Trump vs. the swamp: the first 126 days

It's a mixed bag, it includes some very encouraging developments

Donald Trump has been the President of the United States for 126 days now, and so far, it's been a mixed bag of goods. However, I find that he is probably being judged too harshly, especially by some of his supporters. The attitude among them reminds me of a few people I know when they watch their home football teams play. If the game isn't going as well as they hoped, they turn hypersensitive to every mistake their team makes and jump up and down cursing the players and the coach, with the certain conviction that if only they were in charge, they'd know exactly how to win the game. If they had their way, half the players would be sacked on the spot and the coach might even qualify for a death penalty.

Somehow, when we feel passionate about issues, we seem inclined to unload on the people who are fighting for our side - not because we wish them to fail but because we are frustrated that they aren’t doing better. Only, fighting the fight is very different from being a spectator. Out in the field, even when you've prepared as well as you could, and you're earnestly doing your best, everything you do can come with unpredictable setbacks. The outcomes are always uncertain and the struggle includes the unavoidable 'bad days at the office.'

When it comes to politics and the business of running a nation, we often assume that the President of the United States, supposedly 'the most powerful man in the world,' can change things at will by simply issuing his orders. That's unrealistic, however - it’s not how things really work inside of a complex organization.

“Then all hell broke loose” - an insider’s story

In a recent interview with former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, former senior advisor to the acting Defense Secretary during the first Trump administration, Col. Douglas Macgregor gave us an important glimpse into the way things actually work within the government. He recounted his 90 days inside the administration (the relevant segment is in the first seven minutes of this interview):

"In truth, I was there because Donald Trump at the time wanted to extricate us from Afghanistan, as well as from Syria and Iraq. And he knew that despite of his efforts to push us in those directions, the people under him were disloyal to him and had not done anything to facilitate those outcomes. So, then the point was, see what you can do to reduce or eliminate our presence in Europe, which is interesting, we're talking about something less than 90 days [of Macgregor's tenure with the administration] and I said 'well, I think you could do one of those things but not any more.'"

Shortly thereafter, Macgregor went to see Trump:

"I sat at his office and waited in the West Wing and ... he [the acting Defence Secretary] came back and said, 'Alright, this is what you're going to do,' and the focus was really to extricate us from Afghanistan. So then I sat with everybody and it was working for him and I said, if you want to get out it's a very straightforward matter: the President has to write an executive order that directs the withdrawal from Afghanistan. ... So I drafted an executive order ... and he took it, and I guess he loved it ... ultimately they did it, he did sign it ... then all hell breaks loose.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, the key members of the Senate, as well as the acting Secretary of Defense... he went crazy and his acting chief of staff was Kash Patel ... and they all were called over to the White House by the end of the day, and finally, Mitch McConnell and I don't know who else was there from the Senate, plus the House, along with the acting SecDef and his Chief of Staff, all said, we can't do this. We just can't - the allies. What will we do about the allies?

My answer was, if we leave, the allies will leave. You know, fly them out. Don't ask for permission, you're the Commander in Chief, you're the President of the United States, and you're the leader of NATO. Well, you know - bottom line is, they talked him out of it."

Trump didn't quite give up. Instead, he asked how many troops he could draw down and how many needed to stay behind. He was told that he should leave 5,000 in Afghanistan. Macgregor said this was all about "the contractors... we're going to keep the money flowing. Ultimately, President Trump, he buckled."

So, Trump wanted to get the US out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and even out of Europe. He brought Col. Macgregor to help him achieve that, but the realities in US politics derailed his initiative and things played out contrary to his intentions: he was frustrated by disloyal members of his staff and by the powerful interests of U.S. allies, their lobbyists, and the military-industrial complex. They all had a stake in US troops remaining in Afghanistan and their interest prevailed over the nation's democratically elected Commander in Chief.

The swamp’s deep roots

The circumstances are somewhat different today, but Trump's agenda will still be impeded by powerful interest groups with important stakes in the outcomes of his policy decisions. As we can well appreciate, some of those groups literally want Trump dead and they haven't been shy to let their intentions be known. His administration therefore has to tread through the swamp with great caution, which perhaps explains why it has been so difficult to read Trump's true intentions on important issues like Russia/Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, Iran, Canada, Greenland, etc.

