The Wall Street journal, which has a track record of spreading irascible scepticism over Donald Trump’s credentials for re-election as US president, has come out with yet another sensational story that Congressman Mike Waltz is going to be the White House National Security Advisor.
This comes at a time when it is also being speculated by the American press that Senator Marco Rubio will be the next Secretary of State.
And it follows a report in Washington Post about Trump having had a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Thursday — false news, as it transpired subsequently, compelling Trump’s office to put out a press release listing all the calls Trump made so far as president-elect with foreign leaders where Putin’s name doesn’t even figure. (Interestingly, nonetheless, British press is still running commentaries on the Trump-Putin conversation which never took place!)
Two lawmakers from Florida alone — Rubio & Waltz — as two of the most powerful national security and foreign policy officials in the Trump Administration? It doesn’t gel, prima facie. Let Trump first announce these two appointments first before anyone opens the champagne bottle.
The WSJ was viscerally opposed to Trump. This is how the paper presented Trump’s election victory on November 5: “Former President Donald Trump cleared a path to the White House by doubling down on the very things that Democrats said made him unfit to return to the Oval Office.
“Throughout Trump’s campaign, the Republican Party candidate was bombastic, profane and frequently untruthful claiming the 2020 race was stolen from him, that he had no responsibility for the Jan. 6 2021 attack on Congress and that President Biden had orchestrated his criminal indictments and felony convictions.”
Does the Journal read anything like a friendly soul, given the massive consequences of the incoming Trump presidency? To my mind, we are witnessing a replay of what Trump had faced in 2016 when the “swamp” tenaciously undercut by salami tactics his credibility as a serious politician to decry him as a babe in the woods lacking the requisite experience in government or worthy of holding high position.
Trump took a thousand cuts. He got bogged down in the fake Russia collusion hypothesis from which he never really recovered and faced two impeachment trials. Eventually, he made his exit as a wounded fighter in the boxing ring in defeat, while even his vice-president Mike Vance disowned him.
Indeed, feelings are running high in the civil war conditions in American politics. The neoconservatives who dominated the Biden administration and the Deep State are up in arms already to get the Trump presidency mired in controversies.
Trump must be well aware of it, too. Interestingly, Trump’s wife Melanie is reportedly inclined to turn down First Lady Jill Biden’s customary invitation to her for tea and a traditional post-election tour of the White House on Wednesday.
Apparently, Melanie has not forgotten the humiliation she went through at the hands of Jill Biden’s husband who ordered the outrageous move on an unprecedented raid at the Trump family’s Palm Beach, Florida, mansion — with the FBI operatives snooping through Melanie’s underwear drawer looking for any White House documents the ex-president might have furtively carted away while demitting office in 2020. (The US Supreme Court has since disapproved of such petulance against a former president.)
Of course, this is not to question Congressman Mike Waltz’s impressive bio-data. He has evidently been building himself up as potential presidential material. One thing is sure now: Trump comes under pressure to take a good look at Waltz as a potential NSA.
After all, the globalist American press linked to the Deep State had influenced Trump’s impressionable mind in such a direction in his first term as well by planting fellows like John Bolton, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, et al. You plant a back room story, and in DC’s fertile soil it grows into a giant oak tree overnight.
Plainly put, the issue here is whether Trump wants as NSA someone who is, frankly speaking, a cross-breed of Mike Pompeo, the ex-CIA boss and state secretary whose name too the swamp was mooting, till the other day for a key position in the new administration compelling Trump, finally, to issue a pointed disclaimer underscoring that the likes of Pompeo — or Nikki Haley, for that matter — will have no place in the incoming administration.
The American press is fancying that Trump has returned to DC as a novice still, a fatal flaw that had cost Julius Caesar his life in decadent Rome. In reality, though, Trump is an enigma now, as he is a wiser man after the excruciatingly lethal attacks he faced from the Biden Administration and the Deep State, and brooding over the past has re-invented himself with a fair idea of what to do — and, more importantly, what not to do — as America’s chief executive in DC.
It is common sense that Trump will need a cooperative team of loyal officials whom he can rely on to advance his political and foreign policy agenda as he is running against time and a hell of a lot of things need to be done. If Trump has chosen Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, one prime consideration is that she is “one of his most trusted political confidants for the job,” as Politico reported.
The paper wrote, “In Trump’s third bid for the White House, Wiles succeeded at minimising infighting, leaking and other types of drama that characterised both of Trump’s previous campaigns and his tenure in the White House…
“Historically the first appointee named by the president-elect, the chief of staff is charged with overseeing all policy and day-to-day White House affairs. In his first term, Trump burned through four chiefs of staff — former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, Gen. John Kelly, former South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney and former North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows — who bore the brunt of the infighting and turbulence that defined his tenure.”
Again, Trump announced yesterday that he’s tapping SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” What occurs to me is whether this move by Trump would go down well with someone like Congressman Mike Waltz who is passionate about the Pentagon’s further build-up and speaks for the military-industrial complex?
I don’t think so.
By the way, Wiles is also from Florida! The million dollar question is whether his NSA and state secretary will also now be from Florida? So, the question to be asked is, why is Wall Street Journal doing this by floating highly speculative reports attributing to unnamed sources.