Donald Trump just put the foreign policy establishment on notice. As Lifezette notes:
President Donald Trump has squashed Eliot Abrams’ hopes of being picked for a crucial State Department post.
Abrams had emerged as a possible contender for Deputy Secretary of State, it was reported on Monday, and even met with Trump to discuss the position, according to Politico.
The assumption being pushed by the mainstream media is that Trump had found out that Abrams criticized him during the election. But something deeper might be at play here:
In May 2016, Abrams wrote a column for neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard entitled, “When You Can’t Stand Your Candidate.” Abrams wrote that the GOP had “nominated someone who cannot win and should not be president of the United States” and urged the party to resist “Trump and Trumpism.”
Even if Trump’s decision was motivated by his “thin skin,” the decision itself aligns with his America first agenda.
“What I’ve always wanted for President Trump is to have people around him who agree with him. I think a NeverTrumper should never be in the State Department,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Friday on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” before news of Trump’s decision broke.
“Eliot Abrams was dismissive of Donald Trump, was derisive, said that the chair that Lincoln and Washington sat in, Trump was not fit to sit in,” Paul continued.
Translation: The days of invade the world, invite the world are over. As Trump noted in his inaugural:
For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries, while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military. We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own.
And spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon.
By leveling ridiculous criticisms at Trump and attacking the American people, neocons are doing Putin’s dirty work for him, reinforcing their own detachment from the public they serve, driving that chasm ever-wider.
Trump has loaded his staff up with generals who know the cost of war. He’s crossed party lines to listen to Iraq Vet Tulsi Gabbard, and he’s been supported by foreign policy skeptics like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie along the way. He’s spoken at length about putting our families, and our veterans first, and embraced the Reaganesque notion that America should be a beacon of freedom, always prepared to annihilate our enemies but reluctant to go to war. Sending American troops to replace one dictator with another is not, it seems, high on his agenda.
All the while, Neoconservatives like Abrams sat around Washington and New York wishing the “lazy” white working class would just go away.
In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the American public:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
It seems like the American people finally have a president who’s heeding Ike.
