Glenn Greenwald and the Plot Against America, Part II

How the Sad, Eternal Impotent Torchbearer of the Pro-Trump Left wrote his incredible screenplay about the recent coup that installed Kamala Harris as the Deep State's new commander

On the August 2 edition of his Rumble show System Update, Glenn Greenwald asked Lee Fang, a fearless, independent journalist and fellow traveler in the MAGA-sphere, for help in seeking to unravel one of the 2024 presidential election campaign’s most perplexing mysteries. Why, Greenwald pondered, had Donald Trump dropped the anti-establishment, “Drain the Swamp” message he “embraced and gave voice to” during his successful 2016 run for the White House when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton?

Greenwald found the GOP nominee’s more conventional approach during this year’s campaign not only bewildering but deeply disappointing, and understandably so as he once said that Trump had campaigned as a “true socialist” eight years ago and for at least for that one, bright shining moment had joined two other MAGA icons, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, in the pantheon of great Republicans who had attained that status. Greenwald fervently hoped Trump would listen to Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., his anti-establishment backers in Silicon Valley, and other “populist-flavored” advisors in his inner circle who wanted him to resume his past calls to go to war against Washington’s traditional bipartisan political consensus.

The secret reason behind Trump’s shift to a standard Republican platform was equally “hard to discern” for Fang, who just weeks earlier had been cheered, as Greenwald was as well, by Trump’s selection of his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, the renowned populist leader and millionaire Hillbilly venture capitalist. In a July 18 tweet, he recommended anyone who wanted to get to know the real JD Vance should listen consult the views of like-minded contrarian thinker Zaid Jilani, who had explained during an interview that day with Democracy Now that, as Fang put it, the Trump-Vance ticket represented “a marked shift away from Reaganism towards more pro-worker and less market-based policies for the GOP.”

Whatever had prompted Trump’s rhetorical move, the radical firebrand who promised to burn Washington’s political establishment to the ground back in 2016, now reminded Fang of the weak tea former Bain Capital CEO Mitt Romney had espoused on the campaign trail four years prior to that when he was running against Barack Obama.

For my part, the only question that remained after listening to Greenwald’s conversation with Fang was how it was possible the solution to the riddle still eluded the two clueless dimwits’ collective brainpower, as any political observer with an IQ above room temperature knew the answer long ago, and it had never been a profound mystery to begin with. 

Trump’s 2016 promises were the same type of meaningless, insincere garbage all “outsiders” champion during their initial run for federal office when they’re trying to ride to victory by attacking Washington’s widely despised establishment. Trying to repeat  the strategy is typically much less effective during a reelection campaign, because the self-branded outsiders who triumphed their first time out inevitably fail to deliver on their promises, as they’d never intended to. Trump now confronts that precise situation, which explains his switch to a more conventional GOP campaign strategy by portraying his Democratic presidential opponent Kamala Harris as a radical communist, in hopes it will prove as successful in duping the 2024 electorate as his empty anti-establishment blueprint had in 2016.

Numerous people who expressed opinions on social media about the Greenwald-Fang confab shared my assessment. “What the fuck are these idiots talking about,” tweeted Robbie Martin, in succinctly capturing my takeaway. Even people generally favorable to Greenwald and Fang’s views found their discussion laughable. “Trump governed as an establishment Conservative in his first term,” wrote one such poster. “I realize you both want @TheDemocrats to eat a bag of dicks. So do I. But it's hard for Trump to attack Kamala on things that suck about her when he supports the same shit.”

That observation points directly to the primary overarching problem with Greenwald’s work, namely that his pro-Trump political sympathies have completely corrupted his journalism standards, which have always been somewhere between abysmal and non-existent. As he prefers to maintain his brand for honesty and independence, Greenwald doesn’t openly acknowledge his personal opinions, even though he says all reporters should be transparent about their views and routinely accuses those who have opposing ones to his of being political hacks whether they do or don’t.

An enjoyable side benefit of Greenwald’s peerless buffoonery is that he steadily makes a complete ass of himself in public because he’s so certain no one exceeds him as a journalism paragon, with the possible exception of his friend Carlson, while being simultaneously unaware of how comical that sounds to all but his most credulous admirers. One amusing example of that came in March 2020, when he labeled an unspecified but seemingly near total share of journalists covering that year’s presidential campaign of being “thinly disguised pro-Biden reporters who continue to insist on wearing the unconvincing and fraudulent costume of neutrality,” adding ominously, “They are invoking the classic Orwellian formulation from the novel 1984: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command’.” 

He made the charge in an article for The Intercept where he was standing fully naked with his dick in his hand, to cite the words of James Caan in his role as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, as a Trump cheerleader. About eight months later, he resigned from the outlet shortly before the Trump-Biden election, alleging his overlords had ruthlessly censored his criticism of the Democratic nominee.  

Betsy Reed, the editor-in-chief of The Intercept at the time, responded by saying Greenwald “believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor,” but he was the one whose work was biased due to his attempts “to recycle the dubious claims of...the Trump campaign and launder them as journalism,” and was now was crying that he was “a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum.” Which I would have added had I written the statement, had been true throughout virtually his entire journalism career and matched his standard comportment as an overgrown man-toddler when challenged to show evidence that supported his weakly sourced, often entirely fictitious claims.

Greenwald making a scary face to advertise a video showing his fiercest moments during a debate held earlier this year on the fourth anniversary of the January 6 riots, where he teamed up with fellow highly credible reporter Alex Jones, seen hazily to the left of his quivering nose. Can you guess who he and Jones blamed for what happened that day? Hint: It wasn’t Donald Trump, his supporters, or the GOP.

