Trump learned.
Next time Trump will be more careful picking his team.
Trump is already planning how to staff up, this time with true loyalists in key positions. That got Jack Mullen thinking about the Trump team lineup. I got to know Jack back in our youth when we picked and thinned pears together as summer jobs in Southern Oregon orchards. Jack was an outstanding scholar athlete, a three-sport star playing football, basketball, and baseball for Medford High School. He follows politics with the knowledge and orientation of a sports fan. Real sports fans think about rosters.
Guest post by Jack Mullen
Undecided voters don't make their choice based on potential nominations to the Supreme Court. It's too "inside baseball" for most voters. Nor are undecided voters thinking about potential cabinet members. That is unfortunate, in both cases. The success of a sports team or the overall impact of a presidential administration depends on the whole roster, not just the stars. And there is plenty to worry about in a future Trump team.How about Texas Governor Greg Abbott heading Homeland Security? What about Kari Lake, if she loses her Arizona senatorial race? Would she be put in charge of Health and Human Services? Might Trump place "Mr. DeSanctimonious" in charge of the Department of Education? Trump would love giving a sharp "up yours" to defenders of wokeness, and DeSantis would draw liberal tears.Let's consider Richard Grenell, whom I have followed because of my interest in Guatemala, where I served in the Peace Corps.
Grenell is the perfect utility infielder on Trump's team, able to play a number of positions. Loyal Fox News viewers know Richard Grenell, Trump’s “favorite envoy.” Grenell served four years in the Trump administration. As the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, our top diplomat in Europe pushed hard on Trump’s anti-NATO stance. He warned Germans that Germany’s miserly dues payments to NATO could result in the U.S. pulling out our troops stationed there.Grenell represents Trump's tilt toward Russia. While posted in Berlin, Grenell became Trump’s envoy to the Balkans as a mediator in a Serbia-Kosovo economic dispute. The eventual result of the brokered agreement was the ouster of Kosovo’s prime minister and a win for Serbia, a country long aligned with Russia. Serbia’s ambassador to Washington, Marko Duric, expressed his country’s appreciation for Grenell when he stated “Grenell is undoubtedly Serbia’s friend.” Today Grenell is greeted as a “quasi-official” whenever he visits Serbia, which he visits quite often.Richard Grenell is working on a billion dollar deal with Jared Kushner’s investment fund to build apartments and a luxury hotel in downtown Belgrade, and a resort on an island off the Albanian coast. Grenell told an Albanian television interviewer that he expects these projects to attract a flood of investments. This sits well with the various Mid-East Sovereign Investment Funds.
Grenell garnered his “election fraud” chops when he claimed illegal votes tainted Biden’s 2020 win in Nevada.
Earlier this year, as Trump’s “special envoy," Grenell traveled to Guatemala claiming “election fraud” in Bernardo Arévalo's upset win over the Guatemalan ruling class candidate, Sandra Torres. For four days Grenell met with over 40 members of the Guatemalan hierarchy in an unsuccessful attempt to postpone Arévalo’s inauguration. Fortunately, he did not succeed. Guatemala now has its first anti-corruption candidate to win a presidential election in 70 years.
One more interesting tidbit about Grenell. He became the acting director of national intelligence for the Trump administration’s last nine months. During that time, he purged career professionals in what he called a “bloated counterterrorism bureaucracy” and turned over a slew of declassified documents about Russia to Congress. Trump’s scorn of spy agencies clears Grenell’s path to play a role in national security, be it in the CIA, National Intelligence, or as secretary of state.
Will undecided voters, when casting a November vote, take into account the possible effect a Grenell, an Abbot, a DeSantis, or a Kari Lake can have on the nation’s future? A Trump presidency won't just be Trump. It will be Trump people all the way down.
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6 comments:
Another likely member of a Trump administration would be Stephen Miller, the architect of his anti-Muslim ban and his policy of kidnapping the children of asylum-seekers.
Interesting inside baseball, and all probably true.
But not politically effective, as the writer said.
So this is quite interesting, but it’s just a distraction in the context of actually trying to defeat Donald Trump this fall. Doing that would require one of the following: telling Trump voters something that would dissuade them from voting for Trump, telling Trump voters something that would convince them to vote for Joe Biden, or telling non-Biden voters something that would motivate them to vote for Biden.
Unfortunately, there are none of those things in today’s essay. It’s a clever and interesting analysis of the approaching army, but doesn’t provide anything useful about how to defeat it.
The way to defeat Trump is to hold him accountable for his illegal actions and put him in the Big House instead of the White House. That process has finally begun today.
Some people say he wouldn’t be such a threat if it weren’t for those pesky liberal, woke social justice warriors abandoning the segment of the population that Trump appeals to, such as the White nationalists who believe in the Great Replacement and swallow his claim that Democrats are registering illegal aliens to vote. After all, they just want to make America great again. As near as I can figure, that means taking it back to a time before the civil rights movement, when White men could terrorize people of color with impunity. According to MAGA, God intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation ruled by whites. Trump promises to turn their delusion into a reality.
Some people are so busy building and manning an anti-racist Maginot Line that they fail to notice the political threat moving towards them from an entirely different direction.
All of the polls are showing that increasing numbers of what liberals refer to as “people of color” are moving towards Donald Trump. Apparently, these benighted minorities are too stupid to understand their own interests and are failing to acknowledge and follow the superior political inclinations of the liberal elites who claim they know better.
“Why are these minorities so uppity?“ wonder the “anti-racist” liberals.
Good point. According to Pew Research, 12% of Black voters now align with the GOP.
It's not just POC who vote against their own interests.
That happens in nearly all of the red states on a regular basis. Why do you think the red states lag in so many areas and are essentially third-world countries even with massive welfare paid for by the blue states?
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