Donald Trump: establishment trojan horse?

[Daglord]

after the general, this election was a YUGE loss of liberty (IMO) regardless of who won. Sanders & Paul were the only ones warning of NSA overreach, military expansion, regime change, etc, & there was an obvious difference in establishment support for both of them as opposed to the eventual nominees. IMO, if Hillary won, at least people would be fighting her every step of the way & calling her out on her bullshit. with Trump, it seems people have a huge blindspot when it comes to his advisors & will get a free MAGA pass. I don't understand the cult-like following or the hard on some people have for him, but it will serve the Deep State well. it's almost a complete 180 now from those were supposed to be the most skeptical... voting is legit/not rigged, we are a democracy not an oligarchy & we're gonna MAGA by expanding the MIC & NSA.

If Trump (& the likes of Giuliani, Gingrich, Pence, Christie, Adelson, Sessions, Bolton, etc) is considered "anti-establishment", we may never get back to a smaller, less intrusive government. IMHO, the only good to come out of this election would have been a 3rd (or 4th) party reaching 5% of the pop vote. Libertarians are a hard group to co-opt (Johnson/Weld excluded), let them try.

two party system needed to die & this was the best year for it until Trump, who is now ushering in the old guard GOP back into power.

hope I'm wrong, but haven't seen anything so far to prove otherwise...

that said, glad he won & I didn't have to vote for him. Both choices were deplorable.

[Masato]

^ yes

This possibility is still very much on the forefront of my mind, I will be watching very carefully.

If such a 'Trojan Horse' scenario is true, consider now they have a crazyman in the White House through whom all kinds of shit can be incited? In many ways, things can be taken farther under a Trump presidency than Hillary's. With Hillary in they would be under constant scrutiny to never step over the line too far. But with Trump they can piss all over that line and step as far as they want. Crash the economy, nuke Iran, start a civil war... and say 'see?' He's a madman! Get it under control again!

It could be like the Bush Jr - Obama dichotomy on steroids

Is this being too conspiratorially minded? Have the elites REALLY lost control???

I'm not quite ready yet to believe it...

This thread has been a wonderful counter-balance, thank you for all you've done here Dag

[Megaterio Llamas]

I'm hoping this election will spell at least the temporary shelving of the Clinton/Qatar/Saudi pipeline initiative/Sunni Islamist insurgency in Syria. That alone would mean the world to me.

[Masato]

^ nice

If I had to pick an item of minimal progress it would be continuing the slander and destruction of the mainstream media. I think SO much progress can be made if their strangling control of the narrative and public perception could be smashed. Lets enter an era with no major media giants... open source, independent, competitive journalism.

Keep it up, Mr. Trump. The campaign round was easily a 10-8 imo :D

[Daglord]

I'm hoping this election will spell at least the temporary shelving of the Clinton/Qatar/Saudi pipeline initiative/Sunni Islamist insurgency in Syria. That alone would mean the world to me.

yeah man, I get that. I understand voting for Trump for various reasons & that^ is definitely one of them.

but those with a rabid crush on him (you know who they are), & who voted him in because they think he is anti-establishment or "sticking it to the system", are in for a RUDE awakening - Reagan/Bush style IMO. that's exactly who he/they (deep state) were counting on. some I expected for sure, but everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid, even those who once were the biggest skeptics.

just a few years ago, "anti-establishment" meant anti-big government, anti-NSA, anti-Military Industrial Complex, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-overreach, anti-interventionism, anti-neocon/hawk, anti-DOD think tank, anti-Patriot Act, etc. (pro-liberty, pro-privacy, pro-diplomacy, etc.)

now, can someone tell me how Trump is any of those things? looks to be the exact opposite to me. he is in love with everything listed above (except maybe interventionism, remains to be seen IMO, but his cabinet/advisors don't inspire a lot of faith) & he has not been shy about any of it. people are cheering this on & thinking they beat the establishment. that could very well retard any smaller government, liberty movement. that's my biggest fear of a Trump presidency, complacency, not anything the media is manufacturing.

think of this for a second, here is a candidate (& cabinet) who loves (& is promising) a police state & there is turmoil flooding the streets over his presidency. problem-reaction-solution?

again, I understand the vote & appreciate your reasons why. Fully understand it. I'm glad Trump won & I didn't have to vote for him to do it. godspeed brother.



final note, Liberty did alright on Tuesday despite Trump.

