Part 1
Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of modern times for many reasons beyond the fact that he didn’t have much competition. We are referring, of course, to Tricky Dick Nixon, Jimmy Carter, the Bush’s, Barry and the clown-shows thereafter.
Foremost among the valid reasons for the Gipper’s success, however, was James Baker— the most astute White House chief of staff ever—and his inner team. And at least this much we can say with first-hand knowledge: Baker was not just a smooth, savvy political operator and deft administrator. He was also deeply versed in policy substance and therefore had a unique ability to comprehend, rapidly assess and modulate the relentless inflow to the Oval Office of policy papers and interest group adverts from all corners of the government.
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So doing, he kept the Gipper on message and out of countless detours and troubles that would have otherwise sunk his presidency. Indeed, Ronald Reagan earned the Great Communicator moniker in large part because Jim Baker was at his elbow during his formative first term keeping him focused on the core message of restoring noninflationary prosperity at home and peace in the world abroad.
Needless to say, we knew the Gipper and, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s famous riposte to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate, Donald J. Trump is no Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the Donald is the most ill-equipped, ill-prepared and ill-tempered person to enter the Oval Office since Harry Truman at least, and probably Edith Wilson, too. And the latter, of course, was purely an accident—a usurper who surreptitiously seized the reins of government in the fall of 1919 when Woodrow Wilson succumbed to a paralyzing cerebral embolism at the end of his League of Nation’s whistle stop campaign across the USA and neglected to inform the country of his complete incapacity thereafter.
So the truth is, there is only one thing that can prevent the Donald’s impending second-term from devolving into a nation-wrecking gong show. To wit, America needs a 21st century Jim Baker because the Donald is just too damn impulsive, uninformed, self-absorbed and recklessly bombastic to function effectively as the nation’s President on his own steam; and also because the preponderance of official Washington is so deeply infected by the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) that it will otherwise distract hi endlessly and completely in schoolyard name-calling and petty insults, incidents and indecencies.
As it happens, in recent weeks Trump has actually stood up a solid team of newbies to Trump World who can make all the difference. He needs to make RFK Jr. his chief of staff, and Bobby Kennedy, in turn, needs to park in the West Wing directly across from his office the team of Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and Vice-president JD Vance, too (in a side office away from the VP’s ceremonial digs in the Siberian precincts of the EOB).
As it happens, this is the first time that Trump has been surrounded by a team of serious, informed right-thinking adults not afflicted with beltway-bred UniParty dogma, neocon mental infirmities or wackadoo rightwing xenophobia since he descended down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015. If given control of the White House switchboard of power, therefore, they could potentially keep the Donald on message and on plan for prosperity at home and peace in the world not unlike what the Gipper accomplished during the Baker era.
Unfortunately, there is good reason to fear that the Kennedy Five could end up in their own form of bureaucratic Siberia. That is, upon being bestowed honorific titles such as special advisor to the president or chairs of White House Task Forces on MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), FW&A (fraud, waste and abuse) and other noble purposes, they end up billeted in empty GSA space far from the beating heart of White House power. And after making recommendations that the real government would readily ignore, the soon to be in-the-ditch Trump Administration wouldn’t have a prayer of implementing them even if they could get the Donald’s undivided attention for more than an hour.
Indeed, we see the handwriting of disaster on the wall already in an article fresh from Politico, which is the Swamp’s preferred organ of UniParty propaganda. Entitled “Who Might Make up Trump’s Cabinet”, it is loaded with pedigreed neocon names for national security posts including Marco Rubio, Robert O’Brien, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo. So exactly how would that gang of warmongers and global hegemonists possibly further the cause of peace and drastic shrinkage of America’s dangerously bloated Warfare State?
And while the Politico folks were at it they smoked out Deep State lifers like Bob Lighthizer for Secretary of the Treasury and Eric Hargan for HSS. For crying out loud, Lighthizer has been a corporate trade policy shill for the last three decades and Hargan was the father of Operation Warp Speed at HSS in the first Trump Administration!
All of these dudes were adept at filling the Swamp, not draining it. That’s how they got the Washington chops to make the Politico roster in the first place.
Yet that’s not the half of it. Far more important than the secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury and HSS combined is the chief of staff role. With a typically weak Washington insider you will get ineffective government under almost any president, but totally chaos under the master of chaos himself.
Yet the Politico roster for this make or break post includes two babes in the woods and an utterly failed UniParty GOP lifer. As to the former we are referring to Brooke Rollins, who came from Texas GOP politics and was head of the no-count Office of American Innovation and later the acting director of the equally useless Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump White House; and also Susie Wiles, the daughter of a NFL football player and famous sports broadcaster (Pat Summerall), who had spent several decades running mostly small-time GOP political campaigns until she became chief of staff for Trump’s PAC in exile at Mar-a-Lago.
