Posted on 07/26/2022 1:04:17 PM PDT by absalom01
Don’t go, Boss! That’s my strong advice to President Trump as he prepares to deliver a speech in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday at his alleged “think tank,” the America First Policy Institute (AFPI).
Yes, it is important for President Trump to have a well-credentialed stable of policy experts capable of both building a 2024 platform and finding solid MAGA talent to populate a new Trump Administration. But the AFPI Trojan Horse—whose leadership is now bragging about how it will staff Trump’s “shadow cabinet”—is decidedly not that.
Most comically, the AFPI roster features the author of a poison pen White House memoir who sued the president; a Communist China-trained accountant who criticized the president for “ineffective drug price policies”; a former Cabinet secretary who almost got Trump impeached; a former top advisor to Dick “Endless War” Cheney; and John “Book Deal” Bolton’s former chief of staff. What could go wrong there?
Most perniciously, the AFPI economics team is peppered with free trade ideologues on record opposing Trump’s tariffs—the most important and transformational component of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. The most famous offender here is Trump’s former National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, who is now vice chairman of the AFPI board.
As I document in Taking Back Trump’s America, I had to fight Brother Larry on an almost daily basis, not just on trade policy but also in my efforts to advance Trump’s two most simple rules: buy American, hire American. And Kudlow worked hand-in-hand with several members of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), who now constitute the free trade core of AFPI’s economic experts.
Most egregiously, Casey Mulligan has boasted how Trump’s CEA chairman “would never waver from a free trade position,” and at the White House, Trump’s CEA, by culture and ideology, did everything it could to delay, dilute, and damage Trump’s trade policies.
Incredibly, AFPI also hosts a gaggle of former Trump officials who have publicly criticized him for his “Stop the Steal” efforts and/or falsely implicated him in the January 6 violence. Besides the aforementioned Kudlow along with Kellyanne Conway, this gaggle includes former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf.
Wolf openly defied President Trump’s order to fire the DHS official in charge of election security who laughably claimed the 2020 election was “the most secure in history.” And Trump pulled Wolf’s nomination for secretary after Wolf lit the Boss up over January 6.
Arguably, the most dangerous AFPI fifth-columnist is former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. After the Boss left office, Jindal would insist “Trump was undone by his own predatory nature” and attacked the Boss for his “conspiracy theories and extra-constitutional notions.” Today, Jindal is aggressively pushing a “Trumpism without Trump” agenda.
That may well be AFPI’s broader agenda: Hijack the political attractiveness of Trumpism but replace Trump with an AFPI-anointed RINO. Here, it is worth remembering the Michael Dukakis bon mot: “a fish rots from the head up.”
The fishy CEO of AFPI is Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director, Brooke Rollins. She recently let slip: “[W]hether the next president’s name is Donald J. Trump or whether the next president is a different name, we will be there standing by ready to help and we’ve already begun preparations for that time.”
If that’s not a recipe for Jindal’s “Trumpism without Trump” coup, I don’t know what is; and Rollins ranks high on my list of bad personnel in the Trump White House who helped Trump lose the 2020 election.
I thought when I served with her that Rollins was merely politically tone deaf. Today, after I see how she is staffing AFPI, there is a far darker possibility.
Memo to the Boss: Instead of legitimizing these grifters, why not demand they stop using the Trump good name to raise money to engineer their “Trumpism without Trump” coup. Alternatively, if this really is your think tank, bring in a John McEntee or Liz Harrington to run the place with the full power to fire and hire. Now that would be a real Trump MAGA policy institute.
Trump has plenty of enemies, the most dangerous being those inside the wire trying to hijack the America First movement for their own purposes.
You bet. I can’t name 10 people in his first administration that I would even let near the White House grounds much less in the White House. They’re out there giving themselves away as we speak..........MAGA with President Trump in charge!!!!!
Stole this from CBD over at Ace of Spades:
“What Donald Trump does better than anyone is something else entirely. He has been able to articulate a vision of America in terms that resonate with the silent and so far quiescent majority who have been left behind and marginalized by smug elite. It is my hope that Donald Trump understands this and becomes the elder statesman of a resurgent, conservative-controlled Republican party, guiding its philosophy and keeping it focused on what must be the single issue of our time: America First.”
thanks for posting this
left behind and marginalized by smug elite....
I know many, quite a bit and the numbers are growing, that will say that this can’t be solved at the ballot box anymore. It’ll take a different kind of box. Or should I say the things contained in those different boxes.
But, IMHO, at the end of the day, it all starts at the ballot box and at the most local levels.
Anyone on here that lives in a place like I do, 30 miles east of Atlanta, could be seeing out of control growth. No plan for anything, just build something and we’ll worry about the important stuff later. City councils and county commissions raising taxes through the roof with the mantra...if you can’t afford to live here, sell and we’ll find someone that can...rather than be good stewards of the people’s money. City councils and county commissions that are just as corrupt as any in DC or your statehouse. Deals done behind closed doors. Fake shock when a massive facility is announced, plans already approved, permits already issued, and....oh yeah....10,000 jobs and the money will be rolling in.
