One hundred sixty-four retired generals and admirals have endorsed Donald Trump, but the Trump-Clinton “Battle of the Military Brass” is charging ahead, with each candidate brandishing lists of admirals and generals who have signed on as endorsers. It is a key part of the larger narrative each campaign is rolling out to convince voters that its candidate is more fit than the other to be Commander-in Chief, and is better suited to handling national defense/national security matters.
Hillary Clinton fired the first shot, as we reported previously, with an endorsement letter to the New York Times on August 8 signed by 50 of the nation’s “most senior Republican national security officials” (in the words of the globalist-supporting New York Times). The message was simple: Donald Trump is so bad that we, the GOP’s top national security experts, are jumping ship to vote for Hillary. These were, for the most part, civilian “experts” who had served in the Defense and State Departments and the National Security Council during the past several Republican administrations. Predicatbly, the pro-Clinton establishment media (which includes most of the major daily newspapers, network television news, and their online affiliates) hyped the endorsement and ran stories accenting Clinton’s supposed superiority over Trump on national security issues.
Far from being daunted by the Hillary endorsement letter, Trump responded by pointing out that the letter’s signers are “the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who to blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” Trump added that these supposedly important Republican foreign policy experts are “nothing more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold onto their power.”
And, Trump added, “These insiders — along with Hillary Clinton — are the owners of the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq,” along with other foreign policy failures. But Trump went further; on September 6 his campaign released a letter signed by 88 generals and admirals who endorsed him. Major General Sidney Shachnow and Rear Admiral Charles Williams organized the open letter by retired top brass of the military. Shachnow is a 40-year Army veteran, who was a survivor of the Holocaust. Shachnow took issue with the “senior Republican national security officials,” who declared that Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history.” Shachnow’s generals and admirals, on the other hand, insisted that Trump “has the temperament to be commander-in-chief,” and Admiral Williams said Trump was “more trusted” than Clinton.
The retired military leaders expressed deep concern over the “potentially extremely perilous” combination of budget cuts and policy choices that have “emboldened” the nation’s enemies.
Out of concern that the government will persist “in the practices that have brought us to this present pass,” they are rejecting Hillary Clinton as a potential commander-in-chief. “For this reason,” the generals and admirals explain in their letter, “we support Donald Trump and his commitment to rebuild our military, to secure our borders, to defeat our Islamic supremacist adversaries and restore law and order domestically. We urge our fellow Americans to do the same.”
Trump responded to the letter, calling their support “a great honor.” “I thank each of them for their service and their confidence in me to serve as commander-in-chief,” Trump said. “Keeping our nation safe and leading our armed forces is the most important responsibility of the presidency. Under my administration, we will end the weak foreign policy of the last eight years, rebuild our military, give our troops clear rules of engagement and take care of our veterans when they come home. We can only Make America Great Again if we ensure our military remains the finest fighting force in the world, and that’s exactly what I will do as president.”
The response to the letter by the Big Media cartel was revealing, but predictable. Whereas much of the media echo chamber had heralded Hillary Clinton’s “national security experts” endorsement letter as a huge deal, the Trump endorsement letter by flag officers was largely ignored or belittled. “Trump’s List of Military Endorsements Seen by Some as Lacking Firepower, “ sniffed the headline of an NBC News story. “Trump’s Unimpressive Support From Military Leaders” was the title of a similar story in The Atlantic.
Team Clinton responded with one-upmanship, releasing a list of 95 general and admirals who support Hillary. On September 8 Donald Trump announced that an additional 21 generals and admirals had signed on in support of him, bringing his total to 109. On September 16, Trump announced that another 44 flag officers had been added to the list, for a total of 164 endorsements. Then during the September 26 debate with Clinton, Trump announced that the number of generals and admirals endorsing him would soon top two hundred. Moreover, he has also received endorsements from 17 Medal of Honor recipients, and a September poll by NBC News found Trump leading Clinton by 19 points — 55 percent to 36 percent — among voters who are currently serving or have previously served in the U.S. military.
The “Battle of the Brass Endorsers” between Trump and Clinton will continue, with both candidates flaunting their flag officers as proof of their qualification to lead. However, since the names of most of the admirals and generals mentioned are not familiar to most Americans — and their political leanings and orientations are even less so — a simple bean count does not tell us much. Over the past couple of generations, the top echelons of our military services have become more and more politicized, and the officers who have bucked political correctness increasingly have found themselves passed over or cashiered out. It is no surprise then that a politician as “progressive” as Hillary Clinton can find globalist-minded generals and admirals to support her; many of them have been indoctrinated in one-worldism at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and other think tanks, as well as at our own military academies.