While the presidential race captured our attention the most, several ballot initiatives across the country were important indicators of how the liberty movement is doing. We review the big and small contests on today's program

Elections should be about protecting you from an overbearing government... not about which candidate will grab the ring of power. The goal should be to set you free... to leave you alone... to have a government so small you can barely see it!

[Megaterio Llamas]

I'll also be watching the liberal interventionist NGOs and their neoconservative confreres with great interest. What will become of the Clinton/Soros/Nuland Maidan project in Ukraine? And what of NGO operations in the south Balkans; and what of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict? I'm very optimistic that Hillary's global thermonuclear war with Russia has been shelved for now and support for these NGO destabilization/regime change/make-war projects will wane significantly in this process as they were to be the flash points for the coming Big One.

[Daglord]

might as well see this through... a few days after being elected, Trump named his transition team. James Corbett had some words.

Corbett Report: Meet Team Trump
https://steemit.com/trump/@corbettreport/meet-team-trump

The voting machines have decided who will be the next puppet figurehead of the Pax Americana deep state for the next four years. The circus is over and the peanut shells are being swept out of the stands. So what do we have to show for all of it?

Well, I have some good news, some bad news, and some not-so-good news for you. Let's start with the bad news.

Apparently some people voted for Trump in the belief that he was some sort of anti-establishment truth-telling hero of the working class. I hate to be the one to disabuse you of this notion, so let's just look at his transition team, his campaign team, the people who have already been tapped to be part of the new administration and the people who are being contacted for potential cabinet appointments. Warning: It's not a pretty picture.

So who's leading this transition team that's helping to sort out the cabinet and move Team Trump into the White House? Oh, just the usual assortment of bankster-connected corporate lobbyists we would expect to be hanging around any president-elect. This time is no exception. From former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Eric Ueland to Koch Industries lobbyist Michael Catanzaro to Aetna / Verizon lobbyist William Palatucci, the gaggle of corporate cronies manning Trump for America Inc. (the actual nonprofit group set up to oversee the transition) are as establishment as they come. And the whole kit-and-kaboodle is being run by Chris Christie. Yes, that Chris Christie.

And who are they reaching out to for potential positions in the Trump White House?

Steven Mnuchin - The chief fundraiser for the Trump campaign was not featured in a lot of alt-right cheerleading for the Trump train, and for good reason: He is a 17-year Goldman Sachs veteran who went on to work for Soros Fund Management. Yes, that Soros. Oh, and he donated to Hillary Clinton. But other than that, I'm sure he's a great fundraiser. Which is why he is apparently a frontrunner to be Secretary of the Treasury in the Trump White House. That's right folks, yet another Goldman Sachs vampire squid alumni is within a hair's breadth of taking over the Treasury, just like Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin before him. But don't worry, because another person in consideration for the Treasury Secretary position is...

Jamie Dimon - I'm going to assume you know who Jamie Dimon is, but just to make sure everyone is aware, let me spell it out in black and white: Jamie Dimon is chairman, president and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, the monstrous banking offspring of JP Morgan & Co. and the Rockefellers' own Chase Manhattan. Other than Lloyd "God's work" Blankfein, it would be hard to find a more bankster-y bankster in the world of banksterism. To list Dimon's entire rap sheet would be an editorial unto itself, but let's just remind ourselves of his role in the 2008 bailout fiasco via my Federal Reserve documentary, Century of Enslavement:

A stunning 2011 Government Accountability Office report examined $16 trillion of bailout facilities extended by the Fed in the wake of the crisis and exposed numerous examples of blatant conflicts of interest. Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric served as a director on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the same time the Fed provided $16 billion in financing to General Electric. JP Morgan Chase chief executive, Jamie Dimon, meanwhile, was also a member of the board of the New York Fed during the period that saw $391 billion in Fed emergency lending directed to his own bank. In all, Federal Reserve board members were tied to $4 trillion in loans to their own banks. These funds were not simply used to keep these banks afloat, but actually to return these Fed-connected banks to a period of record profits in the same period that the average worker saw their real wages actually decrease and the economy on main street slow to a standstill.

If there's any ray of hope here, it's that (as I discussed with James Evan Pilato on a recent edition of New World Next Week), Dimon recently said he wouldn't want to become Treasury Secretary due to "Democrat-Republican bullshit." As Pearse Redmond points out, the Trump team may be floating Dimon's name right now to make it seem not so bad when they "only" appoint Goldman/Soros insider Mnuchin to the position.

