When the Swamp Cheers for Haley, Trump Knows He’s Winning

by Capt. Seth Keshel

In March, after Nikki Haley stopped Donald Trump’s undefeated primary streak by beating him in Washington, D.C., among Republican voters, I penned a column explaining why it was more of a victory, or stamp of approval, for President Trump than it was anything productive or beneficial for her.  In fact, for all the lip service Republicans give about small government, conservatism, and all other sorts of unachievable nonsense that amounts to attempting to boil an ocean, having the stamp of approval of the swamp’s own voters and government cheese dependents is not exactly what an “America First” populist would want.  In that sense, it was a ringing endorsement of Trump and telling moment that Haley was indeed the choice of the right wing of the Uniparty.

Now that Trump is once again the GOP nominee, the same chorus is ringing out from the D.C. political complex, magnified by the clueless mainstream media who think Americans suffering under a borderless nation with decaying domestic conditions will be swayed if political hacks prove that we were right about them all along by endorsing Kamala Harris.  In fact, the media had a field day announcing that over 200 lifelong bureaucrats who had previously worked in GOP circles endorsed Harris, including Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump press secretary and Melania Trump aide, and Olivia Troye, a Mike Pence adviser:

With aides and advisers like this, who even needs enemies?  Indeed, one of the great mistakes of our founders was to allow for a capital city of the federal government to take root, grow, and jeopardize the liberties of the American people.  Its “fat cats,” who prosper when the home team is in power, will always side with “their guys” when power is at stake, and will use all sorts of stupid commentary like “you’re not voting for a Democrat.  You’re voting for democracy,” (Troye) or suggesting that Trump has “no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth,” as Grisham opined.

These grifters were the same types who assured us the nation would face certain doom if Romney didn’t beat Obama in 2012, but now have no trouble discarding ideology as long as the sacred “democracy” is at stake.  Never mind the fact that the United States is not a democracy, but rather a Constitutional Republic:

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
–ARISTOTLE

What is this tied to?  Power and control.  Political lifers like Grisham and Troye, who personally and professionally benefitted from the likes of Mike Pence in Washington, will have no meaningful employment anywhere near the White House if Trump returns to his intended place of duty.  They do, however, get to pick up crumbs and table scraps by offering themselves as token Republicans when the Uniparty needs to convey the message that not even Republicans like Trump, intended for those still stuck in the Cold War.  Speaking of the Cold War, another key driver, if not the key driver in this entire mess, is what Eisenhower warned us of – the Military Industrial Complex.

General H.R. McMaster, who took over as the National Security Adviser after the setup and takedown of Lt. General Michael Flynn, recently sounded off against Trump and used unverifiable quotes and anecdotes to do it.  As a company grade officer, I will tell you that McMaster’s commentary is beneath the dignity of a general officer and in violation of trust placed in him by Trump having appointed him to such an important role in a world full of more potential conflicts of alliance that currently exist than at any time since 1914.

Was McMaster truly upset about Trump’s view of who America’s friends and enemies are, or was it more along the lines of what the 200 neocons coming out for Harris have bees in their bonnets about?  Remember, President Trump started zero new wars, the first administration to do so since Jimmy Carter’s (which was still a foreign policy disaster), and only used our military forces for surgical strikes like the one that took out Qasem Soleimani early in 2020.

Readers of this journal will remember that four short weeks ago, I posted an expose of my dealings with the RNC, which is primarily based on the East Coast and Washington, D.C., area and more concerned with cocktail club invites than they are about preventing election crimes.  They appear to be more concerned with preserving current crises as campaign issues to ensure there is at least some demand for their political services, which prompted me to recall some of the most blunt and funniest commentary I’ve ever heard:

Similarly, there ain’t no money in peace.  H.R. McMaster doesn’t have the willingness to serve under Trump again.  Good!  Perhaps he can go find another advisory post, make millions on that, speaking fees, and book deals, and exile himself to the European Union somewhere if we can manage to make some serious change for the balance of this decade instead of advising the United States to take military action in all corners of the globe.  I was once a fool who respected John McCain because the media told me he was a pilot and prisoner of war.  Then he laid down like a dog and lost with utmost dignity to Barack Obama, who began the process of weaponizing our own government’s agencies against American citizens and targeting his political opponents with them.

Then, McCain did all he could to stop Trump in 2016, and when given the chance to fatally damage Obamacare in 2017, which he vowed to stop when campaigning against Obama and later, when he returned to the Senate, gave Americans the proverbial middle finger just to get at Trump, all while his socialite daughter took victory laps online.  McCain’s legacy in Arizona is still alive, as municipalities are often run top to bottom by his ilk and his widow meets with Alexander Soros and plots the demise of the grassroots Republican Party like it’s her job – because it is.  John McCain never saw a war he didn’t want to fight, and his little acolytes like Adam Kinzinger are trotted out in his stead to convince Americans that we are unsafe and that we can’t abandon our “allies,” even though restrictive border and immigration policy would be a far greater way of ensuring terror attacks don’t come to America’s shores than repeating the idiotic mantra of “if we don’t fight ‘em over there, we’ll be fightin’ ‘em over here!”

