Lee Smith, journalist and author of three books, including “Disappearing the President,” spoke with Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, as part of the Arutz Sheva and Israel365 US Election Coverage of Donald Trump’s victory, on the situation in the US leading up the 2024 US elections, the US and Israel, and his optimism for the future.
Lee Smith was not surprised by the outcome of the US elections and says, “I did expect the outcome. Lots of people did. What we were concerned about was fraud, frankly in different polling places, especially across the Battleground States, but it appears that both the RNC, the Trump campaign, as well as state Republican parties, did a terrific job. So they were out there, fighting all the time, they were taking cases to court, they were threatening lawsuits. So they were on the ball. I thought that a Trump victory would not be announced last night. I thought we'd be waiting for some time. Now even with the immediate announcement of a Trump victory, we're looking at the second phase of Donald Trump's return to the presidency.”
“The first stage was the campaign,” Smith continued. “The campaign ended with Donald Trump's victory and now the second phase is getting Donald Trump back into the White House. The Democrats have already promised that they're going to make that exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. But we really are very fortunate though, that the result was announced very early in the morning, because as I show in my new book, ‘Disappearing the President,’ that delays and announcing election results correlate not just with fraud, but also with violence. So that's one of the concerns going forward now, over the next few months, between the election and the inauguration. Of course, we all hope there is no violence, but the Democrats have threatened it; they've been threatening it for years.”
Smith agrees that “the other side,” including the intelligence community or leaders of other governments around the world and media, are not ready to throw Trump the keys, they all have an interest in preventing Donald Trump from taking the presidency, saying “I'll give you a sense of what some of their scenarios look like and then I'll give you what I believe is crucial to resolving that situation before it gets out of hand. Rosa Brooks, who was an official in Barack Obama's Pentagon, has war gamed a number of different scenarios for the 2024 race. These all came out at the end of July and Brooks famously did this for the 2020 race and what this really did was it was not a war game forecast; these were post-election contingency planning scenarios, so that led to such things as January 6th. It led to banishing Trump from Twitter, a whole bunch of different activities. So when we see that she's talking about 2024, we can take it very seriously, that this is what activists are planning.”
Smith suspects, “that there will be massive amounts of violence leading into the inauguration and another scenario proposes that with Trump presidency, there will be such massive street violence that the newly reelected president will be compelled to implement or invoke the Insurrection Act, at which time his senior military officials will refuse to obey his orders. Other military officials will obey his orders, but what we're talking about right there is a split in the in the senior levels of the US Armed Forces. So that's exceedingly dangerous. That's one of the scenarios to keep in mind as we're moving forward. I think that one of the ways right now to avoid or to try to short circuit these things before they get out of hand is that the Trump team should send an envoy to Barack Obama and advise him to leave Washington. He should have left Washington after the 2016 race. The reason that no other presidents aside from Woodrow Wilson stayed in Washington, was that they didn't even give anything like an impression that the transfer of executive authority was complete. The reason that Wilson didn't leave was because Wilson had a stroke. He was incapacitated for the last year and a half of his presidency.”
“Obama is the only man who's ever done that in American history and of course it is Obama who ultimately led the anti-Trump campaign since 2016. So one of the ways to short circuit some of these plans is to send an envoy to Obama, advise him that he's going to have to leave Washington. It's not a threat, but he has to leave Washington. Now that it appears that the Republicans have maintained control of the House and have regained control of the Senate, there will be legislation forbidding former presidents from staying in Washington, so they'll further underscore that. I think really right now whatever can be done to illustrate what a negative influence Barack Obama has cast over American politics since 2016 is very important. He's been leading it. It's time that he leaves the political scene,” Smith says adamantly.
Smith spoke about the US ties with Iran, specifically the infiltration of Iranian operatives and Iranian assets into the State Department, especially at this critical juncture with Israel and Iran and in the middle of a war that Iran is fighting through its proxies against Israel, with various missile attacks and Israel's retaliations, emphasizing that, “it's an extremely important victory for Israel. Israel's ongoing operation against Hezbollah has weakened, if not eliminated, Iran's deterrence. Iran has always understood Hezbollah and described it as our deterrence against Israel, in the event that the Zionists should try to strike our nuclear weapons program. Well they've lost their deterrence and now with the Trump victory, they've lost their strategic depth. It's very important to see what's going on here, certainly during the Obama administration as well.”
“The only thing really sustaining what's a remarkably brittle regime is Israel's operations against Iran's proxies and Iran itself have shown it's an extraordinarily brittle regime, a very weak regime and the only thing that was protecting them for so long, as it turns out, was Barack Obama with the nuclear deal, sanctions relief that flooded the regime's war chest with hundreds of billions of dollars. And now that's over, Iran is in a great deal of trouble. Will they still attack Israel as they've been threatening? I think it's quite possible, because it's not the most strategically brilliant regime, but I think that they're in very serious trouble right now. If I were advising the Islamic Republic of Iran, I'd say, ‘guys, now is a pretty good time, let's keep our heads down for a little bit. Let's shut up and stay out of the picture. It's very bad for them,” says Smith.
In conclusion, Smith talks about his new book, ‘Disappearing the President,’ "which is really a comprehensive account of what's happened in the last eight years, the efforts to go after Donald Trump, which of course includes Russiagate, but it goes all the way up to the assassination attempts, the efforts to kill Donald Trump and also it explains who's been leading the anti-Trump operation since 2016, who is Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama. I think that for our country now and for Israel, I think that we're heading into a very good moment. I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm concerned, as I said, about the violence, but it's an exciting time, it's an amazing time. There are people who didn't go to sleep last night, I'm among them, just talking to friends, figuring out what's going on, celebrating. It's been a very hard four years for all Americans, not just Trump supporters. Our borders have been thrown open, crime is surging, people are hurting, inflation, lots of Americans are having trouble affording their life. So it's a very happy time here and I'm certain that Israel or America's allies, like Israel, are celebrating as well. I saw the very nice social media post from Prime Minister Netanyahu and again I would imagine real friends of America all over the world are celebrating along with us. We appreciate it and God bless them all. God bless you all."