Politics

Why the U.S. Security Establishment Can't Stand Trump

The national security establishment of the United States recognizes a clear and present danger -- not a threat to America’s security, mind you, but rather to their own institutional power.

These Beltway apparatchiks determined early on in 2016 that Donald Trump and the “America First” movement he represented would strategically alter the way America interacts with the world. A Trump administration, they surmised, would directly challenge the prerogatives of the permanent national security apparatus that has operated as a sort of parallel government for decades. For too long, these power brokers have used positions of influence in government, lobbying firms, and media to plunge America into wasteful wars and global meddling. Such policy prescriptions served the ambitions of these operators, making them wealthy and powerful, while largely unaccountable to the American people, the ones who actually paid the massive price in blood and treasure.

As the national security establishment identified Donald Trump as a threat to this established order, it deployed the government’s substantial security capacities to interfere with his candidacy. When he won the presidency anyway, these deep state actors attempted to destabilize his presidency. As catalogued in an outline by my organization, the America First Action Super PAC, the pace of the intervention greatly accelerated as the Trump movement ascended. It culminated in the current Senate impeachment trial.