U.S. President Donald Trump actually does not have a plan. Intentions and expectations he has but no actual plan to make America great again. There are neocons stashed away in the deep state and – what professor John Mearsheimer calls the “restrainers” (more about them in a second) fighting for ascendancy in the Trump administration.
When you have clowns as secretaries and department heads, all you will have in the Cabinet room is a circus. Now, that is the U.S. administration that Trump ended up with. No adults in the room.
Here are the four out of seven headlines from The Washington Post opinion page, on any random day last week: “Trump’s folly is piling up. And America is weaker for it”; “America without free trade: Weaker, blander, smaller”; “Trump is pushing Europe and China into each other’s arms” and “Trump’s war on universities will not end well for him.”
The good old U.S. of A. places its hope on diplomatic magic, thinking Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is “a Trump whisperer” and can get some sense through his thick head.
Please note, thick-headedness should not be confused with heavy-headedness, which can be caused by ear disturbance, motion sickness and medication effects. Trump’s thick-headedness is the direct result of his known narcissism. He thinks he is never wrong. Like all narcissists, Trump doesn’t live in reality; other people are not real things for a narcissist. Like Trump, they don’t let their shame and blame game undermine their self-esteem. Narcissists refuse to accept their deserved responsibility, blame or criticism.
Columnist Andrew Mitrovica writes in his Al-Jazeera article that Trump’s belief that he knows everything and is right all the time is exactly what makes him so dangerous: “His omnipotence overwhelms, leaving most of us feeling bereft and pining for a moment’s reprieve from the incessant chaos.”
Trump, in three short months, has caused not only his country but the whole wide world trauma and uncertainty, yet he has not felt one iota of guilt or bad conscience over responsibility. He, single-handedly, ruined millions of balance sheets; tens of thousands lost their jobs because of the chaos he caused. He ruined the retirement savings and wallets of millions of old people. I am not one of them, but even I and some people I know have had a heavy toll taken on their extremely tired psyche.
It was not the America I knew when his supporters laid siege on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, and trampled over the Capitol steps on their way to occupy one of the remaining meccas of democracy, yelling “Hang them out!” Probably they would have if they could have laid their hands on some uniformed officers. They might have lynched them since they hanged the last person only very recently in 1968. The lynch culture must still be alive in them.
It is still not the America I know since Trump and his clowns raided the White House on Jan. 20, 2025. Maybe the columnists expected some miracles from the Italian prime minister’s visit to Washington, who was risking her political capital in Europe. Well, perhaps not. I don’t know this country; I have never studied Italian politics; I never strolled in the halls of its Harvard.
No, Meloni, who was supposed to whisper to Trump so that he could find the right way to deal with the European Union, whispered one or two soothing words to Trump on the importance of “the West as we know it,” but she could not end Trump’s tariff war on Europe. She could not because Trump himself doesn’t know what to do and what to expect from his tariffs game. Meloni received a lot of compliments from Trump (because he thinks he knows how to charm women), but not a word of forgiveness for the poor scapegoat of neocons in their operation to open a corridor through Ukraine to Russia and through Russia to China. Trump is going to sacrifice Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Russia.
The neocons seem obscured and screened off, but they are heavily invested in defense and diplomatic structures. We do not hear their battle cries nowadays, but they can still have Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a long-time buddy, and his top adviser Dan Caldwell, who has accompanied Hegseth to meetings with foreign officials, and Darin Selnick, the Pentagon’s deputy chief of staff, were escorted by the security guards from the Pentagon. Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, is also slated to leave the Pentagon.
Hegseth himself and the people he brought with him to the Pentagon are known to be related to Defense Priorities, a think tank that had become the gathering place for those who advocated a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. It is deeply skeptical of American engagement in the Middle East and support for Ukraine. Hence, the “restrainers” are watched by the good-old war hawks from the shadows. If Hegseth’s buddies leak important intelligence about Ukraine, the apple of neocon eyes, they pay!
When the neocons think that they have waited enough and those “restrainers” were not going to make the U.S. win, say, in Ukraine, Iran and Syria, then they would have a word or two with Trump. As professor John Mearsheimer and some other geostrategists say, Trump simply wants to shake the world; he simply needs to feel important. If he thinks that not the “restrainers” but the “hawks” would reset the world, he might happily kick some backsides. It is not a matter of how you win for Trump, but that he wins.
For the neocons, it is not how long you wait. It is getting the reins back in your hands. It is not, for instance, the Iranian nukes that matter. It is an opportunity to create a big controversy, so big that it can make going back to the actual plan both possible and unnoticeable.
The plan has several stages: the obliteration of the last pieces of Palestine so that Greater Israel would be a reality. Then, Greater Israel can help the U.S. to dismember Iraq, Iran and Syria and remap the Middle East.
Neocons will wait as long as they should. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot.
The earlier the better for Netanyahu because the non-Zionist Israelis are getting restless, and he is looking at years of jail time if he turns over the prime minister’s seat before creating the Greater Israel.
There is also another point here: The MAGA crowd did not vote for Trump to soon pay $250 for a Chinese-made gadget that sells for 30 bucks now. Even the U.S.-made cars will cost $3,000 more because so many of the parts come from Mexico, Canada and countries that Trump is going to tax to death.
We also wait on pins and needles.