Former President Donald Trump wrote in a new opinion piece for Newsweek on Monday that the real victims of the Russiagate Hoax were the American people, not him.

After establishing that per the Durham Report, the Russia Hoax "was the most atrocious weaponization of our government in American history. It was a crime like no other," Trump goes on to explain why he thinks the hoax victimized everyone in the country, even more than it did him.

"They knew the truth [that Russiagate was a hoax], yet they put our country through hell," he said.

"As savage and cruel as the Russia Hoax was for me, my family, my staff, and so many innocent bystanders, the real victims were the American People."

"Almost incalculable"

"The destruction this hoax caused to America is almost incalculable," he went on. "It subverted our democracy, it threatened our security, and it endangered our freedom."

One consequence he listed was that the backlash against Russia led it to become a closer ally with China.

"Instead of having a better relationship with Russia as I worked to build, we now have a proxy war with Russia, fueled in part by the lingering fumes of Russiagate delirium. Ukraine has been utterly devastated. Untold numbers of people have been killed. And we could very well end up in World War III," he said.

It also caused censorship to become much worse, he said, because of a crackdown on "Russian disinformation" that was not warranted because the entire premise was fake.

Censorship cost Trump the election

In October 2020, the censorship came to a head when Big Tech decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, which directly accused then-candidate Joe Biden of getting 10% of at least one of Hunter's foreign business deals.

That censorship cost Trump the 2020 election, according to a poll taken after the election that showed around 9% of voters would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the laptop.

Trump also cites a poll taken last year that said 79% of people think truthful coverage of the laptop story would have changed the election outcome.

In addition, Trump said, "The Russia Hoax normalized the weaponization of law enforcement against the Left's political enemies," citing FBI and DOJ efforts to investigate parents speaking out at school board meetings and the aggressive prosecution of pro-life protesters even when they are following the law.

The worst example of this weaponization is the pursuit of "an all-out persecution of Joe Biden's leading opponent for the presidency"--namely, himself.

He called on the voters to hold the deep state accountable, saying, "Now the choice is ours: either the Deep State destroys America, or we destroy the Deep State." That's a very good point.