I have every qualification necessary to oppose pointless conflicts and foreign entanglements.  If you’re new to this journal, I spent a year of my life in Afghanistan during “the surge” as an Army intelligence officer, and it was my job to think, understand strategy, and discern exactly how to engage an enemy in consideration of geography, enemy strength, weaponry, weather, and civilian concerns.  Read about some of the major failures of the Military Industrial Complex in one of my early SubStack posts.  Unraveling decades of Cold War propaganda is not easy, which is why the media foists “200 Republicans endorse Trump” narratives at the public.  It doesn’t land on post-9/11 veterans or younger demographics, but it still impacts older voters who were building families in the days of the Cold War, when even liberal states like Massachusetts and Washington voted for Ronald Reagan because they didn’t want to be blown off the face of the earth in a series of mushroom clouds.  The narrative reads like this:

Fear sells.  Fear is the media’s weapon of choice in a psychological battle, and they do it by trotting out those who owe the establishment favors, like generals and admirals who received their stars on approval from Senators on the condition that they held the right foreign policy viewpoints and kissed the correct asses when in senior positions of command.  Very few generals and admirals slip through those cracks.  I have a friend named Todd Bembry who commissioned from Ole Miss Army ROTC two years ahead of me; Todd is still wearing a uniform part-time, but even back then, he extinguished my unbridled ambition for serving in an army at war by calling the expeditions “wars of empire” and “doomed to fail.”

Todd was right, and all it took was twelve months downrange to convince me. For a solid year, the biggest threat to U.S. forces wasn’t roadside bombs or indirect fire, but green-on-blue attacks in places like chow halls, training areas, and facilities, in which members of the Afghan National Army or Afghan National Police would assassinate members of the coalition forces there to help bring about peace to a nation run by warlords that has known only war as long as there have been men living there.  I often describe Afghanistan and surrounding nations as nations that stone women for learning to read, which is very ironic given how the grievance industry in the West loves to say traditional European or American men hate women and want to send them back to the 1950s (which is a much more modern period than 1300 A.D., a time resembling how women are currently treated in much of central Asia).

The military industrial complex knows warlords, barbarians, and jihadists have no interest in American freedom and that those cavemen can no more accept and implement those principles than a woke left-winger can accept that communism has never worked anywhere it has ever been tried.  That is why the message had to go out that our engagement there was about defending our way of life, as if the Taliban can assemble a rapidly deployable Airborne brigade that will unexpectedly jump on Fairfax County at a moment’s notice, and deflect from the obvious truth that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terrorism was about cronyism and wars of empire, and not about payback for 9/11, which persists to this day with more questions unanswered than otherwise.

Contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq generally worked shorter tours, with more breaks, for three or more times the pay of their uniformed counterpart.  For example, I was a First Lieutenant for my entire tour in RC-West. My pay was untaxed per combat zone conditions, and with all bonuses for overseas service, I made somewhere between $70,000 and $80,000.  Or, put otherwise, about $200 a day to give away my life for a year for a mission never intended to win wars or secure regional peace.  Contractors working in the intelligence field were easily clearing $200,000, and this was 13 years ago.  Most nights when I would go to use the phone tent or get online, I had to wait for the many contractors to clear out before I could call home, keep it short, maybe get a workout in, and return to the sleep-work cycle, all while being ready to get dragged out of bed at a moment’s notice if something went boom.

That shit dried up during President Trump’s time in office, despite fools like John Bolton saber rattling about Iran, North Korea, and other nations that should be left to their own affairs and put in check by nations in their own regions, not us.  Trump set the conditions for withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was of course botched by Joe Biden, staved off war in Ukraine, and was on a path to ending the nonstop chaos in the Middle East, which of course would eliminate the need for decades-long occupations and countless Forward Operating Bases in far flung corners of the world that never lack funding, while America’s infrastructure decays at home.

H.R. McMaster and like-minded defense officials considers nearly every other nation an existential threat, but scoffs at the perhaps 80 million or more Americans who will be voting for Trump because they are tired of cartels controlling the southern border and pumping drugs, weaponry, and poverty-ridden people from all over the world into our country.  These are the same people sick of a government seated through the work of election fraud and media PSYOPs crafting international trade arrangements to send jobs to other countries that only work to the disadvantage of the United States.  To McMaster, a couple billion dollars to seal the border’s passable points with an impassable barrier pales in comparison with the need to send a $96 billion national defense package to three nations, which of course would come with an accompaniment of advisers, soldiers, and  contractors who will casually be extended a year at a time until the war in Ukraine, or Syria, or Libya, or Iran becomes familiar within the public’s psyche.

In not receiving the formal endorsements of Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troye, H.R. McMaster, and others among the vaunted 200 Republican bureaucrats who endorsed the most radical major party nominee in American history, Trump, in strange fashion, received a de facto endorsement from the rest of America that is sick of losing her sons and daughters in foreign conflicts that don’t benefit our country, but only entrench the Military Industrial Complex and political class and enrich them and their cronies.  There is a vast country outside the District of Columbia, southern Maryland, and the ten counties and independent cities that make up Northern Virginia, or NoVa as it is colloquially called, and nearly all of it recognizes the grift perpetrated by warmongers and bureaucrats in the capital.

With that, I say a hearty thank you to the professional politicos who have confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt that they never did side with us and are hoping with all your might that the political machine steals this election for someone you may beg for relevance under.  Future historians will mock you viciously for your pettiness and servile demeanors in siding with a bureaucracy that punishes the many for the benefit of the few.

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