Don’t get trumped again. In today’s news, we have an interview with RFK, who effectively terminated his own campaign to throw support behind Trump and who hopes to work with Trump. He provides bombshell information from his discussion about that endorsement with Trump that confirms something I made a very big thing out of when Trump won the first time, as he set up his cabinet.
One of the biggest promises Trump ran on was that he’d drain the swamp. I went over each of his major cabinet choices back then as he started forming his government ahead of inauguration and pointed out how just about every one of them was the swampiest creature you could ever fear seeing in that position.
My series of articles was like a catalog of swamp monsters. I lost readers over it, and many informed me that I was a fool for not realizing that Trump was just playing 4-D chess by holding his enemies closer so he could round them all up and then defeat them. That was also the Q-Anon line that I kept hearing. On prominent Q-Anon publisher tried to recruit me with that line. What Trump was ding was just a big round-up, and then Trump would take them down. I argued back that it would have to be a game of 40-D chess to make that work because he was draining the swamp entirely into the White House basement.
Well, today RFK Jr. let out quite a revelation about how Trump knows he failed badly at that promise, though he’d never say it publicly:
RFK Jr. says Trump admitted to him he didn’t drain the swamp his first term and has asked him to help him drain the swamp moving forward:
“He said, I didn’t know anything about governing and he said, we won this election, and then all of a sudden, you got to fill 60,000 jobs.”
“He said I was surrounded by people, by lobbyists and business interests who we’re saying, you got to appoint this guy, and that’s what he did.”
“They brought in a telecommunications lobbyist to run FCC. They brought in an oil lobbyist, Ryan Zinke, to run the Department of Interior. A coal lobbyist to run the EPA. Another pharmaceutical lobbyist, Alex Azar, to run HHS.”
“He told me, I don’t want to do that again. He said, those were bad guys and this time, we’re going to do something different.”
I’m not going to waste time feeling sorry for Trump for getting swamped, nor give in a second chance. He ran for the most powerful office in the world and did it based on his supposedly astute business-leadership acumen. One of the things I often pointed out back then was that the number-one job of a leader (besides having the right vision) is assembling the best team that can carry forward his vision.
On that primary leadership requirement, Trump not only failed abysmally, but it was so clear that he was doing the wrong thing that I pointed out how and why it would fail again and again before he even was inaugurated. Is anyone going to thank me for telling that truth now? Probably not. Instead, some just left because I was pointing out things they’d didn’t want to hear.
What did Trump think was going to happen—that he’d get in office and all the bad guys would just give up and run and would all stop being slimy and tricky so he could fool them all? No, they duped him! He wasn’t playing 4-D chess as his supporters kept insisting. The swamp was, and they swamped him, as he said to RFK, into believing they could do the job without being the swamp creatures that they so obviously were. They know no other way, and Trump knows no other way than to deal with prestigious people.
The outcome of a White House loaded to the gills with swamp creatures was obvious from the beginning, but the arguments against me were often vehement. We wound up with the swampiest White House I’ve ever seen.
As one example, RFK mentions that Trump appointed Scott Gottlieb, who was a Pfizer business partner to run the FDA! And Gottlieb did as anyone who is not naive should have known he would do: he did a hundred billion-dollar favor for Pfizer. Then he went back to join Pfizer’s board! That is the swamp … right to the bottom. And Trump wound up looking like the photo at the start of this article.
RFK lists a few others. Why would you ever put a highly paid telecommunications lobbyist in charge of the FCC? Why would you put a wealth carrier oil lobbyist in charge of the Dept. of Interior that auctions off oil-drilling rights on US land? How about the coal lobbyist he hired to run the EPA. It was a complete government giveaway to big corporate. How can you possibly not know that hiring lobbyists over and over again to oversee the people they’ve worked for for years would not fulfill the the most sinister plans of all those companies to take over government? This is no-brainer stuff. But the answer was always. “Trump’s just playing 4-D chess.”
I pointed out many times that Trump put Goldman Sachs and other ivy-league bankers in charge of every financial department of the government, and he put military brass in charge of the intelligence branches, and he especially loved to have “his generals” in charge of the whole White House as chiefs of staff because it made him feel big to have high-level generals working as his staff. Why would you make the military the gate-keepers to the White House an all presidential access if you want to defang the military industrial complex?
Bottom line: none of it worked!
After the fact, Trump told RFK those were bad guys, and he doesn’t want to do that again. RFK says all this, not to bring Trump down, but to convince us Trump has learned from his failures and is dedicated to never repeating them. Well, it’s inexcusable they happened on such an extreme scale in the first place because it was so obvious that, everywhere you looked, Trump’s wisdom was to put all the foxes in charge of all the hen houses. These were not hard errors to point out even before his government actually started running things. I referred to Trump as a Trojan horse for the swamp. He brought all the enemies of the people into the White House while convincing the citizens who voted for him that he was doing it all for them and he would defeat them all.
The nuts and Boltons of Trump’s failures
Take, for example, Trump’s choice to put Supreme Warlord John Bolthead in charge of the NSA. There couldn’t be a man with more obvious Neo-con, warmongering credentials. He was a completely known entity from the Bush years. Yet, Trump put him in charge of the NSA. Sure, he eventually fired him, as he had to do with almost all of his appointments. However, the measure of a good leader is not how well you can fire people but how well you can hire them! Can you hire the right ones to do the right job the right way? That’s the obvious first order of leadership and of business—assemble the team—and Trump was an abject failure by that measure time and time again. There is no excuse for not knowing Bolton was a warmonger.
Listen to the interview with RFK below. I’m sure you’ll be able to hear that it is not hit job on Trump. It’s a bid to give him another chance because he has learned from his mistakes. The problem there is that Trump never adits he made mistakes, so he’s not likely to learn that well from them. After all, he made those same mistakes every year he was in office, never learning from the year before. When you constantly have to tell US citizens that you are firing people you hired because they are “idiots” and “morons,” as Trump often said, what does that say about you for constantly hiring them in the first place?
It could hardly be a secret that a Goldman Sachs exec would manage his governmental department for the benefit of GS. When do they ever not? You can hardly be surprised that Bolton is “more of a hawk than I am,” as Trump once said in surprise.
Build back the Obamacare repeal better
But let’s not stop with RFK. Note that Trump, in the debate, said he’s going to repeal and replace Obamacare. Same promise, again as a retread, that he already TOTALLY failed at. And why did he fail? It wasn’t because he didn’t have full control of government … because he did. He failed because he was never able to come up with a replacement plan, which he assured all of us would be “easy, so easy, just you wait and see; and it will be great plan the best plan ever.” He came up with absolutely no plan … ever! Not even today. You can hardly expect to get congress to throw off the plan they already approved when you have no vision to offer of anything better to replace it. So, of course, he couldn’t even get the votes he needed to repeal Obamacare, much less ever replace it.
Now, he’s repeating the same vane promise. And, AGAIN, he has no plan whatsoever. Asked about that in the debate, he said vaguely that his has a concept of a plan right now. A concept? After eight years, all he has is a concept? And what concept? That he’d didn’t say because, of course, the truth is that he doesn’t even have a concept of what a good plan would be anymore than the last time he pulled the wool over people’s eyes with his big promise of a better plan that never showed up.
You know what they say, “Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me!” Don’t get fooled twice. You’re going to get the same complete inability to create and carry out a reformation of government that you got last time. The Donald still looks, walks and talks like the same old duck.