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Elections Have Consequences – We Just Don’t Know Which
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is selecting a number of hawkish people to fill his cabinet.
There are currently a lot of hot takes what these appointees will do.
- Marco Rubio, the likely Secretary of State, may want to launch a new coup in Venezuela.
- Michael Waltz, the potential national security advisor, is anti-Russian and anti-China.
- Elise Stefanik, a Zionist, will serve as the Israel's second ambassador to the United Nations.
If there were no limits either of these people would launch new wars.
That Trump is selecting rightwing nuts is not unexpected. He needs their backing to push things through.
But the fact that Trump is selecting these people does not mean that he will listen to them or follow their advice. His first term demonstrated that the people he selects often do not last. There is thus no reason to despair over this or that bonehead selection.
There are also objective reason why policies Trump or his acolytes might want to pursue might well be impossible. To lower taxes while the budget deficit is at a record and interest rates are high is not really doable. To push Ukraine towards a victory will fail due to facts on the ground. Any itch to attack Iran carries a high risk of a military defeat.
We will have to wait for the administrations real policy decisions to anticipate where it will go. A good sign will be when Trump succeeds in implementing policies that the hawks he has chosen oppose.
I am not really optimistic about that. My earlier prediction still holds:
[Trump] had previously chosen people who were opposing and sabotaging his policies. He lacked the authority and/or will to rein them in. I do not believe that he has learned from it.
But maybe he did learn from it. I for one will try to stay objective and to give him a chance.
Frankly I make very little of most of those probable nominations. The one that disturbs me the most is his Secretary of Defense, and for no reason other than his questionable military background (possibly did mop-up duty in Iraq, unknown if actual combat) and then a training post in the safe confines of the big school the USG built in Afghanistan. Prior to that he was stationed at Gitmo, the illegal based that Uncle Scam has set up in Cuba and repurposed to torture people indefinitely after 9/11. More on that after the quote:
The bottom of the list is perhaps the stupidest of the bunch, though.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as co-members of the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE” for short, after Elon Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, because the man will not do a single thing that is not associated with a 2011 Reddit meme. The DOGE allegedly will come up with a big list of budget cuts by June of 2026 in order to shrink the federal government, which is something that will definitely actually happen and not just be a way for Musk to grab some more idiotic headlines for a few months before quietly dissipating into nothing, like most of his endeavors. We love it!
Erik Prince, of Blackwater infamy, had set up a private chat group that contained the names of numerous shady characters and mercenaries. One of those names was, of course, Pete Hegseth. From a different paywalled article:
President-elect Donald Trump announced yesterday his pick to head the Pentagon would be Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth, making him the first figure – but I very much doubt the last – from Prince’s group chat to a position in his second administration.
If you’re unfamiliar with the group chat, Prince established it late last year and dubbed it Off Leash, like his podcast of the same name. The roughly 600 invitees were heavily populated with prominent figures in the domestic and international far right, among them current and former government officials, members of congress, national security operatives, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, activists, and journalists.
Among the domestic cast of characters in Off Least were Tucker Carlson; retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned first national security adviser; four current or former members of congress, including Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus, who as I recently noted, citing his soon-to-be-ex-wife, “developed friendships with other congressmen and women having affairs and getting divorces, drinking, parties, all while hosting a weekly Bible study in the basement of our home;” Vish Burra, the director of operations for former Congressman George Santos and GOP black bag operator at large; and journalism-crank-turned MAGA celebrity-and-Matt-Taibbi-Bestie Lara Logan.
Off Leash’s overseas contingent included Romanian mercenary Horatiu Potra, who wrote in the group chat, “The globalists want to control the entire planet [and] the only chance to get rid of them is a spark…Surely there will be a strong man like Erik who will initiate it, otherwise there is no chance of regaining our freedom; Yoav Goldhorn, one of several current and retired Israeli intelligence operatives who daydreamed during Off Leash conversations about nuking Gaza; and Sven von Storch, a flatout ideological fascist and prominent figure in Germany’s rapidly growing Alternative for Germany (AFD) political party. Oh yeah, it almost slipped my mind, but Von Storch’s wife and AFD leader Beatrix von Storch is the granddaughter of Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the last de facto leader of the Third Reich who was sentenced to 10 years at Nuremberg for financing the concentration camps.
I hadn’t previously reported that Hegseth was among those Prince invited to Off Leash, but he certainly fits the general profile. A longtime GOP operative and past executive director of the Koch Brothers-funded Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq with the Army. He was a platoon leader at Guantánamo Bay, and has said terrorism suspects detained there were treated A-OK as far as he was concerned.
Hence, it’s no surprise Hegeth, who periodically advised Trump during his presidency, lobbied him hard to pardon four former Blackwater guards – among them Paul Slough, who’s also an Off Leash member – who were sentenced to prison for their role in the murder of 17 Iraqi civilians in an unprovoked attack at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. Trump granted Hegseth’s wish shortly before the once-and-future president’s forced exit out the White House door in January 2021, despite multiple witnesses, including three former Blackwater guards, who said the shootings were completely unjustified.
Slough posted to Off Leash at least a few times, though I didn’t see any comments of his that were particularly notable. I never saw anything posted to the group chat by Hegseth, but I didn’t have access to all of its conversations so he may have.
Hegseth and Slough have already done quite well by Trump. The majority of Off Leash participants will too, either directly by virtue of being appointees to the upcoming Trump II Administration & Griftfest™ or indirectly, by – to cite two of many possibilities – thriving in the private sector thanks to their position in the president’s inner orbit, like Prince, who probably won’t get a government job, or by being international ideological fellow travelers whose parties and movements will gain strength with a fraternal rightist holding power in the US, such as von Storch.
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Nov 14 2024 0:45 utc | 587
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