Formation of the ‘Trump team’ continues

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Republicans are preparing a personnel rotation in the US government systems, appointing their people to key positions. The candidates are unusually irritating for the Democrats, as the reshuffle will lead to purges, a shake-up in the economy and media environment, and a change in the format of NATO’s work.

The FBI is under stress

Trumpism continues to stride across the U.S., and state security officials in Washington are stressed as FBI special agents share “horrific” details of what Trump will do to their bureau.

Kash Patel can be nominated as the FBI director, as he served as Trump’s first-term intelligence liaison. Patel then helped Trump fend off charges in the Russiagate case. He was also one of the emissaries to Ukraine, where Trump associates were looking into the Biden family’s corruption. But Patel’s official position was insignificant at the time, and today opponents fear him gaining power as well.

The FBI claims, in all seriousness, that Trump will ‘politicise’ the bureau’s work and pit agents against opponents. It’s strange rhetoric, given the filing of four criminal cases against Trump by Democrats. And the sending of more than 1,000 of his supporters to prison after protests outside the Capitol. There were plenty of FBI provocateurs in the crowd of protesters that ill-fated day. And we can’t forget about the ‘creativity’ with the creation of radical organisations where Trump supporters were lured. And then they were imprisoned for plans made up by the feds to ‘kidnap’ Democrat governors. But the Democrats haven’t talked about ‘politicisation’ for some reason.

Kash Patel
*Photo by Ross Franklin / AP*

Trump can now start by firing hundreds, if not thousands, of FBI agents that the Democratic Party has used as its ‘personal Gestapo’. After the purges, they can begin investigations into Democrats mired in corruption. One has to admit that this is just a fair ‘response’ to their past actions that they are so afraid of.

Republicans are going to have an economic shake-up

Trump is preparing a ‘revenge’ for the Democrats not only in the security sphere, but also in the economy. As in foreign policy, he is making concessions to the Republican establishment and is also picking officials with different views. The new Commerce Secretary will be Howard Lutnick, a billionaire financier and one of the biggest fans of cryptocurrencies on Wall Street. Under Biden, cryptocurrency exchanges were the subject of numerous investigations that are now certain to be curtailed. And in the trade sphere, Lutnick adheres to protectionism and wants to return to the ‘golden era’ of the early XX century, when the U.S. had low taxes and high tariffs.

But the main contender for the post of Minister of Finance is ex-Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh, who dealt with the ‘internal kitchen’ of the Fed in the 2008 crisis, when he was a market liberal. Since then, Warsh has become a sharp critic of the Fed’s policy of injecting unsecured trillions of dollars into the economy as part of ‘quantitative easing’ programmes. Warsh is a supporter of high interest rates and a strong dollar, which goes against Trump’s position, who would like to return to the days of cheap money and devalue the dollar by 25-30% to stimulate the economy. For the sake of this, Trump even wants to put the Fed under the control of the White House and shake up the U.S. monetary system. Financiers need a cheap dollar to grow their assets, and it will be easier to service the U.S. national debt, which has reached $36 trillion.

Kevin Warsh
*Photo by Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg*

The next head of the White House budget office will be Russell Waugh, one of the authors of the notorious Project 2025, which addressed the theme of a major economic restructuring of America. Among the initiatives of ‘Project 2025’ are sharp cuts in government spending to overcome the budget crisis, the introduction of tariffs on all imports, reformatting the Fed. Waugh is also an advocate of returning to the gold standard, but first the $2 trillion budget deficit needs to be addressed. In addition, in January 2025, the national debt ceiling will have to be raised again, which has exceeded $36 trillion and will take almost a quarter of the entire U.S. budget to service in 2025.

Trump’s plans include drastic tax cuts and devaluation of the dollar. This could be helped by a future Treasury Secretary, who was made Scott Bessent after all. Working in hedge funds, he played on the decline of the pound and yen, and now it’s time to ‘collapse’ and the native dollar. After Trump’s victory, the share prices of many companies tied to government contracts or ‘green subsidies’ fell, and Big Pharma also fell into crisis against this background. Well, the U.S. government bond market is once again unstable amidst all the uncertainty about where this restructuring will take America.

An ambassador with no experience

Trump has chosen a very bright character to be the next U.S. ambassador to NATO. He will be Matt Whitaker, a former prosecutor from Iowa who briefly served as interim U.S. attorney general in 2019. He made his mark as a Trump loyalist, helping to end Robert Mueller’s investigation into a ‘Russian trail’ in the US election. Whitaker also wanted to launch a counter-investigation against Democrats about the origins of Russiagate. Hillary Clinton’s staff eventually had to pay a fine for this, and the Democrats then tried in every way to discredit Whitaker. He was reminded of the way he worked in business and advertised ‘toilet bowls for burly men’. He was also accused of having ties to the fraudulent firm World Patent Marketing, allegedly engaged in investments on the stock exchange.