So, while your local city council person or county commissioner may not be the “elite”, most certainly are smug. They think they rule over you, me and all of us. And to a certain extent, they do. They continue to get re-elected. They get re-elected because they’re home grown and everyone knows their daddy and granddaddy and they would NEVER do anything to screw over the people they’ve known for decades. Only, they will. In a heartbeat.
And it is these people and those like them on the state and federal level that are nothing but pawns to the ‘smug elite’ and allow it to run roughshod over all of us.
If you are truly a “free trader” then Trump’s policies only make sense. You use tariffs to level the playing field with countries that don’t reciprocate. Like China, in particular. And if you recognize that China is busy buying up politicians in both parties, you’ll understand why people hide their pro-China policies behind a “free trade” camouflage.
True dat. I’ve seen it firsthand.
Kudrow is a globalist hack.
Kudlow
Taken at face value, very well stated. Time will tell.
The other place that needs more America First loyalists are the GOP county commissions. Unpaid, unglamorous, but having a good group of people at the county level recruiting solid America First candidates for local elections is critically important.
Too many RINO squishes on those committees.
So What’s new? Trump filled his administration with opponents of MAGA. Why should we expect his think tank to be different?
Desantis 2024!
The rumor is that the ticket is going to be Trump/DeSantis, but who knows.
I’m still on the Trump train. The GOPe must be destroyed and a new party built on its ashes. No one will do that as thoroughly as Trump. If he bows out, DeSantis will get my support.
Waaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy toooooo many.
But I think that goes back to what I said earlier. They allow themselves to be bought and paid for.
Sometimes that’s their original intent...get rich from the position.
Sometimes they go in with the right intentions and get seduced by all the money and corruption.
Sometimes they go in with the right intentions, hold to those ideals and are run out by the 2 types mentioned above.
Trump Voter Wins Douglas County GOP Committeeman Then Replaces ALL of the GOP Board RINOs Who Refused to Serve With Him Because He’s Pro-Trump
From the article....One individual heard Dan’s story and did something about it. Daniel Wiley. Dan is just a regular fellow that had no political aspirations at all.
He heard about the takeover at the precinct level and decided to do one better and go for Douglas County chair position, running on the MAGA platform against a host of RINOs. Not only did he win, he won in a landslide.
The RINOs in Douglas County all resigned because they said they refused to work with a Trump supporter, expecting voters to rise up.
They didn’t and Dan was in the position to name their replacements, all of whom are MAGA supporters.
2022 is going to be a long year for establishment Republicans.
Navarro is “probably” right-—but I caution all of you, the inside fighting does NOT go just one way, and Navarro may be just as guilty as others as trying to cut out people he may personally disapprove of but who are loyal to Trump or America First. In any organization, this occurs and is rarely all one-sided.
Navarro’s a smart guy. I do wonder WHY he writes this article though, ostensibly to warn about traitors when, as a former Trump official, he could probably discuss this directly with Trump. It’s not clear... maybe Navarro is just letting these people know he’s on to them.
Trump’s “flaw” (and talent) was running the office as the nation’s CEO, but he had to rely on recommendations of disloyal people. He couldn’t know what he was dealing with... he didn’t know Pence and picked him by his accomplishments in his state.
I believe Trump is now more aware of who to avoid, like his calling for 50,000+ gov’t employees to be fired.
Hey LS, as an aside, are you back in Twitter jail again? Haven’t seen anything in almost a week.
Yes, for nine more hours.
I’m on Truth at CyberneticsLS, on Getter as @OtherWalls
I’ve written extensively on Trump’s personnel choices.
*Amanda Milius, one of the better ones in State, said that there were “maybe 40-50” total Trumpers in the administration.
*A President appoints something like 300 fairly influential picks, about 3,000 total. Without the help of a MAGA/America First think tank four years out vetting every one of these people, there is simply no way any admin could know who would be loyal or not.
*I endorsed McMaster. Later I told Bannon, I screwed up. He said, “Everybody endorsed McMaster.” His point to me was that virtually everyone felt good about many of these picks. I spoke with Sessions in the Summer of 2016 for an HOUR. I thought he would be a great AG. He was total Trump.
*A second part of this, besides just not having the machinery to vet all these people, is that Trump made a real effort to cooperate with the Deep State in terms of getting things done. He naively believed, as he told Rush Limbaugh, that after the election they would try to actually improve America.
In this regard, look at the NeverTrumpers: they have revealed themselves-—all of them-—to be liberals who parroted conservative lines for years so that they could be the “controlled opposition,” the court jesters who knew that the positions they supposedly backed (repealing Roe, closing the border etc) would NEVER be implemented by one of “their” candidates. So at the end of the day, they could laugh with their liberal masters and say, “Of course, we know THAT will never happen.”
Thanks for the clarity and interesting details. And... as I suspected, although I operate on approx. 60/40% facts and instincts. I also thought Sessions would do a great job = instinct fail.
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