The NeverTrump Movement Joins the Clinton Campaign

by Rebecca Bynum (August 2016)

The NeverTrumpers’ foreign policy division has joined with Hillary Clinton in her effort to defeat Donald Trump. 50 former members of Republican Administrations’ Past have decided not to critique Trump’s actual foreign policy proposals as laid out in his speech of April 27^th – a speech remarkable in its insight and strategic vision – but to ostentatiously announce they would not vote for Donald Trump based on his “temperament” – a page directly taken from the Clinton campaign’s playbook.

Trump’s foreign policy places our struggle against the relentless advance of radical Islam – Sunni division (ISIS) and Shi’a division (Iran) – front and center. Mr. Trump is a realist. He understands we are overextended militarily and that the Bush era mantra, “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” makes no sense whatsoever when Muslims are plotting attacks on Western civilian targets all over the Western world.

These traitors to the Republican Party may well be upset that Mr. Trump’s proposals contain an implicit repudiation of the last 15 years’ policies, which they helped to put in place. Remember, it was George W. Bush who, immediately after the terror attack of 9/11, took off his shoes, padded into a mosque and declared to the American people, “Islam is peace.” This would be comical if it weren’t so serious.

David P. Goldman gives us a good taste of the attitude of this bipartisan foreign policy elite in the Asia Times:

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime.

These people, with a vested interest in the failed policies of the past, feel justified in lashing out at Trump, perhaps in order to curry favor with Hillary Clinton and gain employment in her administration. They especially didn’t like it when Trump refused to roll over when yet another Shari’a promoting Muslim ostentatiously played the victim card at the Democratic Convention. Like the Democrats and other guardians of political correctness, their letter positively drips with contempt for both Trump and his voters. Here is the concluding paragraph:

We understand that many Americans are profoundly frustrated with the federal government and its inability to solve pressing domestic and international problems. We also know that many have doubts about Hillary Clinton, as do many of us. But Donald Trump is not the answer to America’s daunting challenges and to this crucial election. We are convinced that in the Oval Office, he would be the most reckless President in American history.

It is clear Trump wants to change course and so would not hire any of them in any case. Former Ambassador John Bolton said the following on Fox News August 9:

Some people on that list that, whether the nominee was Ted Crus or whomever it might have been, I would not have recommended them for employment in the next Republican administration because I don’t think they represent policies that are mainstream Republican policies. This group is a mixed bag, I think the real issue is not what x number of former staff people or even former Cabinet members think, it’s what the comparison is between Trump’s policies and Hillary Clinton’s policies which represent the third Obama term.[1]

President Obama has done everything possible to protect Islam from its obvious connection to violent jihad, including scrubbing the connections made by the DHS and eliminating all connections between Islam and terrorism from FBI training manuals. Obama has encouraged tens of thousands of Muslim refugees from jihad hot spots like Somalia and Syria to be resettled in towns and cities across the country in complete disregard to the safety of Americans.

Moreover, Obama has relentlessly promoted political correctness in the military, including restricting rules of engagement to the point of insanity, promoting Generals like John Allen (who endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention) on the basis of their acquiescence to this “Islam has nothing to do with terrorism” agenda. The Obama/Clinton administration actively partnered with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and armed jihadi groups in Syria while appeasing the Mullahs in Iran – even paying ransom for our hostages. But these supposed foreign policy “experts” prefer these policies to Trump’s simple common sense proposals.

The core of this argument is the essential conflict between those who continue to insist Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and those who maintain that political correctness has no place in the assessment of our national security threats.

Political correctness is extremely dangerous because it makes the truth unsayable with the ultimate goal of making the truth unthinkable. Officials like those who signed the letter against Mr. Trump, blocked input from experts on Islam and who attempted to enforce political correctness while in office, must justify these lies by thinking “it’s in the best interest of the public.” But they must also admit, were they to be completely honest, that they do not trust the American people with the truth.

Donald Trump has said that from his administration, “[T]here will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth.”

American are invincible when armed with the truth. The forcing of political correctness on the people in the service of lies will be the legacy of the Obama administration and it is the promise of Hillary Clinton’s policy as well. Said she, “”Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

This is the essence of this election. One candidate trusts the people, the other does not.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, we can expect a crackdown on freedom of speech with regard to criticism of Islam, the weakening of American citizen’s ability to protect themselves, and a foreign policy posture which results in nothing but further US entanglement in jihadist conflicts in the Middle East, weakening our military, depleting our resources and making our defense posture increasingly tenuous in a dangerous world. I’ll take the man who occasionally misspeaks, but who tells the truth as he sees it, over the woman who will not tell the American people the truth about anything.

[1] Taken down verbatim and edited slightly by the author.

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Rebecca Bynum serves as Assistant to the Foreign Policy Advisor to Donald J. Trump, Dr. Walid Phares. She is also New English Review’s managing editor. Her latest book is The Real Nature of Religion, published by New English Review Press.

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Rebecca Bynum contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.