John Bolton - John Bolton is a career Republican insider who served roles in both Bush White Houses, including most recently as UN Ambassador in 2005-2006. He's also the worst kind of crazed, bloodthirsty neocon who has literally never heard of a foreign invasion he didn't lust after. Don't take my word for it, listen to him explain Trump's foreign policy imperatives...for as many seconds as you can stomach it. And yes, he's commenting on Trump's foreign policy because he has been advising the Trump campaign and has been name-dropped for months as a possible Secretary of State in the Trump cabinet. So are all of those who voted Trump over Hillary because they didn't like her warmongering suitably upset now? Well if not there's always his picks for Secretary of Defense, like:

Stephen Hadley - Hadley is the man who, acting as Bush Jr.'s Deputy National Security Advisor, served as the conduit for the ridiculously fake yellowcake uranium forgeries that were used to help drum up the war in Iraq. He was also the guy who kept the bogus yellowcake story in Bush's October 2002 speech in Cincinnati laying out the case for the illegal bloody war of aggression in Iraq. A share of the million dead Iraqi's blood is on his hands. And he's in the running to be Trump's Secretary of Defense.

Reince Priebus - Nothing says "anti-establishment party outsider" like the current chairman of the Republican National Committee, right? Well, guess what: Reince Priebus is under consideration for Trump's chief of staff. You know, the highest ranking employee of the White House? Priebus is apparently competing against the likes of Stephen Bannon (Trump campaign C.E.O. and former head of Breitbart News) and Jared Kushner's (The Donald's own son-in-law who the Times of Israel takes great pains to point out is an Orthodox Jew, as is Ivanka Trump). Regardless of who gets the spot, the very fact that Priebus is in the running shows that Trump's feud with the Republican Party was about as real as Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania.

Rudy Giuliani - Rudy Giuliani is an unconvicted 9/11 criminal who illegally cleared the 9/11 crime scene, and who failed to pass on the prior warning that he received about the towers' destruction. He is also hated by the New York Fire Department for having kicked the firemen off the pile as soon as the gold was discovered. As Associate Attorney General in 1981 he was involved in the PROMIS software octopus. He oversaw New York's unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policing policy. He is a ghoul in every sense. So naturally the only question is which spot will he fill in the Trump cabinet: Attorney General, DHS chief, cybersecurity czar, or something else entirely?

Getting nauseated yet? You should be, but if not there are many many many more contemptible establishment insiders who are being vetted for potential cabinet positions at this very moment. But don't worry, this is why I saved the good news for last.

But first, the not-so-bad news: None of these positions have been filled yet. We don't know who is going to actually make it into the Trump cabinet at this point. Who knows, maybe it will be a bunch of swell, upstanding Beltway outsiders, non-banksters and populists who are committed to the principles of human freedom. Trump and Change 2016!

OK, alright. That's wishful thinking. But here's the really good news:

That's right, the electorate favored nobody at all by an almost 2-to-1 margin over either fake, controlled political puppet. Turnout was down from previous elections. Things are looking good.

For those who stayed home out of principle: I salute you.

For those who stayed home out of apathy: can I interest you in some reading? https://www.corbettreport.com/voting-is-the-problem-heres-the-solution/

For those who voted for Clinton: why are you on this website?

And for those who voted for Trump: will you commit to standing by the principles you thought you were voting for when you cast your ballot, or will you rally around the party flag as a new crew of neocons and banksters and establishment insiders step into their pre-ordained roles? And if so, will you re-examine what your vote actually did, or will you simply say "I'll show them! I'll vote them out next time!" Because if it's the latter, then you haven't learned anything at all.

Pence later came in & had to clean house... damage control due to PR backlash? or legit swamp draining? only time will tell.

Pence removes lobbyists from Trump transition team: report
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/306309-pence-removes-lobbyists-from-trump-transition-team

Vice President-elect Mike Pence is reportedly kicking all lobbyists off the transition team, according to The Wall Street Journal. An unidentified source within the transition team told the Journal that it was one of Pence’s first moves since taking over the effort from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was ousted last week.

Pence officially took control of the transition efforts on Tuesday, according to a document sent to the White House. Since Christie’s removal, many of his appointees on the team have also been dismissed, and the transition effort has been taken over by campaign loyalists.

Trump had been under fire for having a transition team filled with lobbyists and other insiders, given his campaign pledge to “drain the swamp.” There had been roughly a dozen registered lobbyists working in and around the transition team, reports have said. Those lobbyists included Rob Collins of S-3 Group, Mike Catanzaro at CGCN Group, Martin Whitmer of Whitmer & Worrall, J. Steven Hart at Williams & Jensen and tobacco company Altria’s Cindy Hayden, among others.