These two wouldn’t know from a traffic jam in the Roosevelt Room when it comes to Washington power and policy. And the third candidate—the disgraced ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy—has spent his entire career on the public teat filling the very Swamp that the Donald professes to truly drain this time around.
And yet and yet. The Donald’s up and running transition team is co-chaired by two loyalists who know virtually nothing about Washington power and policy-making. This includes Wall Streeter Howard Lutnick, who seems to have a crypto axe to grind and Linda McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, who lost a race for the Senate twice and got no closer to the White House during the first Trump Administration than the far side of the Swamp known as the Small Business Administration.
Undoubtedly, these Trump loyalists think Cabinet jobs are very important, when actually it is the five people led by the Chief of Staff that actually count far, far more than even the SecDef. And that’s all the more so in what will otherwise by a chaotic and rudderless Trump Administration 2.0.
Fortunately, it also happens that in addition to the Cabinet-focused Co-Chairs, there are two other people with innate savvy and impressive street smarts on the Trump transition team. They happen to be the Donald’s sons—-Don Jr. and Eric.
And that’s the grand opening for the Kennedy Five. They urgently need to enlist Don and Eric in the cause of staffing the inner circle of the White House with Kennedy, Gabbard, Ramaswamy, Musk and Vance.
And that’s especially true of the latter two. Vice-Presidents can do little more than go to the funerals of newly passed global leaders unless they are included in the inner circle on a daily operational basis in the West Wing. And while Elon Musk may be the richest man on the planet, his only hope of really changing the direction of government is if he is positioned as second Deputy President or Director of OMB.
Still, the sons might well have a decent chance at persuading DJT to bring the Kennedy Five into the inner sanctum because it is evident that the Donald is enamored by the fact that he has been embraced by a Kennedy; and also that the Kennedy Five have been unstinting in their collective efforts to bring his campaign message to a whole new and broader part of the American electorate. In what is still an exceedingly close election in a few key battleground state precincts it will likely prove to be the case that the Kennedy Five made all the difference.
What Don Jr. and Eric have to do, therefore, is to persuade the old man to let the Kennedy Five “go wild” not just on health, food and medicines, but on the Deep State in its entirety— a task which can only be accomplished from the inner sanctum of the West Wing.
Donald Trump: “Robert F. Kennedy cares more about human beings and health and the environment than anybody.” “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines.” “He’s a great guy. He truly cares about this, and it’s an honor.”
Needless to say, the Kennedy Five would have some considerable wood to chop if they are to rescue the Donald from the crash landing of misdirected policy detours. Their job would be to—
- Sideline massive immigrant deportations in favor of targeted removal of criminals and a wide gate for vetted guest workers.
- The harnessing of Trumpian tariffs to revenue raising and/or middle class tax relief rather than out-of-this-world protectionism.
- A one-two punch of bringing the Empire home and slashing the defense budget by 50% in a drive to cap the nation’s exploding public debt.
- A root-and-branch reform of the Fed designed to remove it from the business of enriching Wall Street speculators and monetizing the debts of spendthrift Washington politicians.
Part 2
Unless he takes decisive prophylactic action, the Donald’s impending second term is likely to go into a tailspin so fast as to make even his swollen head spin. That’s because several
early 2025 policy vectors currently percolating in Trump World are likely to ignite fiery and likely fatal political and financial upheavals:
- An attempt by the Stephen Miller faction to launch a sweeping multi-million person deportation campaign that would end-up stymied in the courts and locked in brutal Capitol Hill legislative rider battles, while offering a field day for vicious, relentless MSM attacks on the Donald by the Hitler Howlers and Race Card Hondlers.
- An over-the-top use of Section 232 Trade Act authorities to impose a sweeping 60% tariff on $450 billion per year of goods from China as well as lower but still drastic tariffs on the $3.0 trillion balance of imports from the rest of the world, which together would trigger widespread panic about a new round of severe domestic inflation.
- A thundering return of the bond vigilantes to Wall Street in response to a Christmas-tree tax bill arising from the GOP-controlled tax committees that could add $5-$10 trillion to the Federal deficit over the next decade on top of the $25 trillion already built-into the current CBO baseline, thereby threatening to double today’s $36 trillion public debt.
- A foreign policy firestorm as the the neocon UniParty goes on a full frontal attack against a Trump standstill and partition deal with Putin on Ukraine.
