Personality
For those looking for good news on the foreign-policy front under President Trump, his selection of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser should be very welcome.
It's not just that he's a Philly boy from Roxborough, who attended Valley Forge Military Academy and went on to West Point.
Here's the real key: McMaster couldn't be more different from his deposed predecessor, Michael Flynn, in personality and in his likely approach to this key position. Where Flynn was hot-tempered, narrowly focused, and prone to conspiracy theories, McMaster is a strategic thinker with a broad grasp of global issues who is comfortable with complexity, consults widely, and listens intently.
Personality
The job of planning and building Trump’s wall between the U.S. and Mexican will likely fall on Homeland Security, according to the Washington Post. And Kelly seems to share Trump’s view of border security — something he would’ve had a unique view of during his time heading up Southern Command.
In a 2014 interview with Defense One, he described illegal drug trade and the flow of undocumented immigrants into the U.S. as an existential threat to the nation.
And, in congressional testimony in 2015, he suggested smugglers could be bringing terrorists into the country. “Despite the heroic efforts of our law enforcement colleagues, criminal organizations are constantly adapting their methods for trafficking across our borders,” Kelly told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “While there is not yet any indication that the criminal networks involved in human and drug trafficking are interested in supporting the efforts of terrorist groups, these networks could unwittingly, or even wittingly, facilitate the movement of terrorist operatives or weapons of mass destruction toward our borders.’’
Personality
For those who believe this is all for the better, Trump’s victory represents a long-overdue rebuke to an entrenched and arrogant governing class; for those who see it as for the worse, the destruction extends to cherished norms of civility and discourse, a politics poisoned by vile streams of racism, sexism, nativism. To his believers, he delivers change—broad, deep, historic change, not modest measures doled out in Dixie cups; to his detractors, he inspires fear both for what he may do and what may be done in his name.
