Despite what he sometimes claims, Donald Trump clearly loves Vladimir Putin. He didn’t get along with many world leaders, but he always cozied up to the despots. When Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of Putin’s private mercenary army the Wagner Group, launched a quickly aborted mutiny a couple weeks back, it clearly left Trump verklempt — no less so because he reportedly wanted (and may still want, should he win re-election) one of his own.
As per Raw Story, yet another Trump tell-all is coming out. It’s called Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, and it was penned by Miles Taylor, former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s reign. The tome won’t be released until July 18, but Taylor has already discussed some of the shocking things revealed within. In a piece for Real Clear Politics, Taylor wrote of Trump’s “envy of private armies, like Putin’s wayward Wagner Group.
“The former president once sought his own mercenaries and might do so again if he wins back the White House,” Taylor added, saying there was real “alarm” among his colleagues that he could make this a reality.
Taylor writes that Trump first came up with the idea in the summer of 2017, when he wanted to “yank U.S. troops out of Afghanistan without any planning” because he was “impatient” and was tired of spending money on the issue. The DHS team tried to come up with some new solutions, only to discover that Trump had come up with his mercenary gang idea. What did Taylor think of it?
I explained that this was a horrible idea for many reasons, not least of which was that a Trump-controlled mercenary group would circumvent public scrutiny, erode checks and balances around the use of force, and undermine confidence in the American military.
But by then Trump’s advisers were already talking to Erik Prince about siccing Blackwater upon Afghanistan. Taylor then cobbled together a “thick briefing memo” about why this was a bad idea. But knowing Trump’s attention span, he condensed his 50-to-60-paged book into two pages, writing “in the president’s voice.” They even gave it a Trumpian title: ‘Afghanistan: How to Put America First—And Win!’
Here’s a primer on the then-president’s primer:
If we pulled out of the country too fast, I wrote, we would be mocked as ‘losers’ by terrorists. If we wanted to be ‘winners,’ we needed to fight smarter and harder, then cut a ‘great deal’ to hand over security to the Afghans. I made no mention of deploying a private army to finish the job.”
Thing is, it worked — because Trump was convinced that it would make him look like a “loser,” not a “winner.”
Alas, it was a pyrrhic victory: Trump circled back to the mercenary gang idea the following year when he wanted a 5,000-man team to help overthrow the regime in Venezuela. Someone else had to write the memo dissuading him from that one.
Now that Trump is back on the campaign trail, Taylor’s worried third time’s the charm. After all, he often referred to the U.S. military as “his” — “his military,” “his generals.”
“Next time we won’t be so lucky,” a person familiar with the matter told Taylor. “We’ll have a military run by mercenaries.”
For now, though, Trump’s a little distracted by his various legal woes, and by rage-posting on his rinky-dink Twitter clone.
(Via Raw Story)