"Based on public reports, your transition team and your potential cabinet include over twenty Wall Street elites, industry insiders, and lobbyists making decisions that could have huge implications for their clients or employers,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to Trump on Tuesday.

Trump said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday that selecting lobbyists was the only option he had.

[Daglord]

This is a crucial moment for Donald Trump's upcoming presidency. Neoconservatives are trying to get closer to Trump, and if he ends up appointed any of them to Cabinet positions, it can be a very bad sign for his administration. During his campaign, Trump made some encouraging statements about backing off and being less confrontational with Russia. That's all for the good, but these upcoming appointments are critical and can end up raining on the parade.

[Daglord]

while the transition purge was going on, Giuliani & Bolton (both mentioned extensively in thread) were being vetted for Secretary of State :shock:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_State



not sure Giuliani will make it through the process, looks a lot like Sec Clinton IMO. no chance he makes it to SoS, but not for a lack of trying by team Trump.

Giuliani took money from Qatar, Venezuela, Iranian exiles
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/giuliani-foreign-clientele-possible-conflicts-231413?cmpid=sf

Rudy Giuliani's paid consulting for foreign governments would present conflicts of interest as the nation's top diplomat that would make the Clinton Foundation look trifling.

Since leaving the New York mayor's office, Giuliani has made millions as a lawyer and consultant, including for some clients at odds with U.S. foreign policy. When some of those ties surfaced amid Giuliani's own presidential bid in 2007, they were considered to pose an unprecedented number of ethical quandaries for a potential commander in chief.

Now those concerns have no doubt been eclipsed by Donald Trump's own web of business entanglements, which are still not completely known to the public. Giuliani's participation in Trump's transition and contention for the job of secretary of state poses a direct challenge to Trump's promises to root out Washington self-dealing and ban his administration's officials from lobbying for foreign governments.

In 2011, an exiled Iranian political party called the Mujahedin e-Khalq, known as the MEK, paid Giuliani to give a speech in Washington calling on the State Department to remove the group from its list of terrorist organizations. The MEK recruited a host of other formal officials to its cause and succeeded in reversing the terrorist designation in 2012.

A subsidiary of Giuliani's consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, advised Qatar's state-run oil company on security at a natural gas plant, The Wall Street Journal reported. Qatar is a U.S. ally that hosts a major American military base but once stifled an attempt to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who went on to mastermind the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the 9/11 commission report.

The same subsidiary, Giuliani Security & Safety, provided security advice to a Singapore gambling project on behalf of a partnership that included a tycoon close to the North Korean regime who is considered an organized crime figure by the U.S., according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. "I think the person involved, if it's correct, was a 1 percent owner that had no involvement with us, we never worked for, had nothing to do with," Giuliani told NBC's Tim Russert at the time.

Giuliani Partners also advised TransCanada, which sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline that President Barack Obama rejected but Trump has said he wants to approve. And Giuliani helped the maker of the OxyContin painkiller, Purdue Pharma, settle a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with a fine.

The Houston-based law firm Giuliani joined as a named partner in 2005 lobbied in Texas for Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company then controlled by President Hugo Chavez, The New York Times reported in 2007. The firm also did work for Saudi Arabia's oil ministry, according to The Associated Press.

The law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, lobbied at the federal level during Giuliani's time there for energy companies including Southern Company, Duke Energy, Energy Future Holdings, Arch Coal, Chesapeake Energy and NuStar Energy, records show. It also represented Cornell Companies, a private prison operator that later merged with GEO Group. Giuliani never personally registered as a lobbyist. He left the firm for rival Greenberg Traurig this year, and currently is on leave.

Giuliani's assistant at Greenberg Traurig and the Trump transition didn't answer requests for comment.

The Clinton Foundation has been hounded by Republican suspicions of selling access to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and the nonprofit did accept big bucks from foreign governments. But Clinton's defenders point out there's no proof she ever made an official act to benefit a foundation donor, and, unlike Giuliani, she never personally profited from the foreign contributions to her charity.

When Giuliani ran for president, he reported assets of $18.1 million to $70.4 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuliani_Partners

Giuliani Partners has been categorized by various media outlets as a lobbying entity capitalizing on Giuliani's name recognition. Clients of Giuliani Partners are required to sign confidentiality agreements, so they do not comment about the work they get done or the amount that they have paid for it. Giuliani himself has refused to talk about his clients, the work he did for them, the compensation he received from them, or any details about the company.