It doesn’t take a vivid imagination to picture the utter calamity that could ensue from any or a combination of these ticking time bombs now embedded in Trump World. And this time it’s not January 2017 with both Wall Street and main street on the upswing after a prolonged struggle to rebound from the Great Recession. Nor is the US economy coasting on the tailwind of trillions of newly printed money at the Fed.
To the contrary, this time it’s the morning after—that is, the harvest period after eight years of UniParty madness on both the economic policy front domestically, as well as the Warfare State’s relentless interventions abroad including a pointless near hot war with Russia. Indeed, what lies ahead is the most colossal mess of governance in modern times, and that’s even before the above four vectors of incipient Trumpian error compound the mayhem.
So as we said in Part 1, the Kennedy Five would face a daunting challenge, but they are actually the only hope for making lemon-aid out of the sour fruit of MAGA as it has marinated on the campaign trail and most especially during the closing weeks. In fact, the Donald has literally gone off the deep-end promising to virtually dismantle the tax code, on the one hand, while pledging to pull the props right out from under the main street economy by unleashing a dragnet of labor market dislocations and hiring blockages in the name of stopping the so-called immigrant “invasion”, on the other.
Still, there is a way for the Kennedy Five, if implanted in and around the White House Chief of Staff’s office, to reshape and redirect these Trump World vectors in a more constructive and productive direction. Starting with the rip-roaring immigration crisis, for example, they could lay out a sweeping reform plan on the dual principles of—-
- A send-them-home “no parole” policy for illegal border-crossing asylum seekers, criminals and drug dealers.
- coupled with a wider and more orderly legal immigration gate at US consulates and embassies for thoroughly-vetted economic refugees and job seekers.
Such a constructive immigration program could also incorporate a strict ban on Federally provided or assisted welfare to all immigrants, legal and illegal, for at least ten years from their documented arrival. At the same time, the initiative could be wrapped in the expansive nomenclature of Reaganite supply-side growth.
The latter follows from the undeniable fact that native-born employment stopped growing six years ago: the employment level of 130.6 million in September 2024 was virtually identical to the level of native-born workers in July 2018 (black line). By contrast, foreign-born employment (purple line) is up +4.5 million or nearly 17% and accounts for the entirety of US employment growth in the period shown below.
The companion undeniable fact is that well over half of historic US economic growth was due to more workers and labor hours employed on the main street economy. So with the number of native-born workers declining year-after-year as far as the eye can see, a legal and thoroughly vetted worker immigration program is imperative if supply-side growth in the US is to be restored and sustained.
A wide, secure gate for legal migrant workers, therefore, must be an integral part of safeguarding the border and boosting the economy at one and the same time.
Index of US Employment Growth Since July 2018
The above imperatives need not interfere with stern control of the border, either. According to government statistics, there are currently 405,786 illegal immigrants in the US with criminal records. Of course, these folks should be deported forthwith, and day one of the second Trump Administration would be not too soon to start.
But it would also not be too soon to also ask why there are more than 400,000 criminals roaming around the USA with Federal permission slips in their pockets (i.e. parole status). And further why are they hidden in a population of 7.6 million undocumented workers employed and paying taxes in the construction (upwards of 25%), food service, lawn care and like and similar labor-intensive industries, and also among upwards of 11.5 million total illegal aliens including family members and children?
The answer is simple, dispositive and just possibly remediable by a “Nixon goes to China” politician with credibility on the issue like Donald Trump. To wit, America is a magnet for low and moderate skill workers because was have a growing, dynamic, technologically-enabled economy but an utterly static and soon to be declining native-born population. So what the supply-side needs is a legal and orderly avenue for obtaining vetted economic migrants in lieu of the lawless, dangerous and chaotic regime now overwhelming immigration control officials at the southern borders.
Furthermore, none of these potential legal economic migrants need come to the border courtesy of criminal coyotes or hazard the Rio Grande or Arizona deserts in the dead of night. Even a legalized quota of 400,000 or more per year for low/moderate skill workers could be administered through the dozens of US embassies and consulates in Mexico and Latin America that already specialize in just that. The State department operations worldwide, in fact, vetted and processed 5.7 million legal immigrant and tourist visas in 2023 without too much muss, fuss or error.
The dirty secret of the Washington UniParty immigration wars, therefore, is that the current immigration system is so obsolete and upside-down that there is only one way for economic migrants to find there way to the millions of jobs that they are now filling from coast-to-coast. To wit, they are required by US statute to come to the border, break the law and make pretend that they are political asylum seekers.
Only then can they get into a bureaucratic asylum cue that stretches for months and years, even as they are paroled into the US interior without being vetted during the interim. And when they are eventually granted asylum only then do they reemerge from an illegal no-man’s land as de facto but legal economic migrants.