That may be why the executive appears clueless and chaotic. For us spectators meanwhile, it would be unfortunate to succumb to our frustrations and lambast Trump because he’s not delivering all the changes we hoped he would. To be sure, Trump should be criticized for his unforced errors and failures of judgment. He also deserves criticism for his style and demeanor which is, at times, borderline vulgar. But our criticism must be informed by realistic expectations, given the political climate in the US and the world today.

The positive policy turns

If Trump is steering the US away from the “global rules-based order” and embracing multipolar integrations (this has been explicitly articulated by members of his administration), he is breaking with many decades of policy continuity. In that, his action will provoke pushback from powerful interests that enjoyed massive privileges under the old order as well as the entrenched mindset within the US political class.

But Trump’s change of course deserves support, because the old order is unsustainable and has proven utterly pathogenic. It has reliably produced chronic, successive financial, economic and social crises at home, and forever wars abroad. Trump deserves credit for a number of radical changes he’s managed to effect during his first 125 days, including the following:

• Withdrawal of the US from Paris climate accords

• Withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organization

• Defunding, breaking up USAid

• Reestablishing constructive relations with Russia

• Renewing peace talks between Ukraine and Russia

• Brokering the ceasefire between India and Pakistan

• Announcing a new trade agreement with China

• Signing an executive order to reduce prescription drugs prices by up to 80%

• Successfully negotiating with Hamas the release of the last American Jewish hostage in Gaza

• Dramatically reducing illegal immigration into the US

• Signing of an executive order to provide housing for thousands of homeless veterans

In contrast to the decades of Clinton-Obama-Biden policies, the above changes mark an encouraging change of policy, especially compared to the record of those administrations on the Middle East, Ukraine, EU, illegal immigration, LGBT+ indoctrination, climate change, health care, energy policy, censorship, globalization and much more. They have set the US on an unsustainable path and have sharply escalated the risk of a nuclear armageddon.

Withdrawing support from Trump and discrediting him politically would weaken his ability to effect further positive changes. Worse, it would play into the hands of his enemies who are struggling mightily for the return to the old status quo. That’s the bullet we very nearly dodged only last November with the DNC’s selected candidate Kamala Harris.

The bullet we dodged

Harris presidency would have all but guaranteed the continuity of all those policies that the American people firmly rejected. She was a strong supporter of government crackdown on freedom of expression. In a campaign speech last September, Kamala promised that,

“We will… direct law enforcement to counter this extremism, we will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, ‘cause they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy. And if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyberwarfare, if you don’t police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable as a community.”

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of those words is that they stem from the same approach to censorship that has taken hold in Great Britain. As we’ve learned since, her administration was deliberately adopted that same approach and sought Britain’s assistance in implementing it in the United States.

Turn-key censorship, made in Britain

Two months ago, America First Legal (AFL) revealed the astonishing scale of efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to permanently crush free speech in the US. Determined to learn from the free world’s very best, Biden’s National Security Council (NSC) invited the British government to share their know-how and experience in running censorship operations.

The British did come and on 10 August 2021, UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) brought a presentation to a meeting organized by the NSC’s Interagency Policy Committee (IPC). CDU is the British “cross-departmental” entity that coordinates state censorship programs across the whole of the British government and helps formulate “coordinated Government response” to disinformation and misinformation.

Everybody was onboard!

The meeting was attended by the who’s who of the US security state apparatus, including the White House, NSC, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Departments of State, Treasury, Defense (DOD), Homeland Security (DHS), and Health and Human Services (HHS), U.S. Agencies for International Development (USAID) and Global Media (USAGM), as well as high-ranking officers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

On the occasion, the CDU made specific recommendations to their American disciples, including establishing a dedicated unit to lead government-wide censorship programs; enacting coercive legislation to regulate tech companies’ policies on disinformation and sanction noncompliance; forging partnerships with big tech to “flag” proscribed content, and leveraging the government’s foreign policy structures to coordinate with other governments and supranational institutions.

The documents obtained by the AFL reveal an Orwellian alliance between the US Global Engagement Center (GEC), US Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign Office and media organizations, all working in concert to manipulate public discourse, control media narratives, and suppress free speech. These efforts were not limited to the UK and the US: the GEC’s objective was to “combat foreign disinformation abroad.” The GEC only shut down last December after the election of Donald Trump.