One of Giuliani Partners' clients during this time was Hank Asher, an admitted drug smuggler and millionaire founder of companies that perform electronic information gathering (datamining) on individuals. According to a shareholder in the company, Asher hired Giuliani for his "influence with the federal government to enable Mr. Asher to take an active role in Seisint as a chief executive officer despite the allegations about his drug dealing". Giuliani helped Asher's company get $12 million in government grants. After Asher's past was publicly revealed, he resigned from the company; Giuliani defended him to newspapers without mentioning that Asher was a paying client. After Asher's resignation, investors in Seisint looked into how much Giuliani Partners had been paid: $2 million a year in fees, a commission on sales of Seisint products, and 800,000 warrants for Seisint stock, which would prove valuable when Seisent was sold to Lexis Nexis for $775 million. One investor sued the board, claiming that Giuliani's contributions had not been worth the large amount paid. The Seisent database product that Giuliani Partners was to help market, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, was itself criticized on civil liberties grounds, and within two years the program had folded.

[Daglord]

Thankful for people like Rand in the senate...

Sen. Rand Paul says neither Bolton or Giuliani would get his vote for Secretary of State
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/15/sen-rand-paul-says-neither-giuliani-nor-bolton-would-get-his-vote-for-secretary-of-state/

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a newly reelected member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said this morning that he was inclined to oppose either former U.N. ambassador John Bolton or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani if they were nominated for secretary of state.

“It’s important that someone who was an unrepentant advocate for the Iraq War, who didn’t learn the lessons of the Iraq War, shouldn’t be the secretary of state for a president who says Iraq was a big lesson,” Paul said in an interview this morning. “Trump said that a thousand times. It would be a huge mistake for him to give over his foreign policy to someone who [supported the war]. I mean, you could not find more unrepentant advocates of regime change.”

Paul argued that both Giuliani and Bolton, the people whose names have circulated most widely, “have made it clear that they favor bombing Iran.” Choosing either for a key administration job, he said, would go back on the “America First” foreign policy that helped Trump win the Republican primaries, to the surprise of the Republican Party foreign policy establishment.

“I’m hoping that if there’s a public discussion of this before it happens, people in the incoming administration realize that regime change made us less safe and the Iraq War made us less safe,” said Paul. “We don’t need, as our chief diplomat, someone whose idea of diplomacy is dropping bombs.”

Paul, one of many 2016 presidential candidates who was swept aside by Trump, largely avoided the national spotlight as he won reelection to the Senate. But he was the most prominent of many libertarian-minded Republicans who made peace with Trump because of his ex post facto criticism of the Iraq War and his criticism of intervention in Libya and Syria. Even Alex Jones, the conspiracy-minded radio host who turned his show into a months-long Trump telethon, told viewers this week that electing Trump had prevented a new world war.

But the discussion of plum roles for Bolton or Giuliani have given some libertarians and “paleoconservatives” pause. Tuesday morning, at a post-election D.C. conference hosted by the American Conservative magazine, a series of “realist” foreign-policy writers criticized the names floated for Trump’s State Department. Daniel Larison suggested that former senator Jim Webb of Virginia — a Republican-turned-Democrat who weighed a presidential run as an independent after dropping out of the Democratic primaries — would be a fairer choice and that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) would be “the less aggressive choice” for the Defense Department.

Paul is one of the few Republicans in a position to influence this. As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, he will get to vote on whether to recommend Trump’s nominee for secretary of state. The results of the 2016 elections will give Republicans a 10-to-9 majority on the committee, meaning that Paul could cast a decisive vote, with every Democrat, against recommending a Trump nominee. That would not stop a full Senate vote on the nominee, but it would expose fissures in the Republican Party in the first weeks of a Trump administration.

According to Paul, a nominee such as Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) would have an easier time navigating the Senate. He also suggested that realists would get a broader hearing than “the neocons” who had advocated for war in the past, many of whom went on to endorse Hillary Clinton for president.

“There’s going to continue to be a right-left continuum in the Senate on issues like selling arms to Yemen,” Paul said. “As far as the neocons go, he shouldn’t touch those people with a 10-foot pole.”

CNN | Rand Paul on Trumps Picks: Giuliani foreign ties 'worrisome' (11/15/16)

“We don’t need, as our chief diplomat, someone whose idea of diplomacy is dropping bombs.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., discusses Donald Trump's possible national security choices as well as U.S.- Russia relations (11/16/16)

"you want your diplomat to be a diplomat, not a bomb thrower" though "I don't think I get to choose, nor am I being called or solicited my advice"