Here comes Their October Surprise. The Inimitable Jeff Childers breaks down the story for us in his Sunday Pay per view Coffee and Covid Edition…presented here at Goldtent for the most well informed
readership on the Planet !

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On Friday, the New York Times ran an eyebrow-raising piece headlined, “Inside Donald Trump’s Shadow Presidency.” The QAnon folks might be onto something after all. The remarkable sub-headline added, “In the years since he left the White House, former President Donald J. Trump has remained a force in international politics, meeting with a number of foreign leaders and operating out of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.”

The article was a long-form teaser for Bob Woodard’s predictable October surprise, a new tell-all book titled “War” and intended to assassinate Trump’s character. (Woodward unsurprisingly concludes that Trump is ten times worse than Richard Nixon.)

In the Washington Post’s similar Woodward-promoting story, that far-left paper expressed outrage over Trump sending Putin some free covid test kits. But the Times was more interested in Trump’s calendar.

According to Bob Woodward, for the last four years, Mar-a-Lago has been more crowded than a racetrack snack bar, with Trump meeting a streaming succession of world leaders who practically have to take tickets to get an appointment.

Legions of leaders sought audiences with the former President, including from Ukraine, Israel, Poland, Britain, Hungary, Argentina, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and more. The meetings often closely resemble official diplomatic events. For instance, July’s meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago looked a lot like a formal State Department confab

Beyond the leaders respecting Trump with formal in-person visits, the Times reported that President Trump has also spoken with even more leaders by phone, like the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman, who apparently calls Trump on his cell phone.

But the Times saved its most inflammatory reveal for last.

According to Bob Woodward, an unnamed “aide” told him that Trump has had at least seven calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This unsourced rumor has badly triggered some Democrats who are now crying treason and who have already drafted the next Trump prosecution for FARA violations or something.

But Trump can talk to whoever he wants. The Times grudgingly admitted that “many former presidents maintain contacts with foreign leaders after leaving the White House.” Former State Department official Jeremy Shapiro explained, “As a former president, he has the contacts and the relationships.”

Never forget: Trump’s top-selling book was titled, “The Art of the Deal.” What makes anyone think Trump stopped dealmaking when he stepped off the White House grounds?

Back in June, I described my “Lizard People Doctrine,” which posits that some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories are actually true but in an allegorical sense. In other words, globalists aren’t really shape-shifting lizards, but they might as well be for all intents and purposes. Metaphorically, they are cold-blooded aliens, nothing like regular folks, and in a legal sense, they want to eat us for breakfast. I.e., lizards.

The Lizard People Theory is pretty wild. But ‘QAnon’ must be one of the wildest conspiracy theories imaginable. Q proponents claim that, before Trump left office, he executed a series of intriguing executive orders. Combined, the orders invoked a special state of emergency, designed to handle the alarming contingency of a US government occupation by a foreign power.

Under the Q theory, Trump secretly remained the real President, and Joe Biden is long dead, replaced by an actor wearing a high-tech rubber mask. (In a slightly different version, Trump’s special orders split the jobs of President and Commander-in-Chief. Trump stayed CIC and controls the military, while Biden is “just” the President.)

In sum, according to Q supporters, while Joe Biden (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) pretends to be the public President, Trump remains the actual shadow president, working from his “Winter White House” in Mar-a-Lago. Everything we can see, like Biden’s gaffe-filled mumbling and stumbling around, is actually an eleborate charade, setting up a long-awaited day of reckoning.

The QAnon theory is catnip for conservatives who’ve been horrified at how quickly America’s social, economic, and political infrastructure has devolved over the last four years. It’s quite comforting to think the good guys are just there, actually running things right behind the scenes, and will soon return to take the wheel of power.

At the end of the day, Q is one of the wildest conspiracy theories going; perhaps it is also one of the most seductive ones.

Let’s return to that remarkable New York Times headline: “Inside Donald Trump’s Shadow Presidency.” It sounds like even the Times has swallowed the QAnon pill. At one point, the story even referred to the “complicated diplomacy of dual … presidents” — a Q theme.

Paragraphs after reporting the seven alleged calls to Putin as a fact, the Times finally admitted it was just a rumor, a BlueAnon fantasy featuring Trump using special Get Smart-style communications equipment to evade CIA surveillance:

Maybe it was the shoe phone. While Trump’s contacts with Putin could be more imaginary than actual, it is undeniable that, unlike any former president in living memory, Trump remains fully engaged in the international scene. Other leaders act like he’s still the President.

If we see Trump as Shadow President through the lens of the Lizard People Doctrine, it appears the Q folks may have a legitimate point. Trump may not be the de jure President, but he may be more of a de facto behind-the-scenes mover than anyone ever realized. To be fair, Trump’s formal competitor, the non-shadow President Biden, lacks the energy and focus to be any real competition.

The New York Times finally sees things very similarly to how Q people do, in essence joining the ranks of Q conspiracy fanatics. Is Trump’s Shadow Presidency a conspiracy, or something real? As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”