“Kill Musk’s Twitter”

Biden-Harris administration’s censorship offensive included setting up the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in 2021, modeled on the British CCDH which was in operation since 2019 and had the baking of UK intelligence agencies. CCDH has been the main driving force behind global censorship and some of its activities included running black ops against RFK Jr’s presidential campaign, labeling 12 US citizen as the “disinformation dozen” during the Covid pandemic and pushing the directive to “kill Musk’s Twitter.”

CDU’s agenda was not limited to defending the purity of our information space; they also include preventing people from voting for the wrong candidates in “democratic” elections. To do that, the CDU set up a dedicated unit, the “Central Election Cell.” The Biden-Harris cabinet followed suit and set up within the FBI their own, National Election Command Post during the 2022 US Midterm elections.

MAGA: the designated domestic terrorism threats

Homeland Intelligence Experts Group was yet another entity set up to destroy American democracy. Their contribution was to label Trump supporters as “domestic terrorism threats.” In all, the Biden-Harris team continued with its censorship efforts well into 2024 and regularly convened similar public-private partnerships. Upon revealing all this, AFL’s director, Gene Hamilton stated as follows:

“With no apparent appreciation for the irony that the First Amendment to our Constitution was adopted following our independence from Great Britain, these records show that the Biden-Harris regime apparently engaged with representatives from the United Kingdom on ways to more effectively censor the speech of Americans across the country.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s desire to silence speech and control what information Americans are able to obtain is so extreme, so pervasive, and so over-the-top that they are willing to listen to foreign governments explain ways to better violate core constitutional rights of the American people.”

Had the American people not rejected this totalitarian mission creep by shooting down the Kamala Harris presidency, the United States today might largely resemble Keir Starmer’s Britain, and its leadership would share Britain’s insane, fanatical drive to war against Russia - the war that could easily go nuclear and end humanity. Donald Trump’s presidency is the result of that choice. But let’s stay with Britain’s trajectory for another moment as it remains relevant to the way we should judge Trump.

The global war on liberty

Although the American people elected Trump, British authorities remain undeterred and pose a danger to liberty everywhere around the world. For example, earlier this year, British government ordered Apple to open its iCloud storage worldwide, affecting some 2 billion users. The order was supposed to be secret, including an injunction against Apple not to reveal it on pain of facing criminal charges.

Britain’s CCDH-sponsored Online Safety Act, which came into force in October of 2023 contains provisions under which U.K. law enforcement officials could extradite and jail US citizens. In fact, Britain’s war on liberty is global: in 2021, their government boasted about their close working relationships with more than 20 other nations, including Canda and Australia. These happen to be the countries where tyrannical repression reached the most chilling proportions.

In 2020, Tony Blair took to Twitter to boast that, “Our teams are now embedded in governments around the world, helping them to keep their people safe during this pandemic – not just in respect of Covid-19 itself but also the political and economic collateral damage.” Blair’s teams were most likely deployed for policy coordination and narrative control assignments.

A nuke, not a bullet

Given the scope and scale of this all-out attack against civil liberties and its comprehensive co opting of all the key agencies of state security apparatus, it seems that by electing Donald Trump and rejecting Kamala Harris, the deplorable American voter truly helped the world to dodge, not a bullet, but a nuclear bomb that could have paved the way to a dystopian future for our societies. Western nations would begin to resemble regimes like Eastern Germany, the Soviet Union and North Korea. Britain already does.

Therefore, before we savage Donald Trump for his errors and his antics, we should always keep in mind the crossroads we passed only 126 days ago. The sharp turn away from dystopia was a real deal and should not be taken for granted. For all his personal flaws and policy errors, Trump has been instrumental in making that turn. Rather than withdrawing support, his critics should continue to exert pressure and continue to steer his administration in the right direction and continue to demand the changes they voted for.

After all, it was the exercise in democracy - the people power - that rid the world of the Autopen administration and put Trump in the Oval Office. Equally, the people power can and should keep on pushing for change by strengthening the administration's resolve, and weakening their opponents' hand.

Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass investor reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge, no jumping through hoops to cancel. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at TrendCompass@ISystem-TF.com, or:

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