World News

https://theduran.com/the-top-people-who-lead-the-hiring-for-the-next-trump-administration/

The Top People Who Lead the Hiring for the Next Trump Administration

30 October 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

These are the individuals who will be selecting the top personnel in the Executive Branch of the U.S. federal Government if Trump wins on November 5th:

It’s NOT anyone associated with “Project 25,” because the Wall Street Journal, which can be trusted on matters such as this, headlined on October 24th “Inside Trump World’s Prep for a Second Term: The former president’s team is avoiding anyone with ties to Project 2025” and reported that Trump has personally told his actual Transition Team that anyone who was associated with Project 25 must be excluded from consideration:

Anyone associated with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Trump and his advisers denounced after it became a political target for Democrats, would be barred from working on the team. Transition staff used “Control+F,” a keyboard shortcut, to search through Project 2025’s 900-plus-page policy blueprint for the names of potential hires.

Even a brief mention of a name in an author’s note at the end of a chapter was enough to prevent that person from getting a job on the team. In several cases in recent weeks, informal discussions about working on the team came to an abrupt halt after a name was spotted in the document, according to people familiar with the matter.

Obviously, that is placing both the WSJ and any future Trump Administration automatically on the defensive if anyone who did participate in Project 25 turns out to be hired in any capacity by the Trump II Administration. So, it would be unlikely.

Another trustworthy information-source on this matter is Forbes, which headlined on October 25th, “America First Agenda: What To Know About The Project 2025 Alternative — That Trump ISN’T Disavowing”, and reported:

America First Policy Institute is a right-leaning think tank dedicated to “advanc[ing] policies” that are in line with conservative values, which has crafted its own policy agenda that it describes as a “plan for establishing policies that keep America first, always.”

Publications including Politico and The New York Times report the group has become the Trump campaign’s “primary partner” in crafting plans for a second Trump presidency, proposing hundreds of executive orders that Trump can implement and meeting with lobbyists who want to influence a second Trump term.

America First is a separate entity from the Trump transition team and told The New York Times it “does not speak on behalf of any candidate, campaign or transition,” but The Wall Street Journal reports Republicans are describing it as the “shadow transition operation,” with an anonymous source familiar with the transition plans telling Politico, “AFPI is not becoming the transition … [but] AFPI and the transition may be a distinction without a difference.”

The organization’s president Brooke Rollins was Trump’s director of domestic policy and its staff is filled with former Trump administration officials — including ex-Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and former Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf — and Linda McMahon, wife of billionaire Vince McMahon, serves as both the chair of America First’s board and the chair of the formal Trump transition team. …

America First’s policy blueprint lays out a number of priorities in line with policy views that Trump and his allies have pushed, including imposing tariffs on imported goods, lowering corporate tax rates, protecting “religious freedom,” increasing domestic oil and gas production, getting rid of climate change efforts, opposing policies supporting transgender rights, opposing any gun control measures, imposing work requirements for Medicaid recipients, curbing immigration and reducing America’s role in assisting with international conflicts. The agenda does not call for banning abortion entirely at the federal level, but does argue for defunding Planned Parenthood. It also does not adopt Trump’s proposal for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, but does call for finishing the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, increasing funding for border agents and ending legal immigration programs like family-based immigration paths and the visa lottery.

Back on 16 August 2024, The Hill bannered “Trump names major donors and adult sons to lead transition team”, implying that nepotism and wealth are Mr. Trump’s main criteria for selecting his top people, and it reported:

Former President Trump on Friday announced the leadership for his transition team that will steer policy and personnel efforts ahead of his potential return to the White House.

Trump’s official transition will be led by two top donors to his campaign: Linda McMahon, who previously served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, and businessman Howard Lutnick, head of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

McMahon and Lutnick will serve as co-chairs, Trump announced in a press release. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), will serve as an honorary chair, as will his elder sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. …

Trump Jr. has spoken openly about his desire to have a hand in determining who might serve in a second administration for his father, saying during the Republican National Convention last month that he wanted “veto power” to overrule picks he did not trust.

“I want to block the liars. I want to block the guys that are, you know, pretending they’re with you. I just want to block the bad actors. I just want to be a block. That’s it,” he said.

On October 23rd, Politico headlined “Trump transition chief under fire for conflicts: Howard Lutnick is accused of mixing his Trump work with his personal business interests.”, and reported:

“There’s nobody more loyal and capable than Howard, which is why my father picked him to help put together the greatest collection of talent to ever serve in the United States government,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement to POLITICO. “The great thing about having someone as trustworthy as Howard is we can totally focus on winning and know that things will be ready when the time comes.”

Here is what Wikipedia reports about Howard Lutnick. It’s an extraordinary life-story of a  middle-class boy who at the age of 18 lost both parents and, “Now orphans, Lutnick and his two siblings were largely abandoned by extended family members and instead relied on themselves for support.” Because of his outstanding academic record, he obtained a full scholarship to Haverford College, and upon graduation “joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 1983, the same year he graduated from college. Early on, Lutnick developed a warm relationship with the firm's founder Bernard Cantor as his personal mentor.[11] In 1991, Lutnick was named president and CEO of the company, and he became chairman in 1996.[8]” Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 (out of its 960) employees, including his brother, in the September 11th attacks, which Howard survived because on the morning of September 11th he was taking his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten.

Regarding Linda McMahon, the Wikipedia article on her says that “On March 29, 2019, the Trump administration announced McMahon would step down as the administrator of the Small Business Administration to assume new responsibilities within President Trump's reelection campaign, and the resignation took effect on April 12. On April 15, she was named chairwoman of America First Action, a pro-Trump Super PAC.” So, she has been a major fundraiser — not merely donor — to Trump.

A good introduction to Trump’s intentions is this AFPI panel discussion about his conception of “the DC Swamp,” and “corruption,” that this corruption serves the “bureaucrats” instead of serving the billionaires who fund the successful political candidates; and, so, instead of cutting the $1.5 trillion of annual “discretionary” spending that funds the extremely profitable and unlimitedly corrupt military-industrial complex, he will do everything possible to cut annual “non-discretionary” (mandatory) spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicare, etc. (upon which the public other than billionaires have largely been depending):

https://agenda.americafirstpolicy.com/fight-corruption. 

This is not necessarily to say that all of these individuals are corrupt; many of them might instead be too stupid to have figured-out the reality. If it’s a reality that has greatly benefited themselves, then wishful thinking could be shaping their thinking about their Government and about why it is failing. But the idea that a Government which results from electoral contests between politician-servants of Repubican billionaires versus politician-servants of Democratic billionaires, constitutes a “democracy,” has been repeatedly proven false. That myth survives because panelists such as these have greatly benefited from this reality whose very existence they are implicitly denying to exist.

In any case, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who quit his own U.S. Presidential campaign and simultaneously endorsed (and was praised by) Trump, is NOT a part of his transition team; combined with the fact that at those joint events RFK Jr. was arguing AGAINST Trump’s now-apparent intention to CUT the regulatory agencies INSTEAD OF (as Kennedy has always urged) terminate the revolving-door between them and the corporations that they ‘regulate’, does, at the very least, suggest that Kennedy has been conned by Trump and should therefore promptly inform Trump that he is considering to withdraw his endorsement, for that very reason. If Kennedy will warn Trump that he’s considering to do this, because Kennedy is being excluded from that operation, then the decision will be Trump’s as to whether he’ll correct that error, or instead go down to defeat. Listen to that speech by Kennedy, and contrast that to what AFPI is doing, and you will know that it’s like oil and water between the two of them, on the entire issue of corruption and regulation.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.