“Twitter Files” Reporter Matt Taibbi Uncovers Plot To Stop Trump, Democracy Be Damned

In a pair of articles on his Racket News website, “Twitter Files” reporter Matt Taibbi uncovers corrupt, systematic, and longstanding efforts by leading Democrats to stop the election of Donald J. Trump in 2024 or, at a minimum, cripple his presidency before it can get off the ground.

Taibbi, who, it should be noted, was once a darling of the progressive left while working as a columnist for the New York Press and Rolling Stone, has in recent years become one of the left’s top critics as an independent investigative journalist. He and fellow disaffected liberal Michael Shellenberger have broken major stories about the federal government’s involvement in online censorship on issues like pandemic lockdown policies and the 2020 election as part of their “Twitter Files” coverage, and Taibbi has become a leading detractor of the corporate media and the political establishment in both parties.

In his most recent work, a 4,200 word article that should have every American citizen concerned about the future of free and fair elections in the United States, Taibbi writes, “The 2024 presidential race increasingly looks like it will be decided by lawyers, not voters, as Democrats unveil plans for America’s first lawfare election… To ‘protect democracy,’ democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.”

As Taibbi outlines, the Democrat establishment is already engaged in a systematic effort to ensure that Biden remains in the White House beyond 2024. One part of this effort is the series of lawsuits in a number of states to remove Trump from the ballot. Another is ensuring that Biden has no serious primary threat – something which has, according to Taibbi’s sources, been accomplished through threatening would-be challengers.

Meanwhile, the corporate media has launched a propaganda campaign to convince the American people that Trump would be a “dictator” were he to win this fall. Mainstream pundits and journalists have in unison begun hammering the line that Trump is an “existential threat to democracy” and suggesting that Trump would use the military to go after his personal enemies.

Most chillingly, as Taibbi describes, we’ve seen this same sort of effort before. As he relays and as many major news outlets reported in the months leading up to the 2020 election, a group called the “Transition Integrity Project” (TIP) – comprised of top power players in Democrat circles like current Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as well as nominal “conservatives” who had become anti-Trump fanatics – had gathered to “wargame” contested election scenarios.

TIP participants were ostensibly concerned about Trump refusing to leave office if Biden won. But as Taibbi writes, the final TIP report on the election, published on August 3, 2020, “read like a year by year synopsis” of every Democrat effort to overturn Trump’s 2016 election victory, undermine his presidency, and now prevent his return to the White House.

For instance, TIP participants feared that Trump would “launch investigations into opponents” – which is exactly what Biden and Democrats are doing now to Trump. The TIP report also alleged that Trump would “use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents” – exactly what the Clinton campaign and the Democrat establishment attempted to do in 2016 with the infamous Steele Dossier and Russia Collusion Hoax.

One TIP simulation even predicted “that Trump would contrive to label Biden supporters guilty of ‘insurrection’ for protesting a ‘clear Trump win.’” Now, of course, we’ve seen a direct reversal of that prediction as Biden and Democrats have labeled Trump and every one of his supporters “insurrectionists” and made “protecting democracy” the main theme of their 2024 campaign.

TIP participants allege that all their 2020 scheming was just an effort to be prepared for anything, rather than an explicit plot to prevent a second Trump term even in the event of a clear Trump victory. (It’s worth noting here that none of the TIP “wargames” or scenarios were ever intended to be made public – it was only after a series of embarrassing leaks that the group decided to release their full report in an attempt to save face that largely backfired.)

But as Taibbi argues, even if one accepts these supposedly well-intentioned motivations, the fact that these high-profile power players on the left even felt the need to form a group like TIP provides an alarming look into the psyche of the modern Democrat Party. It is an indication of the fact that the left feels completely justified usurping the democratic will of the American people in order to “save democracy.”

“The grim reality of Campaign 2024,” Taibbi writes, “is that both sides appear convinced the other will violate “norms” first, with Democrats in particular seeming to believe extreme advance action is needed to head off a Trump dictatorship.”

Taibbi’s lengthy conclusion is worth quoting in its entirety:

“Many who couldn’t stand Trump, would never vote for him, and have been willing consumers of the awesome amount of propaganda published on the Trump subject, now need to face the fact that they’ve been had. Transformed into the avatar of all bad things — a crude domestic combo platter of Saddam, Milosevic, Assad, and Putin — this vision of the über-villain, Trump, has been used to distract mass audiences from the erosion of “norms” at home. “Protecting democracy” in the Trump context will be remembered as having served the same purpose as Saddam’s mythical WMDs, the shots fired in the Gulf of Tonkin, or Gaddafi’s fictional Viagra-enhanced army. Those were carefully crafted political lies, used to rally the public behind illegal campaigns of preemption. Voters, by voting, “protect democracy.” A politician who claims to be doing the job for us is up to something. The group in the current White House is trying to steal for themselves a word that belongs to you. Don’t let them.”

In a second article published shortly after the TIP exposé, Taibbi makes the case that Democrats’ efforts to boot Trump off the ballot are merely the culmination of a decades-long willingness by Democrat elites to subvert democracy in order to consolidate their own political power.

As he relays, Democrats employed lawfare back in 2004 to sink insurgent third-party candidate Ralph Nader, devoting millions in spurious lawsuits to keep him off the ballot in competitive states – denying voters the basic right to choose their own leaders in the process.

“Twenty years and multiple political upheavals later, the Democrats are taking the sabotage game it played in 2004 up a notch or ten,” Taibbi writes, pointing to how the Democrat establishment has declared the New Hampshire Democratic primary “non-compliant” and outright canceled the Florida Democratic primary in an effort to thwart potential Biden primary challengers and deny voters the chance to choose someone else as the Democrat nominee.

This, Taibbi argues, is again indicative of how Democrats – as well as the pre-Trump GOP establishment – view democracy: not as an indispensable part of our governing system, but rather a pesky obstacle to be overcome. The Washington political class “reordered the geography of the world, blithely moved whole manufacturing sectors from one continent to another, started moronic wars that pointlessly killed millions and created millions more refugees, bailed out corrupt banks while whole regions went into foreclosure, and failed to accomplish much but a growing sense of foreboding and decline despite decades of promises to the contrary.”

Yet despite all this chaos, tragedy, and failure, “they feel sincere rage at the idea that they should have to earn votes.”

Trump’s victory in 2016 was a major blow to this corrupt system – which is exactly why Democrats are now working so hard to ensure Trump doesn’t have the opportunity for a repeat performance in 2024. But exposing the left’s schemes, as Taibbi attempts to do, is a first crucial step to stopping them.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.