Among the CFR members who appear on Hillary Clinton’s endorsement list, for instance, are General Wesley Clark and General Daniel W. Christman. When NBC News writer Jane C. Timm needed a familiar military “expert” to depricate the stature of Trump’s military endosrsers, she went to General Barry McCaffrey, a corporatist, political general, who, besides being a member of the CFR and the Atlantic Council, is a regular military commentator for the uber-liberal NBC and MSNBC.
The pro-Clinton military endorsements should be viewed as an extension of the August 8 letter by the “Republican” opponents of Trump, which reads as if it were written by the Hillary Clinton campaign. “We know the personal qualities required of a president of the United States,” say the signers of that missive. “None of us will vote for Trump.” Among the signers of the letter attacking Trump were prominent globalists from previous Republican presidencies, including John Bellinger III, Robert Blackwill, Elliot Cohen, Richard Fontaine, Jendayi Frazer, Aaron Friedberg, Brian Gunderson, Michael Hayden, Carla Hills, John Negroponte, Nicholas Rostow, Shirin Tahir-Kheli, William H. Taft IV, Dov Zakheim, Philip Zelikow, and Robert Zoellick. They claim Trump “lacks the temperament to be president.”
While the group acknowledged that they have “doubts” about Clinton, they insisted, “Donald Trump is not the answer to America’s daunting challenges.”
The attack by veterans of previous Republican administrations is a vivid illustration of radio commentator Rush Limbaugh’s comparison of many Republicans to the Washington Generals basketball team. The Washington Generals were the team that the old Harlem Globetrotters would always beat during the days of their comedic skits. Like the Republican Establishment of today, Limbaugh said, the Generals got to play, but they were really just there for the Globetrotters to beat, in a prearranged contest.
For example, Robert Blackwill, one of the signers of the letter condemning Trump, was a member of the National Security Council of President George W. Bush, but he is now expected to formally endorse Hillary Clinton.
The late Georgetown history professor Dr. Carroll Quigley, the mentor of Bill Clinton, explained how this works in his book Tragedy and Hope, written in 1966 but still applicable today. “The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and polices, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea…. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.” (Emphasis added.)
This is certainly what the elites attempt to do: have the same foreign policy of globalism, regardless of which party occupies the White House. John F. Campbell explained how this works in New York magazine in 1971: “Practically every lawyer, banker, professor, general, journalist, and bureaucrat who has had any influence on the foreign policy of the last six presidents — from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon — has spent some time” in the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. These CFR members, Campbell said, have “been pretty much running things in this country for the last 25 years,” and “know it.”
As noted by Admiral Chester Ward, former judge advocate of the U.S. Navy who was himself a CFR member for 16 years before resigning in disgust, the goal of the CFR is the “submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.” David Rockefeller, who has long been a leading member of the globalist elite, has openly admitted that he wants to bring about “one world.” He once boldly asserted, “Some even believe [the Rockefellers] are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ conspiring with others around the world to bring a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I’m proud of it.”
Globalists do not always get what they want — such as in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan refused to send the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) to the Senate for confirmation, after President Jimmy Carter had agreed to it — but they win more often than they lose. Since Campbell made his comments in 1971, nothing much has changed. And they apparently do not want Trump in the White House.
This is probably because, with his blasts against illegal immigration and multilateral trade agreements, he is just too unpredictable, whereas Hillary Clinton has demonstrated her reliability to push the Council on Foreign Relations’ one-world goals many times in both deeds and words. While secretary of state, Clinton told the CFR, after they had opened a branch “down the street from the State Department,” that “I won’t have to go far to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”
As a senator and as secretary of state, Clinton promoted all the CFR’s globalist agenda, including the creation of a UN International Criminal Court, the UN Small Arms Treaty, the UN’s Law of the Sea Treaty, the World Trade Organization, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and so on.
Trump, on the other hand, has opted to oppose this globalist agenda, including opposition to unrestricted immigration, trade deals that diminish American national sovereignty, and the like. He recently joined with his former rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, in opposition to an effort to turn over control of the Internet, which Americans created, to an international body.
The fact that neoconservative Republican foreign policy figures from previous GOP administrations are choosing to side with Hillary Clinton — who openly espouses all the globalist agenda — and to condemn Trump, says more about them that it does about Donald Trump. One-hundred sixty-four retired generals and admirals, on the other hand, have examined the views of the two candidates, and have chosen Trump over Clinton.
(The New American never endorses candidates. Our purpose is to inform the electorate and enable them to draw their own conclusions.)
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