How The Kennedy Five Can Make TAGA (Trump Administration) Great Again
Part 1
Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of modern times for many reasons beyond the fact that he didn’t have much competition. We are referring, of course, to Tricky Dick Nixon, Jimmy Carter, the Bush’s, Barry and the clown-shows thereafter.
Foremost among the valid reasons for the Gipper’s success, however, was James Baker— the most astute White House chief of staff ever—and his inner team. And at least this much we can say with first-hand knowledge: Baker was not just a smooth, savvy political operator and deft administrator. He was also deeply versed in policy substance and therefore had a unique ability to comprehend, rapidly assess and modulate the relentless inflow to the Oval Office of policy papers and interest group adverts from all corners of the government.
So doing, he kept the Gipper on message and out of countless detours and troubles that would have otherwise sunk his presidency. Indeed, Ronald Reagan earned the Great Communicator moniker in large part because Jim Baker was at his elbow during his formative first term keeping him focused on the core message of restoring noninflationary prosperity at home and peace in the world abroad.
Needless to say, we knew the Gipper and, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s famous riposte to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate, Donald J. Trump is no Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the Donald is the most ill-equipped, ill-prepared and ill-tempered person to enter the Oval Office since Harry Truman at least, and probably Edith Wilson, too. And the latter, of course, was purely an accident—a usurper who surreptitiously seized the reins of government in the fall of 1919 when Woodrow Wilson succumbed to a paralyzing cerebral embolism at the end of his League of Nation’s whistle stop campaign across the USA and neglected to inform the country of his complete incapacity thereafter.
So the truth is, there is only one thing that can prevent the Donald’s impending second-term from devolving into a nation-wrecking gong show. To wit, America needs a 21st century Jim Baker because the Donald is just too damn impulsive, uninformed, self-absorbed and recklessly bombastic to function effectively as the nation’s President on his own steam; and also because the preponderance of official Washington is so deeply infected by the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) that it will otherwise distract hi endlessly and completely in schoolyard name-calling and petty insults, incidents and indecencies.
As it happens, in recent weeks Trump has actually stood up a solid team of newbies to Trump World who can make all the difference. He needs to make RFK Jr. his chief of staff, and Bobby Kennedy, in turn, needs to park in the West Wing directly across from his office the team of Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and Vice-president JD Vance, too (in a side office away from the VP’s ceremonial digs in the Siberian precincts of the EOB).
As it happens, this is the first time that Trump has been surrounded by a team of serious, informed right-thinking adults not afflicted with beltway-bred UniParty dogma, neocon mental infirmities or wackadoo rightwing xenophobia since he descended down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015. If given control of the White House switchboard of power, therefore, they could potentially keep the Donald on message and on plan for prosperity at home and peace in the world not unlike what the Gipper accomplished during the Baker era.
Unfortunately, there is good reason to fear that the Kennedy Five could end up in their own form of bureaucratic Siberia. That is, upon being bestowed honorific titles such as special advisor to the president or chairs of White House Task Forces on MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), FW&A (fraud, waste and abuse) and other noble purposes, they end up billeted in empty GSA space far from the beating heart of White House power. And after making recommendations that the real government would readily ignore, the soon to be in-the-ditch Trump Administration wouldn’t have a prayer of implementing them even if they could get the Donald’s undivided attention for more than an hour.
Indeed, we see the handwriting of disaster on the wall already in an article fresh from Politico, which is the Swamp’s preferred organ of UniParty propaganda. Entitled “Who Might Make up Trump’s Cabinet”, it is loaded with pedigreed neocon names for national security posts including Marco Rubio, Robert O’Brien, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo. So exactly how would that gang of warmongers and global hegemonists possibly further the cause of peace and drastic shrinkage of America’s dangerously bloated Warfare State?
And while the Politico folks were at it they smoked out Deep State lifers like Bob Lighthizer for Secretary of the Treasury and Eric Hargan for HSS. For crying out loud, Lighthizer has been a corporate trade policy shill for the last three decades and Hargan was the father of Operation Warp Speed at HSS in the first Trump Administration!
All of these dudes were adept at filling the Swamp, not draining it. That’s how they got the Washington chops to make the Politico roster in the first place.
Yet that’s not the half of it. Far more important than the secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury and HSS combined is the chief of staff role. With a typically weak Washington insider you will get ineffective government under almost any president, but totally chaos under the master of chaos himself.
Yet the Politico roster for this make or break post includes two babes in the woods and an utterly failed UniParty GOP lifer. As to the former we are referring to Brooke Rollins, who came from Texas GOP politics and was head of the no-count Office of American Innovation and later the acting director of the equally useless Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump White House; and also Susie Wiles, the daughter of a NFL football player and famous sports broadcaster (Pat Summerall), who had spent several decades running mostly small-time GOP political campaigns until she became chief of staff for Trump’s PAC in exile at Mar-a-Lago.
These two wouldn’t know from a traffic jam in the Roosevelt Room when it comes to Washington power and policy. And the third candidate—the disgraced ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy—has spent his entire career on the public teat filling the v
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
