Donald Trump’s early appointments may provide us with some clues on what the Trump Administration will look like more generally. These appointments include (as I had predicted) Mike Flynn for National Security Advisor, Mike Pompeo as Director of National Intelligence, and Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. None of these appointments are particularly surprising and neither are the reactions from the progressive establishment.
In common is that all three are Trump loyalists. Should we have expected anything else, especially from the early appointments? President-Elect Trump clearly places a high value on personal loyalty, a quality he holds in common with Hillary Clinton and President Obama.
IMO nearly every Southern white male over the age of 60 probably has some racist baggage or at least arguably has some racist baggage and Jeff Sessions is no exception. When his career is viewed in context is he a bigot, a Southerner, a Southern bigot, or a white Southern politician who espoused whatever views were necessary to be re-elected, particularly with respect to same sex marriage? Is there a difference among those things? Are views very similar to those articulated by President Obama five years ago intolerable bigotry now?
I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. Perhaps we’ll have a better idea after confirmation hearings. Frankly, I doubt it as I expect more heat than light from them.
WRT Gen. Flynn and Rep. Pompeo I think we can reasonably conclude that Donald Trump wasn’t kidding about his foreign policy ideas during the campaign. At first glance Flynn’s and Pompeo’s views are quite similar to those of the President-Elect.
As H. L. Mencken quipped nearly a century ago, there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. Probably our gravest security problem at present is the challenge presented by radical Islamist terrorism.
That some Muslims present particular security problems is not equivalent to saying that Muslims inherently present security problems or that Islam itself is irremediably violent. IMO much more attention should be attached to the sponsorship of terrorism by Muslim states than on ordinary individual Muslims.
A steely-eyed view of what constitutes state sponsorship would help, too. In aristocracies the aristocrats are the state. Our political problem is that too much of our foreign policy establishment just can’t bear the implications of that.
The assertion that southern Whites are historically more “bigoted”
than Whites from any other section of the country is a bigoted assertion.
On foreign policy, Flynn’s previous statements about necessary Iran regime change better be relegated to the past.