‘We should know more and study more, given that the Philippines and the United States signed a military intelligence-sharing deal.’
IN 2022, Dick Morris wrote: “We must realize that there are new rules under which any electoral battle in the future will now be conducted. We must adjust to them and learn to win under them…Big issues look to dominate the political landscape as this is written: inflation, immigration, and crime. Each of the three has the same unique feature: none was a problem under Donald Trump, and all emerged as serious issues on the day that Biden was inaugurated.” [The Return: Trump’s Big 2024 Comeback. West Palm Beach, FL: Humanix Books, 2022] Result: Trump earned 312 electoral votes to win the presidential derby. [https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-Election/Results/zjpqnemxwvx/]
What can we expect from Trump 2.0? Perhaps a run-through of the works of his nominees favors us a glimpse, starting with Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.: “I had my own strong thoughts on these issues. I was particularly agitated, at age seven, to learn that entire species of animals were going extinct, and I was angry at the men who had forever doomed the passenger pigeon and the dodo. Killing off the last members of a species seemed to me to have the desolate finality of a mortal sin. I announced that I would write a book about pollution, wildlife, and the environment and, with my dad’s encouragement, began drafting the opus. Using embossed stationery that I’d received for Christmas, I wrote Uncle Jack requesting an appointment to air my concerns. He invited me for a private audience in the Oval Office. As a gift, I brought him a seven-inch spotted salamander I’d captured the previous afternoon and given the biblical name Shadrach.” [American Values: Lessons I Learned from my Family. NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2018, p. 85]
This is the same RFK Jr. who wrote: “As the COVID pandemic commenced, the rising medical technocracy—with Anthony Fauci at the helm—took on all the menacing features President Eisenhower warned against. A powerful syndicate, composed of government public health technocrats, a rapacious pharmaceutical industry, military and intelligence officials, and media and social media titans, appropriated awesome new powers to override constitutional and civil rights, censor information, suppress dissent, and engineer compliance with arbitrary diktats.” [The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2023, pp. 24-25]
Who else? Tulsi Gabbard: “What’s at stake here is far greater than Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Our democracy is being destroyed by the permanent Washington elite in both political parties who truly believe they—and not the American people —have the right and duty to determine who we want to serve and lead our country…They don’t care about what we want. But they are afraid of us. Just like foreign dictators are afraid of democracy, the Democrat elite are so afraid of a free society and the possibility that the American people will make ‘the wrong choice’ in this election (by choosing someone other than them), they are not willing to risk allowing us to make that choice.” [For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind. NY: Regnery, 2024, p. 9]
1. Mike Waltz: “If we let Taiwan fall, not only will our prosperity be threatened, so, too, will our moral leadership. Our allies much closer to China—Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Thailand—will realize that they are on their own and cannot rely on America to support fellow democracies. As one member of the Philippine Congress said to me, ‘We all know that first it was Tibet, then Hong Kong, next is Taiwan, and then us.’ Our allies in Asia will either make concessions to China to avoid Taiwan’s fate—or they will try to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.” [Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret. NY: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2024, p. 211]
2. Mike Huckabee: “When I was a child and did something my mother found objectionable, she’d say, with some exasperation, ‘Were you raised by wolves?’ Of course (being objectionable), my immediate inclination was to whip back a smart- aleck answer like ‘No, ma’am. I got it from you!’ But I never did because I knew that the wolf in her would come out and probably chew me out. Plus, I knew what she meant: This was her way of reminding me that I was supposed to try to achieve a certain level of civil behavior. I might even demonstrate a notable difference from animals in the wild by using a napkin, saying a blessing before diving into a plate of food, or washing up before sitting down to eat. Such civilized rules of courtesy, kindness, and unselfishness were expected of me not merely so that I could get what I wanted but because, quite simply, they were right.” [A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need From Washington (And a Trillion That We Don’t). NY: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011, p. 15]
3. Vivek Ramaswamy: “The relentless focus on rich and poor, on the top 1 percent or top 0.1 percent—on the have-yachts versus the have-nots—can distract from a wealth concentration of far greater magnitude. Individual wealth disparities in the United States may or may not have reached the highest levels in this country’s history. But the corporate concentration of wealth today is unprecedented in world history.” [Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn’t Vote For. NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2023, p. 189]
4. Kristi Noem: “For my parents, every little thing mattered. But big things mattered too. And as I grew up, I learned that some of the biggest federal regulations mattered so much that they could actually end everything our family spent much of our time and energy working toward. In a very real sense, one stroke of a pen from a bureaucrat a thousand miles away could end our way of life…One of Washington’s worst assumptions is this belief that bureaucrats in a handful of federal agencies in DC know more and care more about the natural environment than the people who own, cultivate, and depend on that land for their very survival. In reality, there are no greater environmentalists than farmers. They love their land.” [Not My First Rodeo: Lessons From The Heartland. NY: Hachette Book Group, 2022, pp. 118-119]
That is one batch of Trump’s crew. We should know more and study more, given that the Philippines and the United States signed a military intelligence-sharing deal. [https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1238106]
