What has changed? We are reaping the results of a multi-decade effort by the communist and socialist left. Leftists have finally dominated and transformed the Democratic Party – into something vicious and dangerous to our republic.

There has been enthusiastic collusion by the leadership of the Democratic Party with the Russian disinformation campaign to destroy President Donald Trump. ( See "A Brief History of 'Fake News'" on AT.) The Democrat willingness to collude with Russia to overturn our democratically elected president is unprecedented. There is the infamous case of Ted Kennedy approaching the Kremlin to help Democrats defeat Reagan, but never before has collusion with our enemies by a non-communist party been sustained and widespread.

Obama openly boasted that radicalized and mostly non-white Millennials will soon give leftists a permanent majority. Our Constitution and two-party system were to be thrown in the dustbin of history. When Trump destroyed their plans by winning the 2016 election, hard-left Democrats weren't willing to give up power. The niceties of democracy, where the voters get to chose their leaders, do not fit the communist credo Obama and his inner circle were raised on.

As I wrote previously, Obama's entire innermost circle were children of communists. That does not happen by coincidence.

With the help of a partisan, unethical press, the Democrats normalized Obama's every aberrant trait. But Obama is aberrant. He is a Democrat in name only – in reality, he is a hard left "red diaper baby" – as were Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod. Obama has had literally lifelong radical ties, starting with his grandfather and mother, as well as his Kenyan father, and Obama's beloved teenage mentor, child molester Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party. According to Paul Kengor, Frank Davis's political work for the Soviets got him placed on the FBI's Security Index, so he could be immediately arrested in a national emergency – the Cold War equivalent of our terrorist watchlist.

In the White House, President Obama surrounded himself with more red diaper babies and communist-supporters. CIA director John Brennan voted for the Communist Party candidate in the 1976 presidential election. Obama biographer David Maraniss was a red diaper baby. So was Obama's pick to head Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson.

Cold War historian Paul Kengor goes deeply into Obama's communist background in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview. Another Kengor article describes the Chicago communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.

Axelrod himself was discovered and launched in his career by Stalinists in Chicago, the Cantor family.

Harry was active in the old Industrial Workers of the World and had been secretary of the Boston Communist Party. ... In 1930, he ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Communist Party ticket. After that, he sojourned to the Motherland, taking his entire family to Moscow with him, including his son David, who one day would come know David Axelrod. ... For the record, as I've noted separately, Davis – again, Obama's mentor – also knew and worked with Valerie Jarrett's grandfather and father-in-law in Communist Party/left-wing circles in Chicago in the 1940s.

Being the child of communists clearly does not make you a communist when you grow up. It can make you a savvy fighter of communists, as David Horowitz exemplifies. But when did Obama reject the radical Marxist beliefs he once openly espoused? In college, he tells us he sought out Marxist professors and radical students (think the creepy SDS students you knew in college). A Marxist student at Occidental College confirms that Obama was an outright Marxist. When he graduated from Columbia, Obama tells us, he attended radical socialist conferences, which gave him his road map in life, with their plan to put a stealth black candidate in the White House.

After law school, Obama's success in Chicago was based on the help of self-avowed communist Bill Ayers. Obama's start in politics was as the anointed successor of an openly socialist state rep who was active in communist circles. Obama joined the socialist New Party, which rejected the Democratic Party. Obama's calling in life, to which he vows to return post-presidency, was work as a hard-left Alinskyite radical agitator ("community organizer"). Obama was a 20-year member of an openly Marxist church whose members had to take a pledge against the middle class. So when did this man become a pragmatic centrist? The day his Marxist backers decided to make him president?

Chief among these backers was Valerie Jarrett, whom Judicial Watch uncovered as another scion of a hardcore multi-generation communist family on the FBI watch list as a possible security threat to America.

Jarrett's dad ... Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows ... "has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line" and engages in un-American activities. ... The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett's maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad. Jarrett's father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett ... appeared on the FBI's Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would "disseminate the Communist Party line among ... the middle class." It's been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

Paul Kengor summarizes the political import of a Democratic Party headed by a president and his two closest advisers, and the head of Homeland Security, all from communist families:

I've suffered ... a mix of amazement, agony, and despair for what has happened in this country. They are at once disturbing and depressing, yet further confirmation that the most politically extreme individuals who once agitated and propagandized in our blessed country were able to place their political children as high as the White House in the 21st century. For the old comrades, it simply took time for the seeds to root and flourish – and only then with the harvest made possible by really oblivious American voters who don't understand the ash-heap of ideological baggage they've permitted to be brought into the country's first house.

There is collusion with Russia going on in American politics today. It has actually been going on for a long time. (See Victor David Hanson on Obama's collusion in the 2012 elections.) President Trump is the target of the collusion. So are we all, all his voters, all Americans who believe in our constitutional republic.

The great mistake of the colluders is they cannot hide behind lies and media corruption, as the hardcore American left has done all these years. It is all out in the open now. The stink of the Mueller witch hunt is in our nostrils. It is sickening, but the stench strengthens our resolve. We are not going to let them annul our victory in the 2017 election with dirty tricks.

The author served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, was a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, and is an author whose a mystery novels highlight the wildlife and peoples of Kenya. She currently writes for American Thinker.