not be inaugurating him as President on January 20, 2025.² 

But, even if Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we still should not be inaugurating him as President again on January 20, 2025, because, without the improper actions of the media and 51 former senior intelligence officials regarding Hunter Biden, Trump probably would have won the election in 2020.  Please understand, I am not talking about so-called election fraud or stolen votes or anything like that.  I’m talking about Hunter Bilden and his laptop.  If the story(ies) about Hunter and his laptop had not been ignored and shut down by the mainstream media and labeled, in effect, as Russian disinformation by 51 high-ranking former intelligence officials, Donald Trump probably would have won in 2020.

But the New York Post stories on Hunter and his laptop didn’t get reported.  Twitter blocked the Post’s account.  The mainstream media didn’t mention the story or report on the issue.  And eventually, when the story did start to get a little traction, somebody, maybe even Antony Blinken, I don ‘t know, got 51 former high-level intelligence officials to sign a letter saying, in the words of the Politico headline, the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo”,  The story itself said that the letter stated the officials’ “belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’”  But the headline didn’t say that, and in his debate with Donald Trump later in October, Joe Biden said the story was Russian disinformation.  Except it wasn’t Russian disinformation>  It was true. 

I don’t know if the mainstream media even tried to find out the truth about Hunter and his laptop.  It would appear those “former high-level intelligence officials” didn’t try, or at least didn’t try very hard before they signed their letter.  And so, the truth didn’t come out until after the election and after Joe Biden was elected.  Without the media blackout and without the claim from those former intelligence officials, Donald Trump probably would have won the 2020 election.  And instead of being inaugurated on January 20, 2025, he would be ending his second term on that date.³

So, but for James Comey in 2016, Donald Trump would have never been president and would now be just another failed presidential candidate.  Without the media coverup of the Hunter Biden story in October of 2020 and the letter from 50+ intelligence people claiming, in effect (if not literally), the whole thing was just Russian disinformation, Trump would be leaving office in less than 30 days instead of entering it again.
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¹ I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
² Also, if not for James Comey’s intervention in the 2016 election, Donald Trump probably would never have been found civilly liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and he would never have been charged, or convicted, in that business records case – because neither case would have been brought.
³ Looking at everything that has happened around the world in the last four years, it is hard to see how things could have been that much worse if Donald Trump had been president for the last four years instead of Joe Biden.