Whitaker has no experience in foreign policy and epitomises Trump’s very sceptical attitude to NATO. His plan is to squeeze the NATO bureaucracy and do a big reformatting of the alliance with a division into mini-blocs. Within NATO there will be a ‘VIP club’ of countries with which Trump has good relations. And it will be a special humiliation for NATO governors that they will be led around the offices of Brussels by some ‘second-rate’ figure from provincial Iowa.

The media is sounding the alarm

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have announced serious cuts in the budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gives grants to all kinds of media in America and beyond. Various NGOs that receive money from USAID and NED will be hit. Republicans have long been outraged by the way public media like PBS or NPR, which are supposed by law to be objective, in reality openly promote liberal propaganda. They are even campaigning to ‘undo’ American history by demanding that U.S. Independence Day on July 4 be turned into a day for the victims of colonialism. Journalists who complain about this are simply fired.

Now all these media will be taken off public funding, and somewhere they will change their editorial staff to more conservative and patriotic. ‘Rotation’ awaits American media, NGOs and “agents of influence” working on the foreign circuit. Trump has already put his people in charge of Voice of America and Radio Liberty in 2020, and these institutions will also face a change of agenda and budget cuts. European editorial offices may be closed down altogether, with an emphasis on broadcasting in Asia, because the main adversary now is China, and the ‘soft power’ of these media is ineffective.

The Democrats’ financial funds, from which NGOs around the world receive funding, will also be quickly liquidated. Republicans are particularly indignant at the fact that they are already being actively used inside the United States, for example, to help migrants cross the border. Only private institutions like those of Alexander Soros will remain in this area. But even he is now winding down his foreign programmes and concentrating on the war against Trump. So, all areas of U.S. ‘soft power’ will undergo serious optimisation, which at first will destroy them, but then may give them a second breath.

Trump replaced the head of the Justice Department under pressure from Democrats

Not everywhere things are working out for the new president. Trump’s team decided to quickly replay the situation with the appointment of a new head of the U.S. Department of Justice. Matt Gaetz came under heavy pressure from the Democrats because of his old scandals around the Florida sex industry, so he decided to withdraw his candidacy.

In Gaetz’s place is proposed nominee Pam Bondi, who is one of Trump’s lawyers and was formerly the head of the Florida Attorney General’s Office for eight years. In that position, Bondi waged legal wars with the Obama administration, blocking its decisions at the state level, including vigorously advocating to keep Florida’s same-sex marriage ban in place. Bondi has been involved in Trump’s legal support, and helped him during the first impeachment attempt. In response, Bondi has incriminated the Biden family for corruption in Ukraine, and in 2020, she has brought lawsuits to challenge the election results. Like Gaetz, Bondi is loyal to Trump and will be tasked with cleaning up the DOJ, firing liberal politicised prosecutors and fighting real crime. Corrupt Democrats could be under attack as well.

Pam Bondi
*Photo by Derik Hamilton / AP*

The Justice Ministry governors are already worried, and it’s for a reason that whole shredding trucks designed to quickly destroy tens of thousands of documents have been spotted near their building. They realise that nothing good awaits them after terrorising Trump and his supporters for so many years. Currently, only 20% of Americans trust their law enforcement system, so Trump has full carte blanche to eliminate the latent criminals in that department.

Trump’s cabinet appointments continue to infuriate liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, and the future U.S. representative to NATO, former prosecutor Matt Whitaker, has recognised the return of Crimea to Russia as not being in America’s national interest, curtsying to Putin ahead of possible talks next February. Whitaker has also been a vocal critic of the invasion of Iraq, as well as advocating a withdrawal from Syria. The latter should happen closer to autumn 2025, but Trump’s team may even accelerate with the closure of vulnerable Pentagon bases in Iraq and Syria, which are difficult to defend against shelling.

Whitaker himself will soon be launching attacks on Brussels-based military lobbyists and NATO bureaucrats, for which Trump is moving him to Europe. Inside the alliance, they hoped to find common ground with Trump, which is why they made Mark Rutte, who had experience of negotiating with Trump, their secretary-general. But apparently Trump is not very interested in negotiating with them now. Among the candidates for special envoys on Ukraine, besides Brian Hook and Boris Epshteyn, there is now Richard Grenell, who previously favoured maintaining Ukraine’s neutral status with non-NATO membership and the creation of autonomous zones there. And it is clear from all this that pressure on his liberal enemies in Europe and NATO is more important to Trump than a ‘holy war’ with Russia, which the U.S. president wants to carefully wrest from the clutches of China.

Among Trump’s advisers can be found also Alex Wong, who organised talks with the DPRK in 2017. It is obvious that Trump is determined to restart the negotiation process on all fronts at once, although it is not clear where this will lead. But many liberals who want to go to war with the whole world, to promote destructive ideology in the U.S., making billions from it, will now clearly have a hard time. And the very formation of Trump’s ‘team’ continues, bringing surprises and scaring his enemies.