By now, readers may be aware that amongst President Trump’s closest advisors, a group of cabals appears to hold formidable sway, to the point where the president’s original policies and platform that he campaigned on — immigration reform, the end of overseas military adventurism and a hardline approach to Chinese trade — all are under extreme threat.
In some cases, as has been seen with the president’s newly announced policy toward Afghanistan, it seems that these factions — the twin powers of the globalists and the military — appear to have won the day, and the president now seems to be carrying out many of their wishes, in a reversal of what he had promised to voters on the campaign trail.
The departure from the White House of many key members of Trump’s popular original nationalist team — Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and foreign policy advisor Sebastian Gorka among others — appear to confirm that the power of these factions — the globalists and the military — is overwhelming.
Of course, one has to ask as an observer, how did we get here? Is the president not in control of his own staff picks and policy initiatives? Why would the president appoint people who by all accounts appear to hold opposing views to Trump’s original platform and agenda items? This is a question that perhaps only the president can answer. But for now, it appears that the forces of the “Deep State” have captured what only six months ago threatened to be a populist revolution operating from inside the White House.
One suspects that even before Trump took office, backroom deals were cut that brought some of these figures into powerful roles surrounding the president. The director of the White House National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, is a former Goldman Sachs president and chief operating officer who many people suspect still has strong ties to that organization.
When Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was forced to resign as Trump’s first National Security Advisor, the man who replaced him, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, seems to be cut from a wholly different cloth than Flynn.
And then, of course, there’s the tremendous influence of the president’s own daughter Ivanka and her husband, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. This pair, whom Steve Bannon reportedly jointly referred to as “Javanka,” now have seen their influence grow to profound new heights in the wake of the departures of Bannon and Priebus.
Between McMaster, Cohn and Kushner, there are rumors and suggestions of the long tentacles of globalist influencers such as billionaire George Soros (who McMaster has allegedly been in communication with) and media titan Rupert Murdoch (who Kushner has met with and called a mentor).
The military also seems to have a great and growing influence over the president as Trump replaced Reince Priebus with former Marine General John Kelly, who reports say now limits the president’s reading list (some sources claim that Trump is no longer allowed to look at news articles on Breitbart News or Infowars). There have even been claims that Kelly has taken Trump’s cell phone away from him so that it’s impossible for allies even within the ranks of the Republican Party to reach the president.
Between Kelly, McMaster, Secretary of Defense James Mattis (a former Marine Corps general), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey (a former Army general) and CIA Director Mike Pompeo (a former Army officer and West Point graduate), much of Trump’s cabinet is composed of former or current military men who have troubling, deep connections to the military-industrial complex. A recent editorial in the liberal Washington Post blared, “The Generals Have Trump Surrounded.”
One has to wonder why Trump has committed to sending 4,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, going against what even he admitted were “his own instincts.” By nearly all accounts, this Middle Eastern nation, which America has been at war with for 16 years now with no end in sight, is a giant drain on America’s treasury at a time when our national debt is rapidly growing past the $20 trillion mark. In fact, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has indicated that he is “100 percent certain” the country’s debt ceiling will have to be raised in order for the government to keep operating.
It would appear that all-powerful Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, despite a recent diagnosis of brain cancer, is getting his way regarding military commitments, at least to Afghanistan and to the Korean peninsula, where the U.S. is assembling a massive buildup of battleships, aircraft carriers, anti-missile batteries and bombers.
On trade, departing strategist Steve Bannon ominously warned, “To me, the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, [the U.S. is] five years away — I think, ten years at the most — from hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”
But the forces of the globalists, who have much to gain from Chinese domination of trade, have no interest in current lopsided trade policies changing. There are reports that Trump has asked his advisors again and again for hard-hitting strategic action items that would deeply cut into the U.S. trade deficit with China, but the most the president has allegedly been able to get is declarations involving intellectual property (IP), which wouldn’t really have much of an effect on the Middle Kingdom and which could be fought for years in international and trade courts.
It wouldn’t be surprising if globalist investments in China — where the annual economic growth rate far outstrips the U.S.’s — have stymied U.S. efforts to rein in the People’s Republic. The North Korean crisis has been a way that the regime of Chinese President Xi Jinping has been able to maintain the upper hand in trade negotiations with America.
And finally, the prospects for true immigration reform — the building of the much-anticipated wall on the southern U.S. border with Mexico and further legal immigration restrictions — appear to be dimmer than ever. The House of Representatives had initially committed $1.6 billion to the wall, but without Senate approval and likely a further monetary commitment, this initiative looks like it’s going nowhere.
There are even hints that ex-President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty, which has allowed 800,000 illegal immigrants to stay in the United States, may be preserved by Trump. The president has warned that he might shut down the government if funding for his wall isn’t ultimately included in the federal budget, but with the ongoing flooding in Texas, it’s likely that this is just hollow talk.
Against the backdrop of all of the above, the recent racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the weather-related crisis in Houston and the pardoning of Sheriff Joe Arpaio all seem like distractions from the major business of Washington.
For the Democrats, the globalists and the media, however, this may be by design — the much-ballyhooed efforts of ex-President Obama to run a “shadow government” out of a compound in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C. may just be bearing fruit.
