by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Given that I strongly disliked the policies of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I didn’t pay much attention to the twists and turns of our recent presidential election, and although I voted, I wrote in someone else’s name. I can’t quite remember whom I honored with that protest vote, though it may have been former British MP George Galloway, a pugnacious pundit and host on RT.
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One silver lining in not having supported either major candidate in the race is that unlike many others I won’t be disappointed in my choice.
For example, some commentators had reluctantly backed Trump, hoping that he had learned his lessons from the many mistakes he had made in his first term. But just a couple of days before the vote, their candidate said that his likely choices for Secretary of Defense would include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Sen. Tom Cotton, both of whom were hardcore Neocons, and the subsequent names floated for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor have been Sen. Marco Rubio and Richard Grenell, who also fall into much the same category. These early indications suggested that the Trump Administration would likely continue the same very aggressive foreign policies of the Biden Administration, and some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters probably began grinding their teeth in frustration.
They surely recalled that during his original 2016 campaign Trump had regularly denounced his own Republican Party’s ruling Neocon establishment, famously declaring in one of the primary debates that the Iraq War of President George W. Bush had been a huge disaster for America, a statement that shocked and horrified all his Republican rivals but may have helped win him the nomination. However, once he actually reached the Oval Office, he soon placed our national security policies in the hands of Pompeo and John Bolton, both arch-Neocons of the worst sort, and they did whatever they wanted. Indeed, I’ve read that in the book he published after leaving the administration, Bolton bragged how easily he had tricked and manipulated his ignorant and detached superior, heaping insults and ridicule upon the president whom he once had served.
However, talk of such potential Neocon appointments may have provoked a political backlash, and by the weekend Trump had declared that neither Pompeo nor Nikki Haley would have any role in his new administration, thereby soothing some of those concerns.
It is widely accepted that in a presidential administration, personnel is policy, so as we learn the names of Trump’s senior appointments over the next few weeks, we will also discover the likely trajectory of the next four years.
Although it is unclear what use Trump will make of his new term in office, the mere fact that he regained the White House certainly ranks as the most spectacular political comeback in our nation’s nearly 250 year history, easily outdistancing the split second term of Grover Cleveland in 1893 or Richard Nixon’s political resurrection in 1968. Indeed, the challenges Trump overcame along the way to Election Day sound like something out of a satirical Hollywood film.
While in office, he had been impeached not once but twice, and after his outraged supporters stormed the Capitol in early 2020, he was widely declared an “insurrectionist” by the Trump-hating media. I doubt that any other major political figure in American history has ever been so massively and uniformly vilified by that media, which for generations had been recognized as having the power to make or break presidential candidates.
Then, as Trump geared up for his 2024 run, Democratic prosecutors across the country brought him up on a host of criminal charges, eventually convicting him of 34 felonies and fining him hundreds of millions of dollars, so for a time it looked like he might have to campaign for the White House from a prison-cell.
Originally Posted at https://www.sgtreport.com