The fact is, the immigration mess has now become so pervasive and politically toxic that the Donald could effectively close the border by just shrinking the asylum program to a token few thousand per year, which he undoubtedly has the authority to do via regulation. He could then couple that with a larger scale low-moderate skill worker legal immigration quota (the existing one is only 4,000 per year) with tough vetting done exclusively and far away from the US border in the home countries and cities of potential economic migrants.
Viola. Fox News would have to move on to other, real issues; the Hitler Howlers would be shutdown; and the Washington playing field would be cleared for the Kennedy Five to proffer equally creative solutions to the other three troublesome vectors listed above.
For instance, it would appear that the $25 trillion of additional debt built into the CBO baseline over the next decade is so threatening that the incoming Trump Administration dare not add a single net dollar to that figure. Otherwise, a runaway surge of interest rates and yields in the bond pits—which has already started with the 75 basis point rise in 10-year yields just since the Fed’s recent disastrous pivot to rate cutting—could cause the US economy, which is now lugging $100 trillion of public and private debt, to buckle and break.
At the same time, it is clear that the Donald and his GOP henchman on Capitol Hill are determined to extend all or at least major parts of the 2017 tax cut and to enact other promises that have been made on the campaign trail such as exempting tips and overtime. So one way to square that circle would be to impose a version of the Donald’s tariffs in the form of a pure revenue tariff on all goods coming into the US and then dedicate two-thirds of the receipts to tax relief and one-third to deficit reduction.
With about $3.5 trillion of imports annually, a “revenue tariff” in the low 20% range would generate about $800 billion per year of new Federal receipts. This means that $500 billion could go to off-setting the cost of middle class tax relief and $300 billion to reduction of the existing structural deficit.
To be sure, $500 billion per year for middle class tax relief would not off-set the estimated $1.1 trillion per year cost of the Donald’s entire package of tax cut promises. But by picking and choosing the most important items of rate reduction, family tax credits and business investment incentives in the Donald’s $11.5 trillion 10-year potpourri of tax cuts, the essence of the Trumpian tax promises could be accommodated.
At the same time, $300 billion per year of deficit reduction via allocated tariff receipts would be barely a decent down payment on shrinking the current $2.5 trillion per year of baseline deficits. But that’s where the Kennedy Five would need to fight long and hard to convince the Donald that an America First foreign policy does not need a national security budget of $1 trillion per year, which is the current funding level for national defense and foreign operations, aid and security assistance.
To the contrary, a Fortress America national security posture at $500 billion per year could fully fund the annual cost of an invincible triad stragic nuclear deterrent at $75 billion per year, while still leaving $425 trillion for defense of the homeland shorelines and airspace and a sparse budget for international operations after whacking foreign aid, the UN, NED and other wasteful globalist spending. This would mean closing most of the current 800 US bases abroad and abandoning obsolete security alliances such as NATO.
Needless to say, a policy of bringing the Empire Home is the only route to a true America First posture, but its pursuit would surely foster a “do or die” opposition campaign from the Deep State and the remnants of the UniParty on Capitol Hill.
That’s why the final piece of the Kennedy Five strategy should be made crystal clear. The two people in that group with the “creds” to take on the military/industrial/congressional complex are Tulsi Gabbard, a decorated veteran of the Iraq War disaster, and Elon Musk wielding the budgetary chain saw.
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If these two were made head of the National Security Council and OMB, respectively, the Kennedy Five would have a fighting chance of bringing the Donald around to embracing a
$500 billion per year cut in national security spending based on a 21st century Fortress America—a concept that should actually appeal to the Donald.
In turn, coupling this with $300 billion per year of tariff revenues and $200 billion per year of domestic spending reforms and cuts could reduce the structural deficit by $1.0 trillion annually. Such a sweeping fiscal policy shift might be just enough to send the bond vigilantes back to hibernation and to short-circuit the current vicious cycle of rising debt, soaring interest rates and catastrophic increases in public debt service.
Finally, there is one other hurdle the Kennedy Five would need to surmount. When the Donald makes a January deal with Putin to end the proxy war on Russia and partition Ukraine along the current line of contact, all five would have to go on a public relations offensive like never before—lest the Donald be eaten alive by the Putin-bashers of the MSM.
Yet at the end of the day we can think of no anti-war chorus that would be more eloquent, powerful and persuasive to the war-weary American public than Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance and Elon Musk. If they couldn’t shore up a Trumpian campaign for an end to the Forever Wars and a return to homeland defense, it simply can’t be done—neither in this world or the next.
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