In the debate between those who believe Greenwald is a useful idiot of the right versus those who see him as a willing tool, I side with the latter group, in part owing to the extraordinary difficulty Greenwald has in finding fault with Trump, and the contrasting ease he displays in identifying flaws in his hero’s political opponents and critics. That was easily seen during the August 2 edition of System Update, when the minor, tepid complaints he directed at Trump over his unsatisfying current political rhetoric was the harshest criticism he could muster for the former president. 

Even more tellingly, to be a useful idiot, Greenwald would have to be as stupid as he looked that night in still claiming to believe Trump genuinely wants to bring down the Washington political establishment rather than using  high office for personal profit and self-aggrandizement, and inflicting as much possible punishment and revenge on his enemies. He’d also have to be as gullible as the client at the strip club who believes the dancer who tells him she thinks she’s falling in love with him as she leads him by the hand to an ATM machine so he can take out money to pay for another lap dance. 

Meanwhile, Greenwald launched an extended, brutal attack on Harris, who’s become the chief focus of his ire since she took the place of Joe Biden as his 2024 campaign opponent, and the Democratic Party. The disparity in his priorities was reflected in the show’s headline – “Kamala Wins the Dem Nomination Without Expressing Views; “Kamala Harris: the Vacuous Chameleon;” and “The Sad Eternal Impotence of the Pro-DNC Left” – which didn’t even mention Greenwald’s chit-chat with Fang. 

There was a similarly huge gap in the tone and substance of Greenwald’s assault on Harris. In addition to her overall bottomless evil and moral depravity, which is pretty much par for the course when he’s talking about Democrats, Greenwald depicts Harris as an unqualified, politically ignorant DEI candidate with the same subtlety as Trump and RNC press office do. 

Harris is so abysmal in Greenwald’s fair and balanced estimation that she compares unfavorably to Biden, who up until the second she took his spot at the head of the Democratic ballot against Trump, had been his personal Public Enemy No. 1. In explaining why, as will be seen below, he’s demonstrated unprecedented sympathy for his old nemesis and has become much more positive about Biden’s performance as president.

The specific focus of this series about Greenwald, which began on July 31 and will conclude with next week’s final installment, is his recently unveiled, breathlessly narrated, fantastical depiction of the Democratic-establishment orchestrated “coup” against Biden that culminated on July 21 when the nation’s current leader announced he was ending his reelection bid. Soon afterwards,  Harris simultaneously replaced Biden as Trump’s opponent in November and, not coincidentally, Greenwald’s most despised target.

If the coup fairytale isn’t at the top of the list when future historians eventually rank Greenwald’s most spectacular career achievements in creative writing, it will be a grave injustice on the magnitude of the infamous decision at the 1991 Academy Awards to bestow Best Picture on Kevin Costner’s insipid Dances With Wolves over the illustrious Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas. Among the things that make Greenwald’s handiwork really sparkle in dreaming up the farcical coup scheme is that he went from not simply recycling Trump’s dubious claims as journalism, which any idiot can do, to writing them directly and helping market them as well.

Other factors that should elevate Greenwald’s coup plot fantasy to the No. 1 spot on the future historians’ list include:

• Biden’s downfall and Harris’ ascension was the most consequential development of the 2024 campaign thus far, easily exceeding the failed assassination attempt against Trump eight days earlier. In falsely transforming an event of such great importance into a GOP attack ad that presented Biden’s decision to step aside as an attack on the nation’s political institutions, Greenwald was working under enormously stressful circumstances that imposed a tight deadline for him to complete his assignment, but somehow succeeded against any reasonable odds or expectations.

• There was no credible evidence to support Greenwald’s storyline, so he had to manufacture all the key facts required  to fabricate the larger coup plot, before he could expose and denounce the Democratic plotters he accused of designing and implementing the bogus scheme.

• Equally impressively, for the past four years, Greenwald had repeatedly and often very recently made assertions in writing and on the air that directly undermine his new account. As a result, he was also forced to airbrush out all of the contradictory evidence from the coup script he hastily rolled out, as thoroughly as Stalin did when he famously had Trotsky erased from a photograph of the two strolling along the Moscow Canal after sending his political enemy into exile, and hope no one noticed.

I can’t say for certain Greenwald was the first political or media figure to go public with a fully developed coup narrative, but he was definitely near the head of the line, and he’s probably the only one who had such an extensive, well documented track record of making allegations that single handedly demolished his own theory. The biggest reward for the fruits of his labor are that Republican officials and campaign operatives, and Trump himself, quickly put the coup story into service, whether they knew it was fake or not. 

Trump continues to relentlessly bang the drum, including when he predicted in an August 6 post on Truth Social that Biden might be planning to crash the Democratic National Convention to try to take back the party’s presidential nomination because he “feels he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the US Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates.” 

Trump’s full post better captures the seriousness of his allegations and the credibility of Greenwald’s coup plot too.

The part about the former Democratic nominee planning to crash the convention was probably a twist added by Trump, but the line about Biden being overthrown by the people he hates most – meaning Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelsosi, Charles Schumer, and the other alleged elite planners – comes straight out of Greenwald’s original coup script and merely caricatures one of the particularly ridiculous narrative twists the author inserted when assembling it.

That few other than Trump, his campaign staff, and most devout supporters ever took the coup plot seriously, or pretended to, doesn’t diminish the immensity of Greenwald’s historic accomplishment in fabricating it from top to bottom and peddling it to his readers and listeners.

Coming in Part III: Unanticipated political developments force Greenwald to junk his own longstanding, mostly true version of key circumstances and events that led up to the “coup” and replace it with a hastily manufactured account. His new narrative is almost entirely false, which Greenwald certainly knew, but, more importantly, it had a politically perfect conclusion, which was not a coincidence as he wrote it first and worked backward from there to prove.