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Donald Trump eyes a super-active second term. Trump therefore has much to do and little time to do it. Arguably no president since Franklin Roosevelt himself has faced a more imminent cascade of threatening crises on taking office.
President-elect Donald Trump has the potential to be a much more effective president in pushing his domestic policy of dramatic reforms than he ever could be in his first term because he has over the past four years dramatically recast the Republican Party in his own populist image. And he will also push ahead forcefully to force Kiev regime leader Volodymyr Zelensky to end the ongoing hostilities and the relentless sacrifice of his own people in the Ukraine War. Also, while Trump is sincere in his support of Israel, he will be much more forceful than senile, incontinent little Joe Biden ever was in ending the apparently endless slaughter in Ukraine and in restraining Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from trying to provoke or preempt a war with Iran.
One of the favorite accusations of Trump-haters over the past four years was that his first administration was an alleged failure and that he was an unscrupulous liar because he never completed his famous “border wall” along the US land border with Mexico. Also, the federal long-term deficit soared during his years in office. These arguments are particularly hypocritical since it was ferocious Democratic opposition that fought to stop Trump’s efforts to allow US authorities to reclaim control of immigration.
Indeed, in his victory speech early in the morning of November 6, Trump specifically pledged to offer many of the expelled illegal immigrants the chance to reenter the United States, provided they did so legally and subject to security checks ensuring that they were not members of the criminal quasi-armies – they are far more numerous organized and vicious than mere “gangs” – that have flooded into the country on Biden permissive watch.
Most important of all, the Trump I administration from 2017 to 2021 was undermined, sabotaged and hamstrung throughout by the phalanx of RINOs – “Republicans in Name Only” who were in reality the liberal internationalist, open-border, free trade imperialists of George W. Bush who have spread so much havoc and misery around the world while impoverishing the American people at home and systematically destroying Industrial America by their open border policies.
But That Was Then and This is Now. Five of the seven Republican senators who voted with Democrats in their unsuccessful efforts to impeach Trump – it happened twice – in his first term have now been forced out of the Senate. They fled rather than face the wrath of the party’s voters in any reelection primary.
The most immediate area where Trump’s greater congressional clout will be felt is in energy extraction.
Liberal internationalists in the House have been even more decimated. Trump and his loyal vice president elect J.D. Vance, the junior senator from heartland Ohio, which also went for the Republican ticket in the presidential election, now command a vastly stronger force in both chambers of Congress than the RINOs who relentlessly gutted and sabotaged the president’s initiatives during the first term. Even the King of Kentucky, unctuous, cunning, tactically brilliant and liberal free trade internationalist to the core old Mitch McConnell has finally retired from the Senate leadership, though retaining his seat. His own encroaching senility, like ludicrous Joe Biden’s, is finally catching up with him.
The most immediate area where Trump’s greater congressional clout will be felt is in energy extraction. The endless crushing mini-regulations used to extinguish fracking under Biden’s energy-illiterate regime will all be scrapped. Most of those came through presidential executive orders that Biden lazily resorted to, rather than through due legislative processes anyway and therefore will be easy to annihilate. The same goes for reestablishing the border controls and reassigning scores of thousands of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and other police and security officials to guard US borders. Once Trump is inaugurated, those measures too will be enacted in a matter of days not years.
The very prospect of US oil and natural gas production again soaring to the record levels it enjoyed under Trump in his first term will bring US energy prices tumbling even before the actual production rise takes place. This will give a rapid boost to the domestic economy. Canada will be pleased because Trump will rapidly seek to reactivate the Keystone XL pipeline to allow Ottawa to export its own oil from its enormous western shale deposits to the United States.
Trump will even seek to make a modus vivendi with the always accountable-only-to-themselves forces of the US Deep State. As President John F. Kennedy’s terrible fate showed, making such an accommodation is essential to the physical survival of any US president. Trump will need to be genuinely guarded. There were no less than three unsuccessful assassination attempts on his life from July through to September. Vice President-elect Vance will also need to be guarded. The period until both are sworn into office on January will be especially fraught.
Trump may even be able to make some progress on reducing the enormous federal deficit, which soared during his first term. Not too much hope should be placed in this. But the slashing of ridiculous spending programs on crazed social issues, such as construction of endless facilities for transgender use, should help a bit. The biggest potential areas for saving would be to start the gargantuan task of reforming Pentagon procurement policies. Trump showed no understanding of this whatsoever during his first term and is unlikely to do so now. The first and most important signal will be whom he chooses as his secretary of defense. Former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard or Kentucky Senator Rand Paul would both be excellent choices. But an insider of the old Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex (MICC) who will continue Business as Usual remains the most likely bet.
On financial or trade issues, Trump may finger billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk as his point man. Musk is a brilliant high-tech entrepreneur as his success with SpaceX shows. But he is totally inexperienced at operating in the political-military sphere in Washington. Also, Trump is likely to give him too broad and ill-defined a mandate to allow him to make genuine progress in restructuring fundamental procedures as is so urgently required.
On the Middle East conflict, Trump could not be worse than Biden and Kamala Harris who blithely allowed Israel to slaughter at least 40,000 civilians in Gaza over the past year. Some estimates put the figure of dead still buried beneath the rubble as high as 200,000. Yet Biden and Harris never raised a finger to stop it. Their shameful silence cost Harris crucial Michigan in the November 5 election. Muslim Americans defected in disgust from the Democrats and supported Trump in record numbers. Trump is certainly committed to supporting Israel to the hilt. But Netanyahu dropped him as if he was dog excreta after he lost his race to Biden in 2020. Trump is not the kind of man to forget things like that.
Also, multi-billionaire Miriam Adelson, the widow of Nevada casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, is a major Trump donor, but she is also highly critical of Netanyahu. The Adelsons continue to fund the influential popular Israeli newspaper Yisrael Hayom (Israel Today). It supported Netanyahu mindlessly while Sheldon Adelson was alive. But it is now highly critical of him. And Trump has publicly pledged to end the killing in Gaza. Netanyahu is wrong to take his blind support for granted. Surprises could be coming.
Trump therefore has much to do and little time to do it.
Most important of all, Trump is certainly sincere in his determination to roll back international conflicts and tensions from their current inconceivably dangerous levels. He may be able to rein in Zelensky in Ukraine quickly. It is extraordinary, outrageous and threatening to the very physical survival of the United States that the inept, posturing crazed and ludicrous Zelensky should be allowed to dictate and override the policies of his superpower patron to the extent of threatening to embroil it in an annihilating thermonuclear war. However, under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Zelensky and his crazed fanatic neocon supporters have so infiltrated the decision-making processes of the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress that they will employ ever dirty trick imaginable to thwart and destroy the policies of their own government – just as they did during Trump’s first term.
That is why Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov icily greeted Trump’s victory with the comment that Russia still considered the United States to be an unfriendly country. The import of those words – totally ignored as usual by America’s worthless mainstream media – is chilling. They warn that Trump must do much and do it fast to reestablish any of the credibility and communication with Moscow that Obama and Biden shamefully and suicidally squandered. The survival of the United States and of most of the Northern Hemisphere of the world remains in extreme danger until he does.
Trump therefore has much to do and little time to do it. Arguably no president since Franklin Roosevelt himself has faced a more imminent cascade of threatening crises on taking office. As the great American poet Robert Frost, who honored John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Inauguration, wrote:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
“But I have promises to keep,
“And miles to go before